The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 26th February – 6th March

After a very quiet week for board games, we definitely made up for it on Sunday with an 8 hour long gaming session with the Broken Meeple. We set aside the time to play the new scenario for T.I.M.E. Stories, but this took a lot less time than expected so we fit in another four games, including our copy of Colosseum that Luke was really keen to try.

Here are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

·        T.I.M.E. Stories: Expedition Endurance has been a long time coming - it feels like a very long time since we played the last scenario in T.I.M.E Stories - so long that I had forgotten some of the basic gameplay rules. Without spoilers it's hard to say a lot about this scenario, but I personally feel that we got quite lucky and had a very sort game as a result. We coincidentally chose, what felt like, the right characters to begin with and most 50/50 decisions went our way, as well as missing out on some read herrings with challenging consequences. The start of the game is a great new way to start and really captures some of the time travel theme and the story is quite strong throughout this expansion. Although there were very few puzzles in this game, I do think that the game rewarded you making the thematic choice based on all of the information available to you - something we succeeded in on almost every occasion. Expedition endurance sits somewhere in the middle for me in terms of favourite scenarios, but I really would like to return to the more puzzle-type aspects of the very first scenario.

·        Dimension is an abstract game that I'd never heard of, but with a short time frame to fill, this game looked interesting on the shelf. It's an abstract, puzzle style game where each player is given a player board with 15 rubber balls in 5 different colours. Each round you race a timer to build a stack of balls that meets as many of the 6 randomly drawn rules as possible. The rule cards demand r prevent different colour adjacencies, demand certain quantities of each colour etc. and it can be really hard to satisfy all objectives, especially in the time limit and whilst trying to ensure that you use 11 marbles and have at least one of each colour in your pyramid. It's a really high production game and quite a unique abstract. Although I enjoyed it, it's probably not a game we need to own, but would happily play again to fill a 15-30 minute time slot.

·       The Pursuit of Happiness has been on my radar for a while, mainly because of rave reviews from The Broken Meeple. I was very happy to get the chance to play his copy. The game is often referred to as the gamer's Game of Life. You take a character from childhood, through their teenage years, into adult hood and eventually old age. Along the way you take on projects, activities, jobs and relationships to ensure that you lead a fulfilled life. These experiences will variously earn you money or improve your attributes, such as creativity, knowledge and influence. These are your resources which you can choose to spend on things such as advancing projects, improving at your hobbies or getting a promotion in your job. Other things in the game require upkeep or time - mainly relationships or jobs. The game works from worker placement mechanisms where your workers represent your time. You can only increase your workers by decreasing your stress levels - by taking on projects such as exercise or healthy eating and your number of workers will decrease if you take on stressful things, like having two relationships (!) or when you enter into old age. When you have no time left you pass away and your legacy is the resources you leave behind, plus some end game rewards for successful achievements throughout your life. The theme in this game is fantastic, with all of the humour and realism in the life activities and on top of this the game mechanics are strong. I will definitely look out for opportunities to play The Pursuit of Happiness again!

Last week we also finished our Imperial Assault campaign, which means we can pull out something new for our regular gaming session, either Mechs vs. Minions, which we already have, or we might try Unlock! as our next game. This week I'll be playing some gateway games at my work board gaming group, but I've also had some new deliveries with Memoir 44 and Carcassonne: South Seas now added to my pile of shame. Hopefully we can at least play something new this Saturday.