Back to the boardgame café.
I saw Arkham Horror: Lovecraft
Letter
on the New Arrivals list, and… oh boy, it really is just Lovecraft
Letter
with some of the names changed, and reskinned with the same old
endlessly-recycled Arkham Horror art.
BGG calls this a separate game, and the uncredited update
designer
has a BGG blog in which he tries to make it sound like more than a
trivial change. And Lovecraft Letter isn't a great game in the first
place.
Then on to
Quorum, a
nominally Roman-themed set collection game. Draw a card, advance a
counter, at the end of the game multiply this by that. The theme is
entirely irrelevant; the gameplay is quite interesting but not really
enough, and the central score wheel is downright fiddly. I ended up
using my usual score tracker on the phone instead.
Finally, The Guild of Merchant
Explorers,
something of a hit from a few years back. It's a roll and write
without the roll or the write: you turn up cards to see what sort of
space everyone can explore this turn, then put out "explorer" cubes,
and get some sort of benefit from the places they're in. At the end of
each era, all the explorers go away and you start from scratch, except
that if you explored all the contiguous spaces of one terrain type you
can put in a village that can serve as a base for future exploration.
Everything gives you coins, which are one-sided (to keep it secret
from other players exactly how much you have), and therefore much more
time-consuming to work with than they should be.
This game felt like work. Tiny wooden pieces and cardboard tokens go
onto tiny hexes, so every placement needs to be painstaking; the cards
are all generic Board Game Beige, with minimal art; and at heart this
is a solo game, since each player has their own map. I don't always
mind that sort of game (I mean, Imperium [foo] is largely that
unless you have an aggressive civilisation) but it was definitely not
a good fit for the mood of the table. I might give this a go on BGA
some time, where most games end up feeling like multiplayer solitaire
anyway.
