Holiday Reviews
Oct. 10th, 2021 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearLots of new games played on holiday in the past week:
Ride the Rails:
This game was new to all three of us who were playing and we couldn't make sense of the rules, so we referred to a 'how to play' video online and then were able to get started.
There are three parts to every turn - buy shares in one of the train companies, place trains on the board to represent railroads being laid across the US, then transport a passenger down a particular route.
You can only lay trains of colours you've bought shares in, and every player gets paid for passengers using trains they've got shares in, regardless of whose turn it is.
It took me a little while to get into it, but I formulated a plan in the penultimate round, managed to implement it and came a respectable second.
Not a game I'd seek out to play again, but it was required some interesting strategising, and I enjoyed it overall.
Isle of Cats:
This game combines several game mechanics that really appeal to me and I absolutely loved it.
You have to draft cards and then choose which ones you want to buy into your hand, like in Terraforming Mars.
Then you have to select cats of different shapes to place into your ship, a bit like Indian Summer.
But there are also lots of placement rules, areas to be completed, items to cover up in particular ways, bonuses for numbers of cats of the same colour that are touching - plus both public an private goals.
I thoroughly enjoyed it both times I played and would have bought my own copy - but Dave didn't really like it so it wouldn't be worth it, as we'd never play it together at home.
Taj Mahal:
This game felt completely beyond me when the rules were explained, and I spent the first half being very confused and grumpy. I managed to resist the temptation of refusing to continue, and gradually got the hang of it enough to come second against people who were much more familiar with it than I was.
You play cards out of your hand, in order to try to have the most of a particular colour or item, so that you can then withdraw from the round and place castles on the board.
Linking your castles together gets you points, as does collecting sets of goods and special tiles.
I'm not sure I'd be particularly keen to play again - but I was glad I persevered and found it satisfying by the end of the game.
Arboretum:
This game involves a lot of complicated thinking, and I'm not sure I fully got the hang of it.
You pick up different coloured trees with different numbers on them, either from the deck or from the top of anyone's discard pile. You then place the cards in an orthogonal way on the table in front of you.
At the end of the game, the person with the highest total value of cards for a particular tree left in their hand, gets to score for a path between cards for that tree (which have to be in ascending order) on the table (but the highest value card - the 8 - is negated if anyone has the 1).
The cards were pretty and the mechanics and scoring were very interesting, but it was a lot to get your head around.
Furnace:
If someone had described this game to me, or perhaps even if I'd seen other people playing it, I might not have been interested in giving it a go - but I'm very glad I did!
Players bid on a selection of cards each round - they obtain a card if their token has the highest number, and they get compensation in the form or resources or actions if they are not the highest bidder. So, you need to bid carefully to secure both the cards and the compensation that you want each round.
You then have the opportunity to place your cards in the optimum order to maximise the amount of money you can make by connecting their actions together in a production line.
It doesn't sound very interesting, but it somehow fed into exactly the right part of my analytical brain, and I really enjoyed working out what to do at each stage. I also turned out to be very good at it and won both games I played by a significant margin.
I also finished a couple of books on holiday!
The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker:
This is the sequel to The Golem and the Jinni, which was one of my favourite books of last year.
The story picks up almost straight after the events of the first book, and it was great to revisit this world and spend more time with its characters.
But, while the first book was all about people coming together and finding connections and a place to belong, the first half of the sequel was all about isolation, rejection, miscommunication and despair.
There also wasn't really any external threat for quite a while, so it was mostly the characters arguing with each other and being unhappy about things.
It definitely picked up in the second half, when the disparate storylines started to come together, but the ultimate conclusion involved far too many coincidences, and didn't feel wholly satisfying.
It was still well written, and kept me reading, but overall I found it disappointing after enjoying the first one so much.
Recovery Man by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
This is the sixth in the Retrieval Artist series, which I started at the beginning of the year and have been thoroughly enjoying.
This instalment was no disappointment, even though there were some implausible coincidences that prompted the protagonist to go in search of information about his former family, just at the time when unexpected events were overtaking them.
Anyway, I loved spending more time in this world, getting to know Miles Flint better and finding out more about his history. It was a shame Noelle DeRicci didn't appear, as I really like her as a character, but the tension of the plot in this book did make up for that absence.
I'm really looking forward to reading more of these.
Ride the Rails:
This game was new to all three of us who were playing and we couldn't make sense of the rules, so we referred to a 'how to play' video online and then were able to get started.
There are three parts to every turn - buy shares in one of the train companies, place trains on the board to represent railroads being laid across the US, then transport a passenger down a particular route.
You can only lay trains of colours you've bought shares in, and every player gets paid for passengers using trains they've got shares in, regardless of whose turn it is.
It took me a little while to get into it, but I formulated a plan in the penultimate round, managed to implement it and came a respectable second.
Not a game I'd seek out to play again, but it was required some interesting strategising, and I enjoyed it overall.
Isle of Cats:
This game combines several game mechanics that really appeal to me and I absolutely loved it.
You have to draft cards and then choose which ones you want to buy into your hand, like in Terraforming Mars.
Then you have to select cats of different shapes to place into your ship, a bit like Indian Summer.
But there are also lots of placement rules, areas to be completed, items to cover up in particular ways, bonuses for numbers of cats of the same colour that are touching - plus both public an private goals.
I thoroughly enjoyed it both times I played and would have bought my own copy - but Dave didn't really like it so it wouldn't be worth it, as we'd never play it together at home.
Taj Mahal:
This game felt completely beyond me when the rules were explained, and I spent the first half being very confused and grumpy. I managed to resist the temptation of refusing to continue, and gradually got the hang of it enough to come second against people who were much more familiar with it than I was.
You play cards out of your hand, in order to try to have the most of a particular colour or item, so that you can then withdraw from the round and place castles on the board.
Linking your castles together gets you points, as does collecting sets of goods and special tiles.
I'm not sure I'd be particularly keen to play again - but I was glad I persevered and found it satisfying by the end of the game.
Arboretum:
This game involves a lot of complicated thinking, and I'm not sure I fully got the hang of it.
You pick up different coloured trees with different numbers on them, either from the deck or from the top of anyone's discard pile. You then place the cards in an orthogonal way on the table in front of you.
At the end of the game, the person with the highest total value of cards for a particular tree left in their hand, gets to score for a path between cards for that tree (which have to be in ascending order) on the table (but the highest value card - the 8 - is negated if anyone has the 1).
The cards were pretty and the mechanics and scoring were very interesting, but it was a lot to get your head around.
Furnace:
If someone had described this game to me, or perhaps even if I'd seen other people playing it, I might not have been interested in giving it a go - but I'm very glad I did!
Players bid on a selection of cards each round - they obtain a card if their token has the highest number, and they get compensation in the form or resources or actions if they are not the highest bidder. So, you need to bid carefully to secure both the cards and the compensation that you want each round.
You then have the opportunity to place your cards in the optimum order to maximise the amount of money you can make by connecting their actions together in a production line.
It doesn't sound very interesting, but it somehow fed into exactly the right part of my analytical brain, and I really enjoyed working out what to do at each stage. I also turned out to be very good at it and won both games I played by a significant margin.
I also finished a couple of books on holiday!
The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker:
This is the sequel to The Golem and the Jinni, which was one of my favourite books of last year.
The story picks up almost straight after the events of the first book, and it was great to revisit this world and spend more time with its characters.
But, while the first book was all about people coming together and finding connections and a place to belong, the first half of the sequel was all about isolation, rejection, miscommunication and despair.
There also wasn't really any external threat for quite a while, so it was mostly the characters arguing with each other and being unhappy about things.
It definitely picked up in the second half, when the disparate storylines started to come together, but the ultimate conclusion involved far too many coincidences, and didn't feel wholly satisfying.
It was still well written, and kept me reading, but overall I found it disappointing after enjoying the first one so much.
Recovery Man by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
This is the sixth in the Retrieval Artist series, which I started at the beginning of the year and have been thoroughly enjoying.
This instalment was no disappointment, even though there were some implausible coincidences that prompted the protagonist to go in search of information about his former family, just at the time when unexpected events were overtaking them.
Anyway, I loved spending more time in this world, getting to know Miles Flint better and finding out more about his history. It was a shame Noelle DeRicci didn't appear, as I really like her as a character, but the tension of the plot in this book did make up for that absence.
I'm really looking forward to reading more of these.
