Well, you know how every month it has been getting quieter and quieter? Well it is not quiet today! Coming off all my normal game times plus getting to go to a mini convention (SVWAGcon II) and have three days of gaming. It has been busy. A lot of plays of games I don’t own (some of which I should own…or will own soon) played and a lot of interesting insight into what is popular in the hobby, or where the hobby is going.
Everything I played
Oh I don’t think we ever needed more than a 5×5 for a month but here we are!
The New
This section is going to be long….so lets get started. Remember good, or bad or meh, it goes here! Lets get the party started!
Magical Athlete: For a while seeing all the reviews I have had a specific question. Do I need both this and Hot Streak? As you avid readers of my blog know I really enjoy Hot Streak and consider it an amazing game. I played this and I have to say I see the value in it, I may even have liked it a lot more. But, in a world where Hot Streak exists, it is just more fun. You have about the same amount of control in the races but having the race run depend on one or two people rather than everyone rolling their dice (even though everyone does have their own dice which is quite smart). In Magical Athlete people also seem to care more about the scoring a bit where the premise of Hot Streak is just so silly you can’t seem to even care about the scoring. Overall it gets my vote, while magical athlete gets….
Verdict: The Meh
Mystic Curling Club: I find it increasingly hilarious that the most Canadian games ever are continually made by non-Canadians. First you had Artyom Nichipurov, a Latvian, making Trick Shot (which…I mean…the eastern Europeans also love their hockey) and now an American (Chris Cieslik) goes and makes a game about Curling! This was a very fun dexterity game. It lets you flick, push or even roll the dice (if you are brave) across the field to try to get the closest stone to the middle. Add to this a whole lot of wacky effects that let you move all kinds of stones all over the place and you have a roaring good time. Did someone just hit your “1” in the middle and make it an “9”, oh so sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t leave it undefended. Then if you are playing the “advanced” (not that advanced) rules you get even bigger variable player powers that can make each player have very different choices when shooting a stone and this is a good time by all. I will need to find a copy of this because this game is magical.
Verdict: The Good
Capital Lux 2: Generations: I actually wanted to play this game last year as it was something that people I trust whose opinion I trust rave about. Over the course of the game you play cards, that have value between 2-6 and one of four colours, either to your main board or the center board (which everyone can play to). The first fun bit is that at the end of each round you get a bonus if you have the highest total of all players in each colour. However, that total is limited by the total in the middle board. If you overshoot it, then you have to discard all of your cards of the colour. So if you have a total value of 15 and the middle has a total value of 13 well…you are out of luck. And cards persist between round on both your own board and the center board so the values get…larger over time. The second fun bit is that every time you play something to the center board you get to do a special power, depending on what colour you play. And these are chosen at the start of the game and stay constant but each can very much affect your choices. Some might do simple things like let you score. But as an example one of them lets you get a small token that allows you at the end of the round to increase the value of the center boards’ total. So if you have two of these tokens and you have a total value of 15, and the middle has a total value of 13 well you can just discard the two tokens and now you can keep your cards and get a nice bonus. I just played one game with the base powers and honestly I feel like there is so much in this game to be enjoyable. If only I could find it for a reasonable amount of money somewhere!
Verdict: The Good!
Galactic Cruise: This was a big one that I had heard good things about and was interested in playing and OH BOY is there a lot going on in this one. If we are being honest, probably too much going on. There are a couple of resources that are important and all of them can be acquired in several different ways all of which are varied and work slightly differently from each other. But at the end of the day if you want to get a specific resource, the game gives you a myriad of ways to do it. Otherwise the game really makes you fight for efficiency and makes you try to figure out how can you achieve what you want with the simplest amount of actions. I think I did enjoy it but it was a lot. Nothing is particularly complex or hard it is just death by a million cuts to remember how everything works and how it inter connects. We found ourselves forgetting a lot of actions (particularly when getting kicked off spaces) and there were a few questions about some actions where the board iconography was not as clear as it probably could have been. On an interesting side, in a four player game we were all within 4 points of each other, and for a game where the scores were around 100 points that was quite impressive. I have a preorder for the most recent reprint though I am questioning if this is really the game for my group or if its a step too much. Though from the demand for the game it may not be that hard to trade/sell away.
Verdict: Good/Meh …not sure need more plays
Baghdad: The City of Peace I was lucky enough to play this game with both hosts of the SVWAG podcast. I own and had have previously enjoyed Autobahn greatly by the same designers. This one was….very point salady. It was my first play so it was definitely a learning game but everything I did, I felt like I did it too late, didn’t have enough resources, didn’t know how to get more resources and was inefficient at it all. The game has an interesting system where the cards you play make a conveyor that eventually falls off and you can use all the symbols as your cards move towards the end. The interesting part is that when cards fall of you get a bonus if you have completed some objectives. With early cards that bonus is resources with later cards those are usually points. I feel like a successful game would be able to utilize most of the cards that fall off the end of your track and I…well I did not do that at all! I think this game ends up being quite a bit lighter than Autobahn and I am not sure if it ever will find its way into my collection as I don’t feel like my game group would love this. That being said, my play was enjoyable even though I got trounced.
Verdict: The Good (though I am probably not going to get it)
Coalitions: Well this isn’t a game that normally would be put in front of me, not one that I would buy or would be able to pull together the 5-6 players needed to play. Grand Strategic Napoleonic (GSN) isn’t exactly my usual bag either. But, people were recruiting and I figured why not. From sporadically playing a few other GSN games over many years what Coalitions achieves is quite impressive! It manages to simplify a lot of the sharp corners in a lot of these types of games and makes what you can do easy to understand. You have a pretty interesting turn structure that means each player is doing a differ phase each turn. And when every player has done every actions that constitutes one round and all the players (except England and France) get to renegotiate their allegiances and figure out who they can and can’t attack easily (and what boons they get for being part of their coalitions). The movement system is also particularly interesting as you need to have a non-allied player give you the ability to take additional moves and often your advancement will be cut short because other players allow you to advance further (happened to me to stop me from winning the game and a few other players similarly as well). My only issue with this system is that it ends up being what I will call “informal king-making” where everyone is so worried about king-making by allowing someone to win they don’t realize that by stopping everyone else from winning they often make it easier for one of the larger powers (like France or England) to just win by inertia. That’s what kind of happened and it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth but I think that is mostly because it was everyone first time playing.
Verdict: The Good
Robotrick: During one of the evenings at the con a pair of people invited me to a three player trick taker. I like trick takers, I enjoy weird ones as well and a three player only trick taker sounded particularly intriguing. The “weird” aspect of this trick taker is that the fourth player is actually an AI player represented by the robot. Their hand is dealt face up and they behave in a predictable way that is randomized and revealed before each round on an AI card. When you win a trick you get to score the AI players card as points, but you are only ever allowed to score 3 cards as points (which can be problematic as there are 12 cards per hand), any cards scored after that become negative points. Additionally if the robot player ever wins a trick all players take the card they played as negative points. the values of the cards go 1-13 and are all worth 1-10 points. Trying to figure out how to win specifically three tricks but also to attempt to win the highest point cards that the robot player holds is quite a puzzle and makes you reconsider what a “good hand” looks like in trick-taking. Would consider picking this up if I ever happened to find it, as I often play 3 player and a fast trick taker in this would be fun. That being said this might not be the easiest game to find.
Verdict: The Good
The Gibberers: As several other games this month this falls under the “very weird” genre of boardgames. Specifically this is a game about inventing a language. I got to join the latter half of this game and was not around for the “initial language creation” where you seed the language with words that you can use for the remainder of the game. But I joined for the main portion of the game which is where you have to define new words using your existing language. Basically one person gets a new word and they make up what that word is in the new language. They proclaim in the made up language that “I know *insert new word here*”. This now begins a conversation where people try to use the existing words in the language to figure out exactly what this word is. For example for the word “frog” I attempted to explain that this word uses up energy. When young it is in water, but when not young it is not in water. and so on and so forth. The thing is you start with some very very basic ideas but as the game progresses it challenges you to explain more and more complex concepts using your language. Your team gets some number of guesses to figure it out. However, if you group is stuck you can use some of those guesses to give extra clues, like pointing to a specific letter on the board, or to define a “helper” word (that they have to figure out what it means) that helps you explain your new word. The game is weird and wild and unfortunately impossible to find. I’m going to see if I can find some scans of it and print a copy myself….because I think we deserve this game and I can think of an awesome audience for it.
Verdict: The Good (or even The GREAT)
Spicy: Another game that was proposed later in the evening. It was proposed as a quick little game and I figured I had the time what did I have to lose? Spicy is a Cheat variant that is…well its okay. The main difference of cheat is that when you play a card you must state both it’s rank and it’s colour (and the colour isn’t allowed to change from the previous card until someone picks up all the cards as points). When you call someone out for cheating you must also state whether you believe that they are lying about the colour or the value of the card. Meaning that you can say that you played a blue 10 but actually played a red 10 and someone can say its not a 10….but it is…so you still win that challenge and get to claim all the points. The only additional weird thing is that there are some special cards that are any number between 1-10 but have no colour (meaning they always win number challenges and lose colour challenges) and one card that is all four colours but has no rank. The game was….fine…..but if I am looking for light bluffing I would never grab Spicy when I could instead get a game of Cockroach Poker in.
Verdict: The Meh.
Marshmallow Test: So I made a “choice” to pick up Marshmallow Test rather than the newer implementation of Pinata (where some people believe the latter to be a better version). Personally reading the rules of both I think I like the more straightforward nature of Marshmallow Test. The game is a trick taker where when you get a preset number of tricks you go out of a round. When you go out you score points equal to the number of tricks that all other players have gotten so far. The main conceit is that if you go out last you get nothing! Then you keep playing rounds until someone gets 20 points. So far I have only gotten to play this at 3 player where the dominant strategy seems to be to always be the one who goes out first and scores 3-5 points and then hope that the other two players will alternate who goes out. I am interested to try it with 4 of 5 players and see how the strategy changes particularly in trying to stay in longer versus going out early. There is nothing too complex about this game but it is a highly enjoyable little trick taker with the cutest little point tokens (basically little pieces that look, and feel, like marshmallows)
Verdict: The good (but may need some more plays)
The Good
What? There’s more? How is there more?!?
One Night Ultimate Werewolf: My partner loves this game and asked to have some people over for the express purpose of just playing ONUW. This string of games reminded me something. I love this game so much more than other social deduction games. Even with my recent enjoyment of Blood on the Clock Tower when I come are it to my experience with ONUW I think I prefer One Night. The game makes up for it’s short play time by just filling the whole system with chaos. And the more chaotic the set up the more I seem to enjoy it. I feel like the game gives me everything I want out of social deduction in delicious 10 minute chunks and afterwards it happens so fast that everyone can’t even be mad! My favourite play this time around was a situation where 4 out of 6 players were werewolves but because of being switched around the four couldn’t co-ordinate enough to vote for a single person and town was able to kill one wolf (and one non-wolf died) making town win. I don’t think I’ve fully given up on Blood on the Clock Tower but I think I have moved from being starry eyed about to to seeing that it is still not the ideal version of social deduction for me.
Indonesia: Got to play this as one of the first games when I arrived at the con. Some people were trying to learn it (none had played before) and I figured, I know the rules I can teach it. When I realized they also had an extra slot we managed to get a 4 player game going. The game went VERY differently to the one from a few months ago. In fact two players managed to rush a very early set of fast food companies (I mean I was one of these people) this meant that we didn’t have any huge rice empires and for a long time didn’t have any large spice groups either. The second effect of this is that very few cities ever grew past level one. In fact we had some opportunities to grow some cities but the players actively chose to keep them at level one and deliver to a different city. The true effects of this were felt near the end of the game where it was legitimately difficult to find places to deliver to and turn order in the final round had a huge impact as several companies competed for a very small number of city spaces. Ultimately my experience with the game came through and I was able to run away with it near the end as I built out an expansion empire of fast food and spice.
Spirit Island: Reintroduced this gem to someone who hadn’t played it in several years. I think we all had a good time. Since then both my partner and my son have expressed interest in playing it again. Maybe I just need to find time to get this one to the table. There is so much unexplored content even for what I own. Though I am not looking forward to having to buy it all again when the new edition with new art eventually makes it back into the stores.
Glory To Rome: Got to play this at the con. This was actually the first time I got to play this game with people who have played a lot more than I have. I managed to hold my own and get second place so I feel like my past experience with the game didn’t mess anything up for me. It did feel like the timings were different than games I have played before. None of us seemed to have anything that was truly broken near the end of the game but we all had a good time.
Startups: This is not often the oink game that people talk about when they want to tell everyone how great the company is but the more I play Startups the more I enjoy it’s simple little economic system. You want to control the majority of any companies you own, but being a majority shareholder makes it harder to acquire some more shares of the company leading to many of the companies ping ponging between different people. The best part of the game is that when it ends all cards in your hand automatically get played to your holdings usually either flipping control of companies in the last minute or alternatively forcing players to play down companies they really don’t want to. For a quick 15-20 minute game it always delivers a lot of fun.
RA, Dro Polter, Thats not a Hat, Paku Paku, L.A.M.A Party edition, Scout: I have written a lot about these already and I don’t think there is anything new to add. They are still good and fun in their own respective ways. I want to make sure they are included in the the good without me needing to make this post any longer than it already is.
The Rest
No meh or bad games this time, just more kids games, or other game experiences. Played Minecraft: Builders and Biomes with the youngest which is never too competitive as he often just wants to go around and kill everything (hey if he has fun playing I am all for it). Monkey Palace is fine as a little game as is Go Nuts for Donuts.
What I am looking forward to next month.
I said that July will be a big write up and boy howdy was it. Now we come back to August and I am sure it will slow down next month. I am looking forward to a few fun games but the month is quite packed with non gaming obligations so we will see how to manages to go. There may have been quite a few acquisitions that will be made after this month so we will see whether we can get back to trying to play out more of my collection. The second half of the year is often less gaming heavy as there start to be a lot of home obligations. Lets see if we can buck that trend…