I finally got something that lets me store my games in a sensible way so I can see them and also access one easily without having to lift twenty others out of a cupboard first.
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I have been wanting to buy Memoir '44 for ages now but I was waiting to see if I got it at Christmas or my birthday, plus it was out of print for a while. I didn't get it so I decided to buy it for myself yesterday but the game shop was out of stock. I wanted to buy something, so for the first time ever I picked a random gme without researching it first. (Actually, it was my girlfriend who picked it up and suggested it). The game was Alchemists and we played it last night. It's fantastic! It's for 2-4 players and it works very well with two. Each player is an alchemist and you are trying to gain respect by discovering the alchemical properties of the available ingredients and publishing theories on them. There are about eight ingredients and each has a red, blue and green aspect which will either have a positive or negative sign. This is randomised and kept hidden by an accompanying smartphone app. You take actions on your turn in the style of a worker placement game. One action could be to forage for ingredients. Then you can test potions on a student. You choose two ingredients and sit them in your play area which is hidden from everyone else by a player screen. You scan them with your app and it it tells the result of mixing these two ingredients. The result will be one of the three colours, and it will be either positive for a potion of negative for a poison. You use this result to eliminate certain combinations from that ingredient until eventually through a process of elimination in the style of Cluedo, you know exactly which alchemical corresponds to an ingredient. Then you can use the 'publish theory' action space to gain respect.
It's a really fun game, you have the Agricola style worker placement aspect where you are trying to balance the actions you need to take that turn while also trying to watch what the other players are doing and how advanced they are with theories, while also carrying out the deduction part of the game.
There are tons of bits to the game but they work really well to make your play area and the board and although it's very overwhelming when you unwrap it, the manual is very well written to hand hold you through your first game. It's the same people who made Galaxy trucker so if you've played that you'll have an idea of how good the manual is. Surprisingly, the game only cost £35 which feels like a great price for all that you get. Thoroughly recommend!
Other recent additions to my collection include stars wars x-wing miniatures, Agricola, Betrayal at house on the hill and Skull. All are great, we've had maybe six games of betrayal including one over Christmas which went on until nearly 4am and multiple games of Agricola with various player counts. Agricola is one of the favourite right now, it's brilliant.
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