Review: Board Game Crate
May. 1st, 2018 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo I saw people discussing Board Game Crate, a subscription service that sends you hand-picked board games. I considered it, and decided it would be a nice present for me and jack. I'd never bought a subscription to a mystery crate before; for a lot of the offerings, I'm more interested in buying a specific thing I want than receiving a mystery package. And you're always paying a bit extra for the service on top of the contents. What made me go for this was the idea of getting recommendations based on the games I already own, and supporting what seems like quite a nice little indie games outfit.
After three months of a six month subscription, I am pretty happy with the decision. It's been a really nice treat when our big parcel arrives each month with two new games in it. Partly it's worked well for us because our 50-game collection is just at the right stage to benefit from experts adding to it. If you have only a handful of games, you probably already have a wishlist, and if you don't, you're likely to get more advantage from going to board game events and finding out what's out there than receiving games based on very limited information about your tastes. If you already have hundreds of games, a new one needs to be exactly right to justify the shelf space so you probably want to choose for yourself. And if money rather than space is the limiting factor for you, well, a subscription crate has to cover its costs so this isn't the cheapest way of expanding your collection. I feel like it's good value for money; £200 for 12 high quality games plus the added value of getting the fun surprises and the new discoveries is not at all unreasonable.
Each month you get a big game and a small game, almost all fairly recent (though not usually brand spanking new releases) Eurogames. The extras aren't that great; they have dropped including a small packet of sweets because the economics didn't make sense, and the promised bonus dice are disappointing because they send the exact same thing every month. If it had been a different D6, even just a different colour, I'd have found it more charming. And a little leaflet with a couple of articles in, which is a nice touch. You also get entered into a raffle for a small chance of a Kickstarter game, which so far we haven't won. So the main advantage to the crate is the surprise of getting a cool new game you might not have thought of by yourself.
Our big games so far have been: Panic Mansion; QueenDomino; and this month Quadropolis. Panic Mansion is a dexterity game, where you have to shake a box to get the explorer meeple (not-Indiana Jones) and the treasure into separate compartments from various spooky things. I didn't especially want a dexterity game, I wanted a strategy game, but PM is desperately cute. What makes it is that all the spooky things are physically different from eachother; large awkward wooden snakes, light foam eyeballs, rubber spiders, and so on, and all behave differently with friction and gravity and fitting through holes. QueenDomino I'd been thinking of getting but hadn't quite committed myself to, especially as my metamour already has a copy. It's a recent game that has generated a lot of buzz, and it's definitely the sort of game I like, so I can't at all complain about the crate company's choice here. I like it, and have come back to play it a few times, but it doesn't quite match the extreme elegance of KingDomino.
Quadropolis, now, is awesome. It's game I'd had my eye on for a while, but wasn't sure enough to go out and buy it at full retail price. So getting it in the crate was exactly the kind of positive surprise I was hoping for when I signed up. And it's a seriously great game. It's a tile placement thing where the scoring is a complex formula based on position and getting multiples of the same advantageous tile, which doesn't sound that inspiring, but the clever and original mechanics of tile selection and placement make it an absolute joy. It's a much more interactive game than the typical tile placement offering, and thinky without being slow or over-complex. So far we've only played it in classic mode, which is already quite challenging, and there's an expert mode we've yet to crack at all. Also the art is kind of ridiculously gorgeous, and the production values are really top quality, and it has the loveliest little translucent meeples. The manufacturer is Days of Wonder and this more than lives up to their high standards.
I think if we'd just gone out and bought three games at around the £30 mark, we'd probably have chosen Quadropolis anyway but could have done better for the other two big games so far. And the selectors have given us one game in a style I don't really care for, and two I already knew about, which is less perfect than I was hoping for. However, what has made the crate stand out for me is the small games. Two absolute gems of 10-15 minute filler games I hadn't heard of at all, plus the thrill of getting our crate, lifts the experience well above just deciding to buy a new game each month for half a year.
We've discovered via the crate an amazing little thing called Dice stars, and a really cool bluffing game, HMS Dolores. Dice Stars has a completely novel twist on the yahtzee type of game where you try to achieve particular combinations of dice rolls. It's a fast and fairly simple game, but one with quite a lot of interlocking effects, the colours of the dice, which aren't quite standard D6s but balanced in a different way, and the positions of where you place your scores for sets in a grid, which again isn't just a simple matrix. Dolores is an absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous card game, heavily based on prisoners' dilemma mechanics, but carefully balanced to be interesting and not too predictable. The way the rules encourage you to play it is to negotiate which option you'll take for each turn, and go back on your word when it seems strategically good (but not so often that nobody will ever trust you again). You could also play it without discussion, more like the original prisoners' dilemma scenario. I'm really hoping to get a chance to play it with three players, but it's already pretty satisfying with two.
This month's small game, Pocket Madness, I'm less excited about. It's basically rummy with a Cthulhu theme. The cards are very pretty indeed, and it's flavourful, and it's enough of a variation on the basic rummy mechanic to be interesting. But I don't really care about Lovecraft and the game's not interesting enough to be worth playing in preference to one of the more strategic rummy variants, such as gin rummy or Rummikub.
Still, overall, that's one excellent and one definitely good big game, two brilliant small games that are completely new to me, and one big and one small I probably won't replay very much, but aren't bad at all. I recommend the crate if you are in a position to spend roughly £30 a month on games and discovering new things is more important to you than getting your absolute most desired games. And if you live in the UK; they will ship to Europe but I suspect the costs of shipping overseas and possibly import charges make the crate not really worth it.
jack. I'd never bought a subscription to a mystery crate before; for a lot of the offerings, I'm more interested in buying a specific thing I want than receiving a mystery package. And you're always paying a bit extra for the service on top of the contents. What made me go for this was the idea of getting recommendations based on the games I already own, and supporting what seems like quite a nice little indie games outfit. After three months of a six month subscription, I am pretty happy with the decision. It's been a really nice treat when our big parcel arrives each month with two new games in it. Partly it's worked well for us because our 50-game collection is just at the right stage to benefit from experts adding to it. If you have only a handful of games, you probably already have a wishlist, and if you don't, you're likely to get more advantage from going to board game events and finding out what's out there than receiving games based on very limited information about your tastes. If you already have hundreds of games, a new one needs to be exactly right to justify the shelf space so you probably want to choose for yourself. And if money rather than space is the limiting factor for you, well, a subscription crate has to cover its costs so this isn't the cheapest way of expanding your collection. I feel like it's good value for money; £200 for 12 high quality games plus the added value of getting the fun surprises and the new discoveries is not at all unreasonable.
Each month you get a big game and a small game, almost all fairly recent (though not usually brand spanking new releases) Eurogames. The extras aren't that great; they have dropped including a small packet of sweets because the economics didn't make sense, and the promised bonus dice are disappointing because they send the exact same thing every month. If it had been a different D6, even just a different colour, I'd have found it more charming. And a little leaflet with a couple of articles in, which is a nice touch. You also get entered into a raffle for a small chance of a Kickstarter game, which so far we haven't won. So the main advantage to the crate is the surprise of getting a cool new game you might not have thought of by yourself.
Our big games so far have been: Panic Mansion; QueenDomino; and this month Quadropolis. Panic Mansion is a dexterity game, where you have to shake a box to get the explorer meeple (not-Indiana Jones) and the treasure into separate compartments from various spooky things. I didn't especially want a dexterity game, I wanted a strategy game, but PM is desperately cute. What makes it is that all the spooky things are physically different from eachother; large awkward wooden snakes, light foam eyeballs, rubber spiders, and so on, and all behave differently with friction and gravity and fitting through holes. QueenDomino I'd been thinking of getting but hadn't quite committed myself to, especially as my metamour already has a copy. It's a recent game that has generated a lot of buzz, and it's definitely the sort of game I like, so I can't at all complain about the crate company's choice here. I like it, and have come back to play it a few times, but it doesn't quite match the extreme elegance of KingDomino.
Quadropolis, now, is awesome. It's game I'd had my eye on for a while, but wasn't sure enough to go out and buy it at full retail price. So getting it in the crate was exactly the kind of positive surprise I was hoping for when I signed up. And it's a seriously great game. It's a tile placement thing where the scoring is a complex formula based on position and getting multiples of the same advantageous tile, which doesn't sound that inspiring, but the clever and original mechanics of tile selection and placement make it an absolute joy. It's a much more interactive game than the typical tile placement offering, and thinky without being slow or over-complex. So far we've only played it in classic mode, which is already quite challenging, and there's an expert mode we've yet to crack at all. Also the art is kind of ridiculously gorgeous, and the production values are really top quality, and it has the loveliest little translucent meeples. The manufacturer is Days of Wonder and this more than lives up to their high standards.
I think if we'd just gone out and bought three games at around the £30 mark, we'd probably have chosen Quadropolis anyway but could have done better for the other two big games so far. And the selectors have given us one game in a style I don't really care for, and two I already knew about, which is less perfect than I was hoping for. However, what has made the crate stand out for me is the small games. Two absolute gems of 10-15 minute filler games I hadn't heard of at all, plus the thrill of getting our crate, lifts the experience well above just deciding to buy a new game each month for half a year.
We've discovered via the crate an amazing little thing called Dice stars, and a really cool bluffing game, HMS Dolores. Dice Stars has a completely novel twist on the yahtzee type of game where you try to achieve particular combinations of dice rolls. It's a fast and fairly simple game, but one with quite a lot of interlocking effects, the colours of the dice, which aren't quite standard D6s but balanced in a different way, and the positions of where you place your scores for sets in a grid, which again isn't just a simple matrix. Dolores is an absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous card game, heavily based on prisoners' dilemma mechanics, but carefully balanced to be interesting and not too predictable. The way the rules encourage you to play it is to negotiate which option you'll take for each turn, and go back on your word when it seems strategically good (but not so often that nobody will ever trust you again). You could also play it without discussion, more like the original prisoners' dilemma scenario. I'm really hoping to get a chance to play it with three players, but it's already pretty satisfying with two.
This month's small game, Pocket Madness, I'm less excited about. It's basically rummy with a Cthulhu theme. The cards are very pretty indeed, and it's flavourful, and it's enough of a variation on the basic rummy mechanic to be interesting. But I don't really care about Lovecraft and the game's not interesting enough to be worth playing in preference to one of the more strategic rummy variants, such as gin rummy or Rummikub.
Still, overall, that's one excellent and one definitely good big game, two brilliant small games that are completely new to me, and one big and one small I probably won't replay very much, but aren't bad at all. I recommend the crate if you are in a position to spend roughly £30 a month on games and discovering new things is more important to you than getting your absolute most desired games. And if you live in the UK; they will ship to Europe but I suspect the costs of shipping overseas and possibly import charges make the crate not really worth it.
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Date: 2018-05-02 11:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-05-02 05:38 pm (UTC)--Rachael/woodpijn
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Date: 2018-05-03 09:31 pm (UTC)