Back to the boardgame café. With images;
cc-by-sa on
everything.
We started with
Potion Explosion,
which has the air of a gimmick game: the central rack consists of rows
of marbles. The player takes some, and more roll down. (The cardboard
version at Thirsty Meeples was pretty ragged, since it's clearly been
heavily used for quite a while.)
The game is enjoyable, though: you try to fill slots on the potions
you're brewing, complete them to score points, and use them for
various benefits. This suffered a bit from unclear iconography, and a
better player mat would have helped here. (There are various options
on BoardGameGeek.) All the same, and even though I came last, I'd
happily play it again. (And I'm working on a 3d-printable rack.)
We carried on with
Dead Men Tell No Tales,
a game about poor life choices. Well, put it this way: you're a
pirate, and you're going onto an undead-infested pirate ship that is
on fire in order to get treasure out of it. This, even though you
start with an inexhaustible flask of rum.
It's a pleasing idea, one of those "spread your too-few actions over
too many things you need to do" games in the vein of Matt Leacock's
designs, and the fatigue mechanic works pretty well though it's quite
punishing; but I thought it was very badly let down by a terrible
rulebook (many things were not explained at all, others only in "play
hint" notes rather than in the proper rules). It's also pretty tough,
though that's fair enough. All the same, probably not one we'll play
again.
I suggested Parade
because I enjoyed it at Airecon earlier this year and wanted to give
it another try. And once more, I won handily. It's quite unusual to
find a game at which I'm noticeably better than most other players,
and I shall probably buy or trade for a copy when it becomes more
available (it seems to be out of print at the moment).
We finished off with the traditional Timeline, in this case a couple
of plays of
Timeline: Inventions,
in which once more we were getting enough things wrong that there was
still a sense of competition, rather than one error being equivalent
to a resignation.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.