New to me games

[liv]

My OSOs got Terraforming Mars for their anniversary and it is just as good as everybody says it is. Just the perfect combination of flavour and strategy.

The cards mean you can do all kinds of fun things like hurl asteroids at the planet surface or introduce ants into the ecosystem. There's enough variety that you feel like you're part of an unfolding story, but you have a limited and strategically transparent set of choices on each turn, and all the cards seem to be well-balanced. At any given moment, most cards in your hand won't meet the planetary conditions to be playable or you won't be able to afford them, but you always have at least a few fun choices. And everything seems optimistic and positive; there are a few actions which directly harm your opponents, but it's semi co-op anyway since you're all trying to improve the habitability of the same planet and you all benefit from progress. Unlike a lot of strategically complex worker placement games, nothing ever really seems desperate; you can almost always do something positive, and you're not short of actions. In a single game, you move from carefully set up multi-turn actions to bootstrap any terraforming at all, to having well-tuned engines producing resources so you can accelerate the process, to a massively exponential phase at the end where everything slots into place.

The only real criticism I have is the phys-rep; you have to keep track of six different resources using tiny little cubes on a really flimsy mat, and if you breathe on them wrong you knock the cubes out of place. I know people have developed apps and unofficial alternatives where you put the cubes in slots rather than on a board.

I had had my eye on Dreamwell for ages, and was glad to get a chance to play at a recent gaming meet. It's a kind of set collection game, but with a really interesting mechanic for moving around the grid to collect the cards, and the art is really gorgeous, and in a very different style from most commercial games. I always felt like I was making meaningful decisions but it's not overly thinky, and I think it would play well with mixed ages or mixed gaming experience. I am not completely convinced I'm going to rush out and buy a copy, but my first game was very happy-making.

And finally, jack and I decided we would buy a few games now our crate subscription has run out. We had a browsing Inner Sanctum date, and considered two games based on computer games, The Witcher and Dragon Castle but decided both were more money than we were willing to chance on games we knew very little about.

So we came home with Azul, which we'd had our eye on for some time. And wow, I can exactly see why it's been sweeping the awards and getting all the hype lately. It's like a cross between mancala and Sagrada, with tiles that are both tactile and pretty. It's really quick to play and rules minimal, but with a lot of strategic depth. The only thing comparable I can think of recently is Kingdomino, not that the games are particularly similar, but it shares the property of emergent interesting strategy from a game you can learn in 5 minutes or play with a young child. Azul worked out as a really nice present to ourselves, and I can't wait to introduce more people to it.

Comments

[ambyr]

Terraforming Mars has been my most-played game for two years running. I could geek out about TM strategy for hours. (If you're thinking expansions: I find the extra maps [Hellas and Elysium] add a lot to replayability. Venus Next is fine but adds more fiddliness, which is not usually a thing my group wants, so it rarely makes it out of the box. We're just starting to see how we feel about Prelude.)

[rysmiel]

Remind me, have you played Tsuro at all?