The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 15th-22nd May

This week has definitely been one for buying games, but we haven’t really got round to trying many yet. This buying addiction could not come at a worse time, with an imminent house move and shelves that have long since overflowed onto the floor, plus the UK Games Expo coming up where I’m bound to want to buy stuff! For now we’ve tried one of the new games I bought, one that’s been sitting on the shelf for a very long time and one belonging to a friend.

Here are the Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

·       Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game is a game we actually played on the day of purchase, which is very rare for us with such a queue on the shelf. However, this was not out of excitement, but more because we needed to know whether to trade it on straight away and thought it might not be a hit for us! In a two player game, one player is the hoard of zombies and the other is the heroes. As the hero player you can move or search for items and then try a ranged attack on a zombie if they’re nearby – your goal in the first game is to kill 15 zombies. As the zombie player you obviously want to eat hero flesh and your goal is to eat two heroes or at least prevent them from achieving their objective. There were some great moments in the game where lots of attempts were countered or the dice did exactly the right thing for one player or another, but overall I think the game just outstayed its welcome at the table. The zombie turn in particular often seemed very dull with the player just moving all of their zombies one space in the obvious direction. If it were a shorter game, I could’ve found this one surprisingly fun, but luckily for a shelves Last Night on Earth is now on the trade pile.

·       Formula D has been waiting on our shelf for a long time, primarily because the box says two-player but it’s so obvious it’s not a two player game. We played our first game with 4 players and it still seemed like too few people, meaning there was not a lot of interaction between cars. Formula D is a pretty simple racing game where you select your cars gear based on how fast you want to be driving to negotiate the course and other cars. Each gear is represented by a dice and the dice roll determines how many spaces you actually advance on the track. Admittedly we played the basic game, as a light introduction at the end of the night and this seemed far too simple with obvious decisions being made about when to push your luck and take wear and when to change gear based on the spaces available – possibly it felt more like a teaching game for young kids. I’d like to try it again with the full rules, but so far Formula D is not selling itself to us.

·       Epic Spell Wars: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre is a game that has been on Amy’s radar to try for a while. Generally we quite like some silly fun so although we didn’t expect much depth from this game, we thought it might provide some amusement. In the game you have a hand of beginning middle and end cards for spells which do damage or sometimes heal players’ wizards in various ways, normally based on dice rolls to determine the severity of the damage. I suppose you could say there is skill in selecting spells that combo well and trying to get authority that suits your need to go first/last each turn, but overall it’s just random bashing at each others health. Unfortunately for me this just wasn’t fun enough to make the game worthwhile, it just dragged, especially once you were eliminated and I couldn’t wait for it to end!

Coming up soon should be first impressions of all of our un-played mountain, which now stands at; Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Colosseum, Ground Floor, Oregon, Village Port Expansion, 1^st and Goal and Homeland.