October's New Board Games
I kept missing gaming sessions in October, which at least kept the count of new games I played down to a reasonable number! Age of Innovation was definitely my favourite of these and the one I’d most like to try again.
Age of Innovation
If you look this game up online everyone will say it’s like Terra Mystica or Gaia Project. Well, I’ve been playing games for years and have never played either of those so that didn’t help me much. There’s a lot of different things going on here but it’s not as complicated as it looks at first glance.
There’s a central board where each player is trying to build buildings, build enough adjacent buildings and you get to form a city. Each player can only build on a certain type of land so you have to terraform the hexes on the central board to get them to your type. You start by building little houses and then upgrade them to ones with better benefits for you. You also have several science tracks to climb up by sending scholars to work there never to return.
Everything in the game takes several resources: money, tools, scholars or books. Some are much easier to earn than others and they can mostly be swapped. Money is the least valuable resource but I found myself with not enough money and too many tools so I could use my tools as if they were money. There’s also a nice resource called power where various things, but mostly building near other players, lets you rotate tokens through a series of bowls until you acquire enough to spend them - usually on gaining one of the other resources or the ability to do actions such as terraforming or building without resources.
I liked the way each player drafted a combo of a faction with a unique ability and a terrain type. I built in the desert and my faction were Blessed which meant we started with some knowledge on each of the science tracks and had already terraformed some territory. There are benefits to be had for having reached certain science levels at the end of each round and we also got a boost at that.
There are a lot of bits that interact in the game and it has a high weight rating on BoardGameGeek but I didn’t think it was super over the top complicated. It definitely took a play to figure out how it all went together but I’m looking forward to having another go at it in the future.
Kavango
The name of the game meant nothing to me but it comes from the Kavango Region of Namibia. This is a game where you build up a safari of animal cards on your board. It’s pretty simple with three rounds of drafting cards from hands you pass around the table. Some of the cards add basic items like trees and termites to your safari, then other animals need those items to be present before they can be played. The only other mechanic really is funding various protections for animals some of which are individual and one is a shared target between the players which was rather nice.
As the rounds go on the cards in your hand get progressively harder to play but that’s ok as you’ve also got more resources, if you have the right ones. Each player has a secret objective, mine was to get antelopes and I aced it, I think I had ten or eleven when the maximum the objective would reward me for was eight. Each round there are different goals that everyone can reach to obtain points and money.
At the end of the game you add up all the points for your animals, and your objectives, plus add on various bonuses for things like having all the different types of animals in your area or having contributed enough to each of the protection targets.
It’s a game where the complexity and strategy come from trying to put the simple pieces in the right order to outfox your opponents and I enjoyed it.
Teotihuacan: City of Gods
A board game where everything you do is decided by the random roll of a dice is kind of annoying and not really a game; without any strategy you get Snakes and Ladders where you have no control at all. This game is definitely not that! But it does have one of my least liked things: you are given a handful of dice but never allowed to roll them! I don’t want vast amounts of randomness but being allowed to use the components occasionally would be nice. What you have here are workers that ‘age’ from 1 to 6 each time they do some of the tasks on the board. Then when they reach 6 they die and are reborn as 1s. There must be games out there that manage to do this kind of thing without making you forlornly turn dice from face to face but I can’t think of any.
Anyway apart from that minor quibble I liked this. And I think that a good player aid would have helped make the teach a lot shorter and hence the game more accessible too. It was a lot less complicated than I thought at first. I really liked the tile pyramid that you build together in the centre of the board trying to match symbols up with the ones below. I played my typical moves in a first game of anything where I try to do a bit of everything just to learn how the pieces work rather than try to strategise. I took an early lead when I got hold of a load of stone and went and built several pyramid tiles with it; but then fell behind when I took advantage of it being easy for me to get gold at that moment only to find I never had time to reach the place on the board where I could do useful stuff with that gold. Another game I’d like to have another go at sometime.
Incan Gold
Hurray, someone pulled out a short game I didn’t know that and for once it wasn’t a trick taking game which all the short games seem to be lately, though this wasn’t be any means a new game. And it was a nice design too. You play a group of explorers looting some kind of temple, hmmm. Each turn a card is flipped that might be a hazard or might give the players a cache of gems. The gems are divided between the players with any leftovers being left on the card. After each turn each player decides simultaneously whether to flee the temple or keep exploring. If you flee alone then you get to keep all the excess gems you find on the run out, as well as all the ones you’ve collected that round. If you stay you risk encountering more hazards, two identical hazard cards mean the run ends for everyone left in the temple and they lose all their gems from that round.
It was easy to learn and fun to play, and the theme is easily grasped even if I find it a bit unpalatable. A bit of digging showed me that there’s been a rethemed version, Tensão Total in which you play deep sea divers looking for treasure but that has issues with having been originally produced without authorisation.
