Board Game Crate part 2
Jul. 18th, 2018 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livOur 6 month Board Game Crate subscription is now complete: we've received 12 new board games. There were a couple of duds in that list but only a couple. The big games are mostly ones I've heard of, with several I was pleased to get and one that turned out far more awesome than I'd expected. And the small games are all completely new to me, and four out of six are really great.
They never quite topped Quadropolis, which was pretty much an insta-favourite and I keep taking it to gaming meets and trying to convince guests to play it. And we still haven't attempted the advanced version, so there's loads of replayability.
Game 4 was Magic Maze, which is exactly the kind of happy surprise I was hoping for when I subscribed. I'd heard of the game but assumed it wouldn't be my sort of thing, because I'm relatively uninterested in speed games, and having a cooperative game where you're not allowed to talk seems to defeat the point. But actually MM is brilliant, and we've had so much fun with it. The concept where each player controls a direction or action for the whole party shouldn't work, but it really does. There's lots of exactly perfect details, the lovely little graphics on the tiles, the level of difficulty of the maze created by laying grid tiles semi-randomly so that it's different every game, the nature of the special actions. It also has a lovely video game-like set of difficulty levels, which we've all really enjoyed playing through and gradually conquering.
I tried it once at a party with six players including partners' 9yo, and that worked really well. It's really fun for a pair of people who regularly play together and can master the tricky cooperation needed for all the different game modes. It's really fun as a little filler game (barely more than 10 minutes including set-up, but you often want to play just one more) for two or three.
Big game 5 was Photosynthesis, something I'd had my eye on for a while but it's quite pricey by Eurogame standards and I wasn't quite ready to commit to buying it. So it felt like a pretty big treat to get in our subscription crate, and OMG it's gorgeous. You have these lovely 3D trees, four different species as well as different colours, with 2mm high drawings of birds and animals among their leaves and roots.
As for the gameplay, it's (unlike typical Eurogames) completely deterministic. There's no dice and no cards and play is entirely transparent.cjwatson described it as being like chess with a rotating board. I think this is going to limit its replayability, because it's hard to see how you'd get much variation from one game to the next. But it's beautifully strategic, particularly with three players when space is at a premium and it's harder to predict your opponents' moves. The only criticism I have is that there's a slightly fiddly mechanic around moving trees between the storage area and the available area and the actual forest.
The last big game was however a disappointment: they sent us Puerto Rico, a fifteen year old classic game. I feel they could have inferred there's a reason we don't have it already, given we own all the other really obvious games. (The reason in fact is that it's minimum three players.) I didn't subscribe to the crate to get a game that was a massive hit when we were still excited about the New! Millennium! I'm pretty inclined to sell it unopened and use the money (and cupboard space) to buy something else from my wishlist.
Small games: in the fourth crate we actually kind of got two medium-sized games. Magic Maze retails for about £20, about the same as the second game, Food truck champion. It's in a physically compact box, barely bigger than a double pack of standard playing cards, and I really appreciate that it bucks the trend of putting games in unnecessarily huge boxes. But it takes about an hour to play, certainly much longer than MM, and quite a lot of strategic complexity. Gameplay takes up quite a lot of space, so it's less ideal as a travel game than its small size might suggest.
The theme of rival food trucks is delightful, and I love the illustrations of the different recipes, and the amazing characters. Gameplay wise I like but don't hugely adore it, I'm certainly glad to have received it from the crate as I'd never heard of it before and it's original and cute. It reminds me quite a lot of Kanagawa, particularly the multi-functional cards. It's mostly about set collection, with a few cute little twiddles.
And our last small game is in some ways similar: Isle of trains, which really is just a single deck of cards (with beautiful art) and some clever mechanics to make a strategically interesting game. After one play I think it's going to get more rotation than Food Truck Champion, if only because it's more original. I really like the way that loading goods onto your own train directly advances your goals, but loading goods onto opponents' trains gives you some major bonuses. The weird thing about it is that it's a train game with a map, but it has absolutely nothing to do with routing / networks / localities, it's about building the train and fulfilling contracts, not, y'know, going anywhere. The downside of having so much strategic depth in a physically tiny (and really quite cheaply priced) game is that every card has about six different sets of hieroglyphics representing all the ways you can use it. It's very much a gamers' game, and I'm happy with that.
Small game 5 is Memoarrr. It really strives to make Pelmanism fun, and it's reasonably successful in that aim. But even with the cute animal pictures it's basically about turning cards over to make pairs. I haven't had a chance to introduce the kids to it yet but I suspect it may be too childish even for the 6yo.
So overall, out of 12 games:
1 X absolutely perfect game that was top of my wishlist already and was just as good as I was hoping (Quadropolis)
1 X good game I was already excited about, and really good value for a £30 crate (Photosynthesis)
1 X unexpectedly great game I would never have picked for myself (Magic Maze)
1 X hyped game that is good but not outstanding (Queen Domino)
1 X silly dexterity game that is very well regarded but really not my thing (Panic Mansion)
1 X waste of a slot with an old classic I didn't want (Puerto Rico)
4 X really cool small games I'd never have discovered otherwise and which will get a fair amount of replay (Dolores, Dice Stars, Food Truck Champion and Isle of Trains)
1 X very pretty but uninteresting Lovecraft-themed rummy deck (Pocket Madness)
1 X good but overly juvenile game (Memoarrr)
And a lot of fun cool surprises :-)
They never quite topped Quadropolis, which was pretty much an insta-favourite and I keep taking it to gaming meets and trying to convince guests to play it. And we still haven't attempted the advanced version, so there's loads of replayability.
Game 4 was Magic Maze, which is exactly the kind of happy surprise I was hoping for when I subscribed. I'd heard of the game but assumed it wouldn't be my sort of thing, because I'm relatively uninterested in speed games, and having a cooperative game where you're not allowed to talk seems to defeat the point. But actually MM is brilliant, and we've had so much fun with it. The concept where each player controls a direction or action for the whole party shouldn't work, but it really does. There's lots of exactly perfect details, the lovely little graphics on the tiles, the level of difficulty of the maze created by laying grid tiles semi-randomly so that it's different every game, the nature of the special actions. It also has a lovely video game-like set of difficulty levels, which we've all really enjoyed playing through and gradually conquering.
I tried it once at a party with six players including partners' 9yo, and that worked really well. It's really fun for a pair of people who regularly play together and can master the tricky cooperation needed for all the different game modes. It's really fun as a little filler game (barely more than 10 minutes including set-up, but you often want to play just one more) for two or three.
Big game 5 was Photosynthesis, something I'd had my eye on for a while but it's quite pricey by Eurogame standards and I wasn't quite ready to commit to buying it. So it felt like a pretty big treat to get in our subscription crate, and OMG it's gorgeous. You have these lovely 3D trees, four different species as well as different colours, with 2mm high drawings of birds and animals among their leaves and roots.
As for the gameplay, it's (unlike typical Eurogames) completely deterministic. There's no dice and no cards and play is entirely transparent.
cjwatson described it as being like chess with a rotating board. I think this is going to limit its replayability, because it's hard to see how you'd get much variation from one game to the next. But it's beautifully strategic, particularly with three players when space is at a premium and it's harder to predict your opponents' moves. The only criticism I have is that there's a slightly fiddly mechanic around moving trees between the storage area and the available area and the actual forest. The last big game was however a disappointment: they sent us Puerto Rico, a fifteen year old classic game. I feel they could have inferred there's a reason we don't have it already, given we own all the other really obvious games. (The reason in fact is that it's minimum three players.) I didn't subscribe to the crate to get a game that was a massive hit when we were still excited about the New! Millennium! I'm pretty inclined to sell it unopened and use the money (and cupboard space) to buy something else from my wishlist.
Small games: in the fourth crate we actually kind of got two medium-sized games. Magic Maze retails for about £20, about the same as the second game, Food truck champion. It's in a physically compact box, barely bigger than a double pack of standard playing cards, and I really appreciate that it bucks the trend of putting games in unnecessarily huge boxes. But it takes about an hour to play, certainly much longer than MM, and quite a lot of strategic complexity. Gameplay takes up quite a lot of space, so it's less ideal as a travel game than its small size might suggest.
The theme of rival food trucks is delightful, and I love the illustrations of the different recipes, and the amazing characters. Gameplay wise I like but don't hugely adore it, I'm certainly glad to have received it from the crate as I'd never heard of it before and it's original and cute. It reminds me quite a lot of Kanagawa, particularly the multi-functional cards. It's mostly about set collection, with a few cute little twiddles.
And our last small game is in some ways similar: Isle of trains, which really is just a single deck of cards (with beautiful art) and some clever mechanics to make a strategically interesting game. After one play I think it's going to get more rotation than Food Truck Champion, if only because it's more original. I really like the way that loading goods onto your own train directly advances your goals, but loading goods onto opponents' trains gives you some major bonuses. The weird thing about it is that it's a train game with a map, but it has absolutely nothing to do with routing / networks / localities, it's about building the train and fulfilling contracts, not, y'know, going anywhere. The downside of having so much strategic depth in a physically tiny (and really quite cheaply priced) game is that every card has about six different sets of hieroglyphics representing all the ways you can use it. It's very much a gamers' game, and I'm happy with that.
Small game 5 is Memoarrr. It really strives to make Pelmanism fun, and it's reasonably successful in that aim. But even with the cute animal pictures it's basically about turning cards over to make pairs. I haven't had a chance to introduce the kids to it yet but I suspect it may be too childish even for the 6yo.
So overall, out of 12 games:
1 X absolutely perfect game that was top of my wishlist already and was just as good as I was hoping (Quadropolis)
1 X good game I was already excited about, and really good value for a £30 crate (Photosynthesis)
1 X unexpectedly great game I would never have picked for myself (Magic Maze)
1 X hyped game that is good but not outstanding (Queen Domino)
1 X silly dexterity game that is very well regarded but really not my thing (Panic Mansion)
1 X waste of a slot with an old classic I didn't want (Puerto Rico)
4 X really cool small games I'd never have discovered otherwise and which will get a fair amount of replay (Dolores, Dice Stars, Food Truck Champion and Isle of Trains)
1 X very pretty but uninteresting Lovecraft-themed rummy deck (Pocket Madness)
1 X good but overly juvenile game (Memoarrr)
And a lot of fun cool surprises :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-19 03:57 am (UTC)I agree with your take on Photosynthesis—it’s gorgeous, and also so deterministic that I don’t see the replay value, especially with two players. With three and four at least you get into each other’s way more and mix things up that way.
I have (optimistically) dropped about $100 worth of games off at my friendly local game shop for their annual used game rummage sale (they organize, advertise, and sell; you get the value of any sales made in store credit), which runs while I’m here in Europe, so I might come home and find I “need” to go game shopping to spend off my lucre. It’s good to have some new games to look for.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-24 02:22 pm (UTC)I'm impressed that you managed to get rid of games. I hope you manage to replace them with something you like better.
Also, I completely forgot to get in touch with you about your visit to Europe, so I'm sorry I missed you.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-24 03:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-19 09:31 am (UTC)I don't have any objection to co-op games where you don't talk. You can still communicate information and have the fun of feeling like you're on the same wavelength as your teamates. Unrestricted talking leads to alpha player syndrome, so I generally prefer restricted talking, like in Hanabi (the set of things you're allowed to say in Hanabi is so small that you could easily play it with zero talking and a small set of cards or tokens instead).
I recently discovered The Mind, which is a zero-talking co-op game and is excellent. You each have a hand of cards and your shared goal is to play them all in numerical order. You have to infer whether people's cards are higher or lower than yours by their body language: whether they look eager to play, or pointedly unconcerned. It works much better than it sounds like it would (especially given some of us at GamesEvening are on the autistic spectrum or have tendencies in that direction).
It's lots of fun playing if 4-player with friends. I found it even more fun playing it 2-player with Alex: it gave us that "wow we are so compatible and practically telepathic!" feeling, that you can get from Codenames or a successful Articulate spade round.
--Rachael/woodpijn
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-24 02:27 pm (UTC)I am intrigued by The Mind. It sounds a bit like a more complex version of the theatre game where a large group of people try to count in order.
I will see if I can get to games evening at any point and I'll make sure to bring Magic Maze if I do.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-19 12:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-24 02:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-24 09:04 pm (UTC)