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alobearWe spent yesterday gaming with friend in Croydon and played two games that were new to me.
The first was Architects of the West Kingdom, which initially seemed like a fairly standard worker placement game. You sent your workers out onto the board, across various spaces that allow you to collect resources, money, building cards and apprentices. You use the apprentice powers to boost your resources and then complete buildings once you've amassed the right combination of stuff.
So far, so similar to a lot of other games.
But - there's a twist! You start with 20 workers and, once they're out on the board, they stay there unless another player (or sometimes you) spend money to move then onto their player board. If you capture your own pieces, they just go back to your supply, but if you capture the pieces of other players, you can send them to the dungeon for lots of money. You then have to send one of your pieces to the guardhouse space to collect your own pieces from the dungeon to return them to your supply.
So, on top of deciding how to allocate your workers, you have to avoid running out of them and manage capturing or releasing pieces, to get money and prevent your own workers being in the guardhouse when the black market resets (or you end up in debt).
I adds a whole different and very challenging (and entertaining) layer to the game. I did pretty badly and got screwed over a lot, ending up in a lot of debt - but it was a fun experience I'd definitely like to play again.
The other game we played was a multi-player computer game called Hidden in Plain Sight. There were various scenarios for this, but the basic premise was that the screen showed lots of knights wandering about, who all looked the same. Each player controlled one of them and the aim of the game was to identify which one was you, then achieve the objective of the scenario without being identified and eliminated by any of the other players. It was very chaotic, very silly, and a lot of fun. I also did quite badly in this game, though I was better at some scenarios than others.
The first was Architects of the West Kingdom, which initially seemed like a fairly standard worker placement game. You sent your workers out onto the board, across various spaces that allow you to collect resources, money, building cards and apprentices. You use the apprentice powers to boost your resources and then complete buildings once you've amassed the right combination of stuff.
So far, so similar to a lot of other games.
But - there's a twist! You start with 20 workers and, once they're out on the board, they stay there unless another player (or sometimes you) spend money to move then onto their player board. If you capture your own pieces, they just go back to your supply, but if you capture the pieces of other players, you can send them to the dungeon for lots of money. You then have to send one of your pieces to the guardhouse space to collect your own pieces from the dungeon to return them to your supply.
So, on top of deciding how to allocate your workers, you have to avoid running out of them and manage capturing or releasing pieces, to get money and prevent your own workers being in the guardhouse when the black market resets (or you end up in debt).
I adds a whole different and very challenging (and entertaining) layer to the game. I did pretty badly and got screwed over a lot, ending up in a lot of debt - but it was a fun experience I'd definitely like to play again.
The other game we played was a multi-player computer game called Hidden in Plain Sight. There were various scenarios for this, but the basic premise was that the screen showed lots of knights wandering about, who all looked the same. Each player controlled one of them and the aim of the game was to identify which one was you, then achieve the objective of the scenario without being identified and eliminated by any of the other players. It was very chaotic, very silly, and a lot of fun. I also did quite badly in this game, though I was better at some scenarios than others.
