So on January 1st, I moved to an island: Kauai, the least populated of the four major Hawaiian islands. It’s got a population of just over 70,000 according to the last count, which makes it a fair amount smaller than the city of Berkeley where I used to live — let alone the whole California Bay Area. So the question was always how hard or easy would it be to find gaming. Fortunately, a nice little game store called 8 Moves Ahead appeared on the island a bit more than a year ago, and even more fortunately they’re heavily focused on play.
But the downside so far has been that that play has mostly been more American games, with Magic: The Gathering taking up most of the oxygen in the store from what I can tell. I’ve had some good sports willing to play my euros, and there are some limited euros available in the store, but as of this moment I don’t feel like I have a strong euro-interested game group. Room to grow, I suppose.
In the meantime, this first New to Me for the year is more Americanized than usual, and also obviously a lot shorter. I only made it to either three or four sessions at the store. That’s because in January I was coming up to speed on my new life here (including learning how to drive again after a multi-decade hiatus) and then in March, COVID struck hard.
But here’s what’s New to Me, and what I think about it, as a somewhat less American game player, more focused on medium-weight euros.
The Great (“I Would Buy This”)
On the Underground: London (2019). On the Underground has long been one of my favorites, as I love its very tactical play: how you can play tracks to grab instantaneous bonuses, and how you’re always reacting to what the passenger might want to do. I also think the way that you can build together multiple lines is quite clever. So, when I saw this new edition “London / Berlin”, I was very interested in getting it, mostly because it had a new map of Berlin.
As it happens I haven’t actually played the new map yet, but I did play the old London map in the new edition, and I thought it was a perfectly good new edition. The graphic design itself I thought was a wash. The new edition by LudiCreations is one of these “artsy” designs, and though the artwork is definitely more attractive, it was also harder to see the lines in the places along the center where there are 3-5 different spaces available. However, where the new edition really improved on the original is the fact the map is now laid out on a large-scale grid, and so you can see where stations are based on a letter and number (e.g., C-4). That’s probably going to be helpful to any non-Londoner.
And I’m looking forward to trying out Berlin. Someday, when I can go to a game store again. Continue reading →