RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples August 2015 05 August 2015

Back to the boardgame café, just two of us this time. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

We started with Yardmaster, which, well, if I'd gone into it expecting a game about railways I'd have been disappointed. You collect "freight" cards, then use them to pay for matching "railcar" cards to add to your train, but each railcar must match the one before in either colour or value. It's basically an abstract game, but a surprisingly deep one, and I quite enjoyed it. (Points off for relying on colour, though. I'm not colour-blind but I know plenty of people who are to some extent, and they'd find it much harder to play this.)

Not as hard as they'd find Race for the Galaxy, though, where the resource type given by a planet is only shown by colour. There's a lot of symbology here, and part of the problem is right there in the name (as a race game there's really very little you can do to your opponents). The rulebook seemed over-complex and didn't do a good job of explaining what were really fairly simple rules. That said, it was enjoyable and flavoursome, and I'd play again, especially with more players so that more was happening each turn.

Next was Waggle Dance, not the beer but a new boardgame from Grublin Games who published the appealing but flawed Cornish Smuggler. It's a light worker-placement dice game: your bees have to raise more workers, expand the hive, gather pollen and make honey. Since the cards are in a set layout and don't move around during the game, I was rather surprised it didn't have a board instead; and the art was distinctly, sorry, "busy", in that there was lots of extraneous detail that sometimes made it hard to tell just what was going on. (And the rules sheet, a huge fold-out affair, is also sometimes a little tricky to follow.) It's another one that relies heavily on colour, and some of the cubes would be hard to tell apart in bad light (especially red/orange/pink, a lot more distinct in these photos than in real life), but the actual gameplay is rather enjoyable, and this worked rather better for me than the mechanically-similar Alien Frontiers that we played a few months back.

I'd been planning to give Red 7 another go, but since there were just two of us I was persuaded to try Star Realms, a deck-building sort of game but not one that devolves into a race like Dominion: rather, you're balancing trade (to buy more ships) with attacks on the enemy. Or in my case going all-out to attack, which won me the game quite handily. One can play with more, but the core game is for two, which is rare; and it's a deck-builder I don't hate, which is rarer. Really, the only thing that's a bit clumsy is the set of cards for tracking one's remaining Authority (victory points). Reader, I bought it.

See also:
Thirsty Meeples May 2015

Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1