Doctor Who, Sol, Librarians
Doctor Who, Ep i
I love everything it's doing, featuring northern england, featuring a little group of different people who are not all white, #13's manic energy, spending some time making do without a tardis.
I am really sad that one of the best characters didn't become a regular :(
I've found that first episodes of new doctors usually drag somewhat for me, that the pacing feels off, and the new doctor is still settling into making the role feel natural, so I'm very positive about this series so far, but didn't actually enjoy ep i as much as I might have thought I would.
Sol: Last days of a dying star
This game is INCREDIBLY beautiful. The game board is the dying sun, with two levels of orbit around it and three levels of orbit within it, and it drips flavour off the page.
Each player has a mothership which automatically rotates one space round the sun, and everything else they do needs to be launched from the mothership, so the geography changes as you have to make use of different players structures at different points in the turn.
The gameplay is quite interesting. Your mothership launches little construction ships called sundivers, which can assemble themselves into energy collecting buildings, sundiver manufacturing foundries, and beam-power-into-space-for-victory-points towers, and activate those buildings. The general outline is of building a collect-energy-beam-energy engine, and then use up everything you can at the end in a big burst of energy.
Variety comes from instability cards -- when you build or activate buildings in the three layers in the sun, you draw a number of cards, which both give you some one-off ability, and when you draw solar flares hasten the end of the game. So the game accelerates quite a lot, because the end approaches quite slowly if you're still operating in the higher orbits, but once you build stuff near the core of the sun you go through cards very rapidly. Each game has three or four effects drawn randomly at the start of the game, which determine which abilities the cards grant, so part of the game is recognising how to make most efficient use of them -- how to build your infrastructure differently if you have the opportunity to move buildings, or if you can move sundivers into the sun more cheaply, etc.
There's a few things mostly just about the flavour that I wish were a bit clearer. You're propelling an ark away from the dying star, but the flavour would work better if the player with the most energy got "ark gets to target planet first" not "ark escapes dying supernova", because running faster/slower than the other players doesn't affect whether you die in a supernova. I wish the rules explained things in a slightly different order. I wish the name "sundiver" could be one that reminded people that the sundivers *turn into* buildings. To activate a building you need to fly a sundiver to it, and then that sundiver is not destroyed but teleports back to the mothership, but I wish there was a clearer representation of how that happened.
The designers have clearly thought about these questions and put some effort into the flavour, and in clearing up rules edge cases, but we were bugged by some of them anyway. (If you're reading, thank you so much!)
Librarians
This series is so ridiculous, it's awesome. Last episode, they fought an evil company that was sacrificing interns to the minotaur in the labyrinth. Next episode they rescued the spirit of father christmas.
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1088169.html using OpenID.
comments so far.
I love everything it's doing, featuring northern england, featuring a little group of different people who are not all white, #13's manic energy, spending some time making do without a tardis.
I am really sad that one of the best characters didn't become a regular :(
I've found that first episodes of new doctors usually drag somewhat for me, that the pacing feels off, and the new doctor is still settling into making the role feel natural, so I'm very positive about this series so far, but didn't actually enjoy ep i as much as I might have thought I would.
Sol: Last days of a dying star
This game is INCREDIBLY beautiful. The game board is the dying sun, with two levels of orbit around it and three levels of orbit within it, and it drips flavour off the page.
Each player has a mothership which automatically rotates one space round the sun, and everything else they do needs to be launched from the mothership, so the geography changes as you have to make use of different players structures at different points in the turn.
The gameplay is quite interesting. Your mothership launches little construction ships called sundivers, which can assemble themselves into energy collecting buildings, sundiver manufacturing foundries, and beam-power-into-space-for-victory-points towers, and activate those buildings. The general outline is of building a collect-energy-beam-energy engine, and then use up everything you can at the end in a big burst of energy.
Variety comes from instability cards -- when you build or activate buildings in the three layers in the sun, you draw a number of cards, which both give you some one-off ability, and when you draw solar flares hasten the end of the game. So the game accelerates quite a lot, because the end approaches quite slowly if you're still operating in the higher orbits, but once you build stuff near the core of the sun you go through cards very rapidly. Each game has three or four effects drawn randomly at the start of the game, which determine which abilities the cards grant, so part of the game is recognising how to make most efficient use of them -- how to build your infrastructure differently if you have the opportunity to move buildings, or if you can move sundivers into the sun more cheaply, etc.
There's a few things mostly just about the flavour that I wish were a bit clearer. You're propelling an ark away from the dying star, but the flavour would work better if the player with the most energy got "ark gets to target planet first" not "ark escapes dying supernova", because running faster/slower than the other players doesn't affect whether you die in a supernova. I wish the rules explained things in a slightly different order. I wish the name "sundiver" could be one that reminded people that the sundivers *turn into* buildings. To activate a building you need to fly a sundiver to it, and then that sundiver is not destroyed but teleports back to the mothership, but I wish there was a clearer representation of how that happened.
The designers have clearly thought about these questions and put some effort into the flavour, and in clearing up rules edge cases, but we were bugged by some of them anyway. (If you're reading, thank you so much!)
Librarians
This series is so ridiculous, it's awesome. Last episode, they fought an evil company that was sacrificing interns to the minotaur in the labyrinth. Next episode they rescued the spirit of father christmas.
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1088169.html using OpenID.
comments so far.