Nytmare
David Jose
I am back from Vegas, and roughly 60 hours of board gaming! It's been a while since I did a game review, so figured I'd copy and paste the review/recap of new stuff I played that I sent out to my local boardgaming group.
Machi Koro - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/143884/machi-koro - A simple "city builder" game. Each turn you roll a die that triggers one or more of the buildings that you and your opponents have built, giving you money which you can use to build more buildings. I think my only complaint about it was that in the three games I played, the benefits of trying to build a city that did well on numbers that were more likely to come up when I rolled 2d6 were totally undone by the benefits my opponents reaped when they built cities on numbers that should have almost never been rolled. I probably just need a better sample.
Roll For the Galaxy - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/132531/roll-galaxy - I really expected to hate this because I hate Race For the Galaxy so much, but I really enjoyed this game. This is one of the grand children of Puerto Rico. Whereas Race took Puerto Rico and made things way more complicated (and then made things even MORE complicated with every expansion), this has taken Race For the Galaxy, and honed it into a simple dice-for-resources/worker placement/role choosing game that I really, really liked.
The Mushroom Eaters - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/135508/mushroom-eaters - What do you get when you take a drugged out hippie and get them to design a board game about psychedelics? A complicated, horror show of black light 70s art, incomprehensible symbols, mechanics, and mini-games, that you have to play while wearing 3D glasses. When the person who had bought the game started unpacking things, I was excited because the game I was building in my head with the components that I saw in front of me was shaping up to be really good, but once we started playing it was just a painful exercise in building up a bunch of points and abilities, and then having them violently stripped away from you for the next hour and a half.
Hyperborea - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/119788/hyperborea - It's as good as I had heard. Effectively a deck builder without cards, shuffled with The Village's bag-o-cubes, Khemet's tech tree building, and played on Nexus Ops' map (which I recently discovered Fantasy Flight had bought and re-released with a totally different design and a bunch of rules changes!)
Spaceteam - http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/ - This wasn't a board game, but it's something we did whenever we were in public and wanted to look like complete idiots. Imagine a game that you play on your phone that makes you stand in a circle and scream Star Trek engineering technobabble commands at each other. That's Spaceteam.
Caverna - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102794/caverna-cave-farmers - Caverna is effectively an overhauled and streamlined Agricola, except you're all awesome dwarven farmers instead of wimpy human farmers. I went into this game with the wrong mindset because it had been described to me so many times as "Agricola Lite" instead of "Agricola; but more complex, and with fewer pieces." In the end it was good, and I definitely prefer it over Agricola, but I had been lied to and had been expecting something else entirely.
Two Rooms and a Boom - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/134352/two-rooms-and-boom - This was by far the weekend winner. Two Rooms and a Boom is basically one big GMless deduction game that you play over three turns, spread between two different rooms. Each person is given a card telling them their role and their team (red or blue), and are sent into one of two rooms. Over the course of three timed rounds, players interact and try to figure out who they can trust, who they can't, and who they should send to the other room as part of a hostage exchange at the end of each round. At the end of the third exchange, the mad bomber (red) and president (blue) reveal themselves. If they are in separate rooms, the blue team wins, if they're in the same room, the red team wins. Merely describing this game does not do it justice, just trust me that it's freaking amazing.
Machi Koro - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/143884/machi-koro - A simple "city builder" game. Each turn you roll a die that triggers one or more of the buildings that you and your opponents have built, giving you money which you can use to build more buildings. I think my only complaint about it was that in the three games I played, the benefits of trying to build a city that did well on numbers that were more likely to come up when I rolled 2d6 were totally undone by the benefits my opponents reaped when they built cities on numbers that should have almost never been rolled. I probably just need a better sample.
Roll For the Galaxy - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/132531/roll-galaxy - I really expected to hate this because I hate Race For the Galaxy so much, but I really enjoyed this game. This is one of the grand children of Puerto Rico. Whereas Race took Puerto Rico and made things way more complicated (and then made things even MORE complicated with every expansion), this has taken Race For the Galaxy, and honed it into a simple dice-for-resources/worker placement/role choosing game that I really, really liked.
The Mushroom Eaters - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/135508/mushroom-eaters - What do you get when you take a drugged out hippie and get them to design a board game about psychedelics? A complicated, horror show of black light 70s art, incomprehensible symbols, mechanics, and mini-games, that you have to play while wearing 3D glasses. When the person who had bought the game started unpacking things, I was excited because the game I was building in my head with the components that I saw in front of me was shaping up to be really good, but once we started playing it was just a painful exercise in building up a bunch of points and abilities, and then having them violently stripped away from you for the next hour and a half.
Hyperborea - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/119788/hyperborea - It's as good as I had heard. Effectively a deck builder without cards, shuffled with The Village's bag-o-cubes, Khemet's tech tree building, and played on Nexus Ops' map (which I recently discovered Fantasy Flight had bought and re-released with a totally different design and a bunch of rules changes!)
Spaceteam - http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/ - This wasn't a board game, but it's something we did whenever we were in public and wanted to look like complete idiots. Imagine a game that you play on your phone that makes you stand in a circle and scream Star Trek engineering technobabble commands at each other. That's Spaceteam.
Caverna - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102794/caverna-cave-farmers - Caverna is effectively an overhauled and streamlined Agricola, except you're all awesome dwarven farmers instead of wimpy human farmers. I went into this game with the wrong mindset because it had been described to me so many times as "Agricola Lite" instead of "Agricola; but more complex, and with fewer pieces." In the end it was good, and I definitely prefer it over Agricola, but I had been lied to and had been expecting something else entirely.
Two Rooms and a Boom - http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/134352/two-rooms-and-boom - This was by far the weekend winner. Two Rooms and a Boom is basically one big GMless deduction game that you play over three turns, spread between two different rooms. Each person is given a card telling them their role and their team (red or blue), and are sent into one of two rooms. Over the course of three timed rounds, players interact and try to figure out who they can trust, who they can't, and who they should send to the other room as part of a hostage exchange at the end of each round. At the end of the third exchange, the mad bomber (red) and president (blue) reveal themselves. If they are in separate rooms, the blue team wins, if they're in the same room, the red team wins. Merely describing this game does not do it justice, just trust me that it's freaking amazing.
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