Title: A Pun About the Game:- Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game

Game: Legendary: A Marvel Deckbuilding Game

Publisher: Upper Deck Entertainment

Designer: Devin Low

Year: 2012

Marvel Legendary is a 1-5 player semi-cooperative deckbuilding card game in which you create a force of crime fighting superheroes to prevent a supervillain from completing their dastardly plot. The game plays out much like other deckbuilders, you have a currency for recruiting new heroes from a central pool and then a fight value that you use for defeating villains. Villains you defeat go into a victory point, the stronger villains being worth more points. Ultimately there can be only one winner, but if you lose then you lose together.

The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 6th-20th November 2016

We’ve had a couple of quiet weekends recently which means we’ve been able to dedicate our Sundays to gaming at home. We’ve got a few of our bigger neglected games back to the table as well as trying a few new titles from the shelves. We also met up with some friends this weekend at the Draughts game cafe in London and played some really fun games as well as one new game included in the blog below.

Here are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Loony Quest

Game: Loony Quest

Manufacturer: Libellud

Designer: Laurent Escoffier  & David Franck

 Year: 2015

Loony Quest had been on my radar, but only as a children’s game. However, I got the opportunity to give it a try at a board game group and found I was rather good at it. To my slight shame, I do tend to enjoy games I’m good at, so Loony Quest caught my attention. On a recent holiday to Valencia we visited a local game store and Loony Quest was one of the few multi-lingual options available so we took it home as our holiday souvenir and it’s been hitting the table a lot ever since!

Loony Quest is a point scoring, drawing game in which each player tries to meet a drawing challenge over the course of 6 rounds. Each round is a scene with certain point scoring opportunities and other features which are obstacles. Each round allows different drawings, for example, a specific number of lines, a certain number of circles or a certain number of dots and there’s a time limit of 30 second to draw the required elements, hitting the targets that gain points and avoiding the obstacles which lose you points.

World of Drawcraft:- Loony Quest

Game: Loony Quest

Manufacturer: Libellud

Designer: Laurent Escoffier  & David Franck

 Year: 2015

Loony quest is a 2-5 player drawing game in which you embark on a number of 30 second challenges in order to claim the most experience points and be the greatest hero in the land. It consists of multiple worlds, each of 6 maps which correspond to the difficulty level you want to play at. Seemingly inspired by a Mario game’s progression you’ll go from a grassland to volcanic islands, ancient ruins and frozen tundras, defeating a boss at the end of each world.

Each level within a world consists of a map tile which gets placed in the centre of the playing area, the box acts as a holder for this map and as a score track using lollypop stick style trackers for each player. Each player has a white mat and a clear sheet to draw on, a timer is flipped and everyone has 30 seconds to draw on their sheet, once the timer runs out each player places their sheet onto the game board and evaluates their score. That’s about it for how to play, the rules are simplicity themselves, draw as required for the map, place your sheet over the map, score points, win!

The Yellow Meeple Starts a Board Game Group at Work - Week 2

The first week of game group left me feeling elated after introducing new people to the hobby and feeling like I had really started something good both for myself, the hobby and to build social bridges for other people in my workplace.

For week two I was probably more nervous about whether people would come back and also about picking the right games – In Week 1 I could forgive myself if I got the games wrong but knowing a little more about my audience my audience would I make the right choice to keep people interested?

Week 2

Number of Attendees: 8

Games Played: Dobble, Get Bit!, Coloretto, Catan, Survive!

The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 15th October – 5th November

It seems like I’m still adding more and more games to our shelves and every time I have a new excuse...recently I passed an exam and had success starting a work board game club – definitely both legitimate reasons to buy new games right? This means there’s even more unplayed games on the shelves but we are progressing slowly with trying out some of the new titles.

Here are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

Thoughts from the Yellow Meeple:- Quadropolis

Game: Quadropolis

Publisher: Days of Wonder

Designer: Francois Gandon

Year: 2016

I’m not sure what took me so long when it came to buying Quadropolis. I’m a big fan of many Days of Wonder games, so knew that eventually it was a game I wanted to play and probably own. I assumed I’d see it being played everywhere and yet 6 months after release I’d yet to play it at a game group and there were seemingly no opportunities to pick Quadropolis up much below RRP so I included it in a sizeable order I made to get myself up to speed with some 2016 releases.

Quadropolis is a gateway level city building game. In the game there are a number of different building types and each has a different scoring mechanism. Each round you are selecting tiles from a central grid which is common to all players. The selection of the tiles is very spatial, and the way that you obtain each tile effects where you can place it in your city. The game proceeds in 4 or 5 rounds depending on whether you’re playing classic or expert and at the end of the game you have the opportunity to organise your resources – energy and people – in the most optimal way around your city.

Squareism is the new Cubism!: Quadropolis

Quadropolis is a 2-4 player strategy game in which you have to design a city to become a productive, pleasant place to live. The game revolves around a square grid (or rectangular in the advanced version) which you fill with various buildings in a series of rounds. Each building type has it’s own unique scoring system which are often affected by the surrounding buildings.

In each round you gather a pile of tiles and lay them out along a central supply grid. You can then use one of your engineers to claim tiles and place them on your city grid. The engineers are numbered one through four, you have once of each number every round, so you’ll be taking 4 buildings in a turn. The number of your engineer is important; to take a tile you place the engineer around the edge of the supply grid, along a row/column. You then take the tile x spaces away from the engineer in the, so a number 3 engineer would take the 3^rd building along the column he’s placed on. Once you have the building you have to place it on a grid reference on your city that has that number as either it’s column or row. So in our example the number 3 engineer must build along column 3 *or* along row 3.

An example of tiles being taken, the 5 architect took the tile 5 spaces away while the 1 architect took the tile next to it. The pawn covers the last tile taken and you can't place an architect pointing towards the pawn.

There is an advanced game which I strongly recommend for people who have played the game at least once before. Instead of having a unique set of engineers, each player uses the same pool of engineers. This adds a lot of player interaction to the game as purposely running down a certain number can make it hard for players to achieve their goals. Since the supply grid is 5x5, at the start of the round you can use a 2 or a 4 to take the same tile, but as the area around the outside of the supply gets filled up with engineers spaces become limited and number selection becomes very important. The advanced game also has a couple of new building types that add a bit more variety to strategy. It also gives each player a bigger city grid, which means that many buildings can score higher.

The buildings themselves encourage synergy, parks work well when surrounded by residential towers, docks work well when in a line of other docks, power plants thrive when surrounded by commercial buildings, but aren’t great for residential ones, so shops can be used to bridge the gap. There’s also pollution and overpopulation to worry about, some buildings produce energy, and others produce population. Most buildings require activation by a certain amount of power or population in order to score at the end of the game, if you don’t have enough people then you won’t have anyone to work in your power plant, but get too many and the unemployed bums will cost you points! There is a careful balance in trying to make the most points without going to far and filling your town with pollution.

Scoring for the various buildings, some buildings require multiples of the same type, while others reward being surrounded by suitable buildings. A well designed city can rack up those precious points!

Quadropolis is a game with a surprising amount of depth, but it is so simple to pick up! The game feels intuitive and even playing with little idea of what’s going on at first you aren’t likely to have any major problems playing. So long as you have worked out what to do by rounds 3 or 4 you’ll be fine, which makes it great for new players. But for veterans the strategy starts coming out of the woodwork, ensuring you don’t fill up certain numbers becomes important or you’ll be limited in the late-game. Watching what spots your opponents have left allows you to block off buildings they want with your engineers. Power plants are all worth the same points, but take the one witch generates too much power and it turns to pollution, so sometimes the “weaker” tiles are better for you. I had no expectations coming into Quadropolis, but now I couldn’t be a much bigger fan... well unless they release a Star-Wars version anyway!

8/10