by qwertymartin
When choosing the monthly winner, I often find it hard to pick between the game that has delivered most fun already and the one that offers more promise for the future. This time I'll go with the former as it's the only game I played more than once.Flip Ships - 3 plays - [BGCOLOR=#99ffff] 7 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 2017
If 'co-operative Space Invaders dexterity game' sounds fun to you, you'll like this - simple as that! Waves of alien cards approach Earth, some with special powers, and the players must flick (into the air rather than along the table) their tokens to land on and eliminate them. In order to win, all aliens must be eliminated before the Earth takes too much damage, but you must also land a sufficient number of tricky shots into the 'mothership' (a chunky box located behind the alien cards).
To spice things up, the players' ships have different powers - so one player might specialise in targeting the mothership while another can take out the trickier 'double hit' aliens. And as the Earth's health declines, the players get to flip more ships each round, which tends to produce a dramatic finish. There are also plentiful options for tailoring the difficulty level to the players' dexterity talents.
It's not a game I'll want to play every week, but it delivers on its premise perfectly and has provided some great laughs.
Star Cartel - 1 play - [BGCOLOR=#99ffff] 7 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 2017
This one's the game with potential to be this month's long-term favourite, after a promising first play last night. It's a stripped-down market manipulation game that feels very Knizian and also reminds me a little of Traders of Carthage.
Over the course of the game, players draft goods of five types from a sliding central market to load into their ships. Each time a ship is full, you make a delivery and this is the crux of the game. The biggest set you deliver boosts the value of that colour on the market board, the smallest set reduces the value of its colour, but you don't get to keep either of those sets - only a set of a third colour if you've managed to collect one.
Each time you deliver you get a new higher-capacity ship and the game ends after all the ships have been filled, with scoring based on the cards you've managed to stash multiplied by the final value of their colour. You'll only get to make 5 or 6 deliveries in the game, so what you stash and what you boost is crucial.
The game felt a little aimless to start with, but as players began to build up their stashes, the decisions became trickier. The card market gives you some ability to plan ahead, but since you can only pick from the bottom row of cards, other players can stiff you with a bunch of bad choices. Some of the ships have special powers that let you get round that though. The tension really ratchets up in the last few rounds due to the market crash mechanism - if a good surpasses its maximum value of $9 it goes all the way back down to a ruinous $1.
It's labelled as a 3-6p game, but I think it's one that will play best towards the lower end of that range, more players only adding downtime and chaos.
Ethnos - 1 play - [BGCOLOR=#99ffff] 7 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 2017
Friends will be shocked to hear that I enjoyed a game with orcs in it! But beneath the lazy pasted-on fantasy setting is a stripped-down old-school Euro with a dash of modern variable setup and special powers.
There are a number of similarities to Ticket to Ride: each turn is a simple choice to draw a card from a display or play a matching set of cards; playing a set allows you to play markers on the board which may score later, but you also score directly for the size of sets you play. But instead of route-building, the board-play is pure area majority, and to add a counter to a region, the set of cards you play must be larger than the number of counters you already have there.
So far so simple, and the turns move pleasantly briskly (in fact the biggest problem was players not realising it was their turn again already!). But there are a couple of twists. At the beginning of the game, 6 races (this is where the bloody orcs come in) are randomly chosen from 12. When you play a set of cards, you also choose one of them to be the leader and get to execute the special power of the associated race. Some give extra scoring opportunities; some get round the restrictions on adding counters to the board; and some help you mitigate the other big twist...
Unlike Ticket to Ride, there's a hand limit and when you play a set, you have to discard the rest of your hand into the face-up display for the other players to pick over - in fact, this is the only way the display gets replenished. This helps with the briskness because you can only really focus on one objective at a time, but it also generates the biggest complaint about the game. Often the display will be empty and the players are reduced to drawing blind, hoping to add to a set.
Opinions on the game in our group were divided and I suspect this was correlated to the amount of luck in drawing the right cards from the deck. Time will tell if it was due only to my good fortune, but it was a good first impression for me.
The Cousins' War - 1 play - [BGCOLOR=#9999ff] 6 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 2017
There has been a rash of 'meaty microgames' lately and this one certainly packs a lot in to 17 cards, a handful of cubes and a tiny map. It pits two players against each other as York and Lancaster in the War of the Roses, each aiming to instantly win by dominating all three areas of England or by dominating two at the end of five rounds.
The cards offer players the familiar choice of spending ops points or using a rule-breaking event, familiar from Twilight Struggle/1960 and more recently 13 Days/13 Minutes. Indeed they also have events that will trigger for your opponent in the right circumstances. Both the ops and the events generally let you move cubes between the various areas in the game - from your supply to your usable reserves; from your reserves to the board; between areas on the map and so on.
Easily the most fun part of the design is the battle that occurs at the end of each of the five rounds. This is resolved with a Liars Dice style bluff-off. The attacker rolls three dice in secret and then declares 'three fours', 'two threes' etc. The defender can either accept the call and try to outroll it or challenge. If the attacker was bluffing, they lose a unit; if not, the challenger takes the hit.
I have two concerns about the game. One is that the events are rather samey which detracts from the theme - besides the more interesting French Alliance/Betrayal I don't really remember what any of the events were called. The other is that it seemed too easy to get all your cubes on the map, which left us rather awkwardly trying to pull them back off again just to have something to do. I ended up feeling that most of my actions might have amounted to busywork - just shuttling cubes around until the final round where the game was decided.
There's nothing to be done about the first criticism (which I had of 13 Days/Minutes too) but I'm hoping that subsequent play will disabuse me of the second because it's a neat little game and the battle mechanism is such good fun.
Downforce - 1 play - [BGCOLOR=#9999ff] 6 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 2017
Downforce is yet another iteration of Kramer's card-based racing system that dates back to the 80s (including Top Race, Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix and Daytona 500). It's a nicely produced edition and adds individual special powers for the first time.
The racing itself is great fun - most of the cards move more than one car by differing amounts of spaces, which you can use to trap opponents' cars in the pack while speeding yours ahead.
But you also have the opportunity to bet on other cars at three points during the race and I'm not sure I like what this does to the game. Suddenly everyone might be rooting for the same car which just isn't as interesting, and it was disappointing when our game was won by a player who'd simply bet on his own car three times with a very strong hand for it.
For a game that combines racing with betting, I still prefer Knizia's Winner's Circle/Royal Turf.
Five-up - 1 play - [BGCOLOR=#9999ff] 6 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 1959
This is the closest BGG entry to All Fives, a traditional dominoes game. It'd make a decent pub game and the aim of getting the ends of the line of dominoes to total multiples of 5 gives it a bit of a Cribbage feel.
Rhino Hero: Super Battle - 1 play - [BGCOLOR=#cc99ff] 5 [/BGCOLOR]
First Published 2017
The biggest disappointment of the month as it seems like such a waste of great components. The original Rhino Hero was a simple Jenga-like affair of building up a tower. This one expands that to a whole precarious city block. But unfortunately the fun building part of the game is almost entirely unconnected to the winning part of the game, which essentially revolves around rolling high numbers. Odd.