Back at Dice Tower West
This is a gorgeous, 3D printed game in a giant box. It was fun to play and seems to be a revamped version of aquire. I like the way that the center board is beautiful and everyone is spending their time looking at it together.
Although I had a good time playing this game, I'm not compelled to do many repeat plays.
This takes many of the known Cthulhu coop mechanics and makes yet another game. We played this twice, winning once, (which apparently rarely happens) and losing once horribly.
Some of the differences:
- Players get a three action turn and the same action can be repeated. This sounds trivial but it really feels like it adds a lot of agency. Players can now do very significant things on their turn.
- Combat is much simpler. None of the pre-horror checks and the player and monsters exchanging blows. There character just attacks during combat, rolls dics, adds wounds. Monsters do the same thing at the end of the turn.
- Losing sanity has an amusing phobia effect but also is responsible for leveling up your character. Your character can become very powerful just before they go insane.
- Character powers feel cool and players can choose which ones to level up. Highest level powers are really good.
Although this game is fun I definitely don't need another coop game and certainly not yet another Arkham coop game. This is a great play for a convention.Q
I played this with a couple other GWT enthusiasts and there is nothing but good things to say. It gives the the basic game of GWT while adding a whole bunch of new and modified mechanics to make it feel fresh. This is a must play for my group.
There was so much buzz about this game and the seemingly brilliant mechanic of adding heat cards to your deck when you take driving risks, but I came away thinking that the game was very good but I have no interest in playing it. To be fair, there are tons of optional rules that add lots of (seemingly) great complexity.
I think Eric summed it but best by saying something like "Racing games put your performance in direct competition with others. When you pull ahead, they get worse. There's no way around this." This "placements" is obfuscated in other games where you feel like you are making progress even if you are falling behind. I think this may be responsible for some of the reason that I'm not enamored with this game but there's probably something else that I can't put my finger on.
This was a pretty little map exploration game with an interesting mechanic: there are a set of actions that all players perform each round but they are in a random order. This sounds cool but in practice it seems to mean that you really hope to get a certain order and are often disappointed if that doesn't happen.
There is also a neat effect in that some of the actions are "special" actions and each player has unique special actions.
The game was clever and pretty but has very little interaction with every player staring down at their own tableaus. Some people like that kind of single-player experience but not me.
An interesting trick taking game where you play the value but choose the suit. I'm attracted to this because a board is used to show all of the played suits which may make the trick taking experience more palatable to me. Eric gave me his copy so we can see.
This is a giant battle game that uses bag building / drawing as its combat resolution mechanism.
The biggest criticism is that the bag building is super random and the game has a zillion other modifiers. I think the bag drawing would be more appropriate for a simpler game.
I was somewhat attracted to the area control mechanic of many battles. You can choose to fight in any of the areas but if you don't fight you can wager on who's going to win. The battles seemed arbitrary going in so I was very poor at predicting winners. I think this would be interesting in a game with fewer zany modifiers.
By all measures this should be a dumb game but the gimmicky tower mechanics and the smart phone app made it very playable by a first time group.
We lost because someone attacked a monster and there is know way to know how difficult the fights will be. Ther player died which lost the game. Seems a little strange that this can happen.
I forced this game on Eric and Kurt and it was a mini disaster. We got some of the setup wrong, we had a hard time understanding the basic flow of the game, and both Eric and I did boneheaded first turns where we spent half our money on upgrades. Kurt was actually doing ok. We stopped after the first year.
I've looked up more reviews and tutorials and am considering getting this for our group. There are lots of fun stuff about this: a nice puzzle engine hooked up to a big economic machine.
Eric gave me perhaps the most passive aggressive line I've heard while playing a game: "I'm fine if we keep playing but I'm just going to pass every turn until the game ends."