Back to the boardgame café.
First relative newcomer
Belratti. It's
a classification game: two players are the gallery curators, while
other players (in this case just one) have to produce (choosing cards
from their hands) a certain number of paintings inspired by one of a
pair of cards representing themes. Then four random "fakes" are mixed
in, and the curators try to allocate each card to theme A, theme B, or
fake.
In theory that looks quite fun, like a miniature Mysterium where
everyone gets to have a turn at being the ghost. But… I think we
collectively made one wrong classification call throughout the entire
game (and that was "which theme", not "real or fake"). The cards are
fairly straightforward items (a pig, an hourglass, a pizza in box,
etc.) and there was very little that we considered a hard choice.
Might be harder with more "artists", who have to choose cards without
consulting each other, but this ended up feeling easier than expected
and therefore not having much potential for long-term fun.
On to Long Shot: The Dice
Game
which I played with the 1PG at Expo. And, yeah, I guess? I'm not sure
quite why this doesn't sing for me; gameplay has essentially nothing
to do with its nominal theme of betting on horses, which isn't a great
start.
A very well-worn copy of
Tsuro next (it may
well be from the original printing in 2005). No surprises, but I
continue to enjoy this whenever I play it.
Finally I spotted a copy of
Shamans and
introduced it to the others. (By virtue of snagging my pocketmod rules
down to the phone, rather than trying to use the original rolebook.) I
took shameless advantage of another player's confusion and feel as
though I should perhaps be embarrassed by that, but it felt entirely
appropriate for the game. (We know each other quite well.)
