RogerBW's Blog

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

We began with current hotness Ethnos, which does its best to sabotage itself with a drab generic-fantasy theme and dreary card art. It's actually not at all thematic except for some of the special powers, and this could easily have been done with a completely different dressing that might actually have appealed more than elves, dwarves, orcs, centaurs, fighting over (yawn) fantasy world only one will (zzz) prevail.

But the game itself is quite fun - you're making sets in order to put down tokens and score points, but when you put down a set you discard all other cards in hand. Then individual cards have special powers. It all works rather well, albeit a little randomly for my taste. Wouldn't mind trying this again. I really hope someone buys the rights and re-skins it, though.

Also tried current hotness The Captain Is Dead next; I've been hearing a fair bit about this cooperative game lately, the theme is one that appeals to me, and if only the gameplay could not be like Space Cadets… well, it wasn't. The core gameplay seems pretty workable if uninspired; what makes this interesting are the role abilities. We had the Admiral (can get lots of one-shot Battle Plan powers), the Chief Engineer (can repair the jump drive, i.e. finish the game, more quickly), and the Crewman (a new one appears on the bridge whenever the old one is injured/killed); I think there are 18 altogether. The rulebook wasn't well laid out, but this is one I definitely enjoyed and may think about buying at some point.

(And I admit it, I'm shallow: I really like the translucent stand-ups.)

We finished off with Timeline: General Interest, which has un-broken itself for us in the year or so since we last played it; we were all making mistakes, particularly in the 19th century.