bluegargantua

Hi,

This past weekend I played a few games and I wanted to talk about them a bit more.

First up Fall of Magic. This is a story-telling game more than a board game, but it's absolutely amazing. In the game, magic is failing and the last mage is dying and he is going to travel to the land Umbra far to the east to see if he can fix things. You play his compaions who travel along with him and try to save magic.

What sets this game apart is the scroll. The game is played on this scroll map that you slowly unroll to reveal new locatations (and roll up behind you once you've left an area). The mage travels from location to location and then each character has a chance to deploy to a sub-location at that spot and has a narrative moment. Once you and your fellow PCs have spent enough time at the location, one of the players picks up the mage and moves him to a new location (narrating the story from the mage's point of view).

The production levels are through the roof on this game. You get the scroll and your character is represented by metal coin tokens with a nice heft. It looks great, it feels great and it plays really well (assuming you play with people who want to tell an intersting story). We only got a little way into the scroll on our playthrough and it's clear that you could easily mark your last location in order to pick up and play the game later if you wanted.

There's some concern that the game may lack replayability, but there's a fair amount of gaming in just one complete pass through the scroll and the mage's path has branching options. There are also random islands that pop up during an ocean crossing. Aside from that, starting choices and interpetations of the various story prompts suggests that you could get a number of solid, lengthy games before you things felt stale.

It's well worth checking out as a game and a piece of art.

I also got a chance to introduce 7 Wonders to a friend. I've played a few games before but this was the first game with my copy. Seven wonders is a card-drafting civilization-building game. Each round starts with a hand of seven cards. You pick one and pass it the remainders along. Some cards are resource/economic cards that allow you to build the point-scoring cards you really want. You can also burn a card to build up your "wonder". Each step of the Wonder you complete either gives you victory points or some special ability.

The game plays fast, the decision making feels solid without being overwhelming and the best part is that the game is pretty well balanced so that even if you have a crap game and play terribly, you probably won't be dismally behind and may end up in a better position than you expected. I've got one of the expansions (Cities) which I haven't tried yet -- in part because the base game is so good I'm not sure you want to be larding on expansions like that.

After 7 Wonders, I got to try another game of mine that I've been meaning to play but had so far failed to get the plastic wrap off the box. The game was Splendor and it's basically a gem-drafting game as opposed to a card-drafting game. The (very thin) premise is that you're a Renaissance gem merchant trying to put together a gemstone supply chain that secures raw gems, transports them to artisans who make them into finished jewelry that rich nobles want to buy. With the expection of the nobles, alot of this is really abstracted. In short, you take some gems from a central pile (which are these delightful poker-chip tokens) and use them to buy cards. Some cards have victory points on them, but all the cards show one of five gemstones and act as a permanent gem for future purchases. So if you buy a ruby card and you see another card that costs 2 rubies you only need the token (which you have to spend) and the card (which you keep) to get it. Eventually you get enough of these cards, you can buy things for free. Get enough cards of the right colors and you earn noble tiles with victory points on them. When someone hits 15 points, everyone else gets a last turn and most victory points wins.

The game starts off pretty slowly as you have to spend a turn or two collecting the gems you need, then buying stuff, then scrounging for more gem tokens. Eventually, as the cards build up, the turns go faster and then the nobles start going out and the game races to a conclusion. I thought the game was fun but I won pretty handily so I'm biased. I do want to take it out for a couple more spins. I think with some further play the subtleties of scoring will become better understood. My guess is that you want to be a close second so that when the first player over 15 has to stop, you get a chance to scoop up some more points and take the win. In my game, I just gobbled up noble tiles and got so far ahead no one could stop me.

Finally, I played another game of my old arch nemisis Pandemic. I'm pretty sure that while this isn't a bad game like Munchkin or Killer Bunnies, it's probably my least favorite cooperative game. Mostly because the theme (stop global pandemics) clashes with the mechanics. Specfically give/take knowledge. To cure a disease you need 4/5 cards of the disease's color. You can give/take cards from another player but to do that, you and the other player have to be in the same city on the card you want to give/take. So if you need a blue card and I've got a blue card for London, we both have to go to London to make the swap. I know why that rule is there, but all I can think is -- "what? no cell phone?". Map movement is similar. You can move from city to city to city or you can jump to a city if you play a card with that city on it. Of course, now that card is discarded and not available for cures. Again, the movement system makes me think "what? four deadly plagues break out all over the world and we don't have a travel budget?".

I dunno. Just not a game I care for. Defenders of the Realm is more thematic but I suspect Forbidden Desert/Island is a better game.

Anyway, lots of fun stuff this weekend.

later
Tom

...sometimes I review games!
So this weekend I played:

Pack the Pack -- a Tetris-like tile-laying game where you try to fill a back pack with matched colors of loot. It was...ok, but the basic scoring mechanism seemed to be a bit broken (with 3 players anyway) and the advanced scoring seemed like too much to deal with.

Love Letter -- the micro card game that took the gaming world by storm when it first came out. I can see what all the fuss is about. It's a short, filler game, but there's a fairly good mix of luck and tactical play. From a pool of 16 cards you try to be the last suitor standing in the round. Win five rounds and you win the game. Would not mind having this in the collection.

Hanabi -- A cooperative game where everyone works together to create an impressive fireworks display by playing cards in six colors down to the table. The gimmick here is that you hold your hand of cards face out. So you can't see what you have. I only screwed up once on that score. Play consists mostly of providing one of two pieces of information to another player about their hand and managing the token system that lets you make those statements. Some shining moments of logical deduction in this game. Possibly too easy to collude on the game via vocal inflection but it is fun.

Bacchanalia -- this is the card-based re-working of a story game by the same name. Everyone plays someone on the run from Rome who all turn up in a village to meet up with their beloved and escape as Bacchus and a few other Roman gods show up for fun and games. Usually everyone dies.

I have been dying to play this game for a while but it's designed for dark, sexy stories and that can be a hard sell for most game nights. We only went for an hour due to time limits, but oh man is this game fun. It's a little fiddly at first, but once you've been through a round or two the pace picks up. The artwork on the cards is gorgeous and it really pushes for these amazing stories if you're willing to commit to it. Totally something I want to try and play through to the end sometime.

Pretty much a perfect Saturday.

later
Tom

...you'll love this.

I dunno, I was charmed:

later
Tom

Mostly for invader_haywire:

Bein' Jedi is fly!

later
Tom