This quarter finally ends my work on the book on cooperative board game design by myself and Christopher Allen. That’s because today marks the hand-off day for Meeples Together, which I’ll be talking about more in the next months. Meanwhile, that means that this was also my last chance to look at co-ops for the book, so whenever one came near me I leapt upon it. There were four more total. I still do plan to play co-ops in the future, as I’ll be starting a long running series of case studies related to the book sometime in the next several months … but it’s a bit of a relief to not have to at this point.
In any case, this is everything I played this quarter that was new to me. As usual it’s rated by how much I like it (or not) as a medium-weight eurogamer. And, there was a lot of middle this month: not the best and not the worst.
The Great (“I Would Buy This”)
Majesty: For the Realm (2017). Sometimes a very simple little game can really hit the spot. This is a simple Dutch-auction game where you purchase colored cards that you place in corresponding places in your kingdom. Most of the cards give you victory points in an exponential progression, increasing the valuation the more tiles you get. Some of the various areas in the kingdom also interrelate in interesting ways. A few of the cards further allow attack of your opponents, defense from their attacks, or recovery of the cards they destroyed.
There’s just enough color to be evocative, and there’s just enough choice to be interesting. It’s also very fast, allowing quick play, and very variable, as each of the locales in your kingdom has two variants for how it works. My only complaints are production related: the box is too big; the scoring components are simultaneously overproduced and not in the right denominations; and the game is overpriced because of that overproduction. Still, it’s on my “perhaps buy” list. Continue reading →