RogerBW's Blog

This Meetup-based boardgames group remains on-line for the moment; as usual we got together on Jitsi and then played some games on BGA.

BGA now has Splendor thanks to its deal with a prince of demons; it's been about three years since I last played. And like Abyss the visual and tactile pleasures were largely absent, and all that was left was the manipulations of the game mechanics. Not helped by an optional mode in which the cost of a card is shown as how much more you need to get to buy it, rather than the total – it's trying to compensate for the limitations of the interface but it pushes the game even further from its physicality. Clinks and bings do not make up for those lovely heavy poker chips in the real thing.

Then more of The Crew, where we blazed through several more levels (playing the five-player game has got us reasonably good at the four-player game) but various irritations compounded and I found myself very much not in the mood.

I suspect that in a face-to-face game I'd do a lot worse, because I'm lousy at card-counting and instead keep a tally of what's been seen, which is apparently not allowed in the real thing.