Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything.
We planned ahead and dove into Sierra
West, which
is nominally a one-hour game… and I guess it could be, if you knew
what you were doing, but we took more like two and a half, granted
including setup and learning the rules.
It's… very much a modern Euro. There are a bunch of things you can do,
each of which racks up a track which will eventually score you points.
There are multipliers which make particular things the obvious course
of action.
But there's also a great deal of randomness, which meant there was
never much scope for planning. Some things need to get done by the end
of the game if you're to have any hope of winning (get your wagon to
the ×4 space, fill all your cabin spaces, flip all your animal tiles)
and we all did them. But a turn consists of seeing what cards you've
drawn (and therefore what you can do at all), picking from a fairly
small number of options, and doing it. (Shades of Terraforming
Mars.) Considering it as a worker-placement game, you only have two
workers (two and a half in some cases), and it rarely seemed worth
putting one out of contention from the main resource-gathering track
in order to get various minor bonuses.
Taken as a mechanics exercise I suppose it's quite interesting, but I
really like my games to have better thematic integration; there's
nothing in here that says "settling the American West" more than
"collecting colours and numbers". I didn't hate it, but if you offered
me fifty quid to swear I'd never play it again I'd take the money
without a second thought.
That took most of the evening, but we finished off with Timeline:
Science and
Discoveries,
a set I don't think we've played before; mildly challenging and
enjoyable as always. (Though I'm not sure what "The Invasion of
Normandy" was doing in there…)
- Posted by Dr Bob at
03:50pm on
13 September 2019
Do people often offer you fifty quid to swear you'd never play a game again? How can I sign up for this? There are LOTS of games I'd never play again! :-)
What do you actually DO in Timeline? (Apart from discover the Invasion of Normandy, obviously. Probably while on a marine biology field trip or something...)
- Posted by RogerBW at
03:58pm on
13 September 2019
No, it just occurred to me as a step up from "I want never to play this again", which is a way I feel about some athematic Euros. It wasn't that far from my tastes.
If you offered me twenty quid, I'd haver about it.
Timeline in a nutshell: each card has an event printed on both sides (e.g. "the discovery of radium"), and a date printed only on one side. Your hand is date-side-down on the table, and you start with one card date-side-up in the middle. On your turn, you pick one of your cards, move it to the place in the middle where you think it fits (i.e. in date order), then flip it over. If it does fit, it stays there, lengthening the row in the middle and making the next placement more difficult; otherwise, it goes out of the game and you take another card. First to empty their hand wins.
There are lots of sets with different themes, and they can be mixed and matched freely (well, except for Star Wars and such like where you're arranging events from the films in order).
- Posted by Dr Bob at
10:55am on
15 September 2019
I think game review websites really, really need a "how much money would it take for me to never play this game again" category, as well as stars and comments! :-)
Star Wars Timeline doesn't sound like much fun.
- Posted by RogerBW at
10:57am on
15 September 2019
The end result of playing Star Wars Timeline (Original Trilogy Edition - of course there's a prequel trilogy one too) was that we all felt vaguely soiled. Especially the winner, which I have a horrible feeling may have been I.
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