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Weekend Board Game Recap
This past weekend I traveled to the wonderful city of Chicago with my beautiful family and celebrated a wedding. Actually, wait. I didn’t travel with my family per se. I technically ventured with some of my beautiful friends. Honestly they were not so much “beautiful” as “beer-guzzling” buddies. And we actually never went INTO Chicago – it was a suburb north of Chicago. It was a friend’s house – which we also never left. So just to be clear, there was NO sight-seeing and NO wedding since no one got married. In fact, there weren’t any couples. Sorry, I often get confused between “weddings” and “48 hours of board games.” And food. And beer.
Let’s start over. This past weekend I traveled to Northern Illinois to play board games for two straight days with 3 friends and gorged myself on family-style meals and family-style packs of alcohol. Maybe next time I’ll see a wedding, or some family. But I sure hope not. Ain’t nothing better than battling your friends in strategy games from morning to night. Here is what our itinerary consisted of, with some mini-reviews.
The First Game We Played was ...
Anachrony (10/10)
Upon arriving at my friend’s abode, we carried in stacks of games and chatted about life. At the exact moment one of them asked “How’s work been?” I used Brazilian Jujitsu to lock them all into a three-man Icelandic headlock before kindly suggesting that we all “sit our butts down so I can end you losers with my mechanical Squidwards.” Anachrony was the first on the table! This resource-management, worker-placement, time-traveling wonder – where you blindly rob your future-self of materials and kidnap administrators that do a surprisingly fine job of recruiting screaming survivors from the surface – is a stressful euro where the worker placement spots fill fast. You want to build private worker locations on your own board that help you prepare for your individual evacuation requirements. Theme and strategy meld wonderfully in this time-traveling dystopian banger. And did I mention MEEEEEEEEECCHS!!!!
The Game I specifically Requested ...
The Guild of Merchant Explorers (7/10)
Do you like Bingo, cubes, and the greenest of point salads? You do?! Well then you gotta check out Merchant Guilds of Exploration Merchant’s Guild Explore! Or whatever this game is called; words have no meaning. Cards from a central deck are flipped over, revealing an area size and terrain type – each player chooses somewhere on their map to place cubes that match these traits (You must always place adjacent to your pieces). When a biome is filled with cubes, replace one with a town. At the end of the round, pick up every cube, leaving the towns where they sit. You then begin another round, with more freedom since your towns help you spread out. What makes this game different? Players gain unique abilities every round AND they will use ALL previously gained powers again. It is these powerful asymmetrical abilities that make this small flip-and-mark game fun.
The Game I was Dying to Share ...
Comic Hunters (6/10)
Comic Hunters is a drafting game with a theme that is literally the game’s name – you are hunting for comics. But your love of comics will not dictate if you enjoy this one. Only your love of drafting. The game is broken into 4 rounds; each round contains a series of 3 drafts. The wild catch is that each draft behaves differently. One is the simple kind seen in Terraforming Mars and Sushi Go. Another works like Coloretto, where you keep adding cards to piles until one pile is so good you take it and duck out. And another is a wild grid of random cards where you manipulate it ever so slightly before snagging one hero’s comics from a line you just created. Players gain points for having large sets of a hero’s comics, points for diversifying sets, and points for symbols that represent milestones in a hero’s comic history. But don’t be fooled by these thematic details I’m sharing. If you hate drafting, yet love comics … you will probably hate this game.
The Game I was Not Expecting ...
Moonrollers (7/10)
The same guy who introduced me to Moonrakers brought Moonrollers this time. And so I had to break a hard truth to my friend – “I abso-f*ck*ng-lutely hated the negotiation part of Moonrakers.” Luckily, Moonrollers is nothing close to its king-making deck-builder grandpappy! It is a push-your-luck dice game where you can roll as much as you like, as long as you are able to commit one or more dice to various symbols on cards. If you fail on a roll, all progress is lost. Players earn VP when cards they are committed to complete and the last person to commit adds the card to their tableau, giving them a die manipulation ability. A quick game I can’t wait to play again.
The Game I Wanted to Show Our Host ...
Architects of the West Kingdom (8/10)
Architects of the West Kingdom is the kind of game banned by the Catholic Church. Actually, wait. That’s me. I’m the one who’s banned since robbing the tax stand and grabbing piles of gold from the black market’s “Dirty Dave” is frowned upon. This game is a worker-placement resource-management point salad with one of the coolest twists on worker-placement. Every space can have an unlimited amount of workers and your previously played workers make their locations stronger. The catch? There is a location where you can arrest your opponent’s workers and throw them in prison for BUCKETS OF CASH! Thematically you are building businesses and constructing a church. Mechanically you are ruining the lives of innocents while helping Dave. Oh, Dave. It is both a gateway and a bloodthirsty game of chance.
The Game I was Not Sure About ...
Challengers! (7/10)
The Dice Tower’s review video of Challengers!, where Roy flinches in pain at Tom’s rating of 8/10, totally makes sense after finally playing it. This big multi-player deck-builder plays out through a series of round robin duels. With so many head-to-heads going on at the table, you are watching the game as much as you are playing. The vibe is honestly pretty energetic – it feels like an actual tournament! But if you start to lose in this card-flipping war-like game, your head will burn with anger. Those with rage issues cannot touch this one. The jealousy they will feel when someone celebrates their own win is … overwhelming. Though no one is being mocked, you will be quite offended by another’s joy when every plan you made has gone up in flames. You build a deck, but you don’t have a d*mn say in the order the cards are played. My temperature eventually cooled and I relatively enjoyed the debilitating loss. Once again, cannot wait to play again!
The Game I Thought Would Go Better ...
Eclipse (6/10)
I rated this epic, 4X euro-space-game a 9/10 after my first play. But since then I have compiled a list of grievances that gets longer with each play. But what can I say, I’m a Twilight Imperium (TI) guy. I also fully understand that I may just be bad at this game. The main issue I have is not something I can prove, but I have felt in all 4 of my plays – the sectors you discover dictate the resources available to you in a way so much worse than TI. You can try and force your fate by building a terrifying fleet that can overtake opponents, but the aftermath of a battle leaves you exposed in a way similar to a battle in Root. But Root is meant to have moments of downfall – recovering is a part of its system. My list of problems is longer, but I’ve been playing games my whole life, so I KNOW I just need to play it more. Which explains my 6/10. I’m hopeful I can get better.
The Game I Had Hope For ...
Fleet the Dice Game (5/10)
The first time someone said “Twilight Imperium but a roll and write” I immediately suffered a stroke and faceplanted into a field of freshly rolled D4s. Roll and writes are dumb cheap games that somehow still cost too much money and are now, for some reason, longer than season 5 of Stranger Things. For a palette cleanser this weekend, my friend whipped out Fleet the Dice Game. It is a roll and write with dice drafting built with a theme of running a commercial fishing company. Actually, I’m not sure about the theme. You launch a dozen boats, drive none of them, and are REALLY concerned about crabs. The game is a 5/10 because, just like all these other Yahtzee and Bingo combos, I have fun comboing, but when making a decision I just think “I guess I’ll mark this spot.” I’ll still keep an open mind, but as of right now, I prefer Gonz Schon Clever to all of them.
The Game I Was Most Excited For this Group ...
SETI (10/10)
Some games really suck to teach. I’d rather rip an eye out with a pair of flaming tongs than teach a game where “concepts” are just as important as the “Literal rules you must follow.” This will always be my one knock against the gloriously thematic euro-game of SETI, where you score VP by finding traces of alien life … before meeting an actual f*ck*ng alien!. Luckily everyone at the table knew how to play. So boy did my eyes roll right out of my head when someone piped up “Yeah, I’m gonna need a refresher.” Saved me the time of ripping them out myself. After a run through, we jumped in. And boy did it take off like a rocket. Fast turns all around – which is surprising cause this game is combotastic. Now, obviously it slowed down near the end as all heavy strategy games do, but it was the fastest session of this satellite-launching, alien-buddy game I’ve played yet. Multi-use cards, tight resources, and crazy combos make this a must play.
