Back to the boardgame café.
First, a game I'd played on the tekeli.li forums but wanted to
try in person: A Carnivore Did
It!, essentially a set of
deduction puzzles. We accidentally fell into an un-timed cooperative
mode, which I quite enjoyed but which did reduce the experience to a
puzzle rather than a game. I'll probably still buy this as I had
planned, but I suspect that finding players may be hard.
Something of a surprise next: I saw Monster Eater: A Delicious in
Dungeon Board Game on the
new arrivals list, and knowing nothing about it but having enjoyed the
anime I suggested we give it a try. You each run a competing party;
you explore the dungeon, working your way towards the level boss, and
must trade off progress cards (that get you further towards the goal)
against other cards that help you acquire resources. You can drop
monsters in front of each other (or in front of yourself, if the
reward is great enough), and then — this is the bit that really ties
in — having defeated them you can try to cook them. If you succeed,
that'll get you food to un-exhaust your characters (or you can save up
gold, or accept delays). Get to 100% on the upper level and you can
fight the end-of-level boss (and once they're defeated, nobody else
has to, so there's a catch-up mechanism built in); beat the boss at
the end of the lower level, and that's the end of the game. (There are
points to determine the winner, but there are a lot more points for
beating the bosses than for most other things.)
Like the 1980s computer game Carrier Command (I bet nobody was
expecting that comparison) you start at a pretty high level of
capability, and as with my winning strategy for that game I pushed
ahead as quickly as I was able rather than building up further. I was
able to beat both bosses without any extra items, by making sure none
of them was exhausted as we went into the fights.
The designer is Seiji Kanai, best known for Love Letter, who started
this project with Ginichiro Suzuki's 1988 game Monster Maker (itself
somewhat inspired by Mille Bornes in that you make progress, impede
your competitors, and build up protections against them impeding you).
I was particularly impressed by the rulebook, which does what many
games don't and actually illustrates each component. So when the setup
guide says that you should gather the Dungeon cards, you can look them
up and see, aha, those are the ones with the green backs.
Overall I think we all found more depth and enjoyment to this than we
were expecting.
Finally, it's been a while, so we had a couple of games of Timeline:
General Interest. (Though
I still contend that the correct date for "Domestication of the Cat"
is "not yet".)
