The Games Afternoon #2
Well, weekend has been both good and bad. Pretty sick yesterday, spent all day in bed sleeping, trying to sleep or reading. Finished Terry Pratchett's "Making Money," which as I'd heard suggested was not as good as "Going Postal". Still entertaining but not quite as good as expected. I've actually got through nearly all his books now, bar spin off Discworld ones, Strata and the rest of "Small Gods" I think. Recently read "Wee Free Men," "Amazing Maurice and his educated rodents," plus "Wintersmith" - all quite enjoyable even if technically classed as kids books.
Board games was good. No Seafarers of Catan sadly for me but we played Warrior Knights, took 5? hours including several food breaks but most was spent on learning rules and as complicated as it seems it starts to make sense fairly soon after the first round and I wouldn't mind playing again. Had a quick game of Fluxx before ordering takeaway, reminds me must fill in the blanxx for that amusingly, and after dinner we tried Sin City, the board game - possibly the second worst board game I've played, beaten only by The Invisible Man boardgame from 1940/50's that I cannot infact find mention of on the net.
The blurb for the Sin City game reports "Extortion, corruption, murder... it's all in a day's work for the people who run Frank Miller's Sin City. Now you can get in on the action! "Violent" Marv, Detective John Hartigan, and Gail are cutting a swath through Sin City, and they've got agendas of their own. Maybe they'll play right into your hands and kill the men you need killed. Or maybe they'll ruin all your plans and deliver victory to your rivals. You'll need to be ruthless, underhanded, and vicious to win! A mean and nasty game of cops, creeps, and dames for 2 to 6 players, ages 18 and up".
Hmm, to be frank it's far more based on luck and there's really no skill. Some of the advanced rules - it really doesn't take long to master th basic rules - might make it more balanced but some goals are hard to achieve if it doesn't happen in the setup phase, meaning some people's goal are much easier than others based on the 3 heroes' possible actions, which are imbalanced in such a way as to make several goals really damn hard (the dames for example are never killed and we came across no cards to move them during action stage of play either). As for extortion, corruption and the accompanying bluffing, being underhanded and vicious...only vicious really comes into it by the default of heroes killing certain types of characters. There's no choice for mercy and bribery as part of play. In the end we swore we could probably make up better rules for the game ourselves, hacked up as these seemed presumably for it to coincide with the films release and not really attempting to emulate much of what the blurb exclaims with exception of murder.
I don't know what it is about playing board games but half the time I come out, even if I enjoyed it, feeling like I suddenly want to design some. My head wants to make something city based now...that or some really simple but addictive thing. Sometimes think the simplest can be the most fun, i.e. Fluxx or yahtzee.
Board games was good. No Seafarers of Catan sadly for me but we played Warrior Knights, took 5? hours including several food breaks but most was spent on learning rules and as complicated as it seems it starts to make sense fairly soon after the first round and I wouldn't mind playing again. Had a quick game of Fluxx before ordering takeaway, reminds me must fill in the blanxx for that amusingly, and after dinner we tried Sin City, the board game - possibly the second worst board game I've played, beaten only by The Invisible Man boardgame from 1940/50's that I cannot infact find mention of on the net.
The blurb for the Sin City game reports "Extortion, corruption, murder... it's all in a day's work for the people who run Frank Miller's Sin City. Now you can get in on the action! "Violent" Marv, Detective John Hartigan, and Gail are cutting a swath through Sin City, and they've got agendas of their own. Maybe they'll play right into your hands and kill the men you need killed. Or maybe they'll ruin all your plans and deliver victory to your rivals. You'll need to be ruthless, underhanded, and vicious to win! A mean and nasty game of cops, creeps, and dames for 2 to 6 players, ages 18 and up".
Hmm, to be frank it's far more based on luck and there's really no skill. Some of the advanced rules - it really doesn't take long to master th basic rules - might make it more balanced but some goals are hard to achieve if it doesn't happen in the setup phase, meaning some people's goal are much easier than others based on the 3 heroes' possible actions, which are imbalanced in such a way as to make several goals really damn hard (the dames for example are never killed and we came across no cards to move them during action stage of play either). As for extortion, corruption and the accompanying bluffing, being underhanded and vicious...only vicious really comes into it by the default of heroes killing certain types of characters. There's no choice for mercy and bribery as part of play. In the end we swore we could probably make up better rules for the game ourselves, hacked up as these seemed presumably for it to coincide with the films release and not really attempting to emulate much of what the blurb exclaims with exception of murder.
I don't know what it is about playing board games but half the time I come out, even if I enjoyed it, feeling like I suddenly want to design some. My head wants to make something city based now...that or some really simple but addictive thing. Sometimes think the simplest can be the most fun, i.e. Fluxx or yahtzee.