Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 6074567" data-attributes="member: 3586">Last week's gaming:The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (FFG): This is a 1-4 player game by FFG using the Living Card Game model; that is: it's like a collectible card game (you build decks from your collection of cards and then play them) with two difference. The first is that it's non-random. You only need to buy one of each 60-card monthly booster to have a full playset (although the core set is annoyingly distributed, you probably need 2-3 of them). The second is that it's co-operative. Each new booster has a new scenario to play against. Scenarios range from easy to hard, from well-constructed to annoyingly broken. Generally it's a fun game. We played a four-player game of The Battle of Lake-Town, a special scenario debuted at GenCon 2012, and lost horribly as Smaug burnt down Lake-Town and killed our characters. Village: This is a new Eurogame which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres award (The Kennerspiel award goes to more "gamer" games than the regular award, which is normally more family-oriented). It's a fascinating resource collection/spending game where your family members (who enable some actions) die during the game. Part of the fun is making them die when in the right profession - as where they die can give you VPs at end of game! It's a nice game for 2-4 players, although probably better with 3-4 than 2.The Adventurers: Temple of Chac: This is an "Indiana Jones"-like game - you have to get in and out of a temple filled with treasure whilst avoiding crushing walls, a rolling boulder, trapped tiles over lava, a rickety bridge and a raging waterfall. It has a number of very nice mechanics: you travel slower the more treasure you're carrying, and there's a memory sub-game for identifying the trapped tiles. It's fairly light, and quite luck-based, but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to.Through the Ages: This is my favourite boardgame. It's designed by Vlaada Chvatil (Dungeon Lords, MageKnight Boardgame, Space Alert) who is one of the most brilliant game-designers today. TTA is a civilisation game where you have to juggle your resources (ore, food, science & population) whilst trying to increase your culture and draft the technology cards you need. It's a long game - about one hour per player, plays 2-4 - but it's quite brilliant. Territorial ambitions are abstracted, rather than dealing with a map you fight over territory cards or use conflict cards directly against another player, so it doesn't play like a wargame, but you can't let your military slip too far behind. I can't recommend this enough for lovers of "heavy" Eurogames.Rex: Final Days of the Empire - this is the retheme of the classic game of Dune. It's not quite as good as the original, as some of the additions dilute the original brilliance, but it does do some things right. You need six players for this one, and it takes 2-4 hours. Basically, the Sol Federation has started bombing the capital of the Galactic Empire, and you're all factions trying to gain control of the planet. Each faction has unique powers, and the interaction of them is brilliant. The original design is by the Cosmic Encounter team, and even if I don't like this as much as Dune, it's still good. Much more of a wargame than anything else!Cheers!</blockquote>

Verification