February's New Board Games
Each month I post online about the board games I’ve played and I like to add a mention of my first impressions of each new game I play. The comments seem to get longer each time and then I lose them to the mists of social media and I’m trying to get better at not losing my own comments (which makes me lose my mind when I try to find my thoughts again) so I finally figured out I should probably just write a blog post instead.
The graphic shows all the games I played during February 2024, oddly just one play of each of fifteen games this month. The ones I hadn’t played before were Tapestry, Wyrmspan, Seas of Havoc, Empire’s End, Cascadia, Trailblazers and Scout. BGStats orders the games roughly from the longest games to the shortest ones so I’ll stick with their ordering here.
Tapestry
I have actually played this a few times before on Board Game Arena but this was my first cardboard play. On BGA I found it went a bit long for an interactive game but when I tried it turn based I struggled to maintain any momentum and got bored. I loved it in real life though. There are four different tracks that you are trying to advance on, science, exploration, military and tech and the game I played was also with an expansion that added an arts track. There are also islands to explore and a city to fill with landmarks. You can’t do everything so you have to concentrate on something but obviously without letting another player run uncontested down one of the tracks. I played a civilization who didn’t really care about building their city and felt I missed out on an aspect of the game as a result. My civilization did get to the centre island and then made it into space and I was happy with that. It’s an excellent game though and one I really want to play again.
BoardGameGeek Board Game Arena
Wyrmspan
I love Wingspan, and this is a version of it that has imaginary dragons instead of real life birds. I was kind of lukewarm on whether that was a good idea when I first heard about it but that wasn’t going to stop me jumping on the first chance I got to play the shiny new thing. And the designer has taken an excellent game and made it better!
The game play is slightly different to Wingspan, the dice have been removed so there is less annoying randomness - when you gain a resource you either get what’s given or pick one of your choice - and the “once between turns” powers have been replaced by “end of round powers” which are easier to keep track of. The way of tracking actions has changed so that there’s a bit more strategy to it and you can gain extra actions and I really liked that change, especially towards the end of the game where Wingspan can feel a bit flat at the point where everyone has their last few turns mapped out. There are other changes too to how you explore the caves and it all worked really nicely. Whilst it’s definitely a relation to Wingspan it’s more like a little sister who took stood on her elder sibling’s shoulders and saw further. I don’t own Wingspan as I have a friend who has all the expansions and add-ons, so Wyrmspan is going on my to-buy list.
Seas of Havoc
This had potential. A pirate themed deckbuilder where each round has two phases. In the first you gather resources like money and cannonballs, or add new cards to your hand. In the second phase you use your cards to move your ship around and fire cannonballs at your opponents ships. I really like the theme and the idea but the game fell a little flat. I think my major problem was that damage cards were playable and didn’t really clog our decks up as they usually do in a deckbuilding game. As a result card draw was a lot more powerful than avoiding damage. I went to have a read of the rulebook after the game thinking that we must have had a rule wrong but I couldn’t find anything we missed. The components are absolutely gorgeous, my only complaint was that I did keep confusing which way round my little wooden ship was facing. I’d happily play it again to see if my problems with it were just down to the slightly stilted learning as we went along first game, but I didn’t find it very promising.
Empire’s End
This is a mad game. There are millions of games about building up empires, this one is about trying, and mostly failing, to stop yours being destroyed. Everyone starts with the same set of cards that represent farms, roads, cities etc and tries to keep them. It uses the same kind of bidding system as No Thanks where everybody throws resources at a disaster card to pass it on to the next player until someone decides that the pile of food, axes and swords on the card is enough that it’s worth taking the card and having their farm or their road be the one that gets destroyed. Each of the disasters you take does give you a bonus of some kind, so the game is to get the disasters that amass you points whilst not letting your opponents get the things that they can make use of. It was brutal but really enjoyable.
Cascadia
A gentle game of trying to place hexagonal tiles containing different terrain types in ways that maximise the area of each terrain type; and then filling them with animals in the right places to score points. For example in this game, which I think used the starter set of scoring cards, bears wanted to be in pairs surrounded by any type of animal that wasn’t a bear but salmon wanted to form a long line of connected tiles. This kind of placement game is the sort of thing I find really relaxing, there’s just enough of a puzzle to occupy my mind. I’m not quite sure how I’ve never got around to playing it before now but this definitely won’t be the last time I play it.
Trailblazers
In this game you draft cards with three different types of paths on them - hiking trails, kayak streams and bike paths - and try to make yourself loops that begin and end at the matching type of base. Again it’s my kind of puzzle but this one was way more frustrating - I’ve not sworn as much recently as I did whilst playing this! Part of the frustration is that you have to make a fairly quick decision on which card to draft and where to place it in order to not hold the game up. It feels very different to Cascadia where you can go quite slowly and figure things out between turns. There’s also a mechanic where you score points for placing animals on the cards and since one player concentrated mostly on that and won it felt a bit unbalanced.
Scout
A short card game in which you make sets of cards. The unique thing here is that you aren’t allowed to rearrange your hand of cards and must play from either end of your hand. But also the cards have two values so you can pick which way up you want your hand before the round starts. Then you are just trying to get rid of your cards by playing a higher ranked set than are already on the table, or you ‘scout’ and pick up a card from the set already on the table. An enjoyable quick game but I wished the circus theme had been made a bit more of. The numbers are huge and the characters are small, so most people say “erm, I’m playing this pair of threes” rather than “Please give a warm welcome to Edward and Isabel on the flying trapeze!”.
