April's New Board Games
A few less new games in April than March, which is kind of a relief as I was beginning to regret deciding to make these blog posts when they turned in to massive essays! Five new games in a month is a far more reasonable number to keep track of and comment on.
Carnegie
Carnegie seemed like a pretty dry looking Euro game at first glance but it grew on me immensely. I’d previously been playing a much brighter game and the subtle colours here took a while to become accustomed to. Players act as entrepreneurs acquiring goods to build projects in various cities across the US, also earning money and upgrading the transport networks. It’s very much a mass of different ways you can get victory points but the theme kind of works. The central mechanism of the game is that someone picks an action and then everyone else does the same thing so the trick is making sure you can do everything at any time but also trying to choose the action your opponents are least well set up to do. The individual player boards where you build different departments have some very nice tracks that slide out as you invest in different projects.
I learnt the game one Saturday with one group and then someone else brought it along to Tuesday gaming and I jumped at the chance for a second game. I very much felt I was on a better footing in the second game though I only did marginally better. There’s more player interaction than you might think as everyone is competing for the same projects on the main board; I got locked out of building in New Orleans at the end of my second game and was really annoyed with it!
I found it on Board Game Arena and had a couple of games there but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much without the other players to talk to, and also possibly because BGA gave me two player games which felt quite different as the board was artificially blocked from the beginning of the game.
BoardGameGeek Board Game Arena
The Isle of Cats
I’m not sure how I’ve never played this game before other than perhaps I’ve already played too many animal themed polyomino games. It’s a game of herding cats to fill up the different shaped rooms on your boat. Each of the five rounds of the game starts with drafting cards around the table which you can then buy in order to be able to herd more cats or add extras like small treasure pieces to your boat. Some of the cards are also ‘lessons’ which you then play in order to score points. And of course you want to do all those things but can’t afford to do everything and so you have to make decisions which is the heart of every board game (except snakes and ladders which doesn’t count as a game in my book).
I enjoyed it, and was pleased to find it was available to play online at Board Game Arena. Again I didn’t enjoy playing it as much on a screen though, this time it was because handling the shapes is fun in person but clunky on the screen.
BoardGameGeek Board Game Arena
San Francisco
This game has some really nice mechanics, I didn’t realise it was a Reiner Knizia game when I was playing it but it wasn’t a surprise when I found that out afterwards. Each builder is building up a city and trying to surround skyscraper foundation tiles with enough workers to build them. And building the 3D skyscrapers is great! There are other considerations such as planning tram lines so that all your workers can reach the skyscrapers. And the main central mechanic is one where each player puts the cards into one of three stacks until someone decides they’ll take them, and every time you claim cards it gets harder to claim more. So you’re watching your opponents boards as well (but mostly the player after you in turn order) to make sure you’re not piling the cards they need together.
I liked how the scoring stayed with very low numbers. The game is very tight and I narrowly lost with 11½ points and the victor had 12. So many games have 100s of points to add up that it was nice to have small numbers to play with for a change!
Skyjo
A simple card game where you try to get the lowest score, but each time you get three matching numbers in a column you can remove them. I think it took us six rounds to play until one player had reached the 100 point limit that ends the game. To be honest, if we hadn’t been waiting on another table to finish their game we probably wouldn’t have played it for that long. An ok filler game but nothing more.
Whistle Mountain
Another polyomino tile game, have I ever met a polyomino game I didn’t enjoy? In this one the polyominoes (actually they are all tetrominoes) are scaffolding towers that you build up to try and get your meeples out of the lake to safety. There are various mechanics involving placing airships in between the towers to collect resources or build machines so the placement is pretty important. I’m not sure that the mechanics make a huge amount of sense if you try to explain them or possibly I didn’t quite understand them but yes it was fun to play and I’d play it again. In fact of all the games here I think this is the one I’d pick to play again right now if I had a copy (or the time to play right now!). It’s only last on this list because that’s how the alphabet works.
