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Surya Van Lierde is pure Eurosnoot and proud of it!
Belgium
Gijzegem
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Last Friday a friend brought over the new edition of Show Manager. This game had been on my 'to try' list for a couple of years, so I was glad to finally give it a shot.
The rules are quite simple and straight forward. A typical euro of the time, I'd say. The theme is quite tacked on, but who cares. We're all eurosnoot here!
I had hoped for the actors to be parodies of real actors, but alas, nothing like Dream Factory here, as far as I could tell.
I was the only player to plan ahead for borrowing the max amount of money from my worst show, which I added to the worst city, so I wasn't losing a lot of points there. Also, that was my second show to complete, which gave me a comfortable position for the next rounds. The other players hadn't planned this way and where borrowing $3 here and $2 there, always short on cash and losing points by being forced to borrow from shows they didn't want to borrow from. So good planning on my part, I'd say  I was 1st, 2nd and 1st in the best, second best and third best cities. I was last in the worst one. Which gave me a comfortable win. I had almost made 1st place on the second best city, but the player before me cleaned up the offer space just before I could buy that perfect yellow 9.
I enjoyed it. It's not spectacular or fresh or original or whatever, but it plays well, doesn't take too long, is entertaining and offers enough strategy to interest me.
Initial rating: 7.2
Next up we played Rattus with both Rattus: Pied Piper, Rattus: Africanus and some bonus characters thrown in.
The game plays mostly the same. Most characters from the expansions are variations on abilities that let you add an extra cube somewhere or something to that extent. I didn't feel the expansions added all that much. It felt more like some slight variation than a real expansion.
I guess if you play Rattus a lot, you'll like the expansions for the change they offer, but for the occasional player (which I am) those expansions seem redundant.
Initial rating: 7
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