Short game reviews
ghost:
Vindication is fine, but I think that is largely what is wrong with it. It's got these giant miniatures and a giant box and all sorts of shit that comes with it. It' s very expensive, and all of the "modules" that come with it are shit. I probably like it better than Schild, but I would never recommend to buy it.
ghost:
1. Gudetama: The Tricky Egg Card Game- This is a game that has the theming centered around this little egg guy that is apparently a Sanrio character. That is the company that did Hello Kitty, it seems, but I don't know much about that stuff. The theme is completely unnecessary for this game, and if you had the correct card counts you could play it with any numbered cards. There are cards numbered from 1-14 and each number has a variable number of cards in the deck, e.g. there are 6 seven cards and 5 one cards, for instance, and there are 63 total cards. It is a basic trick taking game in which each round a player is dealt a hand of seven cards. High card wins the trick. The winner plays first in the next trick. There are two special cards- #14, in which the winner does not play first in the next trick, but chooses who goes first, and 1, which only has a special power in the final trick. The final trick is where the scoring takes place. The winner of the trick scores points based on the number of the card that they play. So if you win the trick with a 7, you get 7 points. That is unless someone plays a 1 card in the final trick, in which case everyone scores points based on the card that they played.
I found this to be pretty fun. It isn't complicated and can play up to 7 players, unlike a lot of trick taking games. The theme is dumb. I guess I'm old, but I don't get the egg dude. Overall, I think this is a good diversion. I'm not in love with trick taking games, in general, but this one I liked. If you are a serious trick taking player, I would say try before you buy because I am certainly no expert. Overall, I liked it.
2. Ohanami- This is another smaller card game by the guy that did The Game, which I have not played. In this game you are going to be drafting cards to put into "gardens" which are essentially just three columns of cards. When you pick cards for your draft, you will take two of them and place them into your garden, or row, in numerical order from high to low. You can play cards on either end of the column, but not in the middle. So you have to be careful about which cards you pick to keep. Then you will pass the rest of your hand to the left or right, depending on the round, and take new cards until the round is done. There are three rounds in the game. In each round, you will only score certain cards in your columns. There are four colors of cards, blue, green, grey and pink. In the first round you score points for the blue only. In the second round you will score points for the blue and green. In the last round you will score points for all of the cards.
This was a lot of fun. I liked it better than I expected to, based on the rulebook. It's a light game, so don't expect anything magical, but it's probably worth the 12 bucks I spent on it. The biggest negative, to me, is that it won't play 5 players. You can play that many, but it makes the drafting a little wonky. If you like lighter card games, I would say that this is a good one.
Mosesandstick:
I like the idea of this thread!
Arkham Horror: The Dunwich Legacy - This is the first expansion to the Arkham Horror Card Game. My partner and I really enjoyed the base set but we were disappointed with the expansion. We found the scenarios underwhelming. I think they'd be more impactful with the whole set, it just seemed like we didn't get much for our ~$30. The new investigators are interesting, but deck building is seriously limited and annoying if you only have one core set and none of the other expansions.
eldaec:
From what I've read on arkham I think Dunwich is the least well thought of expansion.
I tried the base game and respected it. But the theme just felt boring. Every Arkham product ffg makes feels that way to me. I keep thinking how much better they'd be with a better theme.
You could do this brilliantly with an Indiana Jones or Star wars skin
ghost:
I was very enthused about my first play of the AH Card Game, but I could see that, unless they shook things up significantly, that it could get very samey. I love the Lovecraftian theme, though, and tend to be a sucker for it. My initial plays have been very good so far, but I'm nowhere near getting to the expansion stuff.
My games to discuss:
1. Beyond the Sun- This is a game that centers around advancement along a tech tree in a sci-fi setting. It uses dice in an interesting manner as workers and resources, but they are rarely rolled. You just turn the dice to the side marking what it is supposed to represent (a population, a ship, or a material). It is, at the core, a worker placement game in which you have one worker to take an initial action each turn. The available actions, at the beginning of the game, are only four basic actions. As the game progresses you can unlock new actions by progressing along the tech tree, which has four levels of technologies, if you have the appropriate pre-requisites. With the action to discover level 3 and level 2 techs, you will also have an encounter to resolve. Then you will take a secondary action, either to increase population, produce ore, or trade either ore to people or people to ore. There is a small component of area control in which you can place outposts on planets with ships and also "colonize" those planets, taking them into your tableau so nobody else can take them from you. There are also objectives placed at the beginning of the game that are available to everyone to complete (i.e. first level 4 tech, colonize 4 planets, etc). To win, three or four objectives, depending on the player count, must be fulfilled. This is total objectives claimed, not per player, and you cannot skip claiming an objective, if you can do so. Only one objective may be claimed per round.
At its heart, this game feels very old school. The long, skinny Power Grid sized box from Rio Grande feels old school, the limited amount of artwork feels old school, and the game progression feels old school. But we had a lot of fun playing it. I would go so far as to say that I feel that this was really excellent. To me, it felt like Eclipse without the shitty combat and better scoring. The use of the dice was not innovative, but it was very functional for this game. Turns go super fast, so downtime was rather minimal. I will certainly be playing this again.
2. Aquatica- This game is an underwater themed game with a core mechanic similar to that of Concordia. You start with a hand of cards that allow you to do particular actions, and also four "mantas" which act as additional resources to take actions. Each manta will have a resource on its belly, and when you use it, you flip the manta over where it will stay until recharged. On your turn, you will discard the card you want to use into the discard pile on your turn, and take your action. Available actions include to buy a location, conquer a location, buy a character, score locations, take back your cards and reset mantas, and so on. The location cards, once obtained, will be slid into a slot on the player board, and will have several different resources available to use, such as money or fighting power, along the left hand side. As you use these resources, you will slide the cards up until they reach the last available icon, which is victory points. To score these cards, once they have reached the bottom of the card from use or other means, you will take them out of the slot and place them into a score pile. You also may be able to obtain "wild mantas" which will have other resources you can possibly use. There are also additional characters you can buy to augment your deck with special powers and limit the number of times you have to do a reset action. This is another game where there are objectives that you can claim for reaching certain milestones. You will claim these by placing one of your mantas along the objective score track, thus limiting your resources for future turns. The game is over when the character deck runs out, the location deck runs out, or one person claims all four of the available objectives. Most points wins, which you get by your score pile, number of character cards in hand, and objectives.
This is a neat game. It's very similar, mechanically, to Concordia, which I love. It's really very light, however, and while the mechanisms are cool because they allow you to get rid of having a bunch of different little resource meeples or tokens, I have some issues. First issue is that you are going to have a hard time sleeving the cards. This may not bug you, but I usually play with my kids, who are little germ sponges, and like to keep their greasy mitts off of the cards. The cards are a weird size, so finding a right sized sleeve isn't going to be easy, and when you do, I doubt they will fit into the slots. For a light game, however, I'm probably going to jump to something else, such as the next game I'm going to discuss, Wonderful World. So it's good, I'm glad I have it, but I don't know how much we will play it.
3. It's a Wonderful World- This game is what I will refer to as a "cube churner". It is one of those games in which you are getting getting grey cubes to buy a card to be able to produce yellow cubes, which will allow you to purchase a card to get green cubes, and so on. In many ways, it is similar to Century: Spice Road, in that cards cost cubes, then go into your possession to be able to produce other colored cubes. The difference between this and Spice Road is that instead of having a card that goes into your hand, the card will go into a tableau for future use each turn. Also, this is a game with drafting instead of a line of cards to buy from. You start with a starting card that will provide a basic level of cube income. Each round, players will be dealt a hand of 7 cards. You will then draft one card and place it in front of you. This will continue until you have seven cards in front of you. Then you will decide which of those 7 cards to keep, and which of the 7 cards to recycle for a single colored cube, which will be specified on the card. The ones you keep will be slotted for "production", meaning you can start placing cubes on them to complete. An interesting thing about this game is how the cube production works. There are six colors of cubes (grey, black, green, yellow, blue and red). The red are wild and obtained only by turning in five cubes of other colors. The grey cubes get produced first, so all grey cube icons on your starting card and in your tableau will be produced. You will then be able to add these grey cubes to other cards that are currently in production. So you might be able to complete a card in the grey production phase that will help you in, say, the blue production phase or the yellow production phase. There is a level of planning here that is neat. You do four drafting cycles in the game, along with associated production phase, and then you tally scores. Scores are based on victory points on cards and little bonus chits you get. Highest score wins.
I LOVE this game. I love drafting, and I love the way that the cube churning works in this game. The theme is tenuous, but the artwork is excellent. The production, overall, is very good. This is probably going to replace all similar weighted games for me (see Aquatica, above). I put this into a category with Splendor, Paper Tales, Gizmos, all the Century games, Aquatica, etc. that are essentially resource manipulation games. This plays quick, is intuitive, has a little more strategy to it, and plays more players than those other games. So for me it's a winner. In fact, I want to play it right now.
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