New games!!! |There are so many new games coming into our collection
recently, but not much time to play! This week, just 3 new titles have
hit the table.
·
Stone Age is a worker placement game
that I feel we missed out on when we were getting into gaming. Most people seem
to call it a gateway worker placement, and we just skipped ahead, but I am
enjoying slightly lighter games recently and was happy to get the chance to
play. Much like games like Agricola,
you have a tribe of workers who you can place in different locations on the
board to obtain goods, build huts, obtain tools, get better at agriculture
etc. However, unlike many euro games there is an element of luck, in that the
number of workers you place to obtain food and goods represent the number of
dice you will roll. How lucky you are with the dice and the rarity of the
element you are rolling for will together determine how many of each resource
you will receive. The aim of the game is, of course to have the most victory
points, which I generally obtained during the game by building huts using
different combinations of resources. However there are cards you can buy that
also give you end game scoring either for set collection or other things you’ve
achieved throughout the game, such as growing your number of workers or
improving your agriculture. I think the game has a good mixture of strategy and
luck and I like the mixture of in game and end game scoring. We probably don’t
need another worker placement game, but I’ll happily play Stone Age again when I next get the opportunity.
·
Valley of the Kings is a
deck-building games. I normally love deck-building games because I stand a very
good chance of winning when the two of us play together. Valley of the Kings was fortunately no exception! In this game you
are trying to balance building a strong deck by getting rid of your starting
cards and having useful card powers and high value cards, with the need to gain
victory points by removing cards from your deck and placing them in your tomb.
At the end of the game, only cards in your tomb are scored mainly based on set
collection – a set of 1 scores 1, a set of 2 scores 4 and so on. You also need
to be mindful when taking cards from the pyramid of giving your opponent access
to cards they may desperately want or that you desperately want to save for
yourself. Each turn you can usually only buy cards from the bottom row of the
pyramid and if you take a card, the cards above fall down to fill the empty
slots. In particular, the tomb element makes this game a unique deck-builder in
our collection and we really loved this game! It’s also great to have a
portable deck-builder for travelling.
·
Brew Crafters Travel Card Game is a
game about building a brewery and brewing beer. Honestly I bought this game
solely for the theme and knew nothing about the game play. The game is a simple
card game in which each card has two uses – it can either be played for its
ability, which is generally either a boost to your ability to brew eg. a free
ingredient, or a boost in what you get paid for brewing certain types of beer,
or you can play the card as the ingredient depicted in the top left of the
card. Each different beer requires a different combination of ingredients and
those which use rarer ingredients, such as coffee or fruit are more valuable.
The first player to reach 21 points triggers the end of the game, but end game
scoring and a final brewing round for the other players may mean that other
players win the game. I definitely took the wrong strategy in my first game,
but the game is a good combination or a light card game and some easy tactical
and strategic decisions and will become a good addition to our micro-game
collection.
We’ve got some free
time this weekend and I really want to get some longer, deeper new games to the
table, perhaps Tzolk’in or learning
to play Android Netrunner. But we’ll also see what gets brought along
to groups, hopefully on Sunday and Monday this week.
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