sdg wrote:
Played my first game of Carcassonne the other night. Then my second, third, fourth, fifth... Really like it, much fun. Might take it to my sisters tonight and play more. There was a bit of confusion about the river tiles in our first game but I googled it and found out they were meant to be played first!
I love Carcassonne so much. Way more than anyone else in my regular gaming group loves Carcassonne, annoyingly. But the joke's on them because they knocked a couple of quid off the iOS version the other week (leaving it a still quite eye-watering-on-iOS five quid) and I picked it up and have been playing the hell out of it on the iPad and it's fantastic. Mmmmm, tiles.
In other tile-related-iOS-game-news, there's an iPad version of Galaxy Trucker due in the new year and it looks AMAHZING. Can't wait.
What have we been playing? Um... we've been playing Skull and Roses, which is pretty much poker without the maths. Admittedly I like the maths in poker but y'know. Everyone's got a hand of four cards, three with roses and one with a skull. To start a round, everyone puts one card face-down in front of them then the start player either puts down a second card on his stack or bids a number of cards that they can flip over to reveal only roses. If he puts down a card, play passes to his left and that player can either put a card down or make a bid, and so on. Once a bid is made you can either make a higher bid or pass, and once everyone has passed whoever's left has to flip cards one at a time starting, crucially, with their own cards. If you manage to flip the number of cards you bid and find only roses you get to turn over your playmat, if you manage to do it twice you win the game. If, however, you turn over a skull you lose one of your cards at random (with the other players not getting to see whether you lost a rose or your skull) and a new round starts. If you lose all your cards you're out of the game. It's a beautiful beautiful thing, and there's a reprint with new art on its way fairly soon.
Talking of things that pack an awful lot of game into a very small package, my wife and I played Love Letter for like 4 hours straight while we were in the maternity ward waiting for them to decide if they were going to induce her or not and it made the time fly by. It's incredibly simple - you have a one-card hand, each turn you draw a card and play a card and at the end of each round whoever's got the highest-numbered card wins, first to X many rounds wins the game. The game's all in the card abilities - so, playing a Guard lets you try and guess what's in another player's hand. Get it right, and they're out of the round. That's tough if it's a shot in the dark, but it's considerably easier if you played a Priest the previous round that lets you look at your opponent's hand. Aha, but obviously they knew that you knew they were Baron, so on their turn they played it allowing them to compare their hand with yours and knock out whoever had the lower value card AND SO ON. It's a lovely little bluffing and deduction game, it's less than £8, you can literally fit it in your pocket and we easily managed to play it on a 12-by-18 inch NHS rolly bed-table thing. It's great.
Something a bit more out of left field - have I mentioned Escape! The Curse Of The Temple before? It's one of my favourite games in the world. It's a co-op where you're all explorers trying to find your way out of a collapsing temple. Each of you has a handful of dice with symbols that let you move about and gather magic gems which make it easier to get out of the temple once you actually find the exit. THE TWIST! The game is played in real time. There's a ten-minute soundtrack CD, at the end of which is the sound of the temple collapsing. If you're not all out of the temple by that point, you lose. THE FURTHER TWIST! It's not turn-based. Everyone gets to roll and re-roll their dice as quickly as their feeble monkey brains will allow, EXCEPT! One of the faces on each die is a cursed mask. If you roll a cursed mask, that die locks until you or another player in the same room as you manages to roll a gold mask to unlock it, meaning that it's entirely possible that you'll find yourself trapped with all of your dice locked desperately pleading with someone to PLEASE COME AND HELP OH MY GOD THE HUMANITY. This. Is. Amazing. Escape! is simultaneously incredibly tense and utterly hilarious and is the second shoutiest game in the history of cardboard. My only reservations are that it might be a touch too easy out of the box and that the expansions which add in some much-needed difficulty are really fucking expensive for what they are. Still. I love it with every fibre of my stupid heart.
ANYWAY. I didn't actually want to talk about Escape!, I was just laying the groundwork to tell you about the actual shoutiest game in the history of cardboard: Space Cadets Dice Duel. SC:DD takes the real-time, roll-your-dice-as-fast-as-humanly-possible aspect of Escape! and translates it to a team game where each side is manning a starship trying to blow each other out of space. Each team has an engineering officer who's rolling a bunch of d6's and who is able to pass those dice to different stations on the ship depending on what is rolled (1's might be Helm, 2's Shields, 3's Weapons and so forth). Once those dice are passed to a station whoever's controlling that station gets to roll that many dice trying to, for instance, get the front shields up or whatever. As soon as they've got a result they want and put that die on the station display, they get to pass the energy die back to engineering who can re-roll and re-assign it. So! The game's largely about cycling energy as fast as you can whilst also maintaining some sort of situational awareness about where you are and what the hell the enemy is up to. And it. Is. Bonkers. We played with the full 8 player complement, meaning that we got to play with Captains who don't have any responsibility for rolling dice and are just there to keep an eye on the big picture and bring everyone together into a cohesive whole. Or in our case, to fuck up movement orders, misread firing arcs and to spunk torpedoes into the ether and seemingly random intervals, one of the two. Anyway! I liked it and there really aren't enough team experiences in board-gaming but it's very very firmly Not Going To Be Everyone's Cup Of Tea. I'm a little bit concerned that it's not totally intuitive so you need a few games to get to grips with the rules, but that by grokking the rules the chaos that makes the game so funny will abate somewhat. Don't want to sound too negative though, because it's really good and for some people it'll be the greatest bloody game in the world, I'm just not sure I'm one of those people.
Jesus. I'm going to stop talking for a while now.
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The problem I've got is that there are two members of my usual board-gaming group who LOVE Dominion, one who doesn't mind it and one who hates it. So it's difficult to get to the table. Seaside and Prosperity would be my recommendations, Dark Ages and Guilds would be the ones to hold off on.
I don't think she'd even realised it was still to come.
