The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- 20th-28th June 2017

Last weekend we got married!!!!

It was an amazing celebration of all things LEGO and board games and really epitomised us as a couple. We had Thirsty Meeples board game cafe attend with a mobile gaming library of over 100 games and the game room was a definite hit (possibly aided by the presence of cheese and port). Unfortunately it turns out you end up really busy talking to people at your own wedding so we didn't play anything at all!

Now that we have a week with no wedding planning, so we can play some games, followed by a cruise for our honeymoon, so we're going to try and squeeze in as many small games as we can. So far we've just tried a few small games this week

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

• Hanamikoji is a 2-player card game with a geisha theme, which leads to extremely pretty artwork. The game is deceptively simple, with just four actions, each of which you must use once per turn to manipulate your hand of cards. Your goal is to ensure that you offer each of the seven geishas the most of the objects they require. Different actions require you to  give your opponent the opportunity to take a choice of cards, so you need to be very aware of what they might want and what they have already played and might have in their hand. It's definitely a game of out thinking your opponent and one you could play multiple times in one sitting because it is so fast. I look forward to trying Hanamikoji some more.
  

• Quadropolis Public Services is the first expansion to Quadropolis, the big Days of Wonder release from 2016. Quite predictably, the expansion affects the public services, the tiles that previously scored best when you built on in every sector of your board. They still work in this way, however every time you take a public service tile from the board you can swap it for one of the new expansion tiles. The new tiles mostly give you an end game scoring bonus eg. 1 VP per office building or a bonus for filling every square of your board. So far, I don't think you can ignore these tiles and hope to do well in the game. I enjoy how your early selection of tiles defines a strategy for you that you can work towards, as this was always something I struggled to decide on. I look forward to trying Public Services with the expert game variant, but I can't see a reason we will ever play without it unless teaching new gamers.

• HUNGER: The Show certainly has a unique theme - you are on a reality TV show, akin to Survivor or Castaway, and resources such as food and boat parts are becoming short so you've turned against each other in order to survive and be crowned victor of the game show either by building the best raft and leaving or by not starving. The game play is a quick bluffing style game where each player simultaneously selects an action and island location and tries to either gather food, raft parts or steal from other players. Depending on if there are any people who select to do the same thing, different combinations of results occur. At the end of each turn you need to have enough food to eat, otherwise you starve and are eliminated from the game. HUNGER: The Show certainly captures the theme, but it's just not a two player game. We suspect it will be best with either four or 6 players but still need to try it before making a final judgement.
  

• Unlock! - Fifth Avenue is a promo scenario for Unlock!. It's the first time we've tried the Unlock! escape room system, as the full game is still on our shelves waiting for a suitable opportunity with 4 players. This promo is very short with a 30 minute timer, but lasting more like 15-20 minutes, but it still gave us an insight into the system. So far we've not seen anything innovative in terms of puzzles, mostly you need to look hard, think logically and just with common sense and every so often,think in a slightly abstract way. This was an OK puzzle, but nothing overly satisfying and I'm hoping for something better in the main box.

The plan for the rest of the week is to make sure some larger games hit the table as well as hosting one of our friends for a game day on Thursday where we can hopefully introduce her to some new medium-weight games.