RogerBW's Blog

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

First game of the evening was London Dread, which I'd been meaning to try for a while.

It's a great idea: 24 card spaces with "dread cards", each of which is a horrifying thing of some sort. You can either leave them face down, in which case they generate a small number of Dread points, or turn them face up, in which case either the players beat them or they fail and generate more Dread (increasing Dread makes the final boss fight harder). Some of them will be Plot cards, all of which have to be found. Players have various different icons that are used to deal with the encounters, and can get more by drawing cards. And they have to plot all their movement on a clock-board, and in some cases will try to arrive at encounters at the same time to help each other. And it's all timed.

It was a hot evening with a noisy table next to us, and this probably didn't help. Neither did the rulebook, which puts some of the really important stuff in tiny print at the bottom of page 11. We dropped the time limit aspect, did a pretty good job of nailing everything, but still fell to dice luck at the end.

I dunno. I wanted to like this, and I might try it again in a different venue, but this time it really didn't work for me at all.

Brains brains brains brains brains brains; brains brains. Oh, hang on, let me translate.

We went on to something a bit lighter, Last Night on Earth; it's another one I've been meaning to try for a while, and it worked, oddly enough in a way that Zombicide didn't quite when I played that: it was relatively straightforward, with low-key special powers for the heroes and just one type of zombie rather than lots of variations with their own special abilities. I found it very quick to get to grips with and fast to play, and the randomness largely comes in specific known places so you can play the odds to ameliorate it. Now, granted, we didn't use any of the advanced rules, which make things more complex; and I was the zombie player, and won; but this was a lot of fun and I'm now giving serious thought to picking it up at some point. (But there are lots and lots of expansions.)

We finished off with Timeline: British History, which we've still broken (two of us getting perfect games each time); I wouldn't want to own a set of this, but it's still great to play at the end of the evening.