🤓 This is the Way...
It's that time of year again when Kurt goes to a conference and plays lots and lots of new board games. Why not take a break from quietly despairing and check out all the new things I played this weekend?
Rock Hard 1977
If you've heard one thing about this game, it's that it was designed by Runaways bassist Jackie Fox. (If you've heard a second thing about this game, then you've heard about the "candy" mechanic.) This is a heavily thematic worker-placement game about becoming a professional rock musician in the 70s. You have life experiences, a manager, and a day job, and you're trying to build up your chops, your set list, and your reputation so you can turn a demo tape into a record deal and start playing larger and larger venues and get the most fame. You can get yourself extra actions by eating candy. This gives you that extra little bit of pep to go to more hangouts after-hours, but you have to watch out that you don't let your candy craving get too high or you might have to go into recovery for low blood sugar.
Obviously, it's a thinly veiled metaphor for cocaine. This is one of the biggest criticisms of the game, that it kinda sorta promotes drug use. I don't read it that way, but I get where that sentiment is coming from. That aside, the aesthetic and design are fantastic. Your player boards are amps--and your stats go up to 11, of course. The in-game currency looks like 70s-era money that has been doodled on and coffee-stained. Like I said, it's very theme-rich. The gameplay is fine, and it's very finicky. There's a lot of setup and tear-down and cycling out new event and gig cards and hangout tokens between rounds--which gets tiresome since there are 9 of them! I still liked it... probably not enough to buy it, but would definitely play again. An otherwise by-the-numbers worker-placement game can be extra fun with a well-executed aesthetic that properly informs gameplay.
Trekking the World (2nd Edition)
It's a light eurogame about vacationing. Travel the world, get souvenirs, have encounters at specific locations and save up to go on tours. It's pretty fun. Theme doesn't quite line up with gameplay, but it's easy to learn and very engaging, and I liked the components and art. You can feel a little Ticket to Ride and Century: Spice Road in the DNA of this one, so if you like those, it's worth checking out.
Endeavor: Deep Sea
This is a heavier game about deep sea exploration that can be played either cooperatively or competitively. You're managing a crew, actions, effort, ingenuity, and using DNA for currency for some reason? You're also trying to publish journal papers and save turtles. There are some cool ideas here and my single play-through only scratched the surface (ahem) of what's all going on. I think it probably plays better at higher player counts, and I'd be interested to try out co-op mode. I ended up winning a copy, so I'll have my chance to dive into it (ahem, ahem) more deeply.
Harmonies
This was one of my favorites of the con. It's a light-to-medium weight puzzle game about putting together a habitat for creatures. Which... let's be honest, this been a pretty big theme in games for the last few years. It's almost like people care about climate change or something. The gameplay is straightforward but engaging. It's a small box and a small table footprint, which is definitely convenient. It plays and sets up quickly, and the art is gorgeous. It's out of stock most places I've checked, but this is one I'd be interested in acquiring.
Fairy Ring
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Light game about twee little fairies flitting among the mushrooms. It's primarily a drafting game, but you're also trying to manage where the fairies land, because they score differently depending on the mushroom they land on and whose play area it's in. Very cutesy. It's fine, but I don't need to play it again.
Stonespine Architects
Another game in the Roll Player universe, and I don't care for it for many of the reasons I don't care for Roll Player. Similarly to how the whole game of RP is about rolling up your D&D character, this game is entirely about putting together a dungeon for the party to explore. Because your choices are constantly narrowing, the end of the game ended up being very frustrating, and the art and iconography was more confusing than helpful. Also, I don't really like D&D, so the inside jokes are lost on me.
Avant Carde
This was one of my favorites from the last Geekway, and I ended up ordering a copy during the weekend. But we played it several times because it's great for killing 20-30 minutes with five people. This a light deck-builder where you're chaining together cards by rank/color in order to play as many cards as possible in a single hand. You purchase cards that make the chaining easier, either by coordinating with your starter deck composition or by acquiring cards with powers. Or, ideally, both. It's a little off-kilter, a little too swingy, and it suffers a bit from snow-balling (e.g., whoever is winning after a round is probably going to win over-all) but it's short and the real fun isn't so much in scoring points as in putting together really satisfying card runs.
Creature Caravan
This was my favorite of the con. It's a simultaneous-play dice-placement tableau-builder with a path-finding mechanic. It's not difficult to learn, although there's a market board that's rather counter-intuitive where available prices age off the board once they've been used. It's from Red Raven, so the art is cartoon-ier than I'd like and there's entirely too much lore for the scale of game it is. I don't know why there are "ember zombies" in this game, but there are. But the gameplay is great. It's quick, it's got some nice engine-building elements to it, it sets up and tears down easily, and the tableau cards make for some really interesting synergies. One of my gaming buddies ended up winning a copy, so we'll be playing this again soon, I'm sure.
A.I. Space Puzzle
Imagine Solar Storm by way of Codenames. All humanity has been wiped out except the few on this space ship, which is now in trouble (speaking of unnecessary lore!). The astronauts have a fixed number of turns to get the right keys with the right codes into place or else the ship will be destroyed. The A.I. that's trying to help you has a glitch, however, and is very limited in the information it can provide. So one player--the A.I.--uses their tokens to give clues to the rest of the players--the astronauts--about the proper configuration. The game is pretty fun, if you like a think-out-side-the-box social brain-burner. You can get very creative with how you arrange your tokens, but the components aren't great and it feels like something where you'd get to the end of the scenario book and just be done with it.
Gnome Hollow
I met Ammon Anderson a year and a half ago when he was shopping this around and it has since become a very successful game about gnomes cultivating mushroom rings. Between this, Fairy Ring, two different games called Mycelia, and Elizabeth Hargrave's latest Undergrove, mushrooms are very big in gaming right now, apparently. You draft tiles to add to a common garden and use your gnomes to claim paths. Completed paths generate mushrooms which you can then use to trade for jewels (read: victory points). Bigger rings get you bigger bonuses. For a relatively simple game it has a lot of moving parts, and I'm not 100% sold on the game engine. That said, it's charming and approachable and has loads of personality and--as I mentioned--is already quite popular. It was not easy to get time on this one.
Intarsia
While it doesn't have the drafting that's become the hallmark of the Azul series, it feels like it would be right at home in that universe. You're tiling the floors in a Parisian cafe, paying for pieces with sets of cards. Building more expensive pieces gives you cards back in a different color, so a lot of the game is about working various parts in tandem so they can be earning cards to work towards each other. There are limited pieces and limited opportunities to get tool bonuses, so it takes some shrewdness to outscore your opponents. I liked it, but probably not enough to buy it. But if you can't get enough of Azul, this is worth checking out.
River Valley Glassworks
This is a very light set-collection game with really neat pieces and some rather confusing scoring. It's a little bare for my tastes, but if you're looking for a family-weight game, I know a lot of people at the con who really enjoyed it.
Pirates of Maracaibo
Sail the Caribbean! Upgrade your ship! Hire crew! Raid for treasure and then bury it in your secret hideaway. Explore... an island with rivers... that part was unclear to me. This is a fun game that sits somewhere between engine-builder and point salad. It's awfully complex for as slight as it is--the hour-long how-to-play initially scared off one of my gaming buddies, but it's not actually that difficult once you memorize allllllll the iconography. I kid. Mostly. It's a bit finicky, but I had fun playing it.
Art Society
I'd played this one before and dismissed it, but it's quite popular so I wanted to give it another shot, and I liked it more this time. You're collecting art at auction and filling out your display wall. You get bonuses for putting like frames together, but putting like genres together will nullify their scores. The really interesting mechanic here is that the art that doesn't get collected goes to the museum where it increases the prestige of that genre. So you want to be collecting it... but not so much that it loses its value. The components are top-notch and the art is very low-key silly. I still don't feel like I need to own or even have a strong desire to play it again, but I definitely have a better appreciation for it.
Okay, so... I don't have pictures of the next two games because I didn't actually play them during the con--I already own them both. But they're new enough that it feels worthwhile to report on them.
Finspan
Stonemeier's newest addition to the Wingspan series is about fish. It's still pre-release, this game was almost impossible to get time on. Fortunately... I know a guy. Is it good? Yes. Is it better than Wingspan or Wyrmspan? No. It is a bit lighter, but also very different from its predecessors, so I don't feel like it was any easier to learn than Wyrmspan despite being substantially less crunchy. I like that fish cards are arranged vertically--feels very thematically appropriate. You are typically paying for cards with other cards but also retrieving them, so you have a personal discard pile that you have to manage, which is interesting. So my initial reaction was mixed, but I did like it, and I want to play it a few more times to really get a handle on how I feel about it.
Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth
This is a spiritual successor to--and by all accounts improvement on--7 Wonders Duel. One player represents the forces of good, the other the forces of evil. Victory can be achieved along a number of axes--if the Ringwraiths capture Sam and Frodo, Evil wins, but if the Hobbits make it all the way to Mt. Doom, Good wins. If either side is able to capture enough of the map, they win. The result is a tense battle on a lot of fronts while you try to advance what you think the best path for victory is while also blocking your opponent. It's a very good game and it feels like it captures the scope and vibe of Lord of the Rings quite well.
And More...
Those are the Play-and-Win titles from this weekend that I have played. We also broke out some party games, notably Skull, Trio, I Feel Attacked, and my personal favorite game to bring out at Geekway when our brains are fried: Why First!?
The next Geekway to the West is in May, so look for more updates then.
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