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alobearOn the recent JoCo Cruise, I played three very different games I had never played before.
The first was a town-building card game called Machi Koro, where the goal was to be the first to erect four specific buildings in your town. There were other buildings to be constructed in the pursuit of the end goal, and the key was ensuring a good combination of cards that would earn enough money to be able to build the more expensive ones. There was some randomness involved, since you only received the benefit of the buildings when you rolled their number on the dice, but here were various ways to increase your odds.
It took me a while to get the overall strategy, and it’s not a game I’m particularly looking to play again. There may also have been some cheating on the part of the young man who introduced us to it, but Dave won in the end, so I didn’t get too annoyed.
Much more enjoyable was Monikers, which was a team game where the goal was to get your team members to guess the thing on various cards, without actually telling them what it was. The gameplay was enhanced by the progression of the rounds. The same set of cards was used for each round, so in subsequent rounds it became as much a memory game as a guessing game. In the first round, the clue-giver could say anything but the actual words in the card’s title. In the second round, only one word could be given as a clue, and the third round was reduced to just miming. It was tremendous fun, and resulted in some quite dubious clue-giving.
At lunch one day on the cruise, we met someone who told us about GM-less roleplaying and we arranged to play a game with him later in the week. The one we picked was A Penny For My Thoughts, where we played amnesiacs who were trying to uncover past trauma via an experimental drug that connected our minds. It took me quite a while to get the hang of it, and I always find storytelling games a bit stressful, as I’m not very good at coming up with things on the spot, but overall it was pretty fun. It involved exploring a backstory, based on prompt cards written by each player at the start, with the other players each providing the active player with choices as to what happened next at various points in the telling. It was a bit weird playing it with an almost complete stranger, but he generally picked the most unpleasant of the options given to him (we were going for trauma, after all) so we quickly got the hang of suggesting awful things to happen to each other. I think the success or otherwise of this game would depend very much on who is playing, but I’d be very happy to give it another go, or try one of the other, similar games on offer.
Last week, I listened to Shadow Wave, the last in the main Cherub series by Robert Muchamore. It was quite a weird book, since it carried straight on from where the last book left off, but finished the plotline of that mission very quickly before returning the protagonist to Cherub Campus. Then there was an extended flashback to an unrelated training mission, involving completely different characters, which then led into another mission in the present day that was, again, very short, before the book concluded with a section about the immediate futures of various of the characters. So, it was very bitty, with too many different points of view, and it was a bit tricky in places to remember what the significance of the various plot strands was. Still, it nicely rounded off James’ time at Cherub, and I intend to try the spin-off series, as I was never that keen on James as a characters, so I’m hoping to get more Cherub fun with other, more appealing characters.
This past weekend, I spent a lot of time playing 80 Days, a narrative game where you take the role of Passepartout, assisting Monsieur Fogg on his attempt to travel round the world. You have to manage the finances of the trip, choose where to go next, and decide on various activities at each destination. The game does its best to derail your efforts, and includes some weird and wonderful aspects, since it’s set in a steampunk version of history, which includes airships and automata. On my first run-through, it took me 88 days to complete the trip, because I made several bad errors that led to a rather desperate lack of funds. It didn’t help that a strange encounter in the desert near Riyadh saw us mysteriously transported to Omsk, but it was most my fault for mismanaging our finances and accidentally missing a couple of booked trains. My second run-through went much more smoothly, and I completed the trip in 64 days, with nearly £10,000 in the kitty! The game is definitely replayable, with plenty of interesting routes around the globe to explore, though it’s not always possible to end up visiting the same places, since unexpected obstacles turn up to divert you at every turn. Lots of fun!
The first was a town-building card game called Machi Koro, where the goal was to be the first to erect four specific buildings in your town. There were other buildings to be constructed in the pursuit of the end goal, and the key was ensuring a good combination of cards that would earn enough money to be able to build the more expensive ones. There was some randomness involved, since you only received the benefit of the buildings when you rolled their number on the dice, but here were various ways to increase your odds.
It took me a while to get the overall strategy, and it’s not a game I’m particularly looking to play again. There may also have been some cheating on the part of the young man who introduced us to it, but Dave won in the end, so I didn’t get too annoyed.
Much more enjoyable was Monikers, which was a team game where the goal was to get your team members to guess the thing on various cards, without actually telling them what it was. The gameplay was enhanced by the progression of the rounds. The same set of cards was used for each round, so in subsequent rounds it became as much a memory game as a guessing game. In the first round, the clue-giver could say anything but the actual words in the card’s title. In the second round, only one word could be given as a clue, and the third round was reduced to just miming. It was tremendous fun, and resulted in some quite dubious clue-giving.
At lunch one day on the cruise, we met someone who told us about GM-less roleplaying and we arranged to play a game with him later in the week. The one we picked was A Penny For My Thoughts, where we played amnesiacs who were trying to uncover past trauma via an experimental drug that connected our minds. It took me quite a while to get the hang of it, and I always find storytelling games a bit stressful, as I’m not very good at coming up with things on the spot, but overall it was pretty fun. It involved exploring a backstory, based on prompt cards written by each player at the start, with the other players each providing the active player with choices as to what happened next at various points in the telling. It was a bit weird playing it with an almost complete stranger, but he generally picked the most unpleasant of the options given to him (we were going for trauma, after all) so we quickly got the hang of suggesting awful things to happen to each other. I think the success or otherwise of this game would depend very much on who is playing, but I’d be very happy to give it another go, or try one of the other, similar games on offer.
Last week, I listened to Shadow Wave, the last in the main Cherub series by Robert Muchamore. It was quite a weird book, since it carried straight on from where the last book left off, but finished the plotline of that mission very quickly before returning the protagonist to Cherub Campus. Then there was an extended flashback to an unrelated training mission, involving completely different characters, which then led into another mission in the present day that was, again, very short, before the book concluded with a section about the immediate futures of various of the characters. So, it was very bitty, with too many different points of view, and it was a bit tricky in places to remember what the significance of the various plot strands was. Still, it nicely rounded off James’ time at Cherub, and I intend to try the spin-off series, as I was never that keen on James as a characters, so I’m hoping to get more Cherub fun with other, more appealing characters.
This past weekend, I spent a lot of time playing 80 Days, a narrative game where you take the role of Passepartout, assisting Monsieur Fogg on his attempt to travel round the world. You have to manage the finances of the trip, choose where to go next, and decide on various activities at each destination. The game does its best to derail your efforts, and includes some weird and wonderful aspects, since it’s set in a steampunk version of history, which includes airships and automata. On my first run-through, it took me 88 days to complete the trip, because I made several bad errors that led to a rather desperate lack of funds. It didn’t help that a strange encounter in the desert near Riyadh saw us mysteriously transported to Omsk, but it was most my fault for mismanaging our finances and accidentally missing a couple of booked trains. My second run-through went much more smoothly, and I completed the trip in 64 days, with nearly £10,000 in the kitty! The game is definitely replayable, with plenty of interesting routes around the globe to explore, though it’s not always possible to end up visiting the same places, since unexpected obstacles turn up to divert you at every turn. Lots of fun!
