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.

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.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech aviation base commerce battletech beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2022 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1