Back to the boardgame café after a
gap caused by illness.
We started with Knizia classic High
Society, in its latest
Allplay edition. You're auctioning cards and paying for them with
fixed denominations of cash (so once you've spent the 1,000 card, you
can't increase a bid by 1,000 any more). That provides a synthetic
friction which is the sort of puzzle one could get one's teeth into,
but I think we all found it hard to love. (I wonder how the same group
would feel about For Sale, but it's not in the Thirsty Meeples
library.)
Next Switch & Signal,
which I remember as a big hotness during the early days of the
pandemic. It's multi-player only by courtesy, but it felt like a very
enjoyable optimisation puzzle: you have to collect eight cargo cubes
from various cities and deliver them to a destination, but you have to
change points and set signals to allow them to move as you wish, and
the actual movement is biased (black trains move faster than brown
move faster than grey) but random within that. Also the difficulty was
such that on a first play we neither beat the puzzle nor found it
completely hopeless. I find myself very tempted to buy this.
Finally, Tax the Rich,
an Essen hotness from last year. And I fear we all found it
sufficiently like Bridge (even though two of us have never played
Bridge) to hold little interest. Great theme, but there's only one
place the theme matters, and you could do that just as well in any
trick-taking game by saying "if all the cards in your hand are 3 or
below, declare a revolution, lay out your hand, and all the card
values are reversed". I did quite like the art though.
