Burano to Unconcious Mind

These are my first impressions of all the new-to-me games I played between mid March and mid April. Encyclopedia and Nucleum are the ones I’d most like to play again. I certainly wouldn’t turn down Nusfjord or Unconcious Mind either.

Burano

I picked this up in the bring & buy at AireCon, attracted by the huge supply of large wooden cubes that you use to make 3D buildings on the board. That bit of the game is really nice! The other components are a bit rubbish though. There are some tiny worker tokens that we found very hard to pick up from the boards. These tokens have male faces on one side and female on the other, and you’re supposed to send the men off fishing and the women to work in the lace workshops. Except that’s entirely unnecessary fiddliness and it’s easier to ignore it even if you don’t have a problem with that kind of gender segregation. I mean, I get that it’s probably historically accurate, but little cubes or meeples would have worked better for the pieces anyway.

There are a shed load of different mechanics and ways to score points here. Lace making seemed a lot harder to get big points for than fishing which was a pity because I liked the polyomino puzzle of placing people in the workshops. I did miss a rule where you gain privileges when you place a cube on the 2nd or 3rd level of a house that would have helped though.

On the whole I quite liked some of the game, didn’t like other bits - especially the unnecessarily fiddly components - and will probably put it back in a bring & buy sale without playing it again. It’s a pity because the 3D building element is great!

DroPolter

A mad game where you hold five different items in your hand and try to drop the ones on the revealed card to the table before anyone else does. Oh, and your reward for winning the round is that you get to hold a tiny bell in your hand as well and the first to collect five of these tiny bells in their hand, in addition to the five normal items, wins. Dexterity games are fun but I’m never any good at them and this was no different to usual.

Encyclopedia

A game about collecting sets of animal cards, researching the animals on them, and then publishing your findings. Which is very much the same theme as In The Footsteps of Darwin. This is a very different game though. Here each player rolls a handful of dice each turn and these become your workers for the round, except you can pick dice that any player has rolled so you have a good choice at the start of the round. If you pick someone else’s die then they get a bonus for that. I, and my opponent who was also new to the game, both underestimated the amount of points available for the collections of published cards at the end of the game, and the player who had played before stormed to victory having looked well behind us at that point. Definitely a game that I’d like to play again.

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre;

I think the overlong nonsense name is the least of this game’s sins. It’s also an overlong nonsense game. I didn’t hate it, it was quite fun for a while. You have a handful of cards and pick a beginning, a middle and an end card to make a spell with, if the three sections match up then there is usually a benefit to that. But it felt like we’d seen all the jokes after half an hour and there was still loads more game to get through.

Nucleum

After being taught the rules for this game I felt like I had been handed a bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces with absolutely no clue as to what the picture on the box was. I’m happy to do an actual mystery jigsaw puzzle but I needed more info here. This is a game of building in cities across the board and then powering the buildings up by transporting power supplies, coal or nucleum, over rails you’ve also built, to the buildings. I misunderstood a few things about the scoring. One of those games where it makes more sense when you’ve finished but you still need to read the rulebook again to check things out. I liked the fact that we all had slightly different sets of tiles and abilities to unlock. I’d happily play it again with hopefully a bit more idea as to what to do!

Nusfjord

Uwe Rosenberg’s games are often up my street and this was no different. I managed to misunderstand an icon on a card and overpay for fishing boats but I still came in as joint winner so that was quite nice. The theme was entirely forgettable, I mostly built up a fleet of boats but there were also buildings that helped you score. I got a building in the first round that rewarded you for not building and then I concentrated on the fishing side of the game and that seemed to work. Happy to have played it, would play again but not really bothered if I don’t!

Parade

This is a card game with a pasted on Alice in Wonderland theme. I liked it. The mechanism is that you try to avoid taking cards from the parade by playing high value cards that mean you have less chance of taking cards, but low value cards are worth less points. Short and fun.

Town 77

Basically a game of multiplayer sudoku. Each player starts with four tiles in hand, each has a different colour and building shape. Your opponents can see your tile colours but not shape. You play the tiles to the table such that each of the 7 rows and columns conforms to sudoku rules, not matching the shape or colour within a row or column. At the end of your turn you can decide to permanently discard a tile and reduce your hand size. It took us a while to understand how this worked exactly but when it clicked it was a good mechanic. You are trying to be the last player able to play but also to have the least tiles in hand when you can’t place a tile. So reducing your hand size makes you more likely to have less tiles in hand when you are blocked, but also gives you less choice meaning other players might be able to carry on beyond you. It’s the kind of logic puzzle I really enjoy and a nice quick filler game.

Unconscious Mind

This is a shiny sparkly game with some lovely components where you play as assistant to Freud trying to cure the nightmares of your various patients. But it’s basically a game of moving various parts around in an engine to have the right kind of resources on hand at the right time. I quite enjoyed it. I like the use of acetate overlay cards (like those in Mystic Vale) to add the nightmares onto the patients. It’s one of those games that could be themed any way though, you end up talking about having a big red token and a medium green one, and a bit better connection to the theme would have improved the gameplay. It was pretty fun to play all the same.

Pit

A bonus that’s not on the image. Apparently this game dates from 1903. It’s a very simple, but also completely mad, game that’s based on stock trading. Ten matching cards are shuffled into the deck for every player playing. Then each player tries simultaeously to assemble a hand of ten matching cards. You do this by selecting a number of cards that match and asking another player to blindly swap the same number of their cards for yours. In no more than a couple of minutes someone manages to assemble a matching hand and rings the bell to stop the game. We played half a dozen, maybe more, rounds of it with a varying selection of five to eight players at the end of a long day of playing mostly heavy games and it was a good fun finish and whilst it’s not exactly a good bedtime game it certainly woke me up enough to drive home safely!