The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- 16th-20th June 2017

We are now very busy preparing wedding decorations and have nowhere near the amount of board game time we anticipated, so all of our new board games this week were tried at a meet-up on Sunday with Warren from The Rollin' Inn.

So, here are the Yellow Meeple's first impressions;

• Roll Player is a game I was hoping to play before its recent Kickstarter campaign for the expansion ended. I knew that it had similar mechanisms to Sagrada and just don't think that these simple dice placing games are worth the price that is being asked for them. Neverttheless, Roll Player is very popular in the groups we play with, so I was wondering what all the fuss is about. I'm happy to say that there's quite a lot more too this game than I expected, making sure that you take the right cards to move your character cube, trying to get lines to equal your required stats. Using cards and board actions to manipulate your dice successfully and get the right colour dice in the right locations too. As you can see from my description, the theme meant nothing to me, the game was entirely abstract, but I know that for others, there are opportunities to craft a whole character and story around these mechanisms. I actually found Roll Player very interesting, and would love to play again, although I'm still not sure it justifies the price tag for me.

• Refloristation is a card game that is currently on Kickstarter. The card play is very similar to Ticket to Ride, but with some twists that make for some harder decision making. In Refloristation, you are competing florist businesses, trying to fulfil the same orders by buying flowers from the market and either using them directly to fulfil the order or planting them in a garden so that they provide flowers turn after turn. The game played very quickly in just 12 turns and I can see that there is some complexity there that would reward multiple plays. The staff members' special abilities seemed slightly imbalanced but in a full game I understand these are drafted so it's more likely to be an even spread. If you like the set collection mechanics of Ticket to Ride, but fancy a card game which is a little bit more complex, with a quirky theme, then why not take a look at Refloristation before the campaign ends on 5th July?  

• Package?! is a small filler that definitely comes in a cool box, that looks just like a brown paper package. The rules are pretty simple and can all be written on one card to have in front of the players as reference during the game. Unfortunately this reflects very simple and dull mechanics too. On your turn you roll a dice, then depending what you roll and what the state of the board is you take a prescribed action. Your only free choice tends to be which other player you want to screw over by removing their cubes from the game or reducing their value. In our game everyone was quite fair with trying to spread the "take-that" actions, but it could easily result in one player being ganged up on. Package is a dice-rolling filler with a few decisions to make, but a lot of luck and I just don't see the appeal, so I'll be trying to avoid playing it again.

I keep thinking we'll have some time to play new games, but I'm not so hopeful about that happening now before the wedding. We might get to play something new at our wedding though because Thirsty Meeples are coming along with a small library and a couple of Game Gurus to provide our evening entertainment! Can't wait for Saturday's festivities and hopefully will be back with some more first impressions soon!