Two year's later I'm back at Dice Tower West.
A fast little auction game where you get first choice in lots of cards. You also upgrade your coins which are your bidding tokens. It seems a bit like Ra but plays very differently. It is also somewhat fiddly with a large assortment of bonus cards to buy but I think that may make the game more strategic.
This definitely needs repeated plays before judging it. I'm not sure if my group would like this game but I'd like to try it.
A sweet little cooperative game that simulates a cooperative, raid, boss fight and manages to do it with a normal deck of playing cards. Very clever! It look like it's hard enough to warrant repeated plays.
Rolling dice, collecting money and buying cards that do more for you for the next die roll. It has that die rolling excitment but there's not a lot of deep thinking. This would be a good last everybody-is-drunk-and-we-want-one-more-play game, but I probably don't want to own it.
Just barely a game. You draft the best hand of seven cards while trying to keep other players from getting combos that are too rediculous. This is too small and fast to ever hit the table in my group.
I think the best way to describe this is a better Terraforming Mars. There's a giant deck of cards with all kinds of hidden synergy but there are many mechanisms to search and cycle them so it feels that each player has some chance of getting a winnng strategy going.
The action cycling is interesting and simple. Your actions are scaled based on how long it has been since you've played them so you are encouraged to not spam actions. I still ended up spamming some actions near the end of the game because the others had become useless.
Lot's of early unlocks to get more powerful actions. The card synergies are mostly about victory points and income.
There's a lot of fiddling with a private tableau. I'm not a fan of this. The tetris game of arranging your zoo didn't bother me much as it was generally pretty easy to fill in locations.
Do I like this game? If I had a group that wanted to play the game a lot and dig deeply into it, I might give it a shot. Bringing it to the table occasionally, probably would not be fun.
Eric: The tableu was helpful by tyeing into the other cards e.g. some animals needed to be next to be next to rocks, next to kiosk. Eric like the aesthetic of making the zoo. Liked the thematic tie ins. This could make the game enjoyable even if you don't win.
John: The tableu is important for the complexity. Imagine that wasn't there and you just played cards. Something would be missing.
Eric: Five cards that got more powerful when you didn't used them required doing a broad strategy. You suffered a bit by doing a single strategy. Clearing the five slot was sometimes very important.
Robert: I think I misvalued the "move a five card to the one slot" animal effect. Being able to clear a dud card from the five slot is great.
This is a quick game that has a very interesting bidding mechanc where the winner gets a permanent ability and the losers get immediate actions proportional to their bid. When you bid, it's not always clear which ones you'll get.
It's so quick and fun that I'd like to get it just to see how good the strategies/tactics can get in the game.
This was a super point-salady game with a ton of different mechanisms. I fell behind early and ended up joining Eric's Spain strategy which just secured his victory but me second place. I was very frustrated not getting cards that allowed me to get quests. Increasing my hand size didn't help. Eric said that he managed quest requirements by purchasing cards from the tableau.
Others played this game a few times and noted that the many scoring methods did not seem necessary to the game, in particular the exploration track at the bottom of the board.
Chris: the area influence mechanic seemed to make it too easy for a straggleer to piggy back onto someone who advanced the nation. Suggested making a "first here" bonus to fix that. I'm not sure more scoring patches would help.
Mario Kart the board game. Not much to say about this. I bet a group of young kids would have a blast with this.
There were a lot of extra boards that added more game effects. This seemed unecessary to me as the game was already so random but maybe the extra complexity is fun to some people?
The most interesting part of this game was the mechanic of taking a large set of cards and giving each player a subset of them. The subtlety of play was lost on me but the two other players had played the game before and there was a lot of really intereting second guessing.
There was a touch of hate in the game which I didn't like as well as a tie breaking reputation track that felt clunky and unecessary. I don't think I'd be interested in playing this game again but it would be interesting to see anothr game that uses this "subset of a deck" mechanic.
This was a very light game where you collect resources and build a tableu of tetris shapes on a private map. Obviously I hated the tetris mechanic.
The new mechanic was that played cards pass to the next player clockwise. This means any given game uses a very small set of cards. I've complained about games that have huge decks and insufficient searching so I am surprised that now I get to complain of using such a small set of cards. The game felt very samey as we all played similar cards over and over.
There's no reason to play this game again.
IX technology tiles, dreadnaughts, a mess of new cards, and new CHOAM action spaces. All the additions feel good although the increase deck size might make for an even more random tableau as there is no good card searching.
I won the game because I was the only one to unlock the CHOAM ability early and then bought a third worker. This let me spam the powerful ability with my normally dud, third worker.
We played 1 1/2 games without the expansion. Not much new but I had an interesting experience in the last game.
I got a bad start in the second game, got grumpy, and couldn't find a good way out of it. Afterwards, I thought about how the game played out and tried to see if there was some way I could have played better. I realized that early in the game I had decided that I wanted to try a deck building strategy for a bunch of reasons: my power gave me a bonus for buying cards, I had ignored card buying in the previous games, and I wanted to play with the new cards. When the player to my right (Eric) beat me to the 2 bonus buy I should have given up on that strategy as he was able to buy all the good cards before me. As a result I found myself with 6 or 7 buy with nothing good to spend it on. Sometimes I bought a lesser card instead of buying nothing just to pretend I had agency but that was a bad decision since it just opened up potentially better cards for other players. I guess the lesson is to not be wedded to a strategy? Or maybe aware of possible changes to the gamee state that would make you abandon your strategy.
Eric ended up building an amazing deck with some of the new cards, built a big lead, but somehow ended up losing to the other player (Wyatt). I'm not sure how that happened.
I also noticed that in this game the third worker seemed a little more effective than it normally did. On reflrection I think it's because a three player game has the same number of worker spaces as a four player game thus there are usually better placement options. I talked with Eric about this and he said he kind of likes it when games change with the player count. I was reminded of the drastic difference in the effectiveness of the Library card with different player counts in San Juan
I think I really like this game. I wish my game group liked it more. Maybe there's some way to get them to play faster to shorten the length.
We had a group of four, really good gamers and we couldn't think of anything to play. I really should have done my homework and made a list of new games I wanted to play. I'm not sure why, but we decided to play Everdell. Eric and I had played it years ago and were not impressed.
Nothing to say here except two things.
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We had an alpha gamer in our group who grokked the game much better than the rest of us and devastated us.
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The game is, amazingly, listed as a family game despite its complexity.
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I couldn't help but wonder if the cutesy nature of this game could bring some players towards complex gaming. Maybe you could play and have fun with the beautiful tree, build random cards, and slowly learn the game?
Future self: do not play this game again. I repeat: DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME AGAIN!
Another fun play. It improved the second play as I saw a bit more of the depth, looking at all the players hands counts and considering how my actions would affect them. The end came quick like a guiotine which was nice, not long and drawn out.
Sure, I don't like deduction games but this one is fairly constrained and short, so you'd think I could enjoy it a little. I don't know if I'm just terrible at deduction or if I just don't have fun make my brain do it. Probably a combination of the two.
We played our first game with the special powers and the concensus was that it didn't help the game at all. The powers felt a little unbalanced but, more importantly, they really threw the bidding out of whack. It was much more difficult to guess what each player may have wanted.
I won the game but I got really felt lucky in that I overproduced iron in the first round and in the second round there were a ton of spots available for converting consolation iron to something else. Since no one else had iron I was like a kid in a candy store. I'm hoping that since this is such a short game, that lucky breaks like this won't ruin the experience.
Eric gave me the game afterwards. Thanks Eric!