RogerBW's Blog

Back to the boardgame café.

First, multiple award winner Décorum, a limited-communication cooperative game… and yeah, that's really the problem. I have a copy of Magic Maze, which is similarly cooperative with limited communication. But Magic Maze gives you fantasy adventurers finding their way out of a shopping mall, and this gives you housemates with weird constraints on their taste in interior decoration ("there must be the same number of objects upstairs and downstairs") who can only say "I like this" or "I don't like that" and slowly reveal these constraints to other players. It's both too mundane and too lacking in fun.

Quacks & Co.: Quedlinburg Dash is a sort of Quacks of Quedlinburg for children… but while it keeps many of the mechanical trappings, it removes the push-your-luck that makes Quacks fun. You draw one token per turn (like Quacks' synchronised mode), you move a few spaces, you do a thing based on the colour… but when you get the third "dreamweed", that just means it's time to spend rubies on more tokens. The only choice you get is which new token to buy. I don't think there's enough game left in this to be worth playing except with people who aren't up to the full game.

Nice meeples though.

Finally, in our search for an end-of-evening Timeline replacement, Star Trek Chrono-Trek, which is basically Chrononauts in a new guise. You still have a wildly variable game length (in our first game someone won on turn two); you also have a problem I wasn't aware of last time I played, which is that (as in Munchkin the end of the game can be a cycle of a player being on the point of winning, someone else playing a card to prevent it, and so on until everyone runs out of win-prevention cards. Amusing, but I suspect it won't be a regular thing for us.