Ah, Manorcon, how we love thee!
Jul. 27th, 2013 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearLast weekend was Manorcon, always one of the best weekends of the year - and this year was no different.
I played five new games:
Mage Knight
Technically I had sort of played this before, but only on my own in an attempt to learn the rules. It turned out to be tremendously more enjoyable playing with other people, particularly when a very nice guy came over to help us set it up, explain the basics, and guide us through the first round. It took six hours from opening the box to putting everything away again afterwards, but it didn't feel too long. I can't see myself playing this game a lot, but it certainly bears more investigation of the different scenarios, and it was worth buying it after all.
Vineta
This was oddly reminiscent of Escape From Atlantis, in that there was an island made of of different pieces, with coloured houses on them, and one piece of the island sank at the end of each turn. Instead of trying to get all your pieces off the island and across the sea to safety, though, the aim was to have as many of them as possible still on the last island piece at the end of the game. The specific pieces each player was trying to save was a secret, so it was all about being subtle and using misdirection. It was quite fun, though required a skill set I don't have in abundance.
Tzolk'in
This was three hours of utter tedium and despair as I failed to achieve anything at all, and felt as if I was missing some key aspect of how the game worked. It's a resource allocation game, which I usually really enjoy, and it was certainly well put together and had interesting aspects - but I did incredibly badly, couldn't see how I could have made things better and just found the whole thing depressing. I think I maybe need to give it another try, perhaps when I'm a bit fresher, but this game did not agree with me at all last weekend.
Thunderstone Advance
How to make Dominion more interesting? Add a dungeon exploration aspect! This game is essentially Dominion, but the aim is to build up your deck with heroes, weapons and magic items, so that your hand gets good enough to tackle the monsters lurking in the dungeon. Defeating monsters is what gets you victory points, and it adds a whole new dimension to the game, which I really enjoyed.
Tales of the Arabian Nights
Every year at Manorcon, we discover one new game that we like so much, we buy it before the weekend is out. The first year it was Dominion, the second year it was Stone Age, last year it was Kingsburg, and this year it was Tales of the Arabian Nights. This game requires no skill, no strategies, and very little in the way of concentration - but it is two hours of endless entertainment. It's basically a group choose-your-own-adventure, whereby you wander around the board, have incredibly random encounters and suffer increasingly ridiculous doom. I absolutely loved it and now want to introduce as many people to it as possible - though I do think there's a real danger of over-playing it, so I shall try to be restrained. Definitely one for the September games holiday, though!
Two non-Manorcon-related reviews:
Triggers by Robert J Sawyer
Possibly one of the silliest books I've ever listened to (that wasn't meant to be silly). A doctor was trying to excise traumatic memories from a soldier's mind, and pressed the button on his funky machine at the exact same moment that terrorists blew up the White House, sending an electromagnetic pulse through the nearby hospital, and causing about twenty people to start sharing their memories - and one of them was the President! Cue threats to national security, awesome sex between people sharing memories, people learning that racism is bad, and a climax in which the entire world became linked, and so all violent acts were eliminated overnight. Highly entertaining.
Upside-Down
I read a feature about this film in Empre ages ago, but then it never appeared in cinemas - apparently because it bombed so badly in the states, that it didn't get a release here. So, we downloaded it and watched it the other night. The concept (of two worlds so close together that you could interact with people on the other one, though only the gravity of your own world affected you) was absolute nonsense, and very little of what happened in the film made any kind of sense. The romance story was rather sweet, though, and bits of it were very clever, so not a total loss.
I played five new games:
Mage Knight
Technically I had sort of played this before, but only on my own in an attempt to learn the rules. It turned out to be tremendously more enjoyable playing with other people, particularly when a very nice guy came over to help us set it up, explain the basics, and guide us through the first round. It took six hours from opening the box to putting everything away again afterwards, but it didn't feel too long. I can't see myself playing this game a lot, but it certainly bears more investigation of the different scenarios, and it was worth buying it after all.
Vineta
This was oddly reminiscent of Escape From Atlantis, in that there was an island made of of different pieces, with coloured houses on them, and one piece of the island sank at the end of each turn. Instead of trying to get all your pieces off the island and across the sea to safety, though, the aim was to have as many of them as possible still on the last island piece at the end of the game. The specific pieces each player was trying to save was a secret, so it was all about being subtle and using misdirection. It was quite fun, though required a skill set I don't have in abundance.
Tzolk'in
This was three hours of utter tedium and despair as I failed to achieve anything at all, and felt as if I was missing some key aspect of how the game worked. It's a resource allocation game, which I usually really enjoy, and it was certainly well put together and had interesting aspects - but I did incredibly badly, couldn't see how I could have made things better and just found the whole thing depressing. I think I maybe need to give it another try, perhaps when I'm a bit fresher, but this game did not agree with me at all last weekend.
Thunderstone Advance
How to make Dominion more interesting? Add a dungeon exploration aspect! This game is essentially Dominion, but the aim is to build up your deck with heroes, weapons and magic items, so that your hand gets good enough to tackle the monsters lurking in the dungeon. Defeating monsters is what gets you victory points, and it adds a whole new dimension to the game, which I really enjoyed.
Tales of the Arabian Nights
Every year at Manorcon, we discover one new game that we like so much, we buy it before the weekend is out. The first year it was Dominion, the second year it was Stone Age, last year it was Kingsburg, and this year it was Tales of the Arabian Nights. This game requires no skill, no strategies, and very little in the way of concentration - but it is two hours of endless entertainment. It's basically a group choose-your-own-adventure, whereby you wander around the board, have incredibly random encounters and suffer increasingly ridiculous doom. I absolutely loved it and now want to introduce as many people to it as possible - though I do think there's a real danger of over-playing it, so I shall try to be restrained. Definitely one for the September games holiday, though!
Two non-Manorcon-related reviews:
Triggers by Robert J Sawyer
Possibly one of the silliest books I've ever listened to (that wasn't meant to be silly). A doctor was trying to excise traumatic memories from a soldier's mind, and pressed the button on his funky machine at the exact same moment that terrorists blew up the White House, sending an electromagnetic pulse through the nearby hospital, and causing about twenty people to start sharing their memories - and one of them was the President! Cue threats to national security, awesome sex between people sharing memories, people learning that racism is bad, and a climax in which the entire world became linked, and so all violent acts were eliminated overnight. Highly entertaining.
Upside-Down
I read a feature about this film in Empre ages ago, but then it never appeared in cinemas - apparently because it bombed so badly in the states, that it didn't get a release here. So, we downloaded it and watched it the other night. The concept (of two worlds so close together that you could interact with people on the other one, though only the gravity of your own world affected you) was absolute nonsense, and very little of what happened in the film made any kind of sense. The romance story was rather sweet, though, and bits of it were very clever, so not a total loss.
no subject
Date: 2013-07-27 05:23 pm (UTC)Definitely looking forward to giving Tales of the Arabian Nights a try too :)