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.
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.