Back to the boardgame café again,
on my birthday. There may have been beer beforehand. With images;
cc-by-sa on
everything.
We started with
Forbidden Island,
one I haven't played for quite a while; and I still couldn't remember
just how clue cards for artefacts that had already been recovered were
meant to work. (The rules are of no help, of course.) We pulled out a
reasonably clean victory, mostly by hoarding Helicopter Lifts. It was
very noticeable, in retrospect, just how many of the card-moving
mechanics turned up again later in Pandemic.
Particularly since we went on to another Matt Leacock-based game
(though modified by someone else),
Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu.
As the title implies, it's basically very much the same idea as
Pandemic: instead of the world, you have Arkham, Innsmouth,
Kingsport and Dunwich; instead of planes, you have buses; instead of
disease cubes, you have cultists and shoggoths; instead of contagion,
you have summoning.
(You can leave Innsmouth by bus at any time. Oh dear.)
Yes, all right, there's also a sanity die (and when you hit zero, you
flip your card and have fewer actions, but also a nifty new power).
But it all feels terribly familiar, down to the "every action counts"
gameplay, and the frustrating way in which the card transfer rules
require you to bunch up, but keeping the disease/cultists under
control forces you to spread out.
Yeah, we lost. Not really surprising.
I couldn't resist referring to the cultists, with miniatures about
half the size of the player characters and wearing hoods, as Jawas.
Speaking as someone who has bought and then sold Pandemic, I have no
ambition to own this. If I wanted to play Pandemic I'd have kept my
copy. If I wanted to play a Cthulhu-type game, well, there's some
integration of the theme, but the fact that you can walk into a nest
of cultists, beat them up, and not for a moment risk taking any harm
from them, doesn't help matters at all.
More Cthulhu-related gameplay in
Lost in R'lyeh,
where you're trying not to be the last person to escape from the
sunken city… or at least not to be the last player to get rid of all
your cards. This is a near-perfect example of what I call thematic
disconnection: there's quite a pleasant card game here where you play
cards onto a stack and, depending on how many of the same sort you
play at once, take, or force someone else to take, the entire stack.
(Which gives them more cards thus putting them further from victory,
but also gives them more options for what to play.) Mechanically it's
very like the folk game
Palace.
That's fine, but there's also this Cthulhu-related artwork and card
titling which has no relationship to the gameplay. And that annoys me.
I don't mind playing an abstract game, and I don't mind playing a
deeply thematic game, but I don't like abstract games that paint
themselves as thematic. It feels like false advertising. When it's a
theme that's as overdone as Cthulhu, I object more.
That said the game's not bad, if aggressively random; but I don't
expect it to find a place on my shelf any time soon.
The traditional closer, a couple of rounds of
Timeline: Historical Events,
where we actually got some questions wrong.
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