I can firmly say that I am a massive fan of Stranger Things, the Netflix television series that mixed 80s movies, Dungeons & Dragons and a smidgeon of Cthulhu. What is there not to like? Which is why I was very excited about the new little game form Board&Dice, InBetween. For starters it’s Stranger Things the card game, and is certainly a lot better that that Eleven egg waffles nonsense that was recently announced.  Secondly the game was designed by Adam Kwapiński, and although he may not yet be a household name, I think he is always one to watch.

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Whenever I visited my gran’s house, she always had a ropey old tea towel in her kitchen, presumably from around the time when Robert the Bruce was a lad, depicting hairy “coos”, big red-headed strapping men in kilts and the odd wild Haggis. It is this romantic image of Scotland that stuck with me through my life until I lived there and found that it’s actually an accurate depiction of the place and the image on the tea towel was presumably a photograph, much like the image above.

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Monster Lands is a bit of a tease.  Its cartoon artwork and cutesy graphic design are nothing but a honey trap, luring you in with the promise of a cute game for all the family but you will soon come to realise that Monster Lands is a meaty grown up game of resource placement and second guessing your opponent.  However, even that veneer is misleading because behind Monster Land's euro game appearance is a game where the roll of a die can change everything.

In Monster Lands you must hire a group of mighty warriors to defeat fearsome monsters and conquer lands in the quest for glory and reputation.  I'm not going to try and explain every rule and mechanic for Monster Lands, because believe me when I say there is a lot going on in this board game.

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It’s time to get excited about Essen Spiel and so the boys try and keep it clean and family friendly.  Unfortunately, a request for Polyhedron Collider to review adult products leads to a discussion of said products and things evolve into childish giggling.

We do however get a chance to play ‘game of the year’ contender Clans of Caledonia, dice placement fantasy game Monster-Lands and talk about the Stranger Things inspired two-player card game Inbetween. We also then take our pick of the most interesting games to play and buy at Essen.

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There are a lot of board games out there and, unfortunately, not all of them are good.  While we here at Polyhedron Collider try and write well-balanced reviews based on multiple play-throughs and with different groups, there are those game were doing is so torturous we end up alienating our friends and family. So we present the second part of our Review Roundup series, a set of short punchy reviews for games we are never going to play again.

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