Welcome to my blog of games I have played over the past month. I sometimes do a shallow dive into the rules and how the game felt as a player and other times go in deep when I have something to say or have never spoken about the game before. Some of these games are old classics that I have played many times (and I have noted the logged plays so you can see) and I thought it might be interesting for you to see if these games change in my opinion and why. Then there are some "new to me" games where I give you my first impressions. Please use this blog as a guild and compare my thoughts to at least 5 other reviewers to give yourself a good indication on whether the game is for you or not.
I have played a lot of fantasy games over the course of this month and it has made me think that there is possibly a perfect game out there for me. A game that would have the dungeon generation and little story elements of Shadows of Brimstone. The simple, yet intricate and interesting combat of Advanced HeroQuest added with the random dice generation for traps, treasure and creatures. And to top it off with the boss, battles and production values of Dark Souls the board game. That would probably be my perfect game. But alas, it doesn't exist at the moment. I can dream some more about it as I prattle about games that I have played.
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(there is a video version at the end of this blog)
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[thing=116998]
Thunderstone Advance [/thing] (Played 2 times:Total plays 19)
I played this game solo twice. I’m not a big fan of playing games solo, but this one kind of works in this mode. The objective is to kill as many monsters as you can to score as many points as you can. The pressure is on as monsters will be moving up the ranks of their lair, trying to escape. Each one that does, scores points against you. Each monster has a different score value and experience point value. And when lined up in a chain, you can see what is coming up and try to plan to kill the monsters with the higher value scores with the cards that you have. This is the only reason I like playing this game solo.
The other reason I like playing this game is that it is a deck builder, unlike many others, this gives you choises with what you do with your hand. Four choices. Go to the dungeon, go to the village, prepare for your next turn and rest. Two of these in my actions require you to use all of your cards that you have drawn and either use the currency value to buy cards to add to your deck or the attack value to slay a monster in the lair. while the other two actions will allow you to discard cards from your hand, and either save a few good ones for your next hand, or allow you to trash a card that you do not want.
Things about it, which are enjoyable, are the deck building aspects of going to the village and acquiring a new card for your deck. This you’ll be doing very early on in the game, collecting good cards, which you think will help you later on. Some of these hero cards that have either physical attack or magical attacks will help you take down the monsters. Taking down the monster will add that card to your deck and gain you some experience points that you can spend the next time you go to the village. This experience can be used to level up one of your fighters into a hero or one of your heroes to the next level. Where they have a stronger attack and added benefit. This gives you a super cool sensation of evolving your characters just like in an RPG. And you look forward to using them when they come into your hand eventually. But beware as your deck will fill up with a lot of cards very quickly. Cards from the village and cards from the monsters you’ve killed. This can lead to some frustrating hands, and you will feel that you have wasted the turn by preparing, which is technically saving the good cards and discarding the bad ones for the next turn. Sometimes you may not find a way to thin out your deck with cards from the village and will have to rely on resting to do so. You can also be lucky if a creature has a battle power which forces you to trash one of your cards.
Another enjoyable factor about this game is if you have enough expansions, you’ll have a different experience every time. With different creatures to fight in their lair and different items and heroes available in the village, there is quite a lot of replayability, even though you are doing the same thing. The replayability comes from having to plan differently, every time you play due to the variety offered to you. This can also lead to some frustration as you may only see a few good cards in the village that could be useful to you against the creatures that you’re going to fight. You may randomly create a lair full of creatures that can only be killed by magic, but have no magic heroes to fight them. All in all, it’s an interesting take on deck building and one with a theme that interests me alot.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::halfstar::nostar:
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[thing=1758]
Advanced HeroQuest[/thing] (Played 5 times:Total plays 6)
I wanted to try something different with my seven year old. I wanted to try something different with my seven year old. So I dug up this old gang, which I had when I was a teenager. Half read the rules and half improvised the others and set it up as a solo game, but with the two of us playing as heroes. I find games weren’t better in this way with him at this age, due to the fact that it removes the competition and the possibility of losing. Which makes him sulk.
This is the same as the original HeroQuest, but has a more and higher level of role-playing injected into it. Characters have more statistics, the dungeon is randomly generated, as well as everything else from the number of creatures you will encounter to the amount of treasure hidden away. I find this a fantastic system, although a little sluggish to do dungeon crawling and adventuring. The rulebook is full of different tables on many different pages, which can be a bit frustrating, flicking back-and-forth between pages and trying to remember where a certain table is. But it doesn’t give the feeling that you were playing against an artificial intelligence. Some dungeons can be extremely large and long before you find anything of interest, while others are very short and quick to overcome. Obviously, this is due to the random roles of a D12.
Things I like about it are as I mentioned the random generated dungeons and events. but another thing is the combat itself. It’s a slightly convoluted system of comparing your opponent's weapon skill with a table for that character that you have. That will determine whether you manage to hit the creature or not. And then roll X amount of dice to see if you actually damaged them by rolling a result, which is higher than the toughness. Although combat will be stagnant, playing the solo mode suffers from the same problems as the original game involving doorways. Bottlenecking combat is so uninteresting, but practical if you’re playing the heroes. And finally with this system, it’s so easy to manipulate and change to your preferred playing style. You can even generate your own tables to create a dungeon more suited to you. If your characters are not doing too well, exit the dungeon, and go to the store to buy some more potions or some extra henchmen. Then use the map that you have drawn of your exploits to go back down and continue.
Things that this game is not good at is having enough tiles and other components in the game while playing. Figuring bases which are bigger than the square spaces on the tiles, as combat can involve 20 figures in a room. And as mentioned earlier, the random dungeons can go on for over an hour or two, which is not great when playing with a young child, who is easily distracted. There were moments of the game being broken by me being a parent. To raise your voice against your kids. Especially when you’re playing a game. But this game as you can see has been played five times and not because I requested it but because Robin did. Even with these niggles, and this chugging game system, we still have fun.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
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[thing=146791]
Shadows of Brimstone[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 10)
I taught this game to a friend and we had a very quick quest played out. Like Advanced HeroQuest before, this game has a system which randomly generates a dungeon, and the creatures and treasure that you will find along the way. Not by tables and dice rolls but by cards. This one is a slight step up as well, as there are more role-playing elements in this game. But they are very aligned in the fact that you will be collecting money to go to a village to spend to buy more equipment, and then continue diving into the dungeon to collect more money, yada yada yada. And the combat system is a little more simple with more dice to roll, but as the game goes on and creatures evolve, they gain more powers, and so more rules are added to the combat. Convoluting it a bit but after a few turns, you remember what you are supposed to do each time.
The teacher was relatively simple as you could explain the rules as you play, which is the way that I like about games. Although a few times, I would jump over a rule and forget to do something. This meant that we had to rewind a turn or two. But it didn’t hinder the game too much. My friend, who is also a designer, got the chance to get a good feel of the game in its short playtime. Short, because the randomness of the game provided the two objectives we needed within the first two rooms. Just playing off of one shot scenario was a little down for me. Playing a longer campaign is a lot more interesting as you are more invested in your character and earning experience points so you can level up and spending your cash to get better weapons. Always the highlight of a role-playing game is ameliorating your character. Who is the highlight of a role-playing game is ameliorating your character. If you want a good looking game on your table, that has a high role-playing aspect to it, and you don’t mind forking out a lot of money. This will be a good one for you.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
Youtube Video
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[thing=13]
Catan[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 27)
Yes, I’m in the mood for Catan. And it’s about time that Robin leart how to play as well. so I taught this to him and we played with my wife. He crashed the game pretty easily, although it was a little long. Again, random dice rolls can drag this game out. and random dice rolls can really piss me off, even when I have chosen the middle numbers. All the two threes and fours,. tens and 11s and 12s came out to play that day.
So anyway, I thought Robin could learn a lot from my resource gathering game, and he seems to do quite well. Building roads, and then colonies, which turned into cities. Being devious by placing the thief on the person who most annoyed him at that point in time. We had to remind him a few times of how the scoring worked and of course he got upset when someone took the longest road title away from him. But he seemed to have a good time. In fact, he had a better time than me. This is one of those games that can really annoy me when I can never get any resources on the turn. I totally forgot to introduce a rule about receiving a token if you do not receive any resources. Then having the power to trade in two of these tokens for a resource of your choice. This evens out the game a little, and makes it run a bit shorter than normal. A shorter playing time for young children is a benefit for the parent. As their minds wander off into different worlds, and not be at the table.
Yes, I do like playing Catan as it is an easy access game, it looks good, it teaches resource management simply, and it’s a nice in your face conquest game.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
Youtube Video
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[thing=422669]
Halflings: Best Chef[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 4)
Currently on Kickstarter : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameversetech/halflings...
Taught this to my designer buddy when he was visiting his family. Being a designer has its benefits as you can teach them a game, and they understand everything within the first explanation. so the teacher of this prototype version of the game was a walk in the park. And it was also possibly a run through the park as we played extremely quickly. As this is a relatively easy dice placement game where you allocate your roll dice onto a space of the matching number. Once all dice have been allocated, you resolve each location in the hobbit Village one by one.
This is a game about collecting recipes and dressing up your tavern to earn your victory points. At the three player account, there was a little bit of standing on other players toes as you took a space which they wanted to go to. The game does have a medium party of player interaction as you look at the results they’ve rolled, and deduce where you think they will place these dice. And then it’s a case of taking the ingredients that you want, or the decoration, which will either give you a bonus power or another way of scoring at the end of the game. Objectively, you are trying to collect ingredients to complete recipes, which again will score you points. The game is very point Sallady and you were always left with options even when other players cut you off. There are plenty of things to think about in regards to what ingredients to get, and when is the best time to go into the kitchen and prepare the meal. With the addition of second-guessing what your opponents are going to do, what they're gonna take, and when they're gonna do it.
The game play is fluid, and the rules are not too complicated. It's fairly light and amusing as you interact with the other players. And there are many possible routes to victory. The only thing that is missing, is a variety of ways of playing the game as in special action in one game that will not be in another. Or random player powers. But this is only a prototype of a bass game coming to Kickstarter, so there is the possibility of stretch goals, adding extra variety in gameplay.
Youtube Video
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[thing=11170]
Heroscape[/thing] (Played 4 times:Total plays lots of unlogged plays)
What can I say about a rainy day? My son has the power over me to demand to play a big game. And as you can see from this list of games that I’ve played this month, he has done that a lot. So we got this big beast of a game out onto the table and I watched him set up the terrain bit by bit for a good part of an hour. This gave him immense satisfaction. Then we built our armies, and then played out a scenario.
The only difference this time is that I amalgamated my original version with the new version which came out recently. That is a fantastic part about this game. It’s a giant sandbox of components that you can put together and create your own scenarios and battle out amongst yourself to see who is the superior being. We are still just playing with the basic creature cards, which include movement, attack, distance, and defense. One day when he can read English, we will play with the advanced powers. He does get a bit annoyed when a smaller creature deals out one point of damage that his giant dragon can’t defend against, then dies. Playing with the advanced version eliminates this by giving life points to each creature. Also allowing flying creatures to fly.
I am not a tabletop war gamer, but that is what this game is. It has a super toy factor behind it and as I’ve said many times before about this game, if you’ve got a great imagination, this game is infinitely playable. Now all I have to do is save up a shit ton of money to buy more.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star:
Youtube Video
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[thing=217372]
The Quest for El Dorado[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 9)
Back to deck building. Again, a different form of deck building as these cards will be used to move your plane piece through a jungle. Once again, Reiner Knizia has created a simple rule, set of a game with generous amounts of variety to keep you coming back and trying to do better. Playing your cards to advance in certain parts of the jungle, and using other cards to buy new cards to add to your desk is what this game is all about. And it works perfectly. The fact that there are not hundreds of different types of cards, each with their own powers is a blessing. There are only six open in the store to buy at the beginning of the game, and 12 more that can and could be introduced during the course of the game. And there are limited numbers of each of these cards, which can provide conflict between the players, especially if there’s a very good powerful card available in the store.
With a limited amount of cards in the game and their powers to thin out your deck, at the same time means that this game doesn’t get too bogged down with the powers and actions of these cards. providing you with clean information, so you can process very quickly on your turn what you were going to do. If you ever get stuck in the game, it’s all down to you. It’s your fault you built a bad deck. It’s not just the puzzle aspect of your deck that is the fun of the game, but the actual race across the jungle to get to the destination. Traversing the jungle in an economical way, and not being blocked by an opponent who is hogging a space is the meat on the bones of the puzzle of this game. Forcing a player to go on a longer and more expensive route is enjoyable. This can sometimes backfire in your face as it leads them to either a volcano, which will give them an extra one shot power water in space, where they can trash cards from the deck.
Quick and fun to play. Plenty of variety from the cards in the game. And lots more variety as you can create your own tracks from the modular tiles. I love playing this game.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar:
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[thing=375989]
Tiny Turbo Cars[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 6)
Playing the right game with the right people does make all the difference to the experience you have. This game hit the table with two new players, and was easy to teach, apart from one minor rule, which I forgot. The rule of bumping other cars. A contributing aspect to enjoying this game is to be a player that enjoys programmation. Program ocean done by sliding squares in a grid until you have them in the position of the programming that you have for your car. This felt nice and leisurely for a change, as I was not having to race quickly to do this part of the game. Having time to reflect a bit about how many spaces to move forward before veering to the left to avoid the pit and then how many spaces left I need to go before I hit the wall. There was no stress this time about receiving the last player token.
With the program in place, it’s a case of each player, in turn order, moving their vehicle along the racetrack. This can be quite comical as confident players roll through a puddle, which reverses all their left and right steering before that car spins out and runs out of batteries. Then there’s those moments when a player does a perfect programming, which makes them fist pump the air. And you feel happy for them. And all of this takes place within a 30 minute time period. Which will make you want to play again moving the modular tiles around to try a longer and more difficult track. Adding some player powers, and some weapons you can collect along the road, this turned out to be a much better game than my previous experiences. It’s extremely light, because there is a catch-up mechanism for those who are struggling behind. And as I said, it requires a certain type of player to really enjoy this game. I just need to get five of them around the table to get the maximum enjoyment out of this crazy racing game.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar::nostar:
The video version
(opps, I forgot to talk about The Quest for El Dorado)
Youtube Video
Thanks for getting to the end. Let me know what you think about this blog in the comments. And if you have any further question about the games I played, please ask.
Check out my blog on BGG
https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/5498
my Youtube channel
https://www.youtube.com/@BarryDoubletBoardGames
and my music at
https://musicofbarrydoublet.com
I have played a lot of fantasy games over the course of this month and it has made me think that there is possibly a perfect game out there for me. A game that would have the dungeon generation and little story elements of Shadows of Brimstone. The simple, yet intricate and interesting combat of Advanced HeroQuest added with the random dice generation for traps, treasure and creatures. And to top it off with the boss, battles and production values of Dark Souls the board game. That would probably be my perfect game. But alas, it doesn't exist at the moment. I can dream some more about it as I prattle about games that I have played.
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(there is a video version at the end of this blog)
Thunderstone Advance [/thing] (Played 2 times:Total plays 19)
I played this game solo twice. I’m not a big fan of playing games solo, but this one kind of works in this mode. The objective is to kill as many monsters as you can to score as many points as you can. The pressure is on as monsters will be moving up the ranks of their lair, trying to escape. Each one that does, scores points against you. Each monster has a different score value and experience point value. And when lined up in a chain, you can see what is coming up and try to plan to kill the monsters with the higher value scores with the cards that you have. This is the only reason I like playing this game solo.
The other reason I like playing this game is that it is a deck builder, unlike many others, this gives you choises with what you do with your hand. Four choices. Go to the dungeon, go to the village, prepare for your next turn and rest. Two of these in my actions require you to use all of your cards that you have drawn and either use the currency value to buy cards to add to your deck or the attack value to slay a monster in the lair. while the other two actions will allow you to discard cards from your hand, and either save a few good ones for your next hand, or allow you to trash a card that you do not want.
Things about it, which are enjoyable, are the deck building aspects of going to the village and acquiring a new card for your deck. This you’ll be doing very early on in the game, collecting good cards, which you think will help you later on. Some of these hero cards that have either physical attack or magical attacks will help you take down the monsters. Taking down the monster will add that card to your deck and gain you some experience points that you can spend the next time you go to the village. This experience can be used to level up one of your fighters into a hero or one of your heroes to the next level. Where they have a stronger attack and added benefit. This gives you a super cool sensation of evolving your characters just like in an RPG. And you look forward to using them when they come into your hand eventually. But beware as your deck will fill up with a lot of cards very quickly. Cards from the village and cards from the monsters you’ve killed. This can lead to some frustrating hands, and you will feel that you have wasted the turn by preparing, which is technically saving the good cards and discarding the bad ones for the next turn. Sometimes you may not find a way to thin out your deck with cards from the village and will have to rely on resting to do so. You can also be lucky if a creature has a battle power which forces you to trash one of your cards.
Another enjoyable factor about this game is if you have enough expansions, you’ll have a different experience every time. With different creatures to fight in their lair and different items and heroes available in the village, there is quite a lot of replayability, even though you are doing the same thing. The replayability comes from having to plan differently, every time you play due to the variety offered to you. This can also lead to some frustration as you may only see a few good cards in the village that could be useful to you against the creatures that you’re going to fight. You may randomly create a lair full of creatures that can only be killed by magic, but have no magic heroes to fight them. All in all, it’s an interesting take on deck building and one with a theme that interests me alot.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::halfstar::nostar:
Advanced HeroQuest[/thing] (Played 5 times:Total plays 6)
I wanted to try something different with my seven year old. I wanted to try something different with my seven year old. So I dug up this old gang, which I had when I was a teenager. Half read the rules and half improvised the others and set it up as a solo game, but with the two of us playing as heroes. I find games weren’t better in this way with him at this age, due to the fact that it removes the competition and the possibility of losing. Which makes him sulk.
This is the same as the original HeroQuest, but has a more and higher level of role-playing injected into it. Characters have more statistics, the dungeon is randomly generated, as well as everything else from the number of creatures you will encounter to the amount of treasure hidden away. I find this a fantastic system, although a little sluggish to do dungeon crawling and adventuring. The rulebook is full of different tables on many different pages, which can be a bit frustrating, flicking back-and-forth between pages and trying to remember where a certain table is. But it doesn’t give the feeling that you were playing against an artificial intelligence. Some dungeons can be extremely large and long before you find anything of interest, while others are very short and quick to overcome. Obviously, this is due to the random roles of a D12.
Things I like about it are as I mentioned the random generated dungeons and events. but another thing is the combat itself. It’s a slightly convoluted system of comparing your opponent's weapon skill with a table for that character that you have. That will determine whether you manage to hit the creature or not. And then roll X amount of dice to see if you actually damaged them by rolling a result, which is higher than the toughness. Although combat will be stagnant, playing the solo mode suffers from the same problems as the original game involving doorways. Bottlenecking combat is so uninteresting, but practical if you’re playing the heroes. And finally with this system, it’s so easy to manipulate and change to your preferred playing style. You can even generate your own tables to create a dungeon more suited to you. If your characters are not doing too well, exit the dungeon, and go to the store to buy some more potions or some extra henchmen. Then use the map that you have drawn of your exploits to go back down and continue.
Things that this game is not good at is having enough tiles and other components in the game while playing. Figuring bases which are bigger than the square spaces on the tiles, as combat can involve 20 figures in a room. And as mentioned earlier, the random dungeons can go on for over an hour or two, which is not great when playing with a young child, who is easily distracted. There were moments of the game being broken by me being a parent. To raise your voice against your kids. Especially when you’re playing a game. But this game as you can see has been played five times and not because I requested it but because Robin did. Even with these niggles, and this chugging game system, we still have fun.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
Shadows of Brimstone[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 10)
I taught this game to a friend and we had a very quick quest played out. Like Advanced HeroQuest before, this game has a system which randomly generates a dungeon, and the creatures and treasure that you will find along the way. Not by tables and dice rolls but by cards. This one is a slight step up as well, as there are more role-playing elements in this game. But they are very aligned in the fact that you will be collecting money to go to a village to spend to buy more equipment, and then continue diving into the dungeon to collect more money, yada yada yada. And the combat system is a little more simple with more dice to roll, but as the game goes on and creatures evolve, they gain more powers, and so more rules are added to the combat. Convoluting it a bit but after a few turns, you remember what you are supposed to do each time.
The teacher was relatively simple as you could explain the rules as you play, which is the way that I like about games. Although a few times, I would jump over a rule and forget to do something. This meant that we had to rewind a turn or two. But it didn’t hinder the game too much. My friend, who is also a designer, got the chance to get a good feel of the game in its short playtime. Short, because the randomness of the game provided the two objectives we needed within the first two rooms. Just playing off of one shot scenario was a little down for me. Playing a longer campaign is a lot more interesting as you are more invested in your character and earning experience points so you can level up and spending your cash to get better weapons. Always the highlight of a role-playing game is ameliorating your character. Who is the highlight of a role-playing game is ameliorating your character. If you want a good looking game on your table, that has a high role-playing aspect to it, and you don’t mind forking out a lot of money. This will be a good one for you.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
Youtube Video
Catan[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 27)
Yes, I’m in the mood for Catan. And it’s about time that Robin leart how to play as well. so I taught this to him and we played with my wife. He crashed the game pretty easily, although it was a little long. Again, random dice rolls can drag this game out. and random dice rolls can really piss me off, even when I have chosen the middle numbers. All the two threes and fours,. tens and 11s and 12s came out to play that day.
So anyway, I thought Robin could learn a lot from my resource gathering game, and he seems to do quite well. Building roads, and then colonies, which turned into cities. Being devious by placing the thief on the person who most annoyed him at that point in time. We had to remind him a few times of how the scoring worked and of course he got upset when someone took the longest road title away from him. But he seemed to have a good time. In fact, he had a better time than me. This is one of those games that can really annoy me when I can never get any resources on the turn. I totally forgot to introduce a rule about receiving a token if you do not receive any resources. Then having the power to trade in two of these tokens for a resource of your choice. This evens out the game a little, and makes it run a bit shorter than normal. A shorter playing time for young children is a benefit for the parent. As their minds wander off into different worlds, and not be at the table.
Yes, I do like playing Catan as it is an easy access game, it looks good, it teaches resource management simply, and it’s a nice in your face conquest game.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar:
Youtube Video
Halflings: Best Chef[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 4)
Currently on Kickstarter : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameversetech/halflings...
Taught this to my designer buddy when he was visiting his family. Being a designer has its benefits as you can teach them a game, and they understand everything within the first explanation. so the teacher of this prototype version of the game was a walk in the park. And it was also possibly a run through the park as we played extremely quickly. As this is a relatively easy dice placement game where you allocate your roll dice onto a space of the matching number. Once all dice have been allocated, you resolve each location in the hobbit Village one by one.
This is a game about collecting recipes and dressing up your tavern to earn your victory points. At the three player account, there was a little bit of standing on other players toes as you took a space which they wanted to go to. The game does have a medium party of player interaction as you look at the results they’ve rolled, and deduce where you think they will place these dice. And then it’s a case of taking the ingredients that you want, or the decoration, which will either give you a bonus power or another way of scoring at the end of the game. Objectively, you are trying to collect ingredients to complete recipes, which again will score you points. The game is very point Sallady and you were always left with options even when other players cut you off. There are plenty of things to think about in regards to what ingredients to get, and when is the best time to go into the kitchen and prepare the meal. With the addition of second-guessing what your opponents are going to do, what they're gonna take, and when they're gonna do it.
The game play is fluid, and the rules are not too complicated. It's fairly light and amusing as you interact with the other players. And there are many possible routes to victory. The only thing that is missing, is a variety of ways of playing the game as in special action in one game that will not be in another. Or random player powers. But this is only a prototype of a bass game coming to Kickstarter, so there is the possibility of stretch goals, adding extra variety in gameplay.
Youtube Video
Heroscape[/thing] (Played 4 times:Total plays lots of unlogged plays)
What can I say about a rainy day? My son has the power over me to demand to play a big game. And as you can see from this list of games that I’ve played this month, he has done that a lot. So we got this big beast of a game out onto the table and I watched him set up the terrain bit by bit for a good part of an hour. This gave him immense satisfaction. Then we built our armies, and then played out a scenario.
The only difference this time is that I amalgamated my original version with the new version which came out recently. That is a fantastic part about this game. It’s a giant sandbox of components that you can put together and create your own scenarios and battle out amongst yourself to see who is the superior being. We are still just playing with the basic creature cards, which include movement, attack, distance, and defense. One day when he can read English, we will play with the advanced powers. He does get a bit annoyed when a smaller creature deals out one point of damage that his giant dragon can’t defend against, then dies. Playing with the advanced version eliminates this by giving life points to each creature. Also allowing flying creatures to fly.
I am not a tabletop war gamer, but that is what this game is. It has a super toy factor behind it and as I’ve said many times before about this game, if you’ve got a great imagination, this game is infinitely playable. Now all I have to do is save up a shit ton of money to buy more.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star:
Youtube Video
The Quest for El Dorado[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 9)
Back to deck building. Again, a different form of deck building as these cards will be used to move your plane piece through a jungle. Once again, Reiner Knizia has created a simple rule, set of a game with generous amounts of variety to keep you coming back and trying to do better. Playing your cards to advance in certain parts of the jungle, and using other cards to buy new cards to add to your desk is what this game is all about. And it works perfectly. The fact that there are not hundreds of different types of cards, each with their own powers is a blessing. There are only six open in the store to buy at the beginning of the game, and 12 more that can and could be introduced during the course of the game. And there are limited numbers of each of these cards, which can provide conflict between the players, especially if there’s a very good powerful card available in the store.
With a limited amount of cards in the game and their powers to thin out your deck, at the same time means that this game doesn’t get too bogged down with the powers and actions of these cards. providing you with clean information, so you can process very quickly on your turn what you were going to do. If you ever get stuck in the game, it’s all down to you. It’s your fault you built a bad deck. It’s not just the puzzle aspect of your deck that is the fun of the game, but the actual race across the jungle to get to the destination. Traversing the jungle in an economical way, and not being blocked by an opponent who is hogging a space is the meat on the bones of the puzzle of this game. Forcing a player to go on a longer and more expensive route is enjoyable. This can sometimes backfire in your face as it leads them to either a volcano, which will give them an extra one shot power water in space, where they can trash cards from the deck.
Quick and fun to play. Plenty of variety from the cards in the game. And lots more variety as you can create your own tracks from the modular tiles. I love playing this game.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar:
Tiny Turbo Cars[/thing] (Played 1 times:Total plays 6)
Playing the right game with the right people does make all the difference to the experience you have. This game hit the table with two new players, and was easy to teach, apart from one minor rule, which I forgot. The rule of bumping other cars. A contributing aspect to enjoying this game is to be a player that enjoys programmation. Program ocean done by sliding squares in a grid until you have them in the position of the programming that you have for your car. This felt nice and leisurely for a change, as I was not having to race quickly to do this part of the game. Having time to reflect a bit about how many spaces to move forward before veering to the left to avoid the pit and then how many spaces left I need to go before I hit the wall. There was no stress this time about receiving the last player token.
With the program in place, it’s a case of each player, in turn order, moving their vehicle along the racetrack. This can be quite comical as confident players roll through a puddle, which reverses all their left and right steering before that car spins out and runs out of batteries. Then there’s those moments when a player does a perfect programming, which makes them fist pump the air. And you feel happy for them. And all of this takes place within a 30 minute time period. Which will make you want to play again moving the modular tiles around to try a longer and more difficult track. Adding some player powers, and some weapons you can collect along the road, this turned out to be a much better game than my previous experiences. It’s extremely light, because there is a catch-up mechanism for those who are struggling behind. And as I said, it requires a certain type of player to really enjoy this game. I just need to get five of them around the table to get the maximum enjoyment out of this crazy racing game.
:star::star::star::star::star::star::star::nostar::nostar::nostar:
The video version
(opps, I forgot to talk about The Quest for El Dorado)
Youtube Video
Thanks for getting to the end. Let me know what you think about this blog in the comments. And if you have any further question about the games I played, please ask.
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