RogerBW's Blog

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

We started with T.I.M.E. Stories, having skimmed the rules in advance; they're not all that complex, but parts of them are written confusingly. They're trying to be generic, because all the scenario content is on the deck of cards.

So you take over the bodies of people in the 1920s asylum… but it's basically a random clue hunt. In location A, interact with person B and you will randomly be given token C (the dark blue token, not the black token) which you can then use to look at card D if you go to location E.

It's an interesting idea, but I found it something of a grind, the setting uninspiring, and no particular logic to what you can get from where. Open this box, and it's a key; open that box, and it's a trap. There's a lot of complexity in return for not a huge amount of fun. I don't utterly hate it but it's not one I'm likely to play again; I'd be more likely to go back to Tragedy Looper.

We wanted something simpler after that, so gave String Railway a go: you draw random stations, and connect them with bits of string, trying not to cross other strings (other players' tracks, river, mountainous area).

It's a bit random in terms of what stations you get, but it's fast-moving and I rather enjoyed it. Might well give this another try, though it would be better on a baize card table than on this rather slippery black-painted wood.

We finished off with some Timeline. Timeline: Historical Events for us is pretty much a matter of "who messes up first", since we mostly get the questions right. (Or argue. The "dollar" as a unit of currency predates the US Dollar by more than two centuries.)

On the other hand, Timeline: Music and Cinema was a bit more of a challenge, with quite a few in the first game that we hadn't even heard of. We did rather better in the second. I think we're just too smart for this game; how terrible.