Recent Board Games
Mar. 2nd, 2016 10:54 amSeveral of these I received or gave for Christmas, but I didn't really talk about.
Castles of Burgundy.
Rachel and Osos started playing on Yucata. Moves are "take hex tile of ~6 types", "place hex on matching-colour place on board", and a couple of other things. You get two moves per turn, determined by dice roll -- you can take a hex from one of six supply spots, and each empty place on your board has a dice number on, you can only place when you match that number.
It's one of the games that's quite fiddly to grok at first, but each move is really simple once you've played a game and learned approximately what each thing does, and which things you should be concentrating on for points.
There are lots of different ways of scoring a few points, eg. finishing a field (contiguous region of same colour hexes), shipping goods, placing animals of the same type in a field; and lots of things that give you an extra action of a particular type, or allow you to adjust a dice roll, or otherwise let you do something that might score points. And a lot of the game is balancing between these -- you constantly have to judge which will be most beneficial on your board, which isn't always the same as it was last game.
Aquarius
A really simple but interesting game from Looney Labs. You have a deck of cards, each of which is divided up into 1-4 panels (either all one panel, or four quarter panels, or one quarters and one three-quarters, or divided rectilinearly or diagonally into half, etc). Each panel shows one of five (?) elements, but the drawings for the elements are really, really gorgeous, it's worth playing just to see them.
Cards are played in a grid, and a new card must match elements along part (?) of a touching edge with an existing card. Each player has a secret goal element, and you win when you have a chain of 7 (?) panels of that element anywhere on the table.
There's also a few special cards like "swap a card" or "change goal".
Lemminge
One of angoel's, I really love this one. The rules are simple -- you control two lemmings, you play cards with a number and a terrain type and one can move that many cards over grass (?) or that terrain. But you get either a bonus movement for already-played cards of that type, or get to alter the terrain type.
Dixit
From ghoti. Each player has a hand of cards, each of which has a haunting slightly fantastic picture on. Each player takes it in turn to choose a card and describe it with one word, then each other player also chooses a card, then all the cards are shuffled and all the other players have to guess which card was the original the clue was to.
The clue-setter gets points if some but not all people guess the picture. The other players get points for guessing right, and for other players guessing the card they put in.
I've played a couple of other games with similar "design a clue some people will get" mechanics but this seems like the most direct version of it, and the pictures are so, so beautiful.
Other people may not need to specify this, but I realised I was drawn towards "cheating", ie. making a clue based on knowledge I knew only one or two other players would have. And I think that's not actually cheating, but I found it more fun when I deliberately rejected that and chose clues based what I thought anyone could get in theory, but trying to tune to the obviousness where I thought it would be obvious to some people but not all.
Ivor the Engine
I didn't play this but I saw ghoti playing this. Apparently there are other Ivor games as well so I'm not sure how to tell them apart. But apparently, this one fit the feel of the series quite well, but didn't work especially well as a game.
Castles of Burgundy.
Rachel and Osos started playing on Yucata. Moves are "take hex tile of ~6 types", "place hex on matching-colour place on board", and a couple of other things. You get two moves per turn, determined by dice roll -- you can take a hex from one of six supply spots, and each empty place on your board has a dice number on, you can only place when you match that number.
It's one of the games that's quite fiddly to grok at first, but each move is really simple once you've played a game and learned approximately what each thing does, and which things you should be concentrating on for points.
There are lots of different ways of scoring a few points, eg. finishing a field (contiguous region of same colour hexes), shipping goods, placing animals of the same type in a field; and lots of things that give you an extra action of a particular type, or allow you to adjust a dice roll, or otherwise let you do something that might score points. And a lot of the game is balancing between these -- you constantly have to judge which will be most beneficial on your board, which isn't always the same as it was last game.
Aquarius
A really simple but interesting game from Looney Labs. You have a deck of cards, each of which is divided up into 1-4 panels (either all one panel, or four quarter panels, or one quarters and one three-quarters, or divided rectilinearly or diagonally into half, etc). Each panel shows one of five (?) elements, but the drawings for the elements are really, really gorgeous, it's worth playing just to see them.
Cards are played in a grid, and a new card must match elements along part (?) of a touching edge with an existing card. Each player has a secret goal element, and you win when you have a chain of 7 (?) panels of that element anywhere on the table.
There's also a few special cards like "swap a card" or "change goal".
Lemminge
One of angoel's, I really love this one. The rules are simple -- you control two lemmings, you play cards with a number and a terrain type and one can move that many cards over grass (?) or that terrain. But you get either a bonus movement for already-played cards of that type, or get to alter the terrain type.
Dixit
From ghoti. Each player has a hand of cards, each of which has a haunting slightly fantastic picture on. Each player takes it in turn to choose a card and describe it with one word, then each other player also chooses a card, then all the cards are shuffled and all the other players have to guess which card was the original the clue was to.
The clue-setter gets points if some but not all people guess the picture. The other players get points for guessing right, and for other players guessing the card they put in.
I've played a couple of other games with similar "design a clue some people will get" mechanics but this seems like the most direct version of it, and the pictures are so, so beautiful.
Other people may not need to specify this, but I realised I was drawn towards "cheating", ie. making a clue based on knowledge I knew only one or two other players would have. And I think that's not actually cheating, but I found it more fun when I deliberately rejected that and chose clues based what I thought anyone could get in theory, but trying to tune to the obviousness where I thought it would be obvious to some people but not all.
Ivor the Engine
I didn't play this but I saw ghoti playing this. Apparently there are other Ivor games as well so I'm not sure how to tell them apart. But apparently, this one fit the feel of the series quite well, but didn't work especially well as a game.