RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples July 2019 14 July 2019

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

We started with Dice Hospital, which is only not on my shelf of shame because I played it once at the Dice & Mystics Fringe at Essen when I'd just picked it up. Not sure why this hasn't got to the table much; it's good fun, and not too heavy or long, even if it's far enough into abstraction that I'm very bad at it. One to play more.

We went on to try Finger Guns at High Noon, a new release from Indie Boards & Cards – for whom I do quite a bit of demo work, but I hadn't heard of this one and we didn't have it at Expo. It's basically a sort of extended rock-paper-scissors, but in a three-player game dynamite (do three damage to each of your neighbours and one to yourself) seemed tremendously powerful. (Yeah baby yeah, I'm the evil midnight bomber what bombs at midnight.) Not one I'll rush to play again, though it could be fun with a larger group and in the right context.

Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth next, a reimplementation of The Lost Expedition that we've previously played here (and I've played again on Tabletop Simulator). This was hard work; there's the additional complication of a "perps" marker which starts off several spaces ahead of the players and causes a game loss if it gets to the end first. But there were very few things that moved us on (I think we got two in the whole game) and lots that moved them on, and by the end of the second day we were all dead. And that was on easy mode. That's how we felt playing The Lost Expedition too, though in my TTS game it was more of a soluble challenge; I think that there's an awful lot of luck of the draw in this game mechanism, so the difficulty ends up being extremely variable.

Finally, a couple of games of Timeline: Music & Cinema to finish off the evening.

[Buy Dice Hospital at Amazon] [Buy Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]


  1. Posted by Michael Cule at 11:52am on 14 July 2019

    I said about THE LOST EXPEDITION didn't I? I said we were doomed...But someone just couldn't resist the Dredd bling...

    The fact that the same people seem to have been behind the JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL game should have warned me off it. But no, the surface theme got to me as well. At least I have the good taste to go for tales of Regency magic rather than grungy post-apocalyptic law enforcement.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 03:22pm on 14 July 2019

    I don't mind losing a coop game a bunch of times when I'm learning it. But I do like to feel that I could just about have won if I'd done things differently.

    Maggi and Nepitello were two of the three designers behind War of the Ring, which is highly regarded though I've never played it. I don't see anything else particularly notable.

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