I now see how fortunate we were recently. We had the luxury of time to play board games to no end. In these past few weeks with long office hours, family parties and other engagements to go to and the end of a very busy football season our games did not get any love. But I can assure you, the pang, that itch in our hearts, it was there!

This weekend we finally had some much needed time to ourselves and we wasted none of it! One of the games we took to the table was Raiders of the North Sea. It is such a clever worker placement and set collection game. The artwork is beautifully detailed, the characters are down right frightening adorable. We ended up playing it twice in two days and I have to say, the experience was quite different both times! Lovely game!

Having also played some abstracts over the weekend (see the full list at the end of the post) I craved a word game. I already mentioned previously how wonderful Hardback is. And lo and behold, this is the one both of us thought of immediately. With its tongue and cheek humor, with the fact that you can control the luck of the draw with the ink tokens and that there are 5 variants to this deck builder it is guaranteed never to disappoint. And for better or wurst (so sorry, but I just had to. I won 11 point with this word in the last round!) it is a far superior game to Scrabble.

Oh yes, and sometimes a nastier word can earn you a literary award!a

Games pictured (from top to bottom): Raiders of the North Sea, Hardback.

Not pictured: Ganz Schön Clever, Sagrada, Azul.