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Games I Have Played: Last Weekend's Edition
The BF and I had a couple people over last weekend for a board game day, which is always a ton of fun. And also means we get to play a bunch of new-to-us games!
King of Tokyo plus Power Up! expansion: The idea is that everyone is a giant monster of some kind (I chose the Kraken) who is trying to destroy Tokyo. The last monster standing or the first monster to 20 points wins. You play by rolling a set of six dice, and you can choose to reroll or not any number of those dice up to two times. Depending on what you roll, you can regain health, gain energy to buy powerups, gain points, or attack your opponent(s). The powerups in the base game are a refilling pool from which anyone can buy. The Power Up! expansion adds a personal deck of powerups for each monster, which is neat because there's no difference between the different monsters in the base game.
I had fun playing this game! I enjoy dice rolling games in general because they tend to move quickly and have a strong luck component. (On a different board game night, we ended the night with Aggravation, which is almost entirely luck-based, and it was the funnest game we played that day.) The window dressing of getting to pretend you're a giant monster also adds a lot of charm. I'm glad we had the expansion though because it adds individuality to the monsters, and the monsters are (I feel) the main reason why you'd pick this game over something else similar (like Yahtzee).
Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game: Legendary is essentially a slightly more complicated, cooperative version of Ascension with a Marvel comics theme. You still buy cards on your turn to add to your deck so that you can either buy more cards or defeat villains. There's a hero deck, with just the cards you can buy, that functions the same as the deck in Ascension. There's also a villain deck where a new villain is revealed at the beginning of each player's turn, and if you have too many villains on the board, they start escaping which comes with a punishment cost. The win condition is that they players have to defeat the mastermind behind the various villains four times; the lose condition is if the mastermind completes his scheme (our lose condition was if the hero deck ran out of cards).
My verdict: fun but not quite my thing! How to play was pretty easy for me since I have played a lot of Ascension over the years, but the details sometimes got tricky. I (along with everyone else) always wanted to automatically refill the revealed villains after defeating one since that is the action that has been drilled into me from Ascension (and is what you do with regards to the hero deck). I do like deck building games that let me both combo and kill things, and it was a nice change of pace to strategize with my fellow players about who could kill what and if a certain hero would be better in your deck or someone else's. Unlike Ascension, Legendary is composed of several mini-decks that you use to build the hero and villain decks. So, for example, your hero deck could be full of all Avengers or all X-Men or you can mix and match which characters you like or you can try to put in all heavy hitters, etc. It's sort of neat but also not enough of a gimmick to get me super excited about it. I liked the game, but I prefer Ascension if I'm going to play a deck builder.
Scoville: In Scoville, you are a farmer in a village obsessed with peppers. At the start of each round, players bid to pick their place in the turn order. Then each player gets to plant a pepper in turn order. Then, in reverse turn order, each player gets to harvest peppers by walking three steps on the board. Then, in regular turn order, each player gets a chance to make one chili recipe by turning in the appropriate peppers for that recipe, trade a set of peppers at the market for something else, and/or sell one color of peppers. Eventually the game ends, and everyone counts up points (from making chili, trading at the market, leftover money, etc.) to see who won.
This game was...something. It seems really complicated at first, and there are definitely a lot of little pieces, but it wasn't as bad as it first seemed. I just dislike when there are a lot of different little sections to a turn/round because it makes things seem fiddly. I will give that the game is wonderfully made, especially the peppers and board you plant them in. (On the other hand, they sort of have to be because otherwise keeping everything aligned would be a mess.) It's hard to plan for things because so many different things can happen between your chance to plant/harvest/fulfill, but there's enough choices that even if someone else blacks your plan there's generally still something worthwhile available to do.
The BF didn't like this game because he thought he had a handle on it and was crushing everyone else but ended up in last place by a significant amount. (The final scores were something like 84, 91, 92, and 93.) I thought it was playable and enjoyable enough but not something I'd like to play on a regular basis.
Qwirkle: Qwirkle is what you'd get if you replaced the letters in Scrabble with colored symbols. There are six different symbols and six different colors. You have six tiles in your hand and have to play a line of tiles so that they match either the color or shape of any other tiles they touch. You get one point for each tile in each line you add to. You cannot repeat a shape/color in a line, so if you make a line of six, that's a qwirkle which nets 12 points rather than the normal 6.
I really liked this game! It helped that I was pretty good at it, haha, but my problem with Scrabble (as much as I enjoy it) is that it can be very difficult to see what your possible plays are. I think I have a decent vocabulary, but I am horrible at unscrambling letters into something sensible. In that sense, Qwirkle is perfect for me because there's no unscrambling, just matching. Because there are fewer possibilities of what you can play on a turn and they're easier to see, turns also go a lot more quickly. (I always end up looking up a ton of stuff in my Scrabble dictionary because I feel like there's one perfect word I could play if only I knew it, and therefore my turns take forever.)
Wits & Wagers: Wits & Wagers was one of the BF's choices, and it is definitely his sort of game. You're given a fact with a number to guess (e.g., how many people lived in California in 1900), and everyone playing writes down a number in secret. Then everyone reveals their guess, the guesses are arranged on the board in order from least to greatest, and everyone bets on which answer they think is closest without going over using poker chips. The board has different sections, with 2:1 odds being the median answer and the odds increasing the farther out from the median you are.
I dislike betting/gambling personally because I really do not enjoy losing being a built in mechanic that will inevitably happen at some point. So I ended up being super conservative in my betting and only ever wagered the two poker chips I could never lose. I knew this was not a winning strategy from the outset, so I was not surprised or upset when I lost by a lot. I'm also horrible at guesstimating, so even if I had bet more of my chips, I doubt I would have won.
The BF, on the other hand, loves this kind of stuff so he really enjoyed himself. The game was super quick to play, which makes it a lot more palatable to me. I could never play with just the BF though; he's too competitive and I'm too conservative betting for a game between just us to end in anything but tears. But it would be a fun game to pull out at parties for something quick.
Stay Alive: Stay Alive has a board with two sets of sliders with holes crisscrossing each other. You start the game with a random configuration of the board, and each player places five marbles on the board. Then everyone takes turns moving one slider to try to make the holes line up and drop someone's marble through the board. Last one standing wins.
I don't know about this one. I thought I'd really enjoy it, but it was mostly just...fine? It might be one of those games that depends a lot on whom you're playing with and the general attitude of the room since there's not a lot of strategy involved in this game. It also might be more of a breather game, something to play between more intense games in order to give your thought processes a break, whereas we played it after playing two relatively simple and quick games. I'd definitely like to play it more! I just thought I'd have a lot more enthusiasm for it after playing it a couple times.
We also played a couple games of Codenames, which is still a lot of fun.
King of Tokyo plus Power Up! expansion: The idea is that everyone is a giant monster of some kind (I chose the Kraken) who is trying to destroy Tokyo. The last monster standing or the first monster to 20 points wins. You play by rolling a set of six dice, and you can choose to reroll or not any number of those dice up to two times. Depending on what you roll, you can regain health, gain energy to buy powerups, gain points, or attack your opponent(s). The powerups in the base game are a refilling pool from which anyone can buy. The Power Up! expansion adds a personal deck of powerups for each monster, which is neat because there's no difference between the different monsters in the base game.
I had fun playing this game! I enjoy dice rolling games in general because they tend to move quickly and have a strong luck component. (On a different board game night, we ended the night with Aggravation, which is almost entirely luck-based, and it was the funnest game we played that day.) The window dressing of getting to pretend you're a giant monster also adds a lot of charm. I'm glad we had the expansion though because it adds individuality to the monsters, and the monsters are (I feel) the main reason why you'd pick this game over something else similar (like Yahtzee).
Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game: Legendary is essentially a slightly more complicated, cooperative version of Ascension with a Marvel comics theme. You still buy cards on your turn to add to your deck so that you can either buy more cards or defeat villains. There's a hero deck, with just the cards you can buy, that functions the same as the deck in Ascension. There's also a villain deck where a new villain is revealed at the beginning of each player's turn, and if you have too many villains on the board, they start escaping which comes with a punishment cost. The win condition is that they players have to defeat the mastermind behind the various villains four times; the lose condition is if the mastermind completes his scheme (our lose condition was if the hero deck ran out of cards).
My verdict: fun but not quite my thing! How to play was pretty easy for me since I have played a lot of Ascension over the years, but the details sometimes got tricky. I (along with everyone else) always wanted to automatically refill the revealed villains after defeating one since that is the action that has been drilled into me from Ascension (and is what you do with regards to the hero deck). I do like deck building games that let me both combo and kill things, and it was a nice change of pace to strategize with my fellow players about who could kill what and if a certain hero would be better in your deck or someone else's. Unlike Ascension, Legendary is composed of several mini-decks that you use to build the hero and villain decks. So, for example, your hero deck could be full of all Avengers or all X-Men or you can mix and match which characters you like or you can try to put in all heavy hitters, etc. It's sort of neat but also not enough of a gimmick to get me super excited about it. I liked the game, but I prefer Ascension if I'm going to play a deck builder.
Scoville: In Scoville, you are a farmer in a village obsessed with peppers. At the start of each round, players bid to pick their place in the turn order. Then each player gets to plant a pepper in turn order. Then, in reverse turn order, each player gets to harvest peppers by walking three steps on the board. Then, in regular turn order, each player gets a chance to make one chili recipe by turning in the appropriate peppers for that recipe, trade a set of peppers at the market for something else, and/or sell one color of peppers. Eventually the game ends, and everyone counts up points (from making chili, trading at the market, leftover money, etc.) to see who won.
This game was...something. It seems really complicated at first, and there are definitely a lot of little pieces, but it wasn't as bad as it first seemed. I just dislike when there are a lot of different little sections to a turn/round because it makes things seem fiddly. I will give that the game is wonderfully made, especially the peppers and board you plant them in. (On the other hand, they sort of have to be because otherwise keeping everything aligned would be a mess.) It's hard to plan for things because so many different things can happen between your chance to plant/harvest/fulfill, but there's enough choices that even if someone else blacks your plan there's generally still something worthwhile available to do.
The BF didn't like this game because he thought he had a handle on it and was crushing everyone else but ended up in last place by a significant amount. (The final scores were something like 84, 91, 92, and 93.) I thought it was playable and enjoyable enough but not something I'd like to play on a regular basis.
Qwirkle: Qwirkle is what you'd get if you replaced the letters in Scrabble with colored symbols. There are six different symbols and six different colors. You have six tiles in your hand and have to play a line of tiles so that they match either the color or shape of any other tiles they touch. You get one point for each tile in each line you add to. You cannot repeat a shape/color in a line, so if you make a line of six, that's a qwirkle which nets 12 points rather than the normal 6.
I really liked this game! It helped that I was pretty good at it, haha, but my problem with Scrabble (as much as I enjoy it) is that it can be very difficult to see what your possible plays are. I think I have a decent vocabulary, but I am horrible at unscrambling letters into something sensible. In that sense, Qwirkle is perfect for me because there's no unscrambling, just matching. Because there are fewer possibilities of what you can play on a turn and they're easier to see, turns also go a lot more quickly. (I always end up looking up a ton of stuff in my Scrabble dictionary because I feel like there's one perfect word I could play if only I knew it, and therefore my turns take forever.)
Wits & Wagers: Wits & Wagers was one of the BF's choices, and it is definitely his sort of game. You're given a fact with a number to guess (e.g., how many people lived in California in 1900), and everyone playing writes down a number in secret. Then everyone reveals their guess, the guesses are arranged on the board in order from least to greatest, and everyone bets on which answer they think is closest without going over using poker chips. The board has different sections, with 2:1 odds being the median answer and the odds increasing the farther out from the median you are.
I dislike betting/gambling personally because I really do not enjoy losing being a built in mechanic that will inevitably happen at some point. So I ended up being super conservative in my betting and only ever wagered the two poker chips I could never lose. I knew this was not a winning strategy from the outset, so I was not surprised or upset when I lost by a lot. I'm also horrible at guesstimating, so even if I had bet more of my chips, I doubt I would have won.
The BF, on the other hand, loves this kind of stuff so he really enjoyed himself. The game was super quick to play, which makes it a lot more palatable to me. I could never play with just the BF though; he's too competitive and I'm too conservative betting for a game between just us to end in anything but tears. But it would be a fun game to pull out at parties for something quick.
Stay Alive: Stay Alive has a board with two sets of sliders with holes crisscrossing each other. You start the game with a random configuration of the board, and each player places five marbles on the board. Then everyone takes turns moving one slider to try to make the holes line up and drop someone's marble through the board. Last one standing wins.
I don't know about this one. I thought I'd really enjoy it, but it was mostly just...fine? It might be one of those games that depends a lot on whom you're playing with and the general attitude of the room since there's not a lot of strategy involved in this game. It also might be more of a breather game, something to play between more intense games in order to give your thought processes a break, whereas we played it after playing two relatively simple and quick games. I'd definitely like to play it more! I just thought I'd have a lot more enthusiasm for it after playing it a couple times.
We also played a couple games of Codenames, which is still a lot of fun.