Last weekend we
attended a house warming party. There were 18 people so games that included
everyone were limited, but at first people wanted to stick together and
unfortunately that led us to social deduction games – which regular readers
will know I hate. We had a near miss with Werewolf where luckily we managed to
sneak away and play a game of Jaipur
instead, but we did join in with two new social deduction games as well as
getting to play some fun party games, like Telestrations and Articulate!.
Here’s are Yellow
Meeple’s first impressions;
·
Two Rooms and a Boom is a social
deduction game specifically designed for very high player counts. In the game
you are randomly assigned a role card and an affiliation to the blue team or
red team. The blue team wants to protect the president, but the red team wants
to get the bomber into the same room as the president. You start with an random
group of people in each of the two rooms and by sharing the colour of your card
or the full Card with other people in the room you try to find out, within a
time limit, who is on your side and where you think the bomber and president
are. At the end of each round hostages are sent between the two rooms as each
room tries to outthink the other. Unfortunately Two Rooms and a Boom just doesn’t work for me, it was the type of
social deduction game where you could remain completely passive no matter what
card you were given, unless you were the leader deciding on hostages. It simply
didn’t work as the ice-breaker we need it to be.
·
The Resistance: Avalon is the next
social deduction game I was coerced into. At the start of the game you are
assigned an allegiance with either Merlin (good) or Mordred (evil). One player
is given the specific role of Merlin and another is specifically the Assassin.
On each turn the active player chooses which players will get the chance to go
on a quest. All players then vote whether this quest should go ahead, mainly
based on if they think the players on the quest are of the same allegiance as
them. If the quest goes ahead then the players on the quest vote for if the
quest should succeed or fail – the good team wins if 3 quests succeed and evil
wins if 3 fail. The evil players all know who each other are but also Merlin
gets to look and see who they are. Merlin can’t help his good team members too
much because if the Assassin can identify Merlin after a win for good team then
the bad team claw back the victory. Avalon takes the crown as the first social
deduction game I like! I actually felt like I had some meaningful deduction to
make, based on other peoples actions and the power of the lady of the lake. I
also felt like I could have some influence over the way played out because I
had voting every turn. We played 3 times in quick succession and I really enjoyed
it!
·
Bora Bora is my first proper Stefan
Feld point salad game. We’re playing fewer heavy euro games these days due to
time limitations, but every time I get the chance I’m reminded that they can be
really rewarding. In Bora Bora, the
theme is pretty non-existent, but you seem to be exploring the land of Bora
Bora, eating fish, getting help from the tribesmen, visiting the temple and
buying jewellery. Points are available for all of these things during different
phases of the turn. You select your actions by rolling dice which you can then
use to power either the strength of an action or the number of times you can do
it in the turn. Playing earlier is better because actions get blocked so that
other players can only play a lower numbered dice than those played previously.
I was initially doing really well, achieving all of by objectives and making
the map look like more f an area control game by having tents in almost ll
regions, but I underestimated the points value of jewellery and was overtaken
towards the end of the game. It was quite a long game, but being limited to 6
turns made sure it didn’t out stay its welcome. I’d like to pay this one again
and try some different tactics as it was very enjoyable.
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