RogerBW's Blog

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.