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Surya Van Lierde is pure Eurosnoot and proud of it!
Belgium
Gijzegem
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Last night was my last night with gamer friends for this year. I might play a game with the family this evening, but those will be on the much lighter side
When I played Eclipse on Wednesday, the other option was Québec. I had been looking forward to this title since I first heard of it. The cascading mechanism sounded interesting. The rules are quite straightforward, and turns go quickly. You have a couple of choices each turn, but not too many, keeps AP down to a minimum I guess, but my group doesn't suffer from AP. It's not uncommon for you to have only one possible action on your turn though, or only one that is beneficial. There is some strategy, there is some tactical play. All nice and dandy. But the fact that you play 4 phases and the board is reset after each one, keeps the 'story arc' to minimum. You end up doing 4 times the same thing, and oh yeah, in the end there's also bonus points for chains of buildings. While this can be big, it didn't add the depth that I would have liked.
I love the box artwork, but the board is damn ugly. As are the tiles. And the cards. And it's all just a bunch of cubes on colored spots on the board, no real theme there. 400 years of history? Nah. That's a pity.
I liked the game fine, I wouldn't mind playing again, but it's all VERY abstract and didn't have the depth I expected or hoped it would have.
Initial rating: 6.7
I had hoped to play Quebec, but I didn't expect there to be more 'new' Essen titles on the menu. But there where
Next up was Walnut Grove. I had heard good things about this but I also heard it was quite light. Knowing that, I didn't expect too much, but hoped to be pleasantly surprised.
The game plays in 8 rounds with 4 phases in each one. You get to build up your player board with tiles, take some resources, do a single action and feed your people. Everything worked fine, but I've got the feeling this game is overdeveloped. I think they wanted to strip this game to the bare minimum to keep everything tight and short and snappy (a noble cause) but I had the feeling they overdid it. Having only 8 actions in the whole game is very limiting and keeps the amount of strategic options low, as you simply HAVE to feed your workers, as penalties are simply to great not to. So I think they took out just a bit too much. But I also think repeated plays could prove me wrong. We'll see.
Initial rating: 6.5
And yes, next up was an other 'new' Essen title: Shitenno.
This is not a title I was looking forward to. The artwork and them don't get my juices flowing, so to speak. But I liked the designer's previous game Yggdrasil more than enough to wanna try this.
In this game you claim spots on the board and score points for those. The later you claim a spot in the game, the more points it's worth. You can claim them by simply buying them, or by 'fighting' (discarding the right ninja and samurai cards) for them. So in stead of buying with money, you're buying them with a different currency There's bonus points to be had here and there and bonus tiles provide you with some flexibility in future turns. The drawing point for this game is the San Marco mechanism where one player has to make sets of things and lets the other players chose from those first. It's slightly different from San Marco, but it's basically the same thing. I like this mechanism OK, but it can cause some AP but more off: once you have chosen a set, there's very little strategic of tactical options. So all strategy and tactics in the game center around this one mechanism. This keeps the game a bit more one-dimensional than I had hoped.
So I liked this game OK, but it didn't set my world on fire.
One more thing: I know it influences price, but I would have preferred some wooden bits for the payer pieces in stead of tokens. Especially for the scoring markers. Not a game breaker, but slightly disappointing.
Initial rating: 6.7
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