March's New Board Games
10 April 2024
March is always a good month for games because of the AireCon convention in Harrogate. This month I was inordinately pleased with myself for playing 25 different games and entirely filling, but not overflowing, the square grid image that BGStats produces. The notes below are my first impressions of all the new to me games I played this month.
Forest Shuffle
My friend introduced me to this lovely little game (OK, actually she bought it months ago and then waited until she saw me and handed me the rulebook to teach it to her!). You play trees out in front of you and surround them with different flora and fauna. Each non-tree card is split in half so you can play it either {top or bottom} or {left or right} of your tree which is the sort of hideous decision making that makes for good games. The various cards all score points based on where they are placed or perhaps need other cards in your forest to make them worthwhile. We played two games and got a rule wrong in each of them that made the game longer and/or harder, it would probably have been third time lucky but we didn’t get that far, but certainly would play it again.
Ex Libris
I picked up this game about alphabetising library books in the Bring and Buy at Airecon - the photo shows my other purchases as well. I was drawn to the theme and vaguely recalled hearing good things about the game in the past. And I’m pleased with the purchase. It’s a relatively simple set of rules for placing cards in a tableau in front of you forming a set of shelves, and then there’s a bit of worker placement. New worker placement locations are added to the game each round, but the game ends when one player has shelved a certain number of books. As new players we found there were quickly too many locations to remember what they all did at once and the iconography wasn’t super clear. It looks like the second edition has clearer icons but less fun meeples. On the whole though it’s a fun puzzle to try and get the books you want in the right order.
5211
Small card game, the edition we played was Azul themed which was very pretty but the game has no connection to Azul itself other than the artwork. You place down cards simultaneously in attempts to score points at the end of the round. The name of the game tells you how to play. You have five cards in hand, first you play two together, then one, then another one; each time you play a card you draw back up to five cards so you always have more choice of what to play next. Then each player has four cards on the table and you score based on who has the majority in the colour that’s been played the most. There are also cards with cockerels on them then only score if a certain number are played in a round. Very quick to learn but not easy to play. I liked it.
Faraway
This was the game I played and then went hunting for a copy to buy straight away, but the pre-release copies available at the convention had sold out already. It’s definitely on my list to buy soon. The theme is that you go on a journey (far away obviously) meeting various characters who ask you for things, then you come back and give them what they wanted. What that means in gameplay is that you pick cards to play out in front of you and when you have eight cards you turn them all over, reveal the last one and score what that asks for, then turn over each previous card in turn to score that. There are extra side cards that help fulfil the scoring criteria - I forget exactly how you claimed those but it was based on the numbers on the cards - and the turn order is decided using the card numbers played in the previous turn as well. It’s a really nice puzzle, and one where you are balancing taking cards to deny your opponents cards as well as taking what you want.
Criminal Dance
One of the members of my board game group is Japanese and regularly brings along Japanese games to show us. This is a small hidden role game that we played a few rounds of. I’m not a big fan of hidden role games really but I liked the way some of the cards could rotate other cards around so you could get a good idea of what other players had.
Distilled
This was great! A game about making spirits (the alcoholic sort) by mixing yeast, sugar and water cards and then bottling the result. There’s a push your luck mechanism where not all of the cards you put into the mix come out - you can mitigate that by putting in a lot of cards or just roll with it. And there’s another angle where the bottles you use also score you points. And various other things going on where you unlock different recipes and make fancier drinks with more expensive ingredients. It seemed to take a much longer to play than expected but I think that would improve once the players know the game and I’m looking forward to playing it again.
Apiary
Apiary was probably the game I was most excited to get to try out at Airecon. I grabbed it from the board game library and attracted three perfect strangers to play it with me, none of us had played before but I think we got it sussed pretty well between us. You have space bee workers who visit planets collecting resources like pollen and water and build up a hive where you can create resources like honey and wax (and possibly you could get those from planets too, I forget exactly). The trick is that the bees get stronger each time they do something until they have to hibernate. And once a given number of bees have hibernated the game ends. I thought the mechanisms were clever and the interaction between players was interesting. It’s another one I very much want to play again.
Clank: Catacombs
I’ve played Clank before, and Clank in Space I think. Both games where you wander about collecting treasure and trying to not make too much noise that will incur the wrath of the dragon. This was a new version to me and I liked it better than the others, though the others were fine. This version has a board that you build out as you go so it’s not the same every time and also you don’t know what you are going to find where which is more thematic for a delve into a dungeon.
After Us
In this game you draw a hand of four cards and then can arrange them in any order so that you gain the resources and trigger the actions that you want. You then buy better cards to go into your deck. I really liked the arrangement mechanism but the artwork and the theme (it’s a Planet of the Apes vibe) weren’t really to my taste.
Forbidden Jungle
The latest in the Forbidden series from Matt Leacock has you landing on a jungly planet full of hatching aliens from which you have to try and escape. The way the aliens hatch and move about is neat but I found rearranging the tiles to align crystals a bit annoying. Though I think I liked this best of all the games except for the first one, Forbidden Island, which is just a classic cooperative puzzle and all the others tend towards over complication. I’d play it again but I expect the people I play coop games with would rather stick with the Island.
Living Forest
Save the forest by enlisting guardian animals to help you plant different trees and put out fires. I like the push your luck mechanism of turning cards over and having to stop before a bad thing happens, I’m terrible at it but I like it. There are several different ways to end the game - for example collecting enough different trees or putting out enough fires and I found keeping track of the different conditions and which of your opponents was close to doing so a bit of a pain. The theme is right up my street but it felt like it would have been better as a coop game somehow.
Dominion
Just adding this here as I realised that this was my first real life play of the game. I’ve played zillions of games of it online over the years though, most recently with the Temple Gate Games implementation. Someone I played games with at Airecon had bought the base game in the Bring and Buy and asked to play and I was happy too. Whilst some games get lost after a couple of expansions this is definitely a game that is improved with by them. Nice to handle the cards though, it’s a different experience than in an app.
BoardGameGeek Temple Gate Games
Fish & Katz
We played a demo of this entirely because of the cute finger puppets that you use to take the cards. It’s a very simple card game and would make a good ice breaker.
Raccoon Robbers
This was a pretty simple family kind of game where raccoons climb houses and jump off trying to get their leader down the path to the golden trash can. Nice components let down by some mediocre game play. It’s just complicated enough that I wouldn’t want to explain it to people who don’t play games but not complicated enough for gamers. Maybe my point of view is coloured by the fact that we played the two player variant and it would have been more straightforward with three.
Green Team Wins
A write on the whiteboard party game that’s basically Blankety Blank. I have no idea what the scoring was.
That’s Not a Hat
A party game that’s basically Dementia: The Card Game. All you have to do is remember what object each person has on their card that gets revealed, then concealed, and passed around the table. This was actually really fun to play! The way that you don’t know which direction each object is going to rotate until it’s flipped face down - there are direction arrows on the card back - means that you never have all the information at the same time and it’s way harder to remember those few objects than you’d think.
We’re Doomed
A party game where the players are countries on a doomed planet trying to raise enough funds to get a spaceship out of there before time runs out. Mostly memorable for featuring a giant sand timer. I didn’t get to see any of the cards but the people who did seemed to find them very strange. Even though after one game it was obvious that there were better strategies than trying to save yourself (or your country I guess) I can’t say I’d want to play this again to find out.
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