The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 1st – 14th May

As I feared, the last fortnight has not been our biggest two weeks in gaming. It’s been very busy for both of us and we’ve actually acquired as many new games as we’ve played new games. I decided to take advantage of an Amazon deal and pick up Dixit, which we’re amazed we’ve only had the opportunity to play once before and Amy has an amazing find in a charity shop, picking up Eldritch Horror, which will give me the opportunity to try it again after a disastrous introductory game a few months ago with 6 players and poor rules explanation. Nevertheless, we’ve got two new games to the table that have been sitting on our shelf for some time.

Here’s are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

·         Android Netrunner and its intimidating rulebook have been waiting patiently on our shelf for a long time. It turns out this was not without good reason as we found the learning curve pretty steep when we finally took the plunge last week. This isn’t helped by the re-naming of every element of the game eg. your hand, your discard pile, but also just the hug variety of cards and no reference sheet for them. However, we played the game, I think we played it correctly and the hacker theme was pretty interesting to us. When the game ended I wasn’t convinced if I liked it or not, so we will need to play again. It seemed so difficult to prevent the runner from breaking through your defences! It seemed like the corporation had to win in the first few turns, because once the runner has built up their equipment and skills and has a decent method to get income each turn, the just seem unstoppable. We’ll try again, but if we keep hitting the same problems I don’t think we’ll be keeping Android Netrunner.

·         Imperial Settlers is, I suppose, a hand and resource management game where you are each building your own settlement based upon the unique elements of your race. Your race affects which resources you gain as standard each turn and you can draw cards from your race deck or the common deck so the cards from your race deck quickly reveal your specialism, ie. the barbarians like to destroy things. I enjoy the simplicity of the game – there are a certain simple things you can do on each turn and it’s really clear that you can do as many things as you like on your turn, because you cannot carry resources forward to your next turn. The cards have multiple uses so you have to balance the prospect of a short term boost for destroying the card with the potential long term gain of building it in your settlement. I think in our first game we probably played a little bit too much of a solitaire game, not really paying attention to what the other player was doing, but there is the opportunity for interaction when you raze your opponent’s locations to the ground. All in all Imperial Settlers was simple but definitely rewarding for gamers and the assymetrical races added a bit of theme to this euro-style game.

Fortunately this weekend is a quiet one and I’m keen to get in some significant board gaming time. Maybe not new games, but I’ve set my sights on Dungeon Petz, Tikal and 7 Wonders Duel for the next couple of days!