New to Me: Spring 2015 — Resources & More

Last quarter I played a good number of new games and had good success with them. As usual, this is my ratings of these games, which means it’s personal opinion rather than an overall assessment of whether they’re good (or not).

The Great

Eldritch HorrorEldritch Horror (2013). Although it’s only advertised as being “inspired” by Arkham Horror (1987, 2005)Eldritch Horror is pretty much a revision of the cooperative classic. Just like in the original, you have gates opening up and spewing monsters onto the board while investigators stock up on spells and items — while working to stop the Doom Track from dropping to zero and freeing the Great Old One.

With that said, this is a really well-polished revision that looks at Arkham Horror systems like monsters, gates, and money and figures out how to simplify them through abstraction and redevelopment. Much as with Caverna, I think that digging through the systemic changes is a great lesson in game design (which is why I did just that in my last article). The best change is probably in Eldritch Horror’s victory conditions. Each Great Old One has different conditions that must be met to defeat it, as revealed on special Mystery Cards. This makes every game very different; even if you play against the same Great Old One, different mysteries can come up in different orders.

Much as with Arkham Horror, the biggest problem is length. Maybe it’s shorter than the famously long Arkham Horror … but it’s still quite long. Our game took just under four hours, including teach. I’d been hoping the revision would shorten things a bit more than that! Continue reading

New to Me: Winter 2014 — The Season of the City

Every three months I write about the games I played in the last quarter that were new to me. They’re mostly new games, but a few classics that I’m seeing for the first time also show up. This time around, the games date from 2008-2013. You’ll also find that my write-ups for this article are a bit more verbose than usual, as I’ve started writing this snippets shortly after I play the games, when the memory is still fresher. —SA, 3/30/14


The Great

RampageRampage (2013). A dexterity game where you flick monsters around, drop them on buildings, and launch vehicles through the air. I’ve always loved the creativity of a city-building game (and we’ll be getting back to lots of those this time), but it turns out that the destruction of a city-leveling game is just as much fun. There’s some actual strategy here, as you try to collect sets of (eaten) meeples, but the fun is mainly in tearing things down.

Continue reading