Back to the boardgame café.
We started with very new arrival Battle for
Byzantium,
which, well.
The designer of this game is clearly very enthusiastic about Byzantine
history. (He has an Instagram account and everything.)
The art and production are lovely. Each city has a large card giving a
bit of its history—but no game stats, because they don't have any.
But this is barely a game. Roll d6 and move that many spaces (do you
have to move your full roll? The rules don't say), and try to land on
a card space. Sometimes the card will screw you over, sometimes it'll
let you conquer the next city you land on. There are a couple of
spaces which let you conquer any city on the board. My goodness this
is dull. Roll, can I get anywhere interesting, no. Roll, can I land
on a card space, yes, OK I've got plague and have to go to this
particular city and miss a turn.
And because the gameplay is so simplistic, because the decisions are
so minimal, the theme is let down too; you don't do anything thematic,
you just wander around until you get a good card, conquer a city,
repeat.
This is barely a game. It could put a child off boardgames for life.
On to
Cosmoctopus,
which was rather more fun. You move don't-call-him-Cthulhu round a
grid of tiles, getting what you land on and maybe paying resources to
move further. There are four sorts of card that you can collect, pay
for and play: red gives you some instant benefit, black gives you a
discount on future card spending, yellow gives you more resources when
you get resources, and green you have to fill in with more resources
but ultimately get you points (tentacles) to win the game. We went for
various different approaches but were all within a point of winning by
the end of the game, which suggests it's either very good or very bad.
Finally, I spotted
Project L on
the shelf, one of the few copies I've seen that isn't my own. The
player who (I didn't know) normally gets frustrated by
spatial games didn't, and we all had a good time.
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