New to Me: Summer 2018

As usual, my New to Me reviews cover games that I’ve never played before, whether they’re new to the world or not. (They mostly were this time around.) And, as usual, they’re rated by how I personally like them, as a midweight eurogamer.

The Very Good (“I Would Keep This”)

Terraforming Mars: Expansions. I’ve now played through all the Terraforming Mars expansions, and I’d generally recommend them, with some qualms about one of them.

Hellas & Elysium (2017). This is a double-sided map that provides two different playing surfaces for the game: the south pole and the other side of Mars. Changing what the terrain looks like provides very valuable variety, but is of limited interest. However, Fryxelius took the next step and also included different milestones and awards on each map. This makes a huge difference, because it changes what you’re competing for in each game, and makes this supplement highly recommended. Continue reading

New to Me: Spring 2017 — So Much Co-op!

I’ve co-authored a pretty extensive book on the design of cooperative games. (It’s currently seeking a publisher.) As a result, I’m usually quick to suggest a new co-op game hit the table … and a lot of them did this Spring. Sadly, I thought most of them were bad!

in any case, this is my listing of new-to-me games played this Spring. As usual, they’re evaluated by my personal likes, not their intrinsic quality. 

The Very Good

Kingdomino (2016). This Bruno Cathala game is a short and simple filler. You essentially draft domino-tiles, with your draft order based on the quality of your last tile: the better the tile you pick, the later you’ll go in the next draft!

The object is to build your tiles (which depict terrains and victory point multipliers for those terrains) into huge groups to score maximal points.

There’s not a lot of complexity here: you take a tile, your place a tile. Nonetheless, the game is a lot of fun and places very nicely fast. This may be because I always like creative games of this sort. However, there’s also just enough choice to keep the game interesting. It’s a fine little filler. (In fact, it almost made my great listing.) Continue reading