Back to the boardgame café.
We started with current hotness
Night Soil, in which
you're clearing the biological waste out of Tudor London. I think we
were very restrained in the matter of giggles.
The game itself has a lot of moving parts and it's the sort of thing
at which I usually do very badly, so I was very surprised to win (by
one point). You place worker meeples in regions of London, who bring
soil with them, which restricts how much a space can be used. Some
spaces get you more labourer cards (not the same thing as workers),
some let you curry favour with a patron faction (the sub-board to the
left), some let you place your marker in a neighbourhood, etc.
Then you play those labourer cards in rotation to move cubes around
(either to another neighbourhood or, if you're nearly there already,
into the Thames). If you clear an area then on your next turn you
can claim credit for it… assuming nobody else has moved cubes into it
in the meantime. That claiming credit is the only way you'll get back
worker meeples (which are of neutral colour, not belonging to you) for
the next round of play.
It's very much an abstraction-gap game for me (the decisions in play
don't feel very much like the decisions a night-soil operator would
have made) and while I had a good time I wouldn't rush to play it
again. (Though knowing how it works from the start would definitely
make it go faster.)
Finally
Flip 7: With a
Vengeance, which I'd
played at Airecon. I still don't think it's strictly better than the
original, but I had a good time and have now succumbed and bought it.
