The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 16th August – 21st August

I’ve not purchased any new games for ages and as a result we’ve not tried many new titles from 2016. I’ve sorted out my need to acquire more games, by acquiring a copy of Heroquest, Smash Up, Revolution and Isle of Skye in the last week, but still no new games. I think I need to be inspired – any suggestions are welcome or we’ll try to make some time to spend a day at a board game cafe soon. This week our opportunity to try new games came from a meetup with Croydon Board Gamers and an interesting charity shop find.

Here’s are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

 ·         Looney Quest is a game that I’ve been interested to try for a while. Mainly I was intrigues how a game about drawing around things on a board could actually make a game. Each player has a transparency and a dry erase marker. In the middle is a board which depicts the challenge for the round – it might be to connect certain objects with lines or to circle different objects and there’s always traps there too. On your transparency you try to draw lines to achieve the round objectives without hitting any of the obstacles or traps. Positive points are given for different objectives and negative penalties for others. When time runs out each player in turn lays their transparency over the central board and figures out their points total. It turns out I have pretty good spatial awareness so found the game pretty satisfying. I can’t really put my finger on why it’s not really easy, but drawing accurately seems to cause a real challenge and makes the game quite competitive. I would happily recommend Looney Quest and might look into getting a copy myself.

·         Exploding Kittens is a game I’ve successfully avoided for quite some time, having assumed and also heard from other gamers that it was a pretty bad game. Having not learned the lesson to remember to pack fillers for board game groups, we ended up in game of Exploding Kittens. Exploding kittens is a card game where you are trying to be the one player who doesn’t end up with a kitten exploding in their face. Your cards are sometimes defensive, some attack other players, let you manipulate the deck etc. You can play as many cards as you like in one turn and to end your turn you must draw a card from the deck – the exploding kitten cards are distributed through this deck. The game reminds me of Fluxx with its randomness, silly card art and (sometimes) amusing descriptions on the cards. Unlike Fluxx it does seem it will always be over in 10-15 minutes and because of that I suppose its harmless fun, even though it’s a pretty bland card game.

               

·         Katamino was a charity shop find, picked up because the Gigamic brand normally indicates a good production quality for an abstract game. Although abstract games are not our favourites, we so enjoy a number of different titles. Katamino is a speed game about fitting your wooden pieces into space on the board with no gaps, quicker than your opponent. For me this just isn’t much of a game, it’s over in 30 seconds to a minute and is just a test of spatial awareness. Katamino has headed straight for the trade pile.

This week my parents are visiting for 5 days, so I’m looking forward to some family game night, playing titles they’re familiar with like Ticket to Ride, Qwirkle and Lost Cities but also trying to broaden their horizons with some other games off the shelf – I think Dixit might be next. They’re not quite the games we’re really excited to play, but it is an interesting challenge to try and get them excited to take part!