Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion , finally we reached the last mission! And it was a fairly comfortable win for us. The last boss seemed impossible, but we just threw everything at him. Would have been over even sooner, but one of my big attacks wiffed.
Kitchen Rush , first play. Basically a worker placement set in a restaurant. But each of your workers is an hourglass, which has to run out before you can move it to another place. You’ll accept patrons into the restaurant, take their orders, fill the orders with food from the storage rooms, maybe add some spice from the greenhouse, and then cook for the required amount of time. The first scenario (of eight) is pretty easy, each of you has to fulfil two orders within the time limit. The board is made up of eight interlocked, double sided tiles. You start on the A side, and then, as new rooms and actions are enabled, you turn the tiles to their B side. Scenario two introduces spices, and scenario three has dirty dishes that must be cleaned before use. All pretty easy, we didn’t have any major problems, there’s enough action spaces for everyone it seems. Good fun, if a little easy. I expect things to get harder as we go.
Mysterium Park X 2, first play. This is a streamlined version of Mysterium, set in a circus. I love Mysterium, but the setup is a bit of a pain. Park makes it all a lot simpler. There’s a nine by nine grid which you fill with people cards, and then (once everyone has identified people) location cards. No object cards from the full game. There are three rounds – identify the person, then the location, and then work out (hopefully) the final solution. You have six turns to complete rounds one and two. And everyone has to complete them, you can’t move ahead the way you could in Mysterium. The ghost chooses a plot card for each round, which shows the grid and each player colour, thus identifying each players card. The ghost has a deck of vision cards that they choose to give each player, hopefully guiding them to the correct card on the grid. The ghost needs to examine the grid cards in close detail, which could aid the other players. We ended up taking a picture (while the other players looked away). We played 3p, so only two pictures were required. It’s the same deal as the full game, the job of being the ghost is a thankless task. You can’t find the perfect card, so you just have to choose the best from your hand and hope it’s enough. We failed, but it was such a quick game that we tried again, and also failed. Listening to the players talking and discussing clues can be a bit annoying (in a good way!), as they look at the wrong details or misinterpret the card (“my clue card is blue, so he must mean this card”). Good fun, and we probably finished a game in the time it would have taken to setup the original.
Gorus Maximus , first play. This is a fairly straighforward trick taking game. Each of your cards are gladiators, with a rank (value) and a school (suit). As is standard in trick taking games, there is an initial suit lead (the first card played), plus a trump suit, which can change even within the same trick. You have to follow suit, except you can play a card of the same value as the one just played, which changes the trump suit. There’s a card with the suits on it, and you can move a clip around so you don’t have to remember what it is. Each card can have a crowd favour value (which can be negative). After a round in which you play ten cards, you then total your crowd favours, and the highest gets a crowd support token. Win three support tokens, and you win the game. It was fun, it’s pretty quick playing. You can get a bit screwed over. The eight card has a crowd favour of negative four, so obviously you tried to dump those on the winner of a trick. I ended up with three of them in one round, which pretty much torpedoed my chances. Still – enjoyed it, and the artwork is cartoonishly violent, which I loved.
Hats , first play. A simple enough game (or so we thought…). You are competing to see who has the best hats (obviously). You get a hand of nine cards, which show some pretty spiffy hats, with values from one through six, in seven different colours. The board shows spaces marked from one to six, which is then filled with random cards. On your turn you have two possible actions. You can exchange a card from your hand with one on the board – but it has to be either the same colour, or a higher number. The exchanged card is played in front of you. Your second option is to play any card face down, which will give you one point at the end of the game. Obviously you’d like to do a bit better than one point. The game ends when you are down to your last card – this is your favourite hat. Scoring is done for the cards you’ve played, and then for your favourite hat. Each card in your tableau is worth whatever position it is on the board – from one through six. if it’s not on the board – no points. So, if red ended up in position four, and you have three red cards, you’ll score twelve. Also, if any colour has more than one position, only the lowest one counts. Your favourite hat scores a total of the card values of that colour, minus the value of the favourite itself. So, if your favourite was a red six, and you had red cards two and three, your total is five, minus the six, so negative one (not so good). There’s also a very realistic cookie token, which goes to the player with the most different coloured cards in their tableau, and it’s worth five points at the end of the game. Didn’t help me, I held onto it all game and still lost by eight points (winner picked up a cool fifteen points in one colour). For a fairly simple game, it took us a little while to get our heads around it (might not have been a good choice to play late in the day). Looking forward to more plays.
The art is delightful though.