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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Weekend Boardgame: 15 April 2012

Been waiting for this session since i missed my usual friday session. Group dynamics was definitely fun and a lot of bantering to be had, however nearing the end of the night (about 7 hours of gaming with a dinner break in between), we all got kinda tired and with the impending monday looming, we decided to call it a night.

Games we played are:

As I have reviewed this game before, I will not go into too much details again.
In summary, this game is always a hit (especially with the female players as I have discovered) as it provides a suitable amount of strategy and tactics in the right amount of time. Shows a rather good clean design and does not try to do too much and knows its place. A very good buy for me.






A kickstarter game that I gotten recently for review from Bogas.com.sg. This is my 2nd play with 5 full players and I am liking it even less. This time t
hough there is sufficient usage of fighters and bombers though mostly from me. This only served to prolong the game though and when we finished, we have taken almost 2 hours to play this game. The winning also seems to be anti-climatic. A friend commented that perhaps we should play at most 4 players and I will have to try and see how this goes. There are a few interesting points of the games and a few weaknesses as well. So far the weakness seems to be more glaring than the good points. I will play a few more times before I do an detailed review.

Initial Review: Average

A game by the famous Reiner Knizia, which is similar to most of his other games that is, it involves maths. Simple to learn, easy to play, it is a great filler. It is easy to teach and surprisingly fu
n to play. Essentially, there are 3 cauldrons which allows for only 1 color in each of them. During your turn, you must play a card from your hand (of 5 and draw back up to 5 afterwards). If a cauldron reaches or goes over the sum of 13, you have to take all the cards from that cauldron and place it in front of you. The round ends when all cards have been played. If you have cards of a particular color in front of you AND you do not have the most of that color, then those cards will penalize you. In addition, there are Poison cards that will also count against you. After a certain number of rounds (depending on the number of players), the player who has the least points (or closest to 0) will win the game.

Initial Review: Good

I had this game previously but after 1 play i decided that it was not for me. M
y friend brought his and taught us to play with a few variant rules added. The variant rules certainly added a few new dimensions to the game but I still feel that its not my cup of tea. It does not really have a way for the leader to be caught up in the game. In addition, it is very easy to be ganged up upon and usually there is no way to catch up or neutralise or even have some fighting chance as often people will go after the easy targets unless players are very aware of each other's score and target the leader. Even then sometimes the leader's creatures are hard to damage or kill. Definitely not my cup of tea.

Initial and Final Review: Bad


Our final game of the night is Tomb. I always wanted to try it after seeing the components but after playing through it I quite regretted my decision on this. You play an adventurer gathering a group of adventurers to go into the tomb to investigate the various crypts, fight the monsters and traps and search for treasures. Essentially, it all boils down to the dice to determine outcome of the encounters. But I found that there is a lot of downtime between players and some of the rules were not too clear. In the end, the group kinda splintered as a few players were concentrating on their moves in the tomb while the rest were zoning out and no longer paying attention or have made their moves as it does not really impact the others. A few times, players found their ENTIRE adventure group wiped out and they had to start at the inn again. Overall, I did not enjoy myself. There are a lot of characters to cycle through should anything happen thus replay value should be quite high. There are a lot of encounter cards as well which also adds to the replay value. Components wise are nice thick cardboard pieces and a lot of dice so that is fine. But the gameplay is not particularly innovative or engaging for me. I doubt I will play it again soon.

Initial Review: Average

All in all, it was a good night and great fun with a lot of laughter and jokes. Most of the time when you are in a group playing games, its the banter, the chit chat that makes the session very worth the time. Of course, having good games certainly adds to the enjoyment. I hope to try Quebec playing properly this time but I am sure I will have time to try it again next time. :)

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