New Games from ACNW (Mostly)

I got a ton more new games played at ACNW, the smaller version of AireCon that happens in the NorthWest. I didn’t take a photo of the halls this con used this year, we’d been bumped out of the previous halls by a Titanic exhibition, but this was a bonus as the new halls were full of natural light and really nice to play in. There’s 12 new to me games featured in this post, 10 of them were played at ACNW and I bought two of them to bring home.

Let’s Go To Japan

We picked this out of the board game library on the first afternoon of ACNW and it was a hit straight away. You draft cards to plan a trip to Japan trying to schedule activities on the right days to get the right bonuses; all the cards will give you points but ending the day on an activity that suits what you’ve been doing gives you bonus points. There are two decks of cards representing Tokyo and Kyoto and each time you travel between them you need a train ticket which lose you points if you buy them at the last minute but train travel can gain you points and energy if you have acquired luxury train tickets in advance. The art work is lovely and the flavour text is worth reading. I like the mechanic where if you don’t want to play a card in your hand to your trip itinerary you can discard it and take a card face down and “go for a walk” which only reveals the activity you might partake in as you go through your trip at the end of the game.

Really nice game and it worked very well at two players where some other drafting games can feel limited. We played it three times over the weekend, the last play being with the copy I bought to take home.

SETI

One of the two games here that wasn’t played at ACNW. This has been one of the hot new games for a while now but I hadn’t felt a lot of pull towards playing it. I hadn’t exactly been avoiding it but each time I’ve had a chance to play it there’s been another option to play that I’ve preferred the look of or I haven’t felt up to learning this. I didn’t really feel like learning a chunky new game on the night I did learn it but I’m glad I did as I really liked it.

You are launching probes into space from Earth and seeking out traces of extra-terrestrial life whilst exploring the solar system. There is a lot going on but it all fell into place reasonably quickly and I settled on a strategy of trying to achieve missions and reach all the planets, not worrying too much about the aliens. I managed a pretty decent second place score against two players who had played before and was quite happy with that. The alien races you encounter are two picked randomly from a set of five (I think) so each game will have a different feel. I liked that the cards contain no duplicates, some are very similar but they are all different. The solar system rotating as you move around is lovely, you need to plan your path to Jupiter carefully so that you don’t run into the asteroids! Having learnt the game I’d be very happy to play it again.

Calico

This game is a few years old now but I’ve never played it. I met up with a friend at ACNW who had played it and described it as “really calming but super stressful” and as she taught it to us we found out why. And it’s just the kind of game I like. You are selecting tiles to make a pretty patchwork quilt. How calming! There are six different colours of patches in six different patterns. And you have three patches on your board at the beginning which give you some goals to score points at the end of the game depending on the combination of colours and/or patterns around them. And this is where it gets stressful! Meet the goal with the right combo of either colours or patterns and you get a certain number of points but meet the goal with the right combo of both colours and patterns and you get more points! On top of this you get buttons (ie more points) for putting three tiles of the same colour together, and there are cats who will come and sleep on your quilt (ie more points) if the patterns you make meet their approval. This was the second (and last) game that I bought to take home!

Critter Kitchen

This was a very successful Kickstarter game from earlier in the year; I hadn’t realised it was by the same people as Flamecraft which I played at ACNW last year and eventually acquired as a Christmas present. I didn’t like it quite as much as Flamecraft at first play possibly because it just took us a long time to get the hang of some fairly simple rules. You are collecting ingredients to make meals, sending your three chefs out shopping to a set of stores. Then at the end of the game you make a seven course meal of all the ingredients for a special critter with certain preferences that you may or may not have figured out in the course of the shopping. I don’t feel it was great as a two player game as there didn’t seem to be enough choice of ingredients or enough variety in the way the stores worked. I’d happily try it again with more players though.

Pueblo

We picked this out of the library having been intruiged by it when we saw other people playing it. Each player has some coloured blocks and some white blocks, these pair together to make a cube but are an awkward shape alone. You place them one at a time and a chieftain eagle slowly parades around the edge of the board and he doesn’t want to see any coloured blocks. It looks great and it was a nice puzzle but the scoring mechanism felt a bit awkward.

Moorland

We picked this out for an easy end of night game and then messed up the rules and made it much harder than it should have been. Nice enough game really and I like the idea of seeds dispersing along waterways but the artwork felt a bit dull and the theme didn’t really come through. Nothing really wrong with it but I wouldn’t pick it out to play again.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game

We played the two player competitive version of this last year, enjoyed it, bought the video game, enjoyed that, and thought we’d try the cooperative version this year. Much the same but with a box full of achievements to unlock during a completely replayable campaign. We decided we preferred the duel version perhaps because we got a terrible score at this!

Jokkmokk: The Winter Market

Whereas the brightly coloured artwork made this game fun to play even though the mechanics were rather basic and there wasn’t a lot of game to it really. You march around a market picking up cards. The player with the meeple in last place gets to move, similarly to Tokaido, this means that if you jump ahead to pick up a card you really want then your opponents can leisurely stroll and suck up all the cards you’ve skipped. In practice none of the cards were that much better than others and we mostly strolled around in order. There were a lot of different sets of cards in the box though and we played with the beginner set which was probably a mistake. There’s probably a better game in there when random more complicated cards are selected but we didn’t see that.

Tower Up

I wanted to try this just because it looks so good on the table. You build up skyscrapers of different colours placing your coloured roofs down to score points for them, but also scoring points for distributing your building evenly between the four shades of skyscraper. And then points for meeting various objectives such as building in all districts of the city. There was a nice two player board that worked well. An enjoyable game that was shorter and simpler than I expected it to be; I’d be happy to play again at a higher player count too.

Coffee Rush

I’d played this one recently online on Board Game Arena and enjoyed it well enough. I arrived at ACNW on Saturday morning and found the friend I was meeting had done the same and had already bought the game before I arrived. The components are delightful which doesn’t come across in the online version. You play as baristas moving about a board collecting ingredients such as tiny plastic coffee beans, drops of milk and slabs of chocolate and then drop them into doll’s tea party sized coffee cups to fulfil your customer’s orders. It’s really pleasant to handle the tokens and make the tiny drinks, though you do have to spill them onto the table in order to prove you’ve put the right ingredients in your customer’s caramel iced latte. I like the mechanism whereby your orders get more urgent each turn but when you fulfil an order it’s the other player who get more orders in. So if you get your workflow right it’s the other players who get overwhelmed. And the game ends when someone is too overwhelmed and five of their orders have expired. It was also nice to have a game where the winning score was 8 and not a lot of arithmetic was needed to find the winner. Not that I mind arithmetic but it makes a change.

In the Footsteps of Marie Curie

In the Footsteps of Darwin was a big hit with a couple of people I know including the friend I met at ACNW, it’s a fairly simple game of moving a ship around and collecting animal tiles to score points. Quite short and just complicated enough that it doesn’t bore me. This is another in the same series with completely different mechanics and it also runs quite short and I didn’t think it was too complicated. I quite liked it but the people I was playing with were less impressed. It has the same kind of cube tower as Amerigo - you throw cubes in the top and not all of them may come out of the bottom. You can then choose to take a selection of cubes which represent pitchblende, uranium and radium and swap them in various ways to perform experiments and get bonuses, or use them to buy cards which also give you bonuses. And the winning score was 9 so it was another low arithmetic game. I’d happily play it again, I think there’s more strategy in it than we saw on our first play.

Abducktion

This was the second game in this post that wasn’t from ACNW. It was a regular Sunday gaming session and I could not resist the opportunity to try out a game with a shedload of tiny plastic ducks! You pick the ducks out of a giant silicone UFO of ducks, a very tactile experience, and arrange them randomly in your stream. Then you use your hand of three cards to rearrange your ducks - or perhaps rearrange your opponents ducks - and attempt to make the patterns of ducks shown on a central display of cards. It’s a pretty simple game and I have to say it was mostly enjoyable for the components. “Rearrange and match the patterns” is definitely the kind of game that I enjoy but it felt a little lacking. Also whilst the shiny foil ducks on the cards looked lovely it was a bit hard to distinguish the different foil colours across the table leading to players thinking they had made a pattern and then realising that there should have been multiple colours of ducks involved.