July's New Board Games
1 August 2024
Woah, it was a good gaming month! Once in a blue moon my partner decides board games are a good idea at home and we got going on a new Arkham Horror: The Card Game campaign. Not new to me so I won’t talk about it here, but I will talk about…
Undaunted: Normandy
…as this was one of the games he wanted to play. He thought I wasn’t going to like this because of the war theme. Obviously he doesn’t play with me often enough because in board games (and only in board games) I love to be the aggressive shooty person. This is a nice combo of deckbuilding - add cards to your deck to give you the chances to do winning things but not too many of them or you don’t see them often enough; and also remove the bad cards from your deck - plus moving units around on the board to get to the right places to take actions. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to playing more of it. I didn’t get a photo of it as I thought we’d have it out again but then we started playing Arkham and we’re stuck there now 😆
The Networks
I thought this game was newer than it is (it’s a 2016 release) and expected it to be more complicated than it was. That probably means I saw it somewhere near the time it was released when I’d played a lot less games. It was a fairly lightweight and quick playing game of TV scheduling. Get your shows on air at the right time when the audience want to watch them and the advertisers want to pay too and then throw them off into re-runs to make way for something better. Fun enough, the only thing wrong with it was that I was expecting it to be a lot longer, chunkier and thinkier. I played it again at the end of the month and enjoyed it more the second time around.
Forever Home
This is a game about rehoming dogs. The theme is pretty light and it could have been about pretty much anything but it’s a nice theme for a light game. I forgot to take a pic but it’s pretty cute. Get dogs in certain formations on the board to match scoring cards and then rehome them to different places to rack up end game points. We played it slightly wrong but it was fine. I wouldn’t object to playing it again (and trying the correct rules) but wouldn’t seek it out either.
Board Game Arena BoardGameGeek
Mosaic
This is a whopper of a civilisation game. There’s a huge hex map of the Mediterranean to dominate with your cities, resources to manage, technology to build up, populations to tax, and then wonders to build too. Oh, and there’s a bit of military aspect but it’s not the focus. At five players, all of us new to it, it was a long game and I came out victorious. I randomly decided to make money which was a good call as it was a universal resource which allowed me to pivot to whatever action looked best rather than being stuck with stone or food which were better value but less manipulatable. And I found the best action was generally buying in technologies that would give me points at the end of the game. I’d be happy enough to play it again with the same players now we all know how to play and could give each other more competition but it was strangely frustrating to win without really having played the game where you had to get influence in the different regions of the map.
Underwater Cities
In contrast to Mosaic I’d be really happy to play Underwater Cities again despite the fact I came dead last at it. In fact, because I came dead last at it. It took a while for me to figure out how the mechanics of collecting resources to build and feed your cities worked and I didn’t start collecting any ways to score points at the end of the game until it was basically too late. There are fifteen spots on the board for four players to take three actions each which leaves very little room to manoeuvre. Add to that that you have a hand of only three cards that you are trying to match to those actions to make the most of your turns and you have an exceedingly tight game. There are a couple of ways to duplicate another player’s action but they have drawbacks of their own, and the bonuses for moving up the turn order track didn’t seem very valuable but getting to pick your spot earlier was a huge bonus. Yes, I really liked it.
