RogerBW's Blog

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

This time we'd actually made some plans about what to play, and started with Hit Z Road, a new Martin Wallace game that was getting talked about a little at Essen. It's been heavily Designed to resemble a game put together by a zombie apocalypse survivor (the various card decks have "salvaged"-looking backs, the resource tokens resemble bottle caps, and so on). In gameplay, though, it's basically a matter of bidding to choose which set of hazard cards you face, and (for two of us) running out of resources and dying horribly. Very pretty, but there's not really an awful lot of game here, and the only player interaction is in the auction phase.

We went on with Beyond Baker Street, which I've heard vaguely positive things about: but nobody said that it was basically the mechanic of Hanabi (I can see your cards while you can't; I tell you things about them; you try to work out which card you should play where) with a Sherlock Holmes dressing. The various "case files" are just difficulty settings, and I think this would suffer from the same problem that Hanabi does in consistent play with the same group: the fun for me is in working out the conventions you'll use for giving hints, not in actually using those conventions.

Ruddy Vikings is a short filler game: you're placing defences and sending Vikings against your enemies' defences. It's very random, and our second game became an extended two-player slog (yes, it has player elimination) as we worked our way through the deck in the hope of getting something useful. Definitely not one to buy. (Not that one can easily anyway; it was a Kickstarted game that hasn't found a conventional publisher.)

We finished off the evening with a couple more runs of Timeline: British History, which sadly we have now broken as much as the other Timeline games we've played: out of two rounds, each of four cards for each of the three players, I think there were either one or two wrong plays total.