RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples September 2017 01 October 2017

Back to the boardgame café, after a skipped month because of holidays and such like. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

We started the evening with The Lost Expedition, a cooperative game of surviving the jungle to reach El Dorado. It's basically about managing resources and making hard choices; I found it disappointing, particularly the way you have to play all the cards from your hand at some point during the turn rather than being able to discard some, and the saminess of so many cards being "pay a resource to survive in place or pay two resources to advance". While I admired some of the mechanics individually, I never felt that the game was coming together as a unified experience. (And even on easy mode we found it pretty unforgiving, so maybe we got something wrong, but I don't think so; the rules seem quite clear.) The theme is barely present, in spite of the Tintin-esque artwork; this is more token-juggling than exploring the jungle. May well appeal more to people who aren't me.

I'd been angling for another play of The Captain Is Dead, and we got to that next. The shop copy has clearly seen some hard use in the last couple of months, with the board actually torn in half, though it's still entirely usable. We picked characters randomly (not overlapping specialties) and seemed to have a tougher time of it than before; I suspect that there's more variation in effectiveness between them than the game would like you to believe. This is definitely going on my purchase list when money allows.

Brutal Kingdom is an odd game: you play cards with special powers (such as eliminating other cards from play), and some of those cards also gain you influence markers if they survive, but each influence marker is worth the number of markers of that type that haven't been claimed during the game. Like The Lost Expedition you end up playing all the cards in your hand, and it came out feeling fairly random, but I rather enjoyed it. I may play it again, but I'm very unlikely to buy it, partly because I'm not convinced it'll have much replay value but mostly because of that art.

We finished off with the traditional Timeline, this time British History, and after a slightly rough first round scored a perfect game on the second.

[Buy The Lost Expedition at Amazon] [Buy The Captain Is Dead at Amazon] [Buy Brutal Kingdom at Amazon] [Buy Timeline: British History at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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