We started the night playing a really weird game called Schüttel’s. In this game you have a cup with some pawn pieces in different colors. As far as I can tell those colors didn’t mean anything so they may be for a more advanced game or we didn’t play it right possibly.
What you do in this game is you are tossing the pawns out into a basket in one throw. This is effectively a randomizer to get a number from 1-15. Bad numbers are 1,3,7,15 and all other numbers will give you something of advantage. If you hit a basic store number (4,5,6,8,9,11,12), then you will place one of your color tokens at the lowest price of that number store. If you hit a 7 you just lose one of your pieces to the game end track. If you hit a number store again that you have pieces on you can pull them for that cash value. If you place where other pieces are then the previously placed pieces bump up to the next higher value and they can be pushed off if it goes to far up. There are some other numbers that do special things like putting money or taking money out of a pot in the middle and numbers that pull money from all players, but they only happen so often.
The game is really random and the act of throwing pawns out of a cup in one motion is really hard to do with any kind of consistency. I didn’t like this game much as it just seems like a very simple kids game.
The next game we played was First Class. I have this game, but I’ve only played it a couple of times so i didn’t teach it. Luckily the Meetup group host Hurt was able to teach it very quickly to the rest of the players. This game is an engine building game based on the theme of making the Orient Express.
In this game you put down three rows of cards and people will draft from these cards acquiring three cards per phase. There are two phases a round and three rounds total. These cards are either going to give you a one time effect that manipulate your board situation or they will become part of your route that give you bonuses at the end of the round.
Each player’s right side of the board has two different trains they can build off and they both start with zero point cards. Some of the cards will allow you to add more zero point train cards, or allow you to upgrade a card to a one point train card and later on upgrade them further to a two, four, seven, and even twelve. In Russian Railroads-like style the first train card has to be upgraded before the later cards added to the trains. You get bonuses if you make your fifth and ninth addition to either of the trains. On top of that you have engineers, one for each train, and they move over based on card and train route effects which allows the train card and all cards to their left score.
The top of the board shows the actual train route. Cards you draft for these simply go on top of your board and build out to the left. There is also a train token that shows where your train is on your route. As you move your train out you can get points, but more importantly you get pocket watch effects which trigger at the end of the round. You can get a lot of points and combos from these things happening.
Finally there are coins which build up bottom to top, left to right. These coins can be spent at any time on your turn to trigger either (1) adding new zero train cards, (2) moving your engineers or train token, and (3) upgrading a train card to the next tier (e.g. 4->7), (4) paying four of them to acquire a new end of game bonus card. The coins always build up starting from the bottom left, but you may spend them in whichever order you want. You can even trigger them during round end train route pocket watch effects.
At the beginning of the game you receive a end game bonus card that is drafted in reverse player order. These cards net you two to four points for each card of a certain type. The types include engineer movement, train movement, and train adding cards. It might not seem like much to get a few points here and there when on the last round people will be scoring more than 70 odd points, but the few games I have played it always seems like if the person had concentrated on their end game bonus cards right they would have eeked out a win.
The game is notable in that it comes with multiple modules. When you start the game you choose two of the modules you want to add to base decks. The modules we played with were postcards and celebrities. Postcards let you double the effect of the train route cards. Celebrities let you double the points for your train cards. We also played with contracts which are cards you can trigger provided you have the specified requirements like have a four train card next to a two train card next to a one card. These cards can then be turned in for more train cards or end game bonus cards, etc.
This is one of those games that has really gone under the radar and I feel like everyone that likes any kind of engine building game should give it a shot.
The third game we played was Witness. It had probably been two odd years since I played it last so I forgot the cases and we did the first two cases. In the game you read a one page case introduction to everyone. Then each person has a book of information just for them. They read their page of information on the case and memorize it to the best of their ability. When the round starts there will be a sequence of one person whispering to the next and on the other side of the table the same will be happening. In the next phase the person just whispered to will whisper their information to the next person and so on. You are trying to pass on information in a way that everyone understands what you know and in later cases you have to put context on the information in such a way as to put all of the pieces together.
The game then lets you record information at the end of the round. You get some questions which everyone is asked and hopefully you get them all right for a perfect score of 12. The cases all play very differently with some having you do more spatial reasoning to logic reasoning. I like this game, but it feels more like an activity than a game. The most game part of it is how much information you pass on or fail to pass on. The game ONLY plays four so if you can’t get a consistent group of people to play the game, you’ll probably end up like me where you just play it every couple of years. The game is currently out of print and goes for a ridiculous amount of money. If you’re interested in this game, I strongly recommend you try before you buy.
Finally the last game of the night was Crosstalk. In this game you have two leads that are trying to get their teammates to guess a word or phrase. They do this by writing a secret clue that only their teammates can see and by writing on a community board. The trick to the game is when the blue team writes on the community board the black team gets to guess the word/phrase. When the black team writes a clue the blue team gets to guess. Play goes like this for four turns and their is a fifth turn just of more guessing. The mind space of this game is great in that the clue givers both know what it is, but the clue guessers have a really hard time piecing it together.