RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples February 2017 11 March 2017

Back to the boardgame café, which was calming down a bit after Christmas. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

I've been meaning to try Quadropolis for a while, so we did.

The tile choosing system seemed like someone's idea of a couple of great abstract mechanics, jammed together and wedged into a boardgame about building a city. Why can you only build a residence if there's a tile at the right distance from the edge of the board?

It felt very like a chunkier version of Between Two Cities: same sort of "this thing scores for having that sort of thing next to it, this other thing scores for being all together", and so on.

In the end I won handily with lots of park and shop points. But… I'd rather play Suburbia, or Between Two Cities. Which I'll put on the play list for a future visit, even though it's better with a larger group.

We had another game of Colony, in "high conflict" mode. It all made a lot more sense this time. Two of us got two barricades each, so the conflict didn't actually happen.

I was working towards a once-per-turn automatic upgrading engine, but didn't quite make it by the end of the game.

In the end it was a pretty close thing all the way through, and red and yellow would both have been able to win on their next turns had blue not got there first. In spite of the iconography, which usually puts me off games, this is going on my "might well buy it some time" list.

Then on to Not Alone, where one player is an alien and the others are spacewreck survivors, trying to get rescued before the planet assimilates them.

It's mostly a guessing game for the alien: players secretly choose locations, then the alien decides where to hunt that turn, and may play a special power card as well. Some locations bring rescue nearer, while others bolster the humans' abilities in various ways.

The alien won. I wouldn't mind giving this another go some time, ideally with a larger group, but it doesn't get onto the buy list yet.

Finally Timeline: Music and Cinema, which is probably the least-broken of the Timelines for us at the moment: OK, I did play two perfect games, but the others didn't so at least there was some tension. (I'm slightly surprised that I did, and I'm sure I won't next time…)

[Buy Quadropolis at Amazon] [Buy Colony at Amazon] [Buy Not Alone at Amazon] [Buy Timeline: Music and Cinema at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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