RogerBW's Blog

Back to the boardgame café. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.

We started the evening with new hotness Wingspan, an engine-builder themed on North American birds. I admit, if it had been birds I knew I'd probably have been more interested. But the special abilities are themed roughly after what the bird is known for, the two currencies of food and eggs made for an interesting balance, and I just barely won, all of which count in its favour… and yet somehow it never really roused my enthusiasm. I wouldn't mind playing this again, and the production quality is excellent, though I see nothing that would cause me to displace a game from my existing over-full collection.

We went on with Bad Maps, a highly chaotic programming game which I'd never heard of before: there are four minions who will be sent stumbling round the island, and each pirate captain plays cards to any of them, with the aim of getting them into first, second or last place in terms of distance from the centre.

I very much enjoyed it. The objective cards (each player gets four, and ends up picking one to score) are a bit random, and can give away a lot of points if one gets the right set, but I still had a good time; not sure how much long-term replayability it'll have, but I'm giving serious thought to buying this at some point.

That was two games in a row that one of us really hadn't got on with, so he picked Star Fluxx next. This was one of the good Fluxx games; it took about twenty minutes so didn't have time to stop being fun.

Lastly, as we were feeling tired, Timeline: British History, which only wasn't a perfect game because I messed up. Ah well.