Space Alert, it’s been too long since we played this. We were just playing the first test mission, and failing (which I didn’t even think was possible). To those who have never played this, it’s a cooperative game where you program your moves (7 in the tutorial). You’ll play cards onto your own board, which have a movement on one side and an action on the other. So you play either side face up, depending on what you want to do. Actions can be A, B, or C. A is firing the gun for the area of the ship you on, B manages the energy (needed to fire the guns), and C does a range of different things, like moving the mouse on the ship so the screensaver doesn’t kick in.
Enemies come towards you from three different tracks, one for each area of the ship (red, white, blue). Successfully destroying an enemy replies on you using a weapon system that covers that track, making sure the ship is in range, and having enough energy to load the gun. Obviously, you need to all work together to get things done. Oh yeah, and it’s all in real time. It comes with a CD, but you can also download the tracks required, because who has a CD drive anymore (I used to have a usb drive, no idea what happened to it).
After you’ve made all your moves, you then have to resolve each action (along with enemies). We used to do this manually, but I found a cool website that runs it all. You just have to enter each players board and away you go. Shows what’s happening, with some cool animation as enemies are destroyed (which didn’t happen a lot). We played the tutorial three times, on the third attempt we at least survived, so we took that as a win. Was good to get it on the table, it’s such a cool game . I actually sold my copy and rebought it.
Turing Machine, another go of this, since we played just the easy levels last week. Figured we were ready for a bit of a challenge. And we certainly got it. I failed on the first one, but then won the next one (was very lucky, I had it narrowed down to 4 possibles, and I guessed right). We had one verifier that no one understood properly, need to look that one up to get it right.
Beacon Patrol, a quick and easy cooperative game. You play tiles, and get points for completely surrounding tiles. You get the most for lighthouses, then buoys, and then anything else. It seems simple, but we had to trade tiles a lot to keep things going. Our final score was the second highest, so that was a good feeling (while still giving us something to strive for).
Come Sail Away, always fun.
Soda Jerk, first play. A simple game, but we enjoyed it. Cards range from 1 to 3. On your turn you can add a card to a column. There are five columns, one for each colour of card. If you play a card of the proper colour you improve its value, otherwise it counts against that colour. So if you had a red four and an orange one played in the red column, any red cards in your hand are with four minus one, or three. Cards are always played face down, but on your turn instead of adding a card, you can turn over a previously played face down card. It’s pretty light, but good fun.
Park Life Hedgehog, great filler.
Park Life People, a bit trickier than Hedgehog. You have wild cards, and cards that have variable values that either count for other cards of that type, or other cards of that type in your neighbours tableau. Bit more to think about.
