I was planning on exercising fiscal responsibility this year, so what do I do? I go buy 200 bucks worth of board games.
I got the whole shebang on Friday, so I schlepped all my new found lewt into my car and head over to a friend’s place.
Relationship Tightrope
We started with something light. “Relationship Tightrope” is a badly themed Renier Knizia game, where you take tricks (ala spades/hearts) but instead of just the high card doing something, the high and low take points. But points are bad. If you take the high of the trick, you get some blue sticks, and if you take the low, pink sticks Blue and pink cancel each other. The object of the game is to take as few points as possible.
We all felt like it wasn’t a bad game, it was just poorly themed. A solid 6.5-7.2 out of 10.
We went with another oldie but goodie, The Great Dalmuti. We played like 6 rounds, where I held the Great Dalmuti Seat for 4 of them. Meh. Dalmuti is always stupidly fun.
We had an over glut of players that night, so we ended up playing some WoW:TBG, where it just deteriorated from there, as people lost interest.
On Saturday, I got another gaming group in, and busted open both Shogun, and Wildlife.
Shogun
Feudal armies of Japan vie for control of the countryside, with the big gimmick being the “dice tower.” You dump both armies into the dice tower, and whatever comes out are the survivors. The tower has a little insert in it that can trap the armies inside. It’s short, and not light, but lighter than most wargames. I of course dominated everyone, ending up with 3 provinces guarded with a whopping 1 army each. I pretty much got whomped bad.
Tip: Fighting two front wars… not so good.
Rating: General liking by the group, though no one really raved about how awesome it was.
Wildlife
This was an interesting beast. It’s kind of a territory control game where (unbeknownst to us) has a Power Grid like mechanic thrown into it. Each player plays a different kind of animal, which can move into only certain types of areas. Your species can upgrade your ability to move into different areas by playing cards, of which you can play 3 a turn. One of those cards played must be auctioned to the other players for food tokens. Food tokens convert into points at a rate of 3 per point.
The kicker that we missed was the ability cards. There are these ability cards that confer crazy bonuses, and all you need to obtain them was to play the “get ability” card. The key rule we missed was that if you wanted to take an ability, and it was not available, you could take it from another player. You had to take from the person in the lead, though if two players are tied, then you can choose which to steal from. What happened in our game was one person took almost all the ability cards, and proceeded to go nuts. Luckily, I ended the game before he could totally go nuts, and I ended up winning for it.
Our opinion was this game was very interesting and different, and we rated it at a medium/medium heavy type game, though I suspect, this game will be put in the heavy category next time we play it witht he correct rules.
Rating: This one was slippery enough where we definitely want to try it again, but wasn’t sure exactly where it fits in the ole 1-10 spectrum.
