RogerBW's Blog

Back to the boardgame café.

Some New Hotness tonight: first, Fromage, theoretically a game about cheesemaking but for me rather too packed full of gimmicks. There's worker placement (but no immediate conflict as you can only place in the sector nearest to you, and the board rotates each turn), timed worker retrieval, a variety of minigames on the board and point salady scoring. I'm afraid that to me it felt like a very typical bland modern Euro with nothing to say beyond "look, I've combined these mechanisms in a new way". My friends liked it more than I did.

Then on to Marc Andre's new production, Middle Ages; in effect it's worker placement with a constantly changing set of options.each of which determines next round's turn order, gets you some income, and does some kind of special effect. Again I didn't feel there was any soul to it, just a bunch of mechanisms arranged in a new way in a slick production. And again my friends liked it more than I did, so maybe I was just in a bad mood this evening.

I do like the "Lord" tokens though.

Finally Cardline: Animals in which we made some wildly wrong guesses about animals' lifespans.