Here is a list of all first look games in the Hyatt.
This was pre-pax gaming at Cafe Mox. Eric and I played a half game with a few decks. It was an all around awful experience. Eric, being the dueling card game master as a designer of Hearthstone had a huge list of problems with the game. I had a smaller list but I don't think my experience was any less terrible.
- we kept summoning cards which resulted in large confusing tableaus of fine print
- the pre-made decks had little visible synergy
- the games did not race towards a conclusion
- the "select a suit and play/use all cards of that suit" should have been interesting but when combined with the "refill hand" mechanic and lack of summoning cost, encouraged us to simply flop our largest suit every turn
I can't help but think we did something wrong. Garfield made this game and he's not a game design idiot but when two experienced gamers can't think of any reason to play a game a second time, then it may have some problems. Maybe I should look for a review of someone who loves the game.
I did like the mechanic that says: choose a suit only play or use cards of that suit. It would be fun to make/play a game that used that in a better way.
More pre-PAX Mox fun.
The game is very well made and clever. I liked the decision on whether to buy buttons for future earnings, low time for repeated place, or to go for the perfect shape. The fact that you can only select the next three pieces really cuts down on AP. I also liked the aesthetics of setting the board up with a big ring of cloth pieces.
In spite of that I don't think I ever need to play it again. I don't mind spacial placement games but I don't enjoy them either.
Eric had kickstarted this and was looking forward to checking it out. The production values were out of this world and it looked like a fun game. The rules were terrible so it probably took us four hours to play a game that should have taken less than an hour. They'll probably fix this before the final release or at least immediately post-release.
The core game is a worker placement game where you interact by adding colored merchants to boats which eventually land at docks which determines what kind of goods are purchased. I thought this was a clever mechanism.
Over several turns you get a minor opportunity to influence this merchant selection but there are power cards that can be purchased for greater influence. Most players are better off just guessing which merchants will win and building for that.
The key part of the game is the asymetric player powers which has every player performing a completely different personal game to create sellable items. While I should have liked this difference, I instead noticed a bunch of problems.
The complexity of the powers differed wildly. The time traveler was extremely complex while the tavern keeper was almost boring
I played the tavern keeper and it was so boring that I thought I must be playing it wrong. The first turn it made no sense to do anything but build beds and buy tech cards. In later turns it only made sense to brew drinks and rearrange beds. Why have a worker placement game where most of the worker spots have no use?
This game gets a thumbs down but I definitely think it's a gold mine for sub-optimally implemented game mechanics.
This is a nice co-op deck builder that I never managed to play. Players work together to beat the boss. Figuring out who needs to gear up and who needs a temporary buff is a neat problem. We lost our three games so there is definitely some meat in this game (for our group at least).
I won't get it but other folks probably will. I'd play it anytime.
I nice little strategy game that encourages you to role-play Brittish gentry. I got tired of that after a half hour.
The game isn't bad but adds a lot of moving parts that improve them but detract from gameplay. A couple:
- really bad people cards that are drawn at random
- goals that you may get stuck with that have thematic (though unubtainable) combinations of buildings. Woe to the first time player that attempts to accomplish one of these.
- A long playtime for a game that doesn't seem to have too much depth
Still, I think the theme may be enough for some people.
This is the one game I saw at PAX that I may buy.
Pluses:
- It has great aesthetics and over the course of the game you get to see a desert turn into a green garden.
- Very little AP
- The game has good tactics but to win you need to bet on a strategy. This bet is visible to other players as the "power" you buy.
- It appears to obsolete Through the Desert so it would allow me to eliminate another game from my collection.
- multiple tile sides and arrangements makes for lots of replayability
This game was a chore to learn. The board was pretty but had terrible graphic design. I had no idea what strategy I should have been doing until the end.
The game has an interesting placement mechanic where you place at intersection of hexes so not only you get these actions but everyone already on these hexes get the actions. Some good points of this:
- Rural hexes at the top are more basic, building spots in the middle are more complex, and vp areas at the bottom. This means the game naturally grows from top to bottom which is aesthetically pleasing.
- Placing on a fresh hex is making a bet on this hex. You hope other players will fill this up and give you free actions. Placing two houses on a fresh hex may be risky but in our game every spot had to get filled so there didn't seem to be a risk of a spot getting abandoned. The worst you could do is to be the last to place on a hex.
The two bad points of this game:
- The building seemed really unintuitive to me and I was always trying to figure out what I owned and what a new building costs. One player forgot he had an olive location until the end of the game. This is a minor criticism.
- The nature of the free actions means that the game gets exponentially longer as hexes get filled up. This can really bog down.
I definitely won't be buying the game but I'm up in the air about whether I'd play it again or not.
Beutiful game with absolutely terrible primary mechanics. Greedy characters try to get victory points while the space ship is falling apart. We could find no incentive to keep the ship together. The ship doesn't even explode if you fail to work on it! It just drifts to the destination planet.
We stopped playing when all the action became unusable in the first 1/3 of the game.
A clever roll and write where players build a fantasy map while neighbors add monsters to it. It has the spatial game that I don't like but it was still fun. Like many roll and write games it scales to a zillion players.
Almost a heavy euro. Tough to learn but probably plays faster than I would think. It has some interesting Chinese themes such as gift giving and lucky numbers. I think the basic mechanic of gift giving (worker placement of taking a card and playing a new one where you take an action) is arbitrary enough that I don't think it should have been bolted onto such a crunchy game. It would have been better off on a lighter game.
Other interesting mechanics are the leeching mechanic of the great wall and the favors of the cortesans. Having a single work on the great wall allows a player to get a bonus every time the wall is built. The block is never removed and does not need to be replayed. The player who builds the wall losing his bricks but is able to gain an advantage from these single bricks.
The game is not a buy but I would play it again.
A very light game where skeletons attack a players castle. Several players mentioned that moving the skeletons is fiddly and the mechanic would work much better as a movile game.
I did like the mechanic of bouncing a skeleton to the left or right which sent them to torment a neighbor. The catapult "fling a skeleton to a player of your choice" was too much politics for me.
The game has a co-op mode that I haven't looked at it. I should check it out just to see how it works. It would be interesting to have strategies where you send particular skeltons (such as ones that came from the top of the map) to specific players who have built their tableau to handle them.
In any case, the fiddly-ness of this game would stop me from playing it again.
Super light game from the artist/designer of Above and Below. I didn't find the game compelling at all. I don't really have anything to say about it.
Eric got me this. I don't like deduction games but it's light and I may have some groups that will want to play it.
I only played one game. It's more of a psychology experiment than a game. Everyone should play it once.
PAX has more than board games and one non-board game made my list. Plunge is a little rogue-like game which has nice puzzles and way-cool art. After playing the demo for ten minutes I knew I was obligated to buy it.