RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples December 2016 09 January 2017

Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

This time we'd actually made some plans about what to play, and started with Hit Z Road, a new Martin Wallace game that was getting talked about a little at Essen. It's been heavily Designed to resemble a game put together by a zombie apocalypse survivor (the various card decks have "salvaged"-looking backs, the resource tokens resemble bottle caps, and so on). In gameplay, though, it's basically a matter of bidding to choose which set of hazard cards you face, and (for two of us) running out of resources and dying horribly. Very pretty, but there's not really an awful lot of game here, and the only player interaction is in the auction phase.

We went on with Beyond Baker Street, which I've heard vaguely positive things about: but nobody said that it was basically the mechanic of Hanabi (I can see your cards while you can't; I tell you things about them; you try to work out which card you should play where) with a Sherlock Holmes dressing. The various "case files" are just difficulty settings, and I think this would suffer from the same problem that Hanabi does in consistent play with the same group: the fun for me is in working out the conventions you'll use for giving hints, not in actually using those conventions.

Ruddy Vikings is a short filler game: you're placing defences and sending Vikings against your enemies' defences. It's very random, and our second game became an extended two-player slog (yes, it has player elimination) as we worked our way through the deck in the hope of getting something useful. Definitely not one to buy. (Not that one can easily anyway; it was a Kickstarted game that hasn't found a conventional publisher.)

We finished off the evening with a couple more runs of Timeline: British History, which sadly we have now broken as much as the other Timeline games we've played: out of two rounds, each of four cards for each of the three players, I think there were either one or two wrong plays total.

[Buy Hit Z Road at Amazon] [Buy Beyond Baker Street at Amazon] [Buy Timeline: British History at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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