Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything.
We started with
Abyss, a new game
from Bruno Cathala and Charles Chevallier. I have to say, first of
all, it's gorgeous: lots of art evocative of a fantastical undersea
realm.
The game itself is in stages: gather small creatures, trade them in to
get a Lord (who's worth more, and may have a special power), trade in
Lords (making their special powers unusable) to get Locations which
score you extra points for having particular sorts of creature or
Lord…
The currency is pearls, and these give a lovely tactile sensation. I
ended up ignoring most of the funky powers from the Lords, and
eschewing locations completely, just going for the high-scoring Lords
without big powers, and this won the game for me by a handy margin.
None of us used the locations as much as we thought we would.
The rules text is not of the best quality and we got off to a slow
start. I'm not sure the game has enough replayability for my
collection, but it's quite fun and I wouldn't mind playing again.
Then it was time for
Quantum, a game
that's been on my list to try for a while. It's a simple 4X space
game, where you're racing to place your supply of Quantum Cubes on
various planets while preventing the enemy from doing the same thing.
Your ships are dice, and can be reconfigured between the slow but
powerful Battlestation and the quick but vulnerable Scout; to place a
cube, you have to have ships in orbit round a planet equal to that
planet's resource number. (In the picture above, both Red and Green
have just achieved this by putting eight points of ships round
eight-point planets.)
After some early clashes we didn't have all that much fighting, and by
careful use of advance cards (I ended up with Brilliant, giving a
research bonus, and Clever, which let me choose instead of rolling
whenever I reconfigured my ships, and frankly I think this might be a
game breaker) I was able to get my last cube out before anyone else.
That said, the other two players were both one cube away from victory;
we stayed fairly even. Definitely one I'd like to play again, and
going on my "to buy" list.
We finished the evening with
Arctic Scavengers,
a deck-building game that's less annoying than most because you do
actually have a conflict phase each round. This is probably as close
to a deck-builder designed for me as you're likely to get: an
interesting theme, and tension between keeping your deck small so that
the cards you've obtained come up often and large so that you've got a
chance of victory. It was enjoyable, and it's the only game in this
style that I've tried of which I can say that, but it's still not a
mechanic I really like.
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