Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything. (From the grotty mobile phone camera rather than the usual
one, sorry.)
We began with
Keyflower, a
rather heavier eurogame than my usual fare.
One's bidding for tiles, which have various effects: they can produce
resources for future turns or for scoring, can be upgraded into more
useful and higher-scoring tiles, or can give other benefits. Bidding
is with worker meeples, and a later bid has to match the colour of the
first one.
In theory one's building up a village with mines, carpenter, forge,
and so on, but as with most eurogames one pretty much has to ignore
the theme and play the mechanics.
Half-way through the first game I hated it. By the end I was quite
enjoying it. It's not a game I'm likely to buy, because of the
thematic gap and the length, but I'll probably play it again if it
comes out when I'm around. (And I ended up winning. Not really sure
how that happened.) Now I want to try
Suburbia again…
That had taken a while, so we finished off the evening with a
relatively quick game of
Quantum. Last
time I'd got the very handy research card that allows one to choose
how to reconfigure one's ships. This time I just went for raw
aggression, having noticed how the game rewards this (there's no
penalty for failing in an attack other than having to retreat to the
square from which one launched it). With the Ferocious advance, I got
a combat bonus too.
Green was being similarly aggressive in his advances.
We ended up fighting at some length over the central world, which of
course is the point of the game.
My cunning plan went wrong because I picked the wrong world to envelop
with my Mighty Armada (in the distance above; there's only room for
one cube on that world, and it was already taken), and Green managed
to get his last cube down before I could recover.
It's a strange game. I like it a very great deal having now played
twice, but I can't pin down just why I enjoy it. It throws out a lot
of the planning and pretty much all the resource management of a
traditional 4X game in favour of throwing ships into the fray; it's a
sort of anti-wargame in that respect. But I'm still finding it great
fun and surprisingly flavourful.
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