RogerBW's Blog

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

First game of the evening was Evolution, which has been getting a fair bit of buzz lately. I found it a bit clunky (just what is supposed to happen when a card awards you more food than your population level?), but it was also unfortunately subject to positive feedback: once you have an effective large predator, it can kill off any new species before they can become competition to it, and the game had a runaway winner. Fair enough, he played well, but once we'd got into that situation we still had most of the game left to play with no hope of changing it, which is just the same problem as Monopoly.

A return to Castles of Mad King Ludwig next, which felt rather more enjoyable than last time; we've played Suburbia again since our first experience of Castles, and perhaps got a better feel for the way this particular game works. I found myself with surprising amounts of money, never needing to skip a turn to take from the treasury, and indeed my remaining cash got me the winning point. I still prefer Surburbia though I admit this is a slicker and faster game.

Finally, Machi Koro, which we've been meaning to try for a while. Again this suffered from having a runaway winner, though he did need both luck and good gameplay to make that happen; it seems that the game rewards monopolies more than diversification, since that way you get all the money you're going to get in a single turn and can spend it immediately, rather than having to save it up and risk other players taking it off you. I'd like to try this one again some time.