Back to the boardgame café.
We started with First
Rat: the rats
are going to the moon, with a rocket built from plastic bottles and
cornflake packets. All right, the gameplay isn't a great match for the
theme; mostly you're collecting resources and spending them to place
cubes on multiple score tracks (first come most points). Movement is
interesting; you can move multiple rats as long as they all land on
the same colour of space.
It took me a while to get the hang of this one, and by then it was too
late to do well, but I had fun with it and would like to try it again.
Then on to
Swindler, which
I hadn't heard of. The core of it is a push-your-luck game: five loot
bags you can dig into, each of which has one or more tokens that cause
you to lose what you've gained so far. You then spend the loot on
filling orders, or with a dealer.
Getting through the rules was hard work, since they're ambiguous on
such matters as whether a previous turn's green loot is lost when you
pull a green skull (we thought yes, but in that case why all the fuss
about separating your current turn's draw from your previous ones?)
and whether an accomplice card can be used just once or several times
(one of them is explicitly noted as remaining permanently in the game,
so that was a proper case of the exception proving the rule).
We didn't love the cutesy art (by Lisa Forsch), which didn't seem a
good fit for the theme, and the whole thing felt quite random and
flavourless at times. Not terrible, but I don't think we'll go back to
it.
(Also, it's "Beutelschneider" in the original German, an old term for
a pickpocket. I think translating it as "pickpocket" or, even better,
"cutpurse", would have made for a more thematic feel; there's no
swindling in the game at all.)