Game meet-up tonight. We had a table of 3 players and played 3 games.
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Tokyo Highway
A not-so-little dexterity game (it’s quite a lot of components!), where each player builds their own fully-independent highway, getting points for going over or under other players’ highways, circling buildings, and going near/on/through other landmarks, but without touching another road, or building over the top of an existing support column. Every piece of the highway must climb or descend by one column block, with the exception of the two yellow blocks each player has, which (a) let you change height by any amount, and (b) are the only way you can create a fork in your highway. Obviously knocking things over is bad, but remarkably that only happened once in the whole game! It’s not the best dexterity game I’ve played, but I definitely had fun.
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Forks
I really appreciate how quickly this plays. You spend 5 minutes thinking you know what you’re doing; another 5 minutes going “Aaaahhhh, this is evil and all of my options are bad!”; and then, no matter how badly it went, the game is finished and you shuffle up for another try. Fast to teach; fast to play; gives you some decisions to make while trying to manage the luck of the draw and whatever bad options the other players hand you; gets a reaction from players; and doesn’t outstay its welcome. An excellent little filler – happy to have backed this. I’d say that players ought to be comfortable doing quick sums in their heads (and they may be looking at the numbers side-on or upside down) – but it’s not critical, and knowing the exact numbers doesn’t necessarily help you!
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Mantis
An equally quick card game of trying to steal cards from the other players and bank them before someone steals them back again. The face-down deck displays a set of three colours (out of seven) on the back of each card, and the card face will be one of those three colours. On your turn you attempt to either (a) steal cards, or (b) bank cards. If you steal, you nominate another player, flip the top card of the deck, and then you take that card plus any cards of the same colour in front of the nominated player. If you bank, you flip the top card of the deck and, if you have cards of that colour, you can bank them (including the new card); otherwise you just add the new card to your other face-up cards for future banking/theft. First to bank 10 cards is the winner. There’s not a lot to it but, once again, you get a bit of luck, a bit of outrage, and it’s all over too quickly to ever outstay its welcome.
