RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples October 2015 21 October 2015

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

We started the evening with Exploding Kittens, which seemed to me rather too simplistic. Like Cards against Humanity, it relies on the players to form a mutual consensus that This Is Funny, and doesn't have much to offer apart from breaking of taboos. It's a pity that many potential new boardgamers will meet this as their first modern game, and perhaps never realise that there are games which are actually interesting to play too.

Next was Terra, which I'd rejected as an Essen purchase for being too simple, and having now tried it I agree: it didn't take anything like the threatened 45-60 minutes, and the actual gameplay is not at all bad, but this is still basically a trivia game. If I were looking for a party game I could persuade non-gamers to try, I might well go for something like this.

Then Alien Frontiers again. I enjoyed it a lot more this time, treating it as a dice exercise rather than as a game about the colonisation of Mars, and we were all in potentially winning positions until the end. This has climbed up my list to the "probable purchase" level, though obviously not any time soon.

Finally, Roll for It!, which we'd seen played on TableTop by people with no grasp of probability. It's not a terrible game, but I don't think my life will be any poorer if I never play it again.

Only one game I plan to buy, but I enjoyed three out of four, so that's a good evening even without considering the company.

[Buy Exploding Kittens at Amazon] [Buy Alien Frontiers at Amazon] [Buy Roll for It! at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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Thirsty Meeples May 2015

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