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;

·        Fairy Tale is probably one of the oldest games to use the drafting mechanic, which is a mechanic we love. A number of games with drafting don’t support 2-players well so after some research led me to find Fairy Tale does support two players, it went onto my wanted list. Fairy Tale is a really basic drafting game, which now comes as a shock compared to games like 7 Wonders. You play the game in a set number of rounds and try to collect scoring sets of fantasy creatures. The main unique element to the game is that some cards cause you or your opponent to flip cards face down so they don’t score and others reverse this change. For me, there’s nothing to write home about here, but it’s quick, simple, works for 2-player and comes in a tiny box, so it’s likely to see a fair amount of play on our shelves.

·        Risk: Star Wars Edition (the newest version) is only of interest because reviewers have said it’s nothing like Risk and is much more similar to the grail game Queen’s Gambit. Having never played either of the aforementioned games I went into it with an open mind. The game is 2-player and is asymmetrical, with one side playing the Imperials and one side playing the Rebels. You each have ships in the circular board and part of the game is to eliminate the opponent’s ships. However there are a number of side missions including a fight between Darth Vader and Luke, and long trek for the Imperials which are either pathways to bonuses or victory. The game progresses as a series of turns with programmable actions as the rebels try to destroy the Death Star and the Imperials try to wipe out all of the rebel ships. We had quite a lot of fun with the game, but were really disappointed with the ending where the rebels has about 10 chances in a row to roll a six and failure to do so eventually resulted in losing the game. For a mass market game this is pretty solid, but if the ending is as frustrating next time, I’ll probably have to pass on Risk: Star Wars Edition.

·        Knit Wit is not really a title I’ve been seeking out. We really love Matt Leacock’s co-operative games but Knit Wit seemed like such a big departure that I wasn’t too interested. In Knit Wit the players create the board by laying out loops of string and cotton reels. Once laid out, each numbered cotton reel will be surrounded by a number of coloured loops, each with a word pegged to it. As quickly as possible, players compete to write down a word for each reel that fits all of the words associated to the loops. We had fun with Knit Wit, but really the game seems like an over produced version of Scattergories, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a quite convoluted way to play word association.

Last week I had a great game of Catan with some work colleagues which was really fun – personally I’m still not bored of Catan and will hopefully be able to play it with some expansions with this crowd soon. This week though is our full work game group and I am looking forward to trying some new games and consolidating on some previous successes.  The chance to play new titles might be pretty slim, but there are some new games on the way, hopefully through Secret Santa and also a big bundle I recently purchased on Facebook.