Back to the boardgame café. With images;
cc-by-sa on
everything.
Horrible grotty images because I'd left the proper camera at
home, but you get the idea.
We started with
Above and Below,
which seems to be trying to do a bunch of things at once. There's a
Euro-standard engine-building game as you construct your village, and
an Arabian Nights-style numbered-paragraph book of strange stuff to
happen to you as you explore the caves beneath it, and you have to play
both of these games at once with the same resources.
We picked up the rules fairly quickly, though there were sections we
didn't use much. My feeling was that the pieces fit together a bit
awkwardly: a Euro-standard "you made the wrong decision three turns
ago and so there is no possibility of winning" doesn't sit well with
the fantasy-whimsy of the narrative. I'm also concerned that with only
about 200 paragraphs (and some encounters use more than one) the game
wouldn't have much in the way of legs.
A fairly pleasant experience, but I'm generally bad at this kind of
engine-building and this is not something I'm at all likely to buy.
(Last image is by Michael Cule.)
We went on with
The King is Dead,
a vaguely post-Arthurian game of politics… or of cube-pushing. You're
trying to be in control of the faction that itself is in control of
the most provinces, while you have a brutally limited hand of cards
and very little power to affect things.
It has a certain minimalist elegance, and I won so obviously it's a
good design, but unless you have the sort of group that's going to
play this to death and get really good at it I think there are other
games that are more rewarding for the mental investment.
We finished the evening with a game of
Timeline: Music and Cinema,
which… well, I didn't feel as soiled as I did when playing Star Wars
Timeline but I did a substantially better job than the others of
putting nineties and 2000s music in its chronological place. (Possibly
because I could easily make out the tiny print on the cards that
listed the artist, rather than just the song title. Hurrah for lasered
eyes!)
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.