Trickerion , our first complete game. Went fairly smoothly, most of us were in the learning games last week, and the other player had watched a video online. It’s not that difficult to play, just worker placement. Place a worker, take actions. But of course there’s a bit to think about. I quite like the idea of it, placement of your workers can be tense, as it should be. You can be tempted to use a lower value worker, hoping you’ll get a good action space. But of course you don’t know what other players are going to choose. I don’t think we’ll get many plays of this, its pretty long, and one player really didn’t like it.
IKI , first play. I had really been looking forward to this one. It looks great. There are twelve months, over four seasons, and then a special round. Each season has its own cards that can be bought. When you take a card, you can place it in one of the four groups each of which has four slots for cards (people and buildings). After each season, you score for your cards in each of the four areas. You want cards of the same type, and that is multiplied by the number of cards you own. At certain points, a fire will start in one of the four areas, starting with the outer slot and continuing down the row until either it’s put out, or it reaches the innermost card. There is a track for each players fire fighting ability, and this also determines player order.
Really didn’t like the fire mechanism, it’s pretty random. You can try and become better at fire fighting, but you may never need it. The whole game really fell flat for us. It took forever, its a bit fiddly – each season has its own deck of cards, and fish/pipe/tobacco tokens. Barely any buildings were constructed, they are really expensive (but I guess thats by design). Overall, sigh, probably won’t play again.
Are You Dumber Than a Box of Rocks , and we very nearly lost, both of us on three points, but then we pulled out the win. I picked this game up cheap, so I’m happy with that. Some of the questions are just so obscure.
The Key: Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land X 3. Had a great first game, every card was useful, was first to the solution with a score of 18. Second game, not so great.
Fantasy Realms X 2. Drew the Gem of Order in the first game, and a few low cards, so I pursued that strategy. Just needed a 6! I had 4,5,7,8,9, needed the 6 to join them together. And what gets discarded on the last turn that ended the game? Yup – a 6. Cost me 100 points, doh.
