On an unexpectedly wet day, I visited a tekeli.li forumite in London
for outdoor gaming again.
We started with
Dinosaur Tea Party,
much more enjoyable with the physical bits than it had been on BGA.
I found that my most effective niche was as a scavenger: when A has
made an incorrect guess about B, I as C (with a little extra
information from my own hidden card) can swoop in and play the reduced
odds.
Then a teaching game of
Whitehall Mystery.
I took a bold strategy, plunging through the middle of the
investigators, and it almost worked…
Since the rain was coming down hard and the tent was not doing a
perfect job of keeping out leaks, we moved on to famously waterproof game
Too Many
Bones.
(Though the box is still cardboard…)
It's a really interesting system. You have basic attack dice, but you
also gradually buy special-power dice, which you can use once per
combat (of which there will be several in a full game). Between
combats you increase your stats and get more special dice.
And this is all fine, but monsters have keywords, and that's where it
all started to feel too… mechanistic? Well, no, most boardgames are
that. Perhaps that the theme was wearing thin. Why should this minor
monster show up in the final boss fight? Because the rules said that
we should add a 1-point creature. And while I can see the virtue of
keywords to define mechanical effects, when a thing is merely HARDY •
BLEED • COMPOUND with a few numbers and icons the flavour tends to
fade.
It was fun, and I'd play it again, but I can't ever see myself buying
it. (Also because there are many, many expansions and I am often a
completist about this sort of thing.)
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