🤓 Players Gonna Play, Play, Play, Play, Play...
This last weekend was another annual installment of Geekway to the West, the convention where I spend four days playing board games. The draw every year is the Play-and-Win contest, in which you play games from a library of over a hundred recently published games (multiple copies of each, so it netted out to roughly 800 games in all). Every play gives you a chance to win one of those copies. Here's what I played!
Tower Up
Started strong out of the gate. This was easily my favorite of the con. It's a light, puzzly eurogame that plays fast, scales cleanly, has a great tactile component, and looks gorgeous on the table. You can either gather pieces or start a new tower. When you start a tower, you must also build on anything that's adjacent to it as well. You then put a roof on one of the towers you built. Playing a roof does not keep others from playing over it, though. Once someone plays their last roof, the game ends. Score points for completing objective, building high towers, and having rooftops visible at the end of the game. I liked it a lot, and it scratches all the right itches for me, but I don't need to own it. I don't know if anything could supplant Azul in the realm of light, puzzly eurogames that play fast, scale cleanly, have a great tactile component, and look gorgeous on the table.
Ecosfera
This is a co-op deck-builder about putting together biomes. Use elements to acquire plants (and other elements), use plants to acquire animals, use animals to acquire biomes, collect all seven biomes to win the game. The gimmick here is that if you can't do anything at all or if you end up with duplicate cards in your four-card hand, then you start accumulating disaster cards. Stacked disasters lead to extinctions, which make you lose. A lot of the strategy is in moving cards around between players to make sure they don't waste any turns and doing a lot of deck-cleaning as you go. Otherwise, the endgame can drag on for a while. Pro-ecology board games are very much en vogue right now. I appreciate this one for being a small box game and having a compelling visual style. I liked it and would definitely consider owning it.
Top Tier
Party game where you create a slate of people and then try to guess at how one person ranks them against a game-provided category. It's pretty fun for about twenty minutes. Decent filler game for a party.
Caution Signs
Pictionary by way of So Clover. You get an adjective and a noun, and then you have twenty seconds to draw it on your caution sign. The active player then looks at the signs and tries to suss out which cards were drawn by which player. See "falling crocodile," "hopping cat," and "angry astronaut" above. It's perfectly serviceable, but I didn't like it enough to buy it and So Clover already scratches that gameplay itch for me.
Matrx Gipf
This is an abstract-strategy game from a German publisher (I know, I know, the lack of vowels screams "Croatian" to me too, but here were are). The original Gipf is a pretty simple game about shifting pieces around to form lines and using lines to remove your opponents pieces. Matrx Gipf is a collection of Gipf-related expansion and game modes all packaged together. I like the gameplay, but I was not any good at it at all. It's very busy for an abstract strategy game, and the fact that all of the pieces have names like "Donvr" and "Yinsh" does not make it all that easy to internalize. The rulebook was not helpful either. That said, a friend won a copy, so I will have more opportunities to get better at it.
Critter Kitchen
This is very clearly a spiritual successor to Flamecraft. Send your creatures to shops to get ingredients that you use to craft meals. You make challenge meals and then finally a seven-course dinner for a guest critic. While the presentation is lovely, I found the gameplay frustrating. And I didn't feel like the complexity involved in setup was justified for how slight the game is. It's fine, but it's not really my cup of tea. Flamecraft was better.
Rebel Princess: Deluxe Edition
Don't be fooled, this is just Hearts. Well, Hearts with some clunky feminist theming and a lot of chaos stapled onto it. This is a trick-taking game that takes place at a fancy ball. The suits are queens, fairies, pets, and princes. The princes weren't invited, and they're just here to try to get your hand in marriage, as is one particular pet card: the frog prince. He is, in fact, going to propose to you five times. As in Hearts, you are avoiding points, but you can collect them all to "shoot the moon" and get negative points instead. Whoever gets the fewest marriage proposals at the end of five rounds is the "rebel princess." What makes this one different is that princesses have asymmetric powers and the rounds have rules like "set aside one card to play in the last trick" or "any time a new suit is played, it becomes the lead suit." It makes for a game that's quite entertaining, if often frustrating. It's probably my second favorite of the con. Oh, and that princess with the apples on the cover is their version of Snow White. While the game doesn't come anywhere close to passing the Bechdel Test, I still appreciate how it's owning its identity.
Akropolis: Athena
This is the game Akropolis with a new expansion included. (Note: in real life, they are sold separately.) Akropolis is a tile-laying game where you are building out your city to meet various scoring conditions. Green areas get points per area. Yellows score if they're isolated. Purples score if they're not on an edge. Blues score if they're connected. Then you maximize them with multiplier tiles. Pretty basic stuff with a tile drafting system similar to Century: Spice Road's card drafting. The Athena expansion gives you objectives to work towards that will reward you with statue pieces and some smaller, more flexible tiles to augment your city with. If you build then entire statue, then you can get some scoring bonuses. The expansion adds to the core game without fundamentally changing it. It's a nice inclusion. I've played Akropolis before and rather liked it, so my opinion has not changed.
Perch
Put birds into habitats to score points and get control bonuses. Half the birds you place are drawn randomly, so you're going to be placing opponents' pieces as well. There are pets you can use to chase other birds away, plus a fountain where chased birds land that has some pyramid scoring to it. It's perfectly fine. The art is nice. I liked it, but I don't need to own it.
Pixies
This was a teeny little tableau builder with adorably weird art. I'm assuming they're photos of things someone crafted. (Hopefully it's that and not AI-generated.) My ten-year-old liked it a lot. I liked it pretty well myself, so this one may be obtained for the family.
Push Push Penguin
Light, random, kinda dumb family-weight game about penguins racing to the ocean to eat but wanting to come in second place because the first penguin out is going to be attacked by an orca coming the other direction. For a family-weight game, it's pretty darn entertaining. And it has dice cups, which are always fun.
Bomb Busters
Logical deduction game about trying to defuse a bomb by matching wires that you each have. Equal parts Hanabi and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, although it vibes closer to Magic Maze, but in a way that won't end friendships, if that makes any sense at all. We played through the first few scenarios and had a lot of fun with it. It's out of stock in the places I've looked, but it's one that somebody in my gaming group is going to buy sooner or later.
Butterfly Garden
Hex-tile laying game about guiding butterflies to the section of the garden that will score you the most points. It's very similar to Tsuro, in that you're laying down tiles to form a path and what can move along the path must do so. It's a very pretty, reasonably light game that fills a very specific niche. If you're a fan of Tsuro conceptually but want to play something a bit more polished, this is nice.
Tabriz
This is a worker-placement game inspired by the carpet-weaving industry in the Persian city of TabrÃz. Send your apprentices to the Grand Bazaar to get dyes and fabric material, and then fulfill orders to level up and increase your income. It's a busy game, but it's nicely presented and reasonably fun. It's made by Crafy Games, who have been making an effort to be more culturally responsible with game theming. As with their recent game Buru, they hired cultural consultants and have the rules and components in both English and the native language of the culture being represented here. In this case, Persian (or Farsi, if you prefer).
Risk Strike
The game of global domination that won't go away because it's a classic (but doesn't actually hold up that well) has been condensed into a twenty-minute card collection game. I'll be damned if it doesn't work pretty well. Attack countries with other countries, augmented with troops. Roll dice for combat, and if you lose you cede your territory to the winner (if you're defending) or the draw pile (if you're attacked). If you finish the set, you get a domination token. First one to two tokens is the winner. It's swingy and random--it's still Risk after all--but that's a lot more tolerable in a short card game as opposed to an hours-long grand-strategy game. My thirteen-year-old really liked this, and it's stupidly cheap, so I foresee this being in our household soon. The one thing I'm curious about is how it plays at higher player counts, because we only tried it out at two-players.
Harmonies
I played this one at Mini this year, and my opinion has not changed. It's really good, really pretty, and very easy to pick up.
Ito
Party game in which everyone gets a number between 1 and 100 and tries to sequence them by assigning them to scenarios that match the category. E.g., if the category is "popular sports," you would pick a sport whose popularity was roughly where your number is on a scale of 1 to 100. I had an 18, so I said "Jai alai." Soccer was at the top, followed by American Football, then basketball, then Formula-1, and so on. I didn't find it very engaging, but a number of people in my group did.
Phantom Ink Arcana
Phantom Ink is a word-guessing game in the mold of Codenames where both teams are trying to guess a common word based on partial answers to questions that are only known to one team or the other. Arcana is a standalone expansion that adds "Arcana" cards that give you some bonus powers. As with Akropolis: Athena, this is a nice addition to gameplay that doesn't interfere with the core game. I own and enjoy the original, although I don't have many opportunities to break it out.
Hifi
The presentation of this game is amazing. The gameplay is fine. 70s rockers The Meeples have reunited after fifty years to finish their album, and you are one of the producers who has been hired to help them complete it, and hopefully make enough of a name for yourself to launch your own career. You spin the record to select a "vinyl action" and then place a card from your hand onto the board. Each card represents a minute of song that prominently features one of the four members. You get bonuses for matching the waveform, the performer, or the time code. You score for the track you play on as well as for any EQ markers you have on that instrument, and work against your fellow producers who are trying to score their own objectives. I want to reiterate that the presentation is fantastic here, especially for a musician like me. As far as theme-heavy 70s rock-inspired games that don't quite have enough gameplay there, I think I'd rather play Rock Hard '77, but we did win a copy of this one, so perhaps it will grow on me.
Portmanteau
Light small-box party game in which one person assembles a portmanteau from a grid of images and the other players must identify the images you used. This sounds easy, but you are hampered a bit due to limitations on the number of letters your portmanteau can be. It must be from 3 to 8 letters long, and as the group successfully guesses words, those lengths are removed from the game. Coming up with a three-letter portmanteau based on images that are selected for you is one hell of a win condition. It's fine. I would play it if it came out at a party.
Robot Quest Arena
This is another one that I'd played before and my opinion hasn't really changes. It's Battlebots as a deck-builder and the gameplay just isn't sophisticated enough to engage me. Just hide in the corner and buy powerful cards until you have a deck that can slaughter any other bots. It's a very "solved" game. But the minis are nice and it has a decent table presence.
Yro
This was one of those "there's only a few minutes to check anything out, and this looks short" plays that we attempted at the end of the con when our brains were fried. It's pretty good. The art style is very much "what if the Precious Moments figures were mythic races?" That is to say, it's very anime. Build your tableau to increase your fighting power, technology, or magic. The gameplay is all about finding synergies in the cards you've drawn. It's almost entirely simultaneous, so it goes quickly. We all liked it, but none of us really understood it until halfway through the first playthrough and we didn't have time for a second. I want to try it again.
Slay the Spire
This was one of those darlings of the con that you absolutely could not find on the shelf. A friend of mine bought it, so we were able to play through part of it after Play and Win closed. It's based on the eponymous roguelike deck-building video game from Megacrit. The video game is a lot of fun, and this adaptation is an excellent reinterpretation. It's fully cooperative and uses sleeves to allow upgrading and modification. There's a saga aspect to it, so more components become available over successive playthroughs. It's really good. The gameplay is crunchy without being a complete brain-burner. If you like the video game and also don't mind making a hefty investment in a tabletop game, you should consider it.
Other P&W
Here are some of the other Play-and-Win games that I already own, meaning I'll still give a review, but there won't be any pictures.
Mistborn: The Deck-Building Game
Designed by John D. Claire, it's a lightly asymmetric fighting game that can be played either competitively against each other or cooperatively against the Lord Ruler. Cards can be used for their effects or burned as metals to fuel other cards. There's a leveling system that keeps you from running away at the beginning. You can go on heists to get bonuses, and at a certain point you get the ability to play cards from the buy row instead of purchasing them, which obviates the need to do a lot of deck-cleaning. The art style feels all wrong and the components are pretty cheap, but it's a pretty decent game otherwise.
Finspan
The third in the ____span series. I reviewed it for Mini back in January. I didn't have any pictures then either.
Rebirth
Area control with tower building. Thematically you're repopulating Scotland after the world has ended. The theme is completely unnecessary, but it is there. Draw tokens from a bag and then place them in compatible spaces on the board in order to complete objectives, build chains, and own the most space around castles. It's cute, it's pretty slight, but the components are nice.
The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game
I love Lord of the Rings and I love trick-taking games, so this is one of my absolute favorites. It's similar to The Crew in that it's cooperative trick-taking based around goals, but it follows the story of The Fellowship of the Ring and uses characters as goals. It also has a lot of fun modifying rules. For instance, the fifth (or so) game is against Old Man Willow, who removes the "Forests" suit and creates a deck that the rest of the players have to play against in order to proceed. It's fantastic. It's based on the book, and all of the things that make the book frustrating work wonderfully here. Remember when Glorfindel shows up for exactly one scene and is never heard from again? Well, having a character that you can play as for one scenario works really well in a progressive story game and it works theme into gameplay very inventively. Tom Bombadill gets extra cards, but has to have won a number of cards in the suits he last left over. Goldberry plays open-handed. Frodo has to win some number of the "Rings" suit. The One of Rings (the one ring, get it?) is the only potential trump card in the game, and if Boromir ever wins it, the Fellowship loses. I love this game, have played through it with one gaming group already, and am halfway through a second playthrough with another. And they're planning to do the whole trilogy!!!!!
Aaaaaaaaand...
That's all she wrote. The next Geekway is in January, so look for another post then. Assuming the board game industry hasn't completely collapsed due to Chinese tariffs, of course.
Comments