UK Games Expo 2019, the quick summary of my day
(Long time no post! I've no idea how many people are still reading, but this is as good a place as any for me to post this so I can refer interested parties to it.)
I visited the UK Games Expo yesterday.
Things I bought
Arboretum, sort of a set-collecting card game, but with three or four very unusual twists. I've played it twice and want to play it more.
Paco Ŝako. Ignore all the cobblers about peace, friendship and collaboration: this is a Fairy Chess variant with three key features:
Half a dozen Fudge dice, also for Penultima.
A larger cloth bag for my Acquire set because, inexplicably, not all the tiles can fit in the supplied one.
The Oink Games version of Riner Knizia's classic Modern Art. It's so refreshing that Oink sells fully-fledged board games in the kind of tiny boxes normally reserved for card games. Strictly speaking, I didn't buy it at the show; I merely talked to people on their stand and confirmed licensing restrictions mean they can't sell it here. So I bought it from amazon.de while I was at the show.
Echidna Shuffle is adorable: a pick up and deliver game where you move huge plastic echidnae around the board. It's basically a kids' game, but I'm itching to have a go anyway. I didn't buy this myself, but I did persuade my friend Charlie to get a copy, which also works.
Things to try before I buy
Bärenpark: Compete to make beautiful zoo enclosures for bears. Looks like a thin thematic skin over a game of tesselating polyominoes. It's encouragingly well rated, and it's by Phil Walker-Harding of Imhotep and Sushi Go fame.
I am not a fan of Richard Garfield. Don't get me started on Richard Garfield. However, Bunny Kingdom is tolerably playable, with fewer glaring flaws than most of his stuff. I'd play it again. I'm not personally about to buy the In the Sky expansion, but it exists and might be interesting.
(As a side note, it appears I'm disproportionately likely to enjoy a game if it has "king" in its name: Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Joking Hazard, Kingdom Builder, Kingdomino, Kingdoms, Kingsburg. At a pinch, also Bunny Kingdom, Isle of Skye: from Chieftain to King and the venerable Kingmaker. Richard Garfield's outrage King of Tokyo is the notable exception - the game that meant I'll no longer buy based solely on reviews; the only game I've ever sold.)
Matt Leacock's Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are perfectly playable, good, solid co-operative games. His next game in the series is Forbidden Sky, which I was expecting to be merely more of the same. Now I've seen it in the flesh, though, it looks like a dramatically different game, with some interesting aspects to its physrep. I want to investigate further.
The Fox in the Forest has eye-catchingly beautiful artwork, and a reasonable BGG rating. So far, that's all I know about it; I hope the game itself is good, because I want to spend more time with those cards some day. (-8
I own and like Imhotep. It plays fine with two, but now Phil Walker-Harding has produced Imhotep: the Duel. I've looked at it in detail, and seems to be a solid and interesting game with considerable stylistic similarities to Imhotep. I want to play it. I might have bought it on spec, but I simply don't get enough opportunities to play two-player games these days.
From the description, Letter Jam sounded like a word version of Hanabi. It's currently late in prototyping and the rulebook isn't online because it's not finalised, but I managed to browse a draft: aside from being a co-op with the notion of having other players able to see your cards while you can't, it has nothing else whatever in common with Hanabi. It seems to test the ability to make long words using a specified subset of the alphabet, the ability to identify a word that has missing letters, and just a touch of solving 5-letter anagrams. Intriguing. I tend not to get bogged down actually playing the games at the Expo, but that's definitely one to try once it's properly available.
Continuing the Phil Walker-Harding theme, there is also Sushi Roll, a wonderfully-named dice game based on Sushi Go. That's all I know for now...
Tokyo Highway is a few years old, but I'd not encountered it before. And it's not especially well loved in the BGG ratings, either. But they had a hyuuge version of it at the show that I could hardly not notice - so congratulations to their marketing team. It's a very spatial game, which looks like it might be right up my street.
Dishonourable mention
I've no idea about the gameplay, but in all other respects Ticket to Ride: London annoys the hell out of me. The artwork has a vexing " 'allo Mary Poppins" quality to it, and is riddled with anachronisms. (This isn't just me being overly sensitive when it's my own country they're creating a pastiche of; the UK map's artwork was entirely tolerable.) The choice of locations, and of paths between locations, makes no sense whatever; I somehow doubt Alan Moon has ever visited London, or knows very much about it. Hohum.
Pandemic: Rapid Response isn't by Matt Leacock, and appears to have nothing in common with the rest of the Pandemic family of games. This means it's just some random real-time game of no especial interest, and I'm worried Z-Man may have begun to milk the format. )-8
Cross-posted from this Dreamwidth original. If you can, please comment there instead.
DW Comments: Read
or Add Your Own.
I visited the UK Games Expo yesterday.
Things I bought
Arboretum, sort of a set-collecting card game, but with three or four very unusual twists. I've played it twice and want to play it more.
Paco Ŝako. Ignore all the cobblers about peace, friendship and collaboration: this is a Fairy Chess variant with three key features:
- You never take pieces; if you move onto a square occupied by an enemy piece they become paired and either player may move the pair as a unit, according to the rules of their half of the pair.
- You can move onto a square occupied by a union. In this case, you liberate your piece which was previously in the union and move it away from that square. If that in turn moves onto the space occupied by a second union then you get a chain reaction, which is both cool and a really alien concept to get one's head around after a lifetime of playing regular chess.
- The pieces are specially designed to pair up nicely. They're beautiful and almost worth owning merely as a work of art.
Half a dozen Fudge dice, also for Penultima.
A larger cloth bag for my Acquire set because, inexplicably, not all the tiles can fit in the supplied one.
The Oink Games version of Riner Knizia's classic Modern Art. It's so refreshing that Oink sells fully-fledged board games in the kind of tiny boxes normally reserved for card games. Strictly speaking, I didn't buy it at the show; I merely talked to people on their stand and confirmed licensing restrictions mean they can't sell it here. So I bought it from amazon.de while I was at the show.
Echidna Shuffle is adorable: a pick up and deliver game where you move huge plastic echidnae around the board. It's basically a kids' game, but I'm itching to have a go anyway. I didn't buy this myself, but I did persuade my friend Charlie to get a copy, which also works.
Things to try before I buy
Bärenpark: Compete to make beautiful zoo enclosures for bears. Looks like a thin thematic skin over a game of tesselating polyominoes. It's encouragingly well rated, and it's by Phil Walker-Harding of Imhotep and Sushi Go fame.
I am not a fan of Richard Garfield. Don't get me started on Richard Garfield. However, Bunny Kingdom is tolerably playable, with fewer glaring flaws than most of his stuff. I'd play it again. I'm not personally about to buy the In the Sky expansion, but it exists and might be interesting.
(As a side note, it appears I'm disproportionately likely to enjoy a game if it has "king" in its name: Castles of Mad King Ludwig, Joking Hazard, Kingdom Builder, Kingdomino, Kingdoms, Kingsburg. At a pinch, also Bunny Kingdom, Isle of Skye: from Chieftain to King and the venerable Kingmaker. Richard Garfield's outrage King of Tokyo is the notable exception - the game that meant I'll no longer buy based solely on reviews; the only game I've ever sold.)
Matt Leacock's Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert are perfectly playable, good, solid co-operative games. His next game in the series is Forbidden Sky, which I was expecting to be merely more of the same. Now I've seen it in the flesh, though, it looks like a dramatically different game, with some interesting aspects to its physrep. I want to investigate further.
The Fox in the Forest has eye-catchingly beautiful artwork, and a reasonable BGG rating. So far, that's all I know about it; I hope the game itself is good, because I want to spend more time with those cards some day. (-8
I own and like Imhotep. It plays fine with two, but now Phil Walker-Harding has produced Imhotep: the Duel. I've looked at it in detail, and seems to be a solid and interesting game with considerable stylistic similarities to Imhotep. I want to play it. I might have bought it on spec, but I simply don't get enough opportunities to play two-player games these days.
From the description, Letter Jam sounded like a word version of Hanabi. It's currently late in prototyping and the rulebook isn't online because it's not finalised, but I managed to browse a draft: aside from being a co-op with the notion of having other players able to see your cards while you can't, it has nothing else whatever in common with Hanabi. It seems to test the ability to make long words using a specified subset of the alphabet, the ability to identify a word that has missing letters, and just a touch of solving 5-letter anagrams. Intriguing. I tend not to get bogged down actually playing the games at the Expo, but that's definitely one to try once it's properly available.
Continuing the Phil Walker-Harding theme, there is also Sushi Roll, a wonderfully-named dice game based on Sushi Go. That's all I know for now...
Tokyo Highway is a few years old, but I'd not encountered it before. And it's not especially well loved in the BGG ratings, either. But they had a hyuuge version of it at the show that I could hardly not notice - so congratulations to their marketing team. It's a very spatial game, which looks like it might be right up my street.
Dishonourable mention
I've no idea about the gameplay, but in all other respects Ticket to Ride: London annoys the hell out of me. The artwork has a vexing " 'allo Mary Poppins" quality to it, and is riddled with anachronisms. (This isn't just me being overly sensitive when it's my own country they're creating a pastiche of; the UK map's artwork was entirely tolerable.) The choice of locations, and of paths between locations, makes no sense whatever; I somehow doubt Alan Moon has ever visited London, or knows very much about it. Hohum.
Pandemic: Rapid Response isn't by Matt Leacock, and appears to have nothing in common with the rest of the Pandemic family of games. This means it's just some random real-time game of no especial interest, and I'm worried Z-Man may have begun to milk the format. )-8
Cross-posted from this Dreamwidth original. If you can, please comment there instead.
DW Comments: Read
or Add Your Own.