Festive Reviews
Jan. 5th, 2014 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearWhen I did my 2013 final stats early, I forgot that I would potentially be playing new games before the end of the year. So, a few of these reviews should technically fall into 2013. But hey, whatever...
Games:
Tash Kalar:
This is an arena game where you have to make patterns with your pieces in order to summon more powerful creatures to join your side, while at the same time attempting to disrupt the patterns your opponents are trying to make. I didn't think I'd like it at all, but I actually really enjoyed it - not least because I crushed cholten99 and quintus_marcius - mwahahahaha!
The game ends either when one player runs out of cars, or when one player reaches 12 points with one of their scoring tokens (your final score is determined by the lower of your tokens to encourage balanced carnage), so it was very satisfying that I ran out of cards and then pushed both my scoring tokens over the 12 point mark in my last turn.
However, there was a flaw in the game - in that, once I was ahead, it was very difficult for either of the other players to catch me. They were struggling to complete patterns while I was summoning two creatures every turn, because I already had so many pieces on the board that most of my patterns were already made. If they had noticed this problem earlier and ganged up on me, it might have made a difference, but then they wouldn't have been scoring points by defeating each other, so their overall score would still have been low.
Pirate Dice:
This game is just bonkers. You plan out your turn really carefully, and then the actions of the other players completely disrupt it and you end up turning in circles or going totally the wrong way.
We were supposed to be heading out to sea in our ships to find sunken treasure and then transport it back home, but I spent most of the game touring the coastline on the home tile. I decided my ship must be crewed by hobbits when we finally got as far away from home as we'd ever been (the very edge of the home tile) and then just turned around and went home again.
I like to think I was cunningly staying close to home so that I could wait until someone else got the treasure and then steal it from them when they came back. But then, because the game was going on too long, we decided that the first person to the treasure should just win - so my crew finally got in gear and we sailed straight there and nabbed it from under the noses of all the other players, who had been circling it for ages.
Huge fun, as long as you're not easily frustrated by your carefully laid plans going totally awry.
Escape:
A co-operative game against a strict ten-minute time limit, where the players have to explore a tomb and release crystals in order to escape. The basic game play involves frantically rolling dice, running around the tiles like headless chickens, yelling at each other when you get stuck, and generally failing to make it out of the tomb alive. It's quite fun, and very short, but a bit stressful!
Munchkin:
I had actually never played this before, despite hearing a lot about it. I mostly enjoyed it (especially as I ended the game as an orc riding a flatulent wolf), but felt it the final victory was a bit arbitrary, as it went to the first player on nine points to have a turn after all the other players had run out of attacking cards to play. I'm not that keen on games where everyone sabotages whoever is in the lead, but the silly cards made up for this quite a bit.
Pie Shop:
The roleplaying game that was never meant to be played - but we did! I resurrected a character from a live game of five years ago, just so I could freak out cholten99 (whose character she murdered on that occasion). Having apparently gained a taste for killing, Annabel de Mar joined a party of other serial killers on New Year's Day to track down a murderer for a shady government agency. Of course, the character played by cholten99 ended up handcuffed to a gurney in a freezer, along with the corpse of a radioactive nazi, and a hazmat suit full of prostitute chunks - until another member of the party doubled back to finish him off. Annabel entered into a pact with Simon H's character so that he would murder her rich husband to deflect suspicion from her - thus turning herself into exactly his preferred category of victim (rich white people) and subsequently being dispatched herself. All in an afternoon's Pie Shop!
Space Team:
Depending on who you play with, Space Team can be more or less frantic than Escape. It requires several phones/tablets on the same wi-fi network, so that everyone can play together. You each get a panel of spaceship controls, and then different instructions start appearing at the top of each player's screen. If the instruction says, "Turn the Doohickey to 6" and you have the Doohickey on your screen, you simply turn it to 6. However, if you do not have the Doohickey on your screen, you have to call out the instruction to alert whichever player does have the Doohickey. With multiple players all calling out different instructions while trying to listen for the ones that apply to them, you can see how this game can quickly get out of hand. If approached in a civilised manner, however, it can be a lot of fun.
Cosmic Encounter:
I had played this before, but not for over 15 years, so I decided to count it as new game and review it anyway. It quickly demonstrated how shallow I am, because I was already enjoying it far more than I remembered before we'd even started, just because the game pieces and art were so much prettier than in my old edition. I got to play the race that re-incarnate whenever they are defeated, so I got new powers most turns, which was a lot of fun. The ending was a little odd, because one of the other players and I made a deal which meant we would both win, so we had a shared victory. Not the best game in the world, but quite entertaining.
Galaxy Trucker:
This is the only new game I played that I'm planning to buy - and I loved it! It's another Vlaada Chvatil classic and tremendous fun. At the start of each round, you get a board with the outline of spaceship on it (they get bigger each round) and have a certain amount of time to construct your ship from the tiles laid out face down on the table between the players. There are lots of different ship components (lasers, engines, crew quarters, cargo slots, shields, alien life support, etc) with different connectors in different configurations. You have to use the time to build the best ship you can, with as many of everything as you can manage. Then, you set off into space and the doom begins! There is a randomly selected deck of encounters (space pirates, planets where you can pick up cargo, meteor showers, open space, etc) and you need different combinations of ship components to successfully traverse them. It's very silly, but lots and lots of fun - plus, I am determined to get better at ship-building so I can work towards eventually getting a half-decent score!
Wiraqocha:
A tile-based game, where you roll dice to determine which tiles you can conquer each turn, which in turn determined what resources you get, and what technology cards you can buy. There are multiple different winning conditions, so you can pick different strategies, but have to pay close attention to what your opponents are doing so as to sabotage them before they get too close to winning. It was fun, but ended rather abruptly when cholten99 pointed out that I could win in my turn, so I did - despite the fact that I hadn't remotely spotted it myself!
Film & TV:
Sherlock:
I didn't have to wait nearly as long as most people to find out what happened, as I only watched The Reichenbach Fall a couple of months ago, but anticipation was still very high on New Year's Day. Luckily, I thought the bit I was most concerned about (John's reaction to Sherlock's reappearance) was brilliant. Most of the rest of the episode was excellent, too, in my opinion, though I thought it dipped a bit in the middle, as I'm not keen on John being completely helpless and needing to be rescued. Roll on tonight's episode, though - really looking forward to it!
47 Ronin:
We went to see this last night, and it wasn't really what I was expecting. The trailer suggested a silly romp through feudal Japan, with lots of fighting and mythological monsters. There was a lot of travelling, there was a fair amount of fighting, and there were two mythological monsters, but there was also quite a lot of plot, a good dollop of culture and, unfortunately, rather a lot of dour characters being very serious. This didn't make it a bad film - for the most part, I thought it was pretty good - but it wasn't really any fun, and I had been prepared for silliness, so it took me rather longer to get into it properly than it should have done.
Games:
Tash Kalar:
This is an arena game where you have to make patterns with your pieces in order to summon more powerful creatures to join your side, while at the same time attempting to disrupt the patterns your opponents are trying to make. I didn't think I'd like it at all, but I actually really enjoyed it - not least because I crushed cholten99 and quintus_marcius - mwahahahaha!
The game ends either when one player runs out of cars, or when one player reaches 12 points with one of their scoring tokens (your final score is determined by the lower of your tokens to encourage balanced carnage), so it was very satisfying that I ran out of cards and then pushed both my scoring tokens over the 12 point mark in my last turn.
However, there was a flaw in the game - in that, once I was ahead, it was very difficult for either of the other players to catch me. They were struggling to complete patterns while I was summoning two creatures every turn, because I already had so many pieces on the board that most of my patterns were already made. If they had noticed this problem earlier and ganged up on me, it might have made a difference, but then they wouldn't have been scoring points by defeating each other, so their overall score would still have been low.
Pirate Dice:
This game is just bonkers. You plan out your turn really carefully, and then the actions of the other players completely disrupt it and you end up turning in circles or going totally the wrong way.
We were supposed to be heading out to sea in our ships to find sunken treasure and then transport it back home, but I spent most of the game touring the coastline on the home tile. I decided my ship must be crewed by hobbits when we finally got as far away from home as we'd ever been (the very edge of the home tile) and then just turned around and went home again.
I like to think I was cunningly staying close to home so that I could wait until someone else got the treasure and then steal it from them when they came back. But then, because the game was going on too long, we decided that the first person to the treasure should just win - so my crew finally got in gear and we sailed straight there and nabbed it from under the noses of all the other players, who had been circling it for ages.
Huge fun, as long as you're not easily frustrated by your carefully laid plans going totally awry.
Escape:
A co-operative game against a strict ten-minute time limit, where the players have to explore a tomb and release crystals in order to escape. The basic game play involves frantically rolling dice, running around the tiles like headless chickens, yelling at each other when you get stuck, and generally failing to make it out of the tomb alive. It's quite fun, and very short, but a bit stressful!
Munchkin:
I had actually never played this before, despite hearing a lot about it. I mostly enjoyed it (especially as I ended the game as an orc riding a flatulent wolf), but felt it the final victory was a bit arbitrary, as it went to the first player on nine points to have a turn after all the other players had run out of attacking cards to play. I'm not that keen on games where everyone sabotages whoever is in the lead, but the silly cards made up for this quite a bit.
Pie Shop:
The roleplaying game that was never meant to be played - but we did! I resurrected a character from a live game of five years ago, just so I could freak out cholten99 (whose character she murdered on that occasion). Having apparently gained a taste for killing, Annabel de Mar joined a party of other serial killers on New Year's Day to track down a murderer for a shady government agency. Of course, the character played by cholten99 ended up handcuffed to a gurney in a freezer, along with the corpse of a radioactive nazi, and a hazmat suit full of prostitute chunks - until another member of the party doubled back to finish him off. Annabel entered into a pact with Simon H's character so that he would murder her rich husband to deflect suspicion from her - thus turning herself into exactly his preferred category of victim (rich white people) and subsequently being dispatched herself. All in an afternoon's Pie Shop!
Space Team:
Depending on who you play with, Space Team can be more or less frantic than Escape. It requires several phones/tablets on the same wi-fi network, so that everyone can play together. You each get a panel of spaceship controls, and then different instructions start appearing at the top of each player's screen. If the instruction says, "Turn the Doohickey to 6" and you have the Doohickey on your screen, you simply turn it to 6. However, if you do not have the Doohickey on your screen, you have to call out the instruction to alert whichever player does have the Doohickey. With multiple players all calling out different instructions while trying to listen for the ones that apply to them, you can see how this game can quickly get out of hand. If approached in a civilised manner, however, it can be a lot of fun.
Cosmic Encounter:
I had played this before, but not for over 15 years, so I decided to count it as new game and review it anyway. It quickly demonstrated how shallow I am, because I was already enjoying it far more than I remembered before we'd even started, just because the game pieces and art were so much prettier than in my old edition. I got to play the race that re-incarnate whenever they are defeated, so I got new powers most turns, which was a lot of fun. The ending was a little odd, because one of the other players and I made a deal which meant we would both win, so we had a shared victory. Not the best game in the world, but quite entertaining.
Galaxy Trucker:
This is the only new game I played that I'm planning to buy - and I loved it! It's another Vlaada Chvatil classic and tremendous fun. At the start of each round, you get a board with the outline of spaceship on it (they get bigger each round) and have a certain amount of time to construct your ship from the tiles laid out face down on the table between the players. There are lots of different ship components (lasers, engines, crew quarters, cargo slots, shields, alien life support, etc) with different connectors in different configurations. You have to use the time to build the best ship you can, with as many of everything as you can manage. Then, you set off into space and the doom begins! There is a randomly selected deck of encounters (space pirates, planets where you can pick up cargo, meteor showers, open space, etc) and you need different combinations of ship components to successfully traverse them. It's very silly, but lots and lots of fun - plus, I am determined to get better at ship-building so I can work towards eventually getting a half-decent score!
Wiraqocha:
A tile-based game, where you roll dice to determine which tiles you can conquer each turn, which in turn determined what resources you get, and what technology cards you can buy. There are multiple different winning conditions, so you can pick different strategies, but have to pay close attention to what your opponents are doing so as to sabotage them before they get too close to winning. It was fun, but ended rather abruptly when cholten99 pointed out that I could win in my turn, so I did - despite the fact that I hadn't remotely spotted it myself!
Film & TV:
Sherlock:
I didn't have to wait nearly as long as most people to find out what happened, as I only watched The Reichenbach Fall a couple of months ago, but anticipation was still very high on New Year's Day. Luckily, I thought the bit I was most concerned about (John's reaction to Sherlock's reappearance) was brilliant. Most of the rest of the episode was excellent, too, in my opinion, though I thought it dipped a bit in the middle, as I'm not keen on John being completely helpless and needing to be rescued. Roll on tonight's episode, though - really looking forward to it!
47 Ronin:
We went to see this last night, and it wasn't really what I was expecting. The trailer suggested a silly romp through feudal Japan, with lots of fighting and mythological monsters. There was a lot of travelling, there was a fair amount of fighting, and there were two mythological monsters, but there was also quite a lot of plot, a good dollop of culture and, unfortunately, rather a lot of dour characters being very serious. This didn't make it a bad film - for the most part, I thought it was pretty good - but it wasn't really any fun, and I had been prepared for silliness, so it took me rather longer to get into it properly than it should have done.
