Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything.
Our first game was
Saltlands, a
post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt, of which our first impression was
that this is a game that tries very hard not to be played. The rules
are not at all clear even about how setup works; and you get all these
neat vehicles
but you don't get to use most of them in a smaller game; and they're
only for the raiders; if you capture one, you don't get to use the
miniature.
The raider trucks swarmed.
There's a really nifty system for moving your sand-yacht as the wind
changes strength and direction… but if you capture a raider vehicle,
while it's slower, you get to carry more cards and go up-wind.
The goal of the game is to turn up all the rumour cards (which move
the coloured goal tokens about), then to get to one of those goals
with the right cards. Which means in practice it's a scavenger hunt
where you have to turn over lots and lots and lots of tokens – so it
would have been really nice if the rules had made it clear that
revealing an adjacent token isn't an action, while picking it up and
getting the benefit of it is. (I think.)
In spite of this we managed to complete the game on the last action,
with two out of three of us escaping. But, well, I saw this at Essen
in 2016 and didn't back their kickstarter then… and I don't regret
that, even if the plastic vehicles are really nifty; the random
token system just serves to draw the game out, without letting you
plan anything more than "get to as many tiles as possible". I may
steal the mechanics I like (the wind system, mostly) and do something
more interesting with them.
That took a while, so our other game was
Museum Rush…
which ended up feeling like
Burgle Bros
Lite. You're all thieves, stealing stuff from a museum; but the Clock
cards that end the game are scattered randomly through the deck, and
in my five turns I drew four of them, which meant I didn't get much in
the way of nifty powers (in the same deck). It's OK, I guess, but I
can't think of a reason I'd recommend this rather than Burgle Bros.
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