Rat-a-Tat Roll, a pretty quick and light game. You roll some dice, move around a board (I guess that makes it roll to move). What you’re aiming for is to have the lowest total of cards in front of you. Spaces on the board let you take cards (each section has it’s own face up card), roll a wild die (which may allow you to take the lowest or highest of cards around the board), and swap cards with other players.
Camel Up: Off Season, first play. Bought this for cheap on Amazon, thinking it was something to do with the Camel Up game, but it really isn’t. About the only thing they have in common is that camels are involved. It’s still fun tho. You choose from various market tiles, which show goods tiles (usually both face up and face down). Then you load up your camels, each type of good gets it’s own camel. And if you overload a camel, everything is lost. You want to load up your camels, and then sell as much as you can. There’s a lot of goods cards, but you go through them pretty quickly.
Ghostbusters: Blackout, play your favourite Ghostbuster and clean up New York. This is fully cooperative, and you’ll need to help each another. If you don’t deal with ghosts they add to the chaos track, and when that gets to the end, it’s game over. Luckily there is a die face that can reduce chaos. We were a bit slow there, and before we knew it the game was lost. We had a ghost that prevented us from lowering the chaos tracker, so that didn’t help. Obviously there’s a fair bit of luck involved (it’s a dice game), but it’s still fun.
Ghosts of Christmas, a tricky trick taking game. You can play to one of three positions on your time track – past, present and future, and winning a trick in an earlier position might just help you win later tricks.
Too Many Cinderellas, a very light game of trying to find the right Cinderella for the Prince. Each card shows the attributes for that Cindererella, like their age, sex, and what they like. Each card also has a rumour, like “The princess doesn’t like ice cream”. You have four If cards, and you’ll play two of them for the rumour. Each player as a “Yes” and a “No” token, and you select one in secret when each rumour is played. You can play the “Yes” as much as you like, you’ll always take it back after the vote. But your “No” token can only be played once, so you’ll try and keep that for rumours that will stuff up your cards. It’s pretty light fun, but entertaining.
Planet etuC, another game by Taiki Shinzawa (who also designed Ghosts of Christmas). But this isn’t a trick taking, it’s a shedding game where you have to play all your cards out first. On your turn, you can play either one or two cards. If two cards were played by someone, they can either be the same number (so, a pair of whatever), or two cards of the same colour (suit). If someone plays a pair, then you have to play a bigger pair. If they play two of the same suit, then you just have play two cards of a higher suit (like Red7, there is a list of colours).
Faraway, not sure about this one. I can see what it’s trying to do, but it seems like mostly luck if you get the right cards. The gimmick is that you play eight cards, and then you process them from the last card back to the first. So for a card to score, it needs to have any prerequisites already played, which takes a sec to get your head around. I expected a lot from this game, can’t say it’s a real favourite.
Uchronicle, a trick taking game where you can change the game rules anytime you like, but have to fix up any problems from earlier tricks. One of our players really doesn’t like this, so I don’t think I’ll get it to the table much. Shame, I think it’s clever.
), which is a thing in most of his games.
Definitely not a game for getting over invested!