Back to the boardgame café. With
images; cc-by-sa on
everything.
A couple of recent releases this evening, starting with
Wayfinders;
the rulebook was determined that this game of flying from island to
island building airstrips was WHIMSICAL!, but the gameplay really
wasn't. You collect five sorts of resource with an interesting
worker-placement mechanism, then spend them (in a less-interesting
way) to move around and spend more of them to put down your hangar
("airstrip") markers, which give various benefits either during the
game or at the end.
Which was not at all helped by the iconography; there are four sorts
of in-game benefit for putting a base on an island, and seven or more
sorts of scoring benefit, but the two classes aren't visually
distinct. I could have done a better job of this, and I'm not any sort
of designer.
It was… fine. As light unthematic perfect-information
minimal-randomness Eurogames with involved endgame scoring go, it
didn't do anything terribly wrong. But there are thousands of games
out there which are fun, which leave a positive impression rather
than a neutral one; I find it very difficult to picture this becoming
anybody's favourite game, or even a game they feel strongly about.
We went on to Last
Bastion, the
new implementation of the well-known very hard cooperative game Ghost
Stories. Which, I should say, I've never played; but whereas that had
monks defending a village from creatures out of Chinese folklore, this
has a generic Western fantasy theme. OK, it's still just "a three red
dot monster that has these powers", but I find pretty much anything
else more interesting than pseudo-Tolkienian genre fantasy. It's the
lazy option; and so are the miniatures, which may well be different
for each character (woohoo), but that just means you need to put a
coloured ring on the base to remember which one is you. What's so
terrible about four colours of the same monk mini? I don't think this
was even a Kickstarter game, but it looks like one.
The game… is tough, and we lost comprehensively, but I enjoyed it. I
could definitely picture myself playing it again. But if I buy it,
it'll be a second-hand copy of Ghost Stories, not this version.
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