Thursday night we played a collection of quicker games. We started off with Megaland, which at first glance looked to me like Machi Koro, but then you quickly realize it’s more like a more complex version of Incan Gold. The objective of this game is to acquire 20 coins which are essentially points.
In Megaland you choose to either stay in or get out of the “level” you and everyone else is running. If you stay in you acquire one of six different treasure cards. If you choose to get out then you get to keep all treasure cards you’ve acquired up to that point. Each level will deduct 0-3 health from your character and if you run out of health you automatically fail and keep no treasures.
After everyone is done with this you go into a buy phase where you can purchase either more total health for same treasure types or buildings which generate points. Following this buy phase you go into a night phase which resets health and shuffles the levels deck and possibly procs different building card effects.
Overall I thought this game was ok. I haven’t played a lot of the games from Ryan Laukat. I always like his art and design, but of the few games I’ve played that are his designs I always feel like the games are missing something. Whether it’s streamlining (Islebound), or balancing of cards (Artifacts Inc), I feel like this one has a little bit too much tacked into it that doesn’t make the game any better. I’d rather play Incan Gold over this if given a choice.
The second game we played was The Builders: Middle Ages. This was probably the most interesting game I played in the night. It’s a very simple building efficiency game where you’re trying to put workers with various strengths in four different characteristics and assign them to buildings which have building requirements in those same four characteristics.
You get three actions on your turn, which consist of (1) Gaining a worker from the pool, (2) Gaining a building from the pool, or (3) Assigning your workers to a building in your tableau. Assigning workers costs money and assigning more than one worker to the same building costs more actions. There are also some buildings that act like machines which are workers that you don’t have to pay wages for.
I went for a strategy of getting some machines which turned into a strategy of too many machines and lost by one point. I really liked this one for it’s streamlined nature with some small interesting decision points.
The third game we ended up playing was Skull. We just used a set of playing cards and it was just four people. In the game you have three “roses” and one “skull” card for each player. Everyone lays down an initial card in front of them and the first player has the option of either adding a card to their stack or making a bid. Turn order goes clockwise and if the player didn’t make a bid the next player can either add to their stack or make a bid.
Once someone makes a bid, players in clockwise order can no longer add cards and must either pass out completely from the bidding or increase the bid. The bid is how many cards can be flipped and not reveal a skull card. Once everyone is out save one bidder, that player will reveal all of their cards in their stack and try to flip enough cards from other people’s stacks to make their bid. If successful, that player makes a point. 2 points wins the game. If they fail they randomly lose a card from their set which adds a level of intrigue to the game.
The game is in my opinion a lot better with the set that is a bunch of coasters. It looks nicer and feels better to play. I like the game with more than four also. I really like this game, but I still don’t own it and I really don’t know how much I would play it if I did. I like Cockroach Poker over this most of the time.
The fourth game we played was Tempurra. I describe this game as Push Your Luck Uno and I like it. Strangely enough this is one of those games that I haven’t played enough to be able to teach it off the top of my head.
In this game you get dealt an initial hand of cards and you’re trying to avoid indigestion cards in the deck. There will be a card with a value of 2-7 to start the game. The next player has four options: (1) Add a card of the same value thus increasing the value of the middle cards, (2) Play a special card, (3) Play a pair to wipe the cards in the middle and have one of that pair be the new middle card, or (4) Eat cards from the top of the deck equal to the value of the cards in the middle.
Anytime someone gets indigestion they take a token and they can add another indigestion card to the deck and take back the discards and shuffle it all back up. Play continues like this until someone hits three indigestion or more. Person with least indigestion wins.
The artwork in this game is great and the game plays fast enough that you can get a couple of games in 20-30 minutes. It’s very random and the strategy really boils down to playing pairs only when you really need to and eating a ton of cards early on to build up a sizable hand so you don’t have to eat as much. I really like this one.
The last game we played was Kingdomino with the Age of Giants expansion. I had played Kingdomino way back when it first was released and I thought it was ok. To me it feels like playing one of the Martyn F games, either Cities or Limes, but not as strategic. The components are really great and it did win the Spiel des Jahres, but there’s plenty of games that won the SdJ, that I’m not crazy for. But let’s see what the Giants expansion adds and see if it changes my feelings on the game.
First off you get this really cool looking tile dispenser tower for the game. This is a neat addition, but ultimately I didn’t really see the necessity for this. You also get some giants which are wooden pawns with screen printings of giants and the best addition are goals you can receive at the end if you construct your kingdom in a certain way. Overall the presentation of the expansion is nice and the goal tiles are nice for variation.
Tiles come with one or two different terrain features on them and there may be crowns on those features. On your turn you select a tile out of a pool with your meeple. In the following round a new set of tiles will come out and whoever is at the top of the column will choose a new tile from the new set of revealed tiles. The tile the meeple was removed from goes into that player’s kingdom and you get points based on how many crowns times how many tiles that land occupies. Players are making a five by five grid and anything outside of the bounds will be discarded.
The giants are part of the tiles and they do two things. The first thing they do is they occupy a part of a tile when you’re bidding which means you’ll get that giant. The second negative is the giant will nullify one of your crowns of your choosing. You symbolize that by putting the giant on your tile with a crown. Fortunately there are tiles that let you move giants to another player’s kingdom.
Overall the giants are ok. They add a little bit of take that and interaction to the game, but the real winner in my eyes are the goal tiles. In my game we had two goals: (1) Don’t discard a terrain tile, (2) Build wheat tiles in the corners. I was able to do a little bit of #2, but I failed on #1. I had no giants on my board and somehow I won by two points. I still don’t think the expansion adds enough for me to go out of my way to play Kingdomino, but this is a great game for people just starting out in the hobby that want something quick with dabs of strategy.
After the games were done I watched a game of Herbaceous that was almost over. I haven’t played it yet and I didn’t even realize what it looked like. I’ll probably try it at some point like most games. I don’t think I’ll really enjoy it that much from what I saw of it, but like most games you don’t really know until you try it.
NB: This is my first Thursday Meetup summary for this blog. As such I meant to take more pictures of the games in question and I’m not used to that so I forgot to do it. Next week I’ll be taking a picture of every game I play so I can add more photos. Please feel free to comment or ask questions about anything I present here and thanks for reading!