RogerBW's Blog

Back to the boardgame café.

After last month's single game, we ended up playing several short ones this visit. First game of the evening was new-ish hotness Cryptid, a deduction game. Each player has one bit of information, and between them this will pin down an individual hex on the board, but play progresses by pointing out individual hexes and getting "no" or "maybe" signals from the other players.

I guess I can see it, but the puzzles have to be pre-designed (there's a deck of them, and the inevitable app for making more), and I'd probably rather just play Tobago where you make it all up as you go along and have more than one puzzle in the game. (My fellow players hadn't ever played this, so I'll have to fix that some time.)

On to Trio, an enjoyable game with light memory elements. You can reveal a card off either end of your (sorted) hand, or off another player's ("highest" or "lowest"), or turn one of the face-down cards in the centre; if you get three matching cards, you score that set. If not, any revealed cards are hidden again. This is undemanding enough of memory that I was still able to play it, and overall I had a good time; this was a decent filler which I might well buy at some point.

Quite new hotness Spots next, basically a push-your-luck game with dogs as the scoring mats. I think this leans heavily on its appearance; there are a great many games which broadly take the form "roll dice and put them on mats", for example Pandemic: Contagion, and this didn't seem to offer anything that those other games don't. But cartoon dogs, I guess.

A bit of a disappointment next: someone had left a copy of Kluster on the next table, and I snagged it. But not only were two pieces missing, it was old enough that the magnetic stones were pretty weak, so we had no trouble placing all the pieces. Hey ho.

To finish off, Timeline: Inventions, still a decent filler for the end of the evening even if tonight I was particularly rubish at it.