The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 14th – 24th September

We’ve not been playing too many new games recently. New jobs, mean that we’re not managing to fit in a board game group at the moment. We are still gaming with friends though and have a campaign of Imperial Assault in progress. The best gaming moment of the last couple of weeks was introducing some friends who are not into the hobby to Terror in Meeple City – we all had great fun and they wanted to play again straight away – a roaring success!

Here are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

·         Quadropolis is the newest release from Days of Wonder and one I’ve been waiting to play for some time. In Quadropolis you are building a city from different types of buildings; apartments, shops, harbours, parks etc. Each building type scores differently depending on adjacencies and placement. The key mechanic of the game is about choosing an appropriate tile that’s the type you want but also fits nicely into your available spots on you town. I normally expect a light game from Days of Wonder, but this is one of their lightest. There’s some decisions to make but with two players we are finished in 20-30 minutes which seems a bit quick for a big box game. It’s still really good to play and it will probably get a lot of table time due to its short length. For me it’s kind of Suburbia-Light.

·         LEGO Atlantis Treasure is obviously a game aimed at the children’s market, but we love LEGO and we love games, so we always give these games a chance! Atlantis Treasure has a quite unique idea based on some simple programmable movement. On your turn you first roll a dice which normally allows you to place a direction arrow onto the board, otherwise you move a seaweed or fire a torpedo. You then move as far as you can i one direction, being affected by any directional arrows. You’re aiming for treasure and will only sop when you hit some or some other obstruction. The game is too simple for adults, but the concept is really cool, making use of LEGO’s buildability and building some spatial awareness – I appreciate it but won’t be keeping it.

·         Make-n-Break is a speed dexterity game that we picked up at a charity shop. You take turns trying to build as many structures as you can that match cards you flip over from the face down pile during your turn. Different structures have different complexity and earn you varying points. For some reason the amount of time you have available to do this is variable based on a dice roll of 1,2 or 3 and then after a few turns each the player with the most points wins. It seems a bit obvious that the player who rolls best will get more time and just get more points, but ah well it’s actually quite fun and some of the structures are a challenge for adults to build as well as kids.

This weekend we’re heading to Draughts board game cafe in London and hopefully in the coming weeks we’ll manage to play some of the exciting new stuff that’s been sitting on or shelves for some time!