RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples May 2019 17 May 2019

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

Some of their food is more, er, "aimed at the Oxford market", than the rest. (I could see this being popular in Marlow.)

We started with The Big Book of Madness, which I remember from its launch a few Essens ago – though I didn't look closely at it then. It's somewhat athematic, being basically a succession of set-collecting challenges, but I had a good time, and we lost collectively by one card – which seems like a reasonable difficulty level for a first play. Perhaps a bit heavy on the luck of card draws, though I can see that one could fine-tune one's deck over time. I won't be buying this but I had fun.

We went on to Eaten by Zombies!, a "20-40" minute game. The first half hour was actually quite fun; on your turn, you're presented with one or more zombies, and you have to play cards to fight or flee (tougher zombies are easier to flee from). The more cards you play the more stuff you get to salvage (cards added to your hand); killing zombies adds them to your deck too, and if you ever get a full hand of them you're turned zombie yourself, while fleeing causes you to lose cards, and zero cards also means you've turned. Failure to do either causes you to lose even more cards.

Which is fine, but nearly two hours later nobody had been turned (though they'd come close) and it felt very samey. We had missed a rule restricting the addition of zombies to other players' hordes, which might have meant we'd have kept more in hand, but what had been enjoyable gameplay had come down to rote, and we ended up abandoning the game. Shame, because it started off quite well.

[Buy Big Book of Madness at Amazon] [Buy Eaten by Zombies at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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