Played 2 rounds of (button shy’s) Death Valley yesterday. That teaches me to buy games because of the pretty color scheme. The 18 card formula can produce great games (Sprawlopolis), it can produce decent games like Tussie Mussie or Food Chain Island. And it produces games like Death Valley where I am not sure if we just didn’t compete hard enough for the points… but after 2 games it was like I had grokked the cards and that was that. Replayability done. The game is:
- play a card from the desert to your trip (adding to the right)
- or rest to take cards from the trip to the scrapbook (where they are safe from busting)
- if you get 3 same hazard symbols in your trip + scrapbook you bust and have to start over your trip
Person with the most VP wins when there is only 1 card left in the desert. VP are either Stars on cards or gained from “card scoring conditions”.
The thing is, we never busted. The strategic decisions are minimal. And there is a card that allows you to peek at the top of the deck and play the card to either your or your opponents trip and so I caused the only bust in the game for my partner.
The “expansions” are just a few cards you can exchange with the basic deck which has to remain 18 cards to guarantee the hazard distribution. I think this goes in the “give away” bin immediately. It is really pretty though.
As a palate cleanser I followed up with a nice juicy game of Sprawlopolis which after not having played a while gave me a nice 13 point score I had not expected but Looping Lanes is just so good.
Last night we played our first two player of Formosa Tea. That is also really pretty and has a nice color scheme. But that is where the similarity ends. Because I really enjoyed the laid-back worker placement for tea production. Initially when learning the game back home I had to read the manual at least twice to grok some of the concepts. But while the teach took me a half hour (had to refamiliarize myself with the rules a bit), it wasn’t nearly as complicated.
We had a bit of an issue at first because it was unclear if my partner’s character card wasn’t a bit unbalanced and possibly a translation error as it stated he could (when trading) fulfill any contract not just those in the right-most row. It seemed quite powerful as he could get the higher value contracts easily while I had to do with the small-points single tea-cube ones. However, that proved to be his downfall.
I ended up trading an awful lot spending action upon action to get to the good contracts deeper in the stacks. So by the end, I had managed to get to the last spot on all 3 tea masteries by some carefully managed tea production and selling in the local market several times as well. Additionally our historical events also gave additional points for having a lot of mastery and contracts at game end…
For me, having suffered a lot of Rosenberg worker placement punishment (I like his games, it’s just they are a bit more difficult and they do punish players for not feeding the workers), this one was on the easy side. There is not a lot my partner could do to prevent me from reaching all the masteries and so it becomes a race for points and who can optimize better.
I liked the flow of the game, the harvest, bringing the tea to the factory, the production with the tea masters and then selling the tea. It is—as stated above—a good game for a relaxed afternoon with a few cups of thematic beverage. I want to play again but due to the huge point difference at the end my partner was quite frustrated through no fault of his own.