River Valley Glassworks beats Flip 7

These are my first impressions of all the new-to-me games I played between mid April and early June. River Valley Glassworks is easily my favourite, and Flip 7, which seems to be one of the hot games of the moment, can have my least favourite award; the bonus tenth game Hol’s Der Geier was a far better quick card game.

Power Grid

A classic modern board game that I’d never played. I expected it to feel a bit clunky and dated but it was actually very tightly held together and I enjoyed it. I want to play again as I definitely didn’t really understand how the winner was chosen until we actually reached the end of the game. And the end of the game suddenly appeared when I wasn’t quite ready for it. You are building a network of towns across Germany, and buying power stations in an auction format to power them, then you also need to buy fuel for the power stations so the towns can actually receive power for which you receive cash. Then you go round again buying more power stations and adding more towns to your network.

The beer mats are obscuring parts of the board as in a four player game we didn’t need the whole board. This was one thing that made it feel dated, a newer game would probably provide different maps for different player counts, and the components in general felt cheap. The cash was proper paper monopoly style money! I have got so used to deluxe upgraded game components that I’ve forgotten that cardboard coins were once fancy! Apart from our beer mat obscured board the components didn’t get in the way of the game though so I have no complaints.

Vicious Gardens

This one is a pretty ordinary card game of ‘planting’ sets of cards to allow you to use other helper cards to win big cards that are worth points. I like the way that the cards you need to be able to read across the table are actually huge cards that you can read across the table, but mostly the game was forgettable and felt very generic.

Photograph

I have a history of not being impressed by small card games but this was lovely and different to the run of the mill. This is a game that rewards advance planning. You only get one chance to rearrange your hand in one very specific way each turn. You’re trying to play cards to the table in order and it’s really hard to do! Very much a game that I want to play again now I understand it!

Flip 7

I’ve played the Board Game Arena online version of this game and enjoyed it well enough. A few minutes of fairly mindless push your luck card flipping with a bit of watching the odds. You flip one card at a time from the deck trying to score as highly as you can without drawing a matching pair of cards. The deck is stacked with high value cards, less low value cards, a few cards that change the way the game plays. I expected it to be fun in person but actually it felt remarkably boring to play. The “Second Chance” cards that let players flip without fear seem overpowered. It bills itself as “The Greatest Card Game of All Time” on the box. I’m not sure how much irony the marketing department included in that statement but it made me just want to go back to playing Pontoon to be honest.

Zooloretto

I could have sworn I’d played this game before but I must have confused it with something else as this was definitely the first time I’d played it. Pretty simple mechanics where you either place a tile drawn from a bag into one of the groups of tiles in the centre of the table, or you choose one set of tiles to add to your zoo. The trick is to take things at the right time so you don’t end up being forced to take things you don’t want, as there is limited space in your own zoo. There are more kinds of animals than you can house and duplicate attractions that you don’t want. Easy going family style game, entertaining enough for the end of a game evening with tired brains without being boring.

River Valley Glassworks

Oh, I loved this! Another one that has relatively simple game play and goes by pretty quickly but that didn’t make it simple to play. You take various glass tiles from the river where you are restricted by the shape of the pieces, trying to get the colours into the right places on your own board to score points. I’ve forgotten most of the specifics of how both those things happen but remember how beautiful the game is with a constantly changing stream of glass-like pieces in the river on the table. Definitely on my must play again list. Gentle but thinky.

Pandemic Hot Zone - North America

I’ve played plenty of base game Pandemic and numerous spin offs over the years but had never played this one. It’s like the city themed Ticket to Ride games in that they take an hour or two’s game play and squish it into a fifteen minute experience. And somehow they don’t lose the essence of the game in this condensation. In this game everything got out of control, then we just about got it under control and then we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Given just a couple more turns we’d have saved the world. Very much the same as the full game so I think that’s a success.

Mille Fiori

Another glass themed game with pretty pieces (see also River Valley Glassworks). I’m a total sucker for these, I’m just glad other people buy them so I don’t have to. Though really this could have been a lot fancier but it was fancy enough really. Cards are drafted around the table that then allow you to play your pieces onto the board into different areas that give you different amounts of points for how you place them. It sounds very generic when I put it like that, and in many ways it is. But it was nice enough. I’d happily play this again though I probably wouldn’t buy my own copy.

X Nimmt

I’m terrible at 6 Nimmt, a game where you try and get rid of your cards by playing the right number at the right time so that you never play the 6th card into one of the lines on the table. This is 6 Nimmt on some kind of psychedelic drugs. The lines are shorter - only 3, 4 or 5 cards can be placed in a row. And unlike 6 Nimmt the cards keep getting recycled so there’s a closed economy of card numbers in use. Knowing what cards other players have had take ought to help you but it sure as hell didn’t help me. This takes a decent filler game you can teach anyone to play in two minutes and bends it so that your brain melts. I’m not really sure I enjoyed it that much as a result.

Hol’s Der Geier

Bonus tenth game that didn’t make it onto the picture because I couldn’t remember the title or find it in the BoardGameGeek database at the time I played it. I eventually recalled that the game’s owner had told me the English title was ‘Beat the Buzzard’, and then tracked it down listed under the title ‘What The Heck?’. As far as I can see the German title translates literally as ‘Get the Vulture’, but it’s a phrase meaning ‘to hell with you’. It’s a very simple card game. Each player has a deck of cards numbered 1 to 15 and uses one each turn to secretly bid to get a card randomly selected with values between -5 and 10. Highest bid wins the positive cards, lowest bid wins the negative cards. If two players bid the same then their bids are cancelled out, which is when you’ll exclaim ‘to hell with you!’. A lot more entertaining than you’d think, and far preferable to Flip 7 in my opinion.