Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything.
We began with the one we'd planned, the recent edition of
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.
It's an impressive setup, with a map of London and a directory of
addresses, as well as specific results for visiting particular
locations associated with a case.
It's a bit of a blunt instrument, though: you go to location A and get
the text associated with location A, a bit like a cut-scene in a video
game. You can't ask the questions you want to ask, which I suppose is
inevitable in a GM-less game like this.
We did find that visiting a particular location had our party asking
something about which we the players had no idea: had we gone to
another location first, all would have been clear. It's a shame that
the game couldn't have been written to be agnostic on the matter of
order; indeed, that it couldn't have been written a bit better, with
lots of mis-spellings and grammatical errors which often made the
meanings of things quite unclear. (Not helped by an over-fancy font.)
I enjoyed it moderately. I can see why people play it, but as one of
my friends put it "I'd rather play a role-playing game" – an
investigative scenario with a good GM gives much more of the same sort
of fun than this can supply. We got 82 out of 100 on the first
scenario, but I don't think we'll be rushing to play it again.
We were all feeling a bit weary, so tried some lighter games.
Timeline: Historical Events
seemed surprisingly less enjoyable than the Inventions version that we
played a couple of months ago. Perhaps we were more familiar with the
historical events that were chosen; the majority of them seemed very
easy, and anyone who made a mistake was likely to lose, whereas with
Inventions we were all making mistakes.
Why First? is
a very simple game: you play numbered cards on your own or others'
pawns to move them up and down the track, with the aim of having the
second-highest score. Possibly not a lot of depth to it, but I quite
liked it. Would play again, if not buy.
We finished with the travel edition of
Brew Crafters,
which I thought a bit simplistic. All right, I guess, and maybe I'll
try the full version some day, but I probably won't play this one
again.
Not the most enjoyable evening we've had, though it's not the café's
fault. I suspect we might even start asking them for recommendations,
having now played through most of the games that we were interested in
when we started coming here a year ago.
Count the Love Letter implementations: original, Batman, Hobbit,
Factory Edition. There's an Adventure Time version too. And five more
in the pipeline, apparently.
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.