Amerigo to Silver & Gold

Lots of new games seemed to roll in quickly during June and July this year. Amerigo and Shackleton Base were very different games but were my favourites of the heavier new games I played here. Team 3 was a not very gamey game really but it was great fun to play!

Amerigo

Why does Castles of Burgundy get all the love, all the reprints and the deluxe editions? I mean, it’s fine and there’s not much wrong with it apart from the monotonous colour palettes they keep using for it but this game from the same designer Stefan Feld was much more my thing. You are getting your boat to islands, then placing polyominoes on those islands, whilst avoiding pirates and probably another couple of things that I’ve forgotten about. But the big thing is that there’s a tower into which you feed cubes and out of which random cubes then fall which sets up the randomness of which actions you can choose. It reminded me a little of Rolling Heights in that rather than plumping for the usual dice roll it’s a different sort of randomness that you have to work with on the fly. Really fun and I’d happily play it again. It looks like it’s being remade in a slightly different format and renamed Manila. I’ll be looking out for it.

Shackleton Base

I like games where it feels like there are entirely too many things going on to start with and they slowly fall into place whilst I play. Then I need another game to actually figure out a strategy. This was very much a ‘what on earth is going on’ game. Except it wasn’t on earth, it was on the moon. Each round you draft a selection of red, yellow or blue astronauts who all have different powers and then you put them to work. Putting them to work away from the map seems to build your engine faster but they need to be put to work on the map to have a chance of scoring you end game points. But only if they are placed such that you have the most bits of moon base on the diagonal where they are. It’s really clever and very much something where you need to do everything but just can’t. There were three corporations in play which each brought different mechanics to the game and there were more in the box so the game can be varied each time you play, that’s always good for replayability. And I would very much like to replay this!

Tungaru

A dice placement game that was okay. I mostly liked it, apart from I hate having a handful of dice and not getting to roll them. I took the first player marker in the first round and then kept it for most of the game so that I was the one who got to roll the dice and everyone else had to set their dice to the same values as mine. I get that it’s a ‘limit the randomness’ device, and I don’t think the game would be better if you all got to roll, but there’s other ways you could do this than making me hold dice I can’t roll. Tungaru is the largest island of what is now Kiribati, under colonisation this was the Gilbert Islands, because of course the British had to colonise it. Happily there is no sign of colonisation in the game, the characters all look indigenous and the ‘settle’ action involves leaving one of your three meeples on an island so they can perform actions there after your boat sails away. I think I played the deluxe edition and the pieces were very nice, each player had different shaped islanders and icons. And plastic boats are always a win with me because they invoke the spirit of ‘Don’t Miss the Boat’, a staple game of my childhood (not sure I’d recommend it today!). So lots of nice things about the game, but nothing special enough to make me want to play it again really.

Knarr

This was introduced to me as “Splendor++” but I’m not really sure I agree. I didn’t feel like I could plan ahead like I could in Splendor. I can see where the comparison comes from: you play stuff to the table that then allows you to buy different cards from the market. But it felt very different to me. Those bought cards all give you a bonus thing and a permanent effect that you can channel each turn if you have the right resources to do so. It was maybe a half hour game with five of us playing so it didn’t outstay it’s welcome but it didn’t feel like anything special.

Power Plants

Each turn sees a player place one of several types of hexagon-ish tiles to a central display, and then they can manipulate wizards based on the powers of the tile they placed, or the ones they placed adjacent to. Quite fun and the components were lovely to handle.

Quest

Social deduction games are not my thing. This was no different, it was played at a party and I was happy to join in. I still don’t really get why people enjoy these though really!

Team 3

Played at the same party as Quest but way more my thing! Polyominoes are always a win with me even when they are in a party dexterity game. Well, it’s not exactly a dexterity game. There are three players on a team. One can see a pattern to make with the blocks on the card, but they can’t speak. Another player can handle the blocks but must shut their eyes. The player in the middle must interpret the gestures of the first player and translate them into words for the sightless player to use to build the pattern. I think we started playing it as a race between two teams of three but it quickly just became a challenge for its own sake with everyone wanting a turn at the different roles and the different levels of pattern difficulty. Despite the fact that you could probably challenge whether it should be described as a game or not when played like that we all had great fun with it.

Mindbug

I didn’t see this game at it’s best. It’s a two player combat card game with each turn seeing a player summon a creature to the table or attack with one they’ve already summoned. In the brief play I had I couldn’t see anything much, other than the speed of the game, to differentiate it from Magic: The Gathering or any of it’s close relatives. The game was over quickly since I’d missed what my opponent’s creature’s keyword meant and wasn’t able to fight it at all. The trick of the game is that you have two chances per game to steal your opponent’s creatures when they are played and that’s obviously what I should have done here. It’s the kind of game where you’d instantly play a second really but I was just having a quick demo between other games and there wasn’t time. Inconclusive at to whether I liked it really, but leaning towards the ‘I can’t be bothered, just hand me an Magic deck’.

Silver & Gold

A quick and easy flip and write. Flip a card, look at the polyomino shape and mark that shape on one of the treasure island cards in front of you. Not dissimilar to Cartographers in many ways, but whilst I love Cartographers this fell a bit flat with me. Some of that is down to the fact that whilst it is a simpler game I was playing it with people who weren’t understanding it so it was difficult to just relax into the simple puzzle. I felt like for the effort I was taking to explain the game to people I’d rather have just got them straight into Cartographers.