Back to the boardgame café.
First, a game rejected by me at Essen, Railroad
Tiles (mostly because the
box is quite large and it wasn't immediately compelling).
The Railroad Ink DNA is certainly present, but remixed: you draft a
set of tiles each round (same mix of roads and rails, but as there are
no edges, instead there are a few "dead end" tiles), then add them to
your layout. Taking more tiles puts you later in the next round's turn
order. Then you add cars, locomotives and "travellers" to get
increasing numbers of points for your routes; the resource I found
most scarce was the placement spots for these.
I found it quite fun, though fiddly—but alas, rather than instilling
in me a desire to play it again or to buy it, it caused me to think of
the coffin-box of Railroad Ink I already have, and why don't I play
that more? (Well, because some of my regular gaming friends don't get
on with it, but that might well be true of this too. And the original
is on BGA.)
On to Moonshine, which
I've heard a few people talking about recently. One person rolls the
dice and perhaps rerolls, everybody tries to use them.
My arc of enjoyment here was very much like the reroll symbol ↷. I
started off feeling fairly confused, worked out what was going on (in
particular that the moon tokens you need to pay for some cards come
off the activation spaces you've already used), and by the end was
wondering whether that was it. Quite fun, and I'll try it once more,
but the game has absolutely nothing to do with the theme or the art,
and that doesn't help me enthuse about it.
(Since that evening I've played once more on BGA, and my opinion
hasn't changed.)
Next, Roughly, a party
game with one gimmick but it's a good one. Each card asks you to
estimate a numerical value… in terms of something else. (E.g. "What is
the longest distance ever danced in a conga line, in rolls of
linoleum." And each card has three options for the secondary unit,
which one chooses blindly, Concept-style.) In spite of this
simplicity it's agreeable at least for the length of the game, there's
a decent number of cards in the box, and we might try this again as an
end of evening possibility since we've rather burned out on
Timeline.
(Problems: there's an obvious move for the lead player, who can change
their guess after guesses are revealed, which is if they're highest or
lowest to change to one more or less than the second highest or
lowest, since closest wins. And there's nothing to indicate what
happens if there are two identical winning guesses. But these should
be fixable.)
Finally, a deliberately random game, Done I
Am, in which you're
trying to put out three goal cards but plenty of other cards can upset
the whole thing. It feels as though it's in the same sort of space as
Fluxx, but at least this specific game was over before it had time
to pall, which is my biggest objection to Fluxx. Even so, I suspect
I won't come back to this, but it might well be an agreeable light
game for the start or end of a session as long as it stays short.
