15th October 2021
Impromptu gaming Friday continues, we're on Board Game Arena to play Codex Naturalis. Read my blog on it here.
0 Comments
15th October 2021
Impromptu gaming Friday on Board Game Arena continued with King of Tokyo. Read my blog on it here. 15th October 2021
Friday afternoon was time for some impromptu gaming on Board Game Arena. The first game of the day was Via Magica, read my blog about it at here. 12th October 2021
The final game of Tuesday night gaming at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club was Port Royal. Read my blog about it here. 12th October 2021
We're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club and Tuesday gaming continued with auctioning game High Society. Read my blog about it here. 12th October 2021 It's a Tuesday and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club. The first game of the evening was Sushi Go Party!. The big brother and follow up of the excellent Sushi Go!, if you've not read it, check out my blog about Sushi Go! here and then come back. I'm not going to talk too much about Sushi Go Party!, other than where it's different to Sushi Go!. Mechanically, it shares almost exactly the same blend of drafting and set collecting rules as its predecessor. What Sushi Go Party! brings is a bunch of new cards with new ways to collect sets and/or score points. In fact, Sushi Go Party! brings so many new cards to the game, that they can't be all used at the same time and introduces the concept of menus. More on menus below. What's in a game?
The components in Sushi Go Party! are all pretty good, the tiles and board feel sturdy enough and the cards made well enough. The game maintains the same excellent, cheerfully colourful illustrations of cartoonish looking food as it's predecessor. If it ain't broke... There's not much iconography to the game, it's mostly just numbers. How's it play? It plays almost identically to Sushi Go!, the same take-a-card and pass-your-hand and set collecting mechanics played over 3 rounds that made the original so good are found here. Sushi Go Party! only differs in 2 ways. In setup, Sushi Go Party! requires the players to create a menu from the available sets of cards. This consists of the nigiri cards (Which are used in every game.), 1 rolls set, 3 appetiser sets, 2 specials sets and a dessert set. The rules provide a large, varied list of menus to use. I guess there's nothing stopping players from creating or randomly selecting their own menus. After the menu has been finalised, the relevant tiles are placed into the relevant recessed spots on the board so that all players can see what sets will be in the game. Finally, all the sets in the menu are shuffled together into a face down deck and dealt out to players as per the rules. The second difference: In Sushi Go!; the game goes through the deck without reusing it, i.e., at the end of a round, all played cards are scored, then discarded out of the game - except for puddings of course. But in Sushi Go Party!, the played cards are shuffled back into the deck, along with more pudding cards to balance out any that were taken players. Then the reshuffled deck is reused in the next round. It's a subtle difference, but it technically makes Sushi Go Party! a tiny bit more predictable as the composition of cards in the deck will 'reset' from round-to-round. Whereas in the original, once they're played, they're played. Overall
If you like Sushi Go!, you'll like Sushi Go Party!, no doubt about it and if you play Sushi Go! a lot, then this is probably also worth playing, the extra cards go a long way to increasing the game's longevity. But there's something that makes Sushi Go Party! less appealing than its predecessor and I think it's immediacy. Sushi Go! is pretty much the epitome of a quick, pick-up-and-play game; shuffle the cards, deal them out to players and you're ready to go. Clean up after the game end involves collecting the cards and putting them away. Conversely, in Sushi Go Party!; the board must be set up, a menu agreed upon and placed the relevant tiles placed on the board, then the pertinent card sets must be taken from the available sets, only then can they be shuffled and dealt to players. It doesn't end there though, when Sushi Go Party! is over, all cards must be put back into their sets before packing away. Not only that, Sushi Go Party! by necessity comes in a bigger tin, while the original is compact enough to fit in coat pocket. Gone is the portability and convenience. It sounds like I'm dissing Sushi Go Party! but I'm not, it's a great game. It's just that I don't feel the need to play it over the original, it doesn't offer a different enough experience to warrant the extra effort. However, like I said, if you play a lot of Sushi Go!, you should give this a try and if you've never played Sushi Go! or this, then you should definitely try one of them. 6th October 2021 Time for some midweek gaming! It's a Wednesday and we're round Simon's. Valor & Villainy: Minions of Mordak is the game of the evening; an open-world styled, fantasy-themed, RPG-inspired exploration game with one player assuming the role of big-bad Mordak and the others taking on the mantle of heroes. What's in a game? Valor & Villainy is fairly involved game that features a lot of components.
The components are all high quality, tiles and tokens are suitably thick and sturdy, as are the standees. The cards are all well made and the rounded plastic dice feel weighty enough but the standout components are the chunky recessed hero boards which feel solid and also fairly practical. Artwork throughout the game is excellent. The landscapes on map tiles are well produced, clear but also colourful. Character illustrations are bold and slightly-cartoony, it's a style that gets used quite a lot in fantasy-themed games, but it looks good in Valor & Villains. As you'd expect for a open world game like, Valor & Villainy uses a variety of icons and symbols, particularly on spell cards - which essentially are all different. For the most part, the iconography is intuitive and pretty straightforward to understand. How's it play? Setup
On to play In Valor & Villainy, the hero players are trying to discover the 3 shrines hidden somewhere amongst the face-down tiles to weaken Mordak and the Mordak player will be trying to make it hard for the heroes to find them until he arrives on the map after the 6th round. Heroes always act first with the starting player beginning, then going left. The Mordak player may then act after the hero players. The Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns to act, 1 for Mordak himself (Although Mordak doesn't have much to do in the early game.) and 1 for minions. When players take their turns, they will have a number of actions points they can spend to move or act as they see fit, there are also some free actions that can be performed
Endgame Once 6 round have been completed (Or all 3 shrines have been discovered.), the game goes into The Final Battle! During the final battle, Mordak himself will appear on the map and directly engage the hero players in combat. Mordak has a large amount of health; 70-100. If the hero players reduce Mordak's health to 0, they win the game. Conversely, if the Mordak player manages to defeat 3 heroes during the final battle, then the Mordak player wins the game. Overall
There's a lot of charm to Valor & Villainy's presentation, especially the bold, chunky artwork for characters and minions. Mechanically, the game is actually quite straightforward, unremarkable even (At least it is for the hero players.), although it does contain a fair amount of exception driven and situational rules. Using cards for minions makes it a little fiddly to move them around and handle, it also looks a little dull and flat (sic) but conversely, it makes it easy to track minion health and combat initiative. Valor & Villlainy has several quibbles in my opinion One of the most significant is the game's one-vs-many mechanic, these types of mechanic rarely work well in my opinion. Obviously the game will have been balanced to try and take this into account, but few games can balance the difference between 1 human brain versus 4 human brain and the hero players will always have this to their advantage. It almost feels like the game is set up to advantage hero players over the Mordak player. The game also has a weird tonal shift thanks to this one-vs-many mechanic. For most of the game, the Mordak player will be a thorn in the players' sides, a source of constant minor irritation. Then, during the endgame, it becomes straight up, directly confrontational PvP as Mordak appears on the map. It feels weirdly more aggressive. For the heroes, the game is mostly about managing encounters as they appear, recognising and prioritising threats, then dealing with them using the most efficient method, allowing them the maximum opportunity to explore the tiles. For the Mordak player, it's about exploiting any opening or weakness that the heroes present, not only defeating heroes but stymieing and thwarting them whenever possible. Valor & Villainy is a open-world RPG-esque experience where a varied band of heroes, explore, fight monsters, acquire treasure and level up. The ingredients of an RPG are all there, but it doesn't feel quite right and I think there're a couple of reasons why. There's a lack of storytelling to the game and variety to the encounters, there's randomness when setting up a map and not all tiles will appear in any single game, but they're just encounters, they feel a little bland and there's no sense of travelling, journeying or adventuring. The normal map (For 4+ players) will have 20 face-down map tiles to scout, to explore all of them will require turning over 3-4 map tiles per round. Scouting tiles is actually a bit of a balancing act and one of the challenges the hero players face. if the heroes scout too slowly, they risk not finding all the shrines, if they do it too quickly, they risk revealing more minions than they can handle at once. This will require players to head off in different directions and in an RPG you should never split the party! In relation to combat, it seems the most efficient way for the Mordak player to accumulate experience points is to relentlessly pick on one player until they are defeated, then choose another player to pick on. It feels particularly un-RPG-like where combat tends to distributed amongst all heroes. Even then, when a hero is defeated, on the next turn, the hero will reappear in the centre tile like it's a videogame spawn point. All of this adds up to make Valor & Villainy feel disconnected from RPGs. But for me, by far the biggest problem the game has, is its run time. We played with 5 players in total and a game took somewhere between 2-3 hours to play out. If felt like each player took about 4-5 mins to complete their turn and don't forget that the Mordak player essentially gets 2 turns in a row, 1 for themselves and 1 for their minions which makes a round 25-30 minutes long and that's before adding in The Final Battle. It also meant players had about 20 minutes of downtime between turns. It's too much, if Valor & Villainy was an exceptional or engaging game, it wouldn't be such an issue, but it's not. It's not a bad game either, it's just slightly bland and slightly average. There's nothing wrong with an average game, so long as it doesn't outstay it's welcome. The effort Valor & Villainy requires to play doesn't quite justify the experience it provides. 5th October 2021
Tuesday gaming at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club continued. The final game of the night was Codex Naturalis, read my thoughts about it here. 5th October 2021 Tuesday night is here and the Woking Gaming Club is at The Sovereigns in Woking. The first game of the evening was Jump Drive, whisk through the Galaxy instead of racing through it! Jump Drive is a streamlined version of the great Race for the Galaxy and like it, shares a setting with games New Frontiers and Roll for the Galaxy. What's in a game? Jump Drive uses 2 different types of cards which will be familiar to players of Race for the Galaxy. All cards have a cost and may also have icons for exploring, genetics or military, they may also powers, victory points or income.
Jump Drive's art style matches that of the other games in the series and at least some of the artwork is recycled and as I've said before, it's not a bad thing as it lends them all a consistent look. The game's iconography is for the most part straightforward and certainly less intimidating than Race for the Galaxy. How's it play Setup
On to play Rounds in Jump Drive are played out simultaneously over 3 phases and players have choice from 3 actions, 2 of which can be completed in 1 turn.
Endgame When any player's score reaches 50+ VPs, then the game will end with the current round. All players should calculate their VP total. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
Jump Drive plays very quickly and the game can be over in a handful of turns; at the start 50 victory points may seem like a lot but thanks to the exponentially increasing scores, players will suddenly find themselves hitting the endgame. They cannot afford the luxury of meandering in their decisions or make frivolous choices. Players must learn to be ruthless with spending their hand of cards, keeping more than 1 or 2 cards back will really slow them down, this is even more true in Jump Drive than Race for the Galaxy as Jump Drive provides players the choice to put down 2 cards a time and that double cost can easily empty a players hand. Sure, it's fine and prudent to play one card at a time but if opponents are putting down 2 at a time instead, they risk streaking ahead and it may be necessary to keep up with them! Jump Drive is not only about engine building, it's about optimisation, players have try an exploit the opportunities given to them instead of searching too hard for them. It's also impressive how Jump Drive manages to distil so much of Race for the Galaxy into a streamlined, more accessible and quicker iteration. Pretty much everything that makes Race for the Galaxy a good game is is present here: The hand of cards as currency, hidden choices, engine building and synergy and so on. Jump Drive is an enjoyable experience, reasonably easy to learn with a quick set up and play time that provides players with meaningful choices, a game well worth trying: If you like Race for the Galaxy, you'll find a lot to like here. 3rd October 2021
Our Sunday gaming evening on Board Game Arena had reached its conclusion. The final game of the night was Love Letter, ready my blog about it here. |
AuthorI play, I paint. Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|