RogerBW's Blog

Thirsty Meeples December 2022 22 December 2022

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.

[Buy Décorum at Amazon] [Buy Quacks & Co.: Quedlinburg Dash at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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