The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- 14th - 18th February 2018

My name is Fiona and I'm a board game addict, it's been almost a month since my last first impressions blog! We have been playing some new games, but have been featuring them in our weekly reviews almost straight away. In addition, I've had a lot of opportunities to introduce new people into board games in the last few weeks, which has meant playing some simpler, familiar gateway games rather than bringing out the new hotness and learning the rules.

However, after a good game evening on Sunday, here's the Yellow Meeple's first impressions;

• Charterstone is a legacy style game that I've been desperate to start playing. It will be our first competitive legacy game, which makes me a little nervous, but the designer and publisher reputation as well as some amazing feedback it has been getting from many people in my board gaming community means I'm very excited. Our first game was a little slow, but towards the end of the game we started to notice interesting engines starting to appear in the worker placement space on the board and I'm excited to see what happens as we progress down different paths and start to specialise our villages and perhaps our  workers. It's a beautiful game, it seems to have solid mechanics and I'm excited to explore more, although it was such a quick game that 12 games feels like it will feel very short.
  

• Fold-It is a game I was very happy to finally find after first seeing it released at Essen over a year ago. In Fold-It, each player has a cloth with a 5x5 grid of different foods. Each turn is a race to fold the cloth to achieve the required combination of food cards showing on the cloth. It's a puzzle game and a race not to be the last person to solve the puzzle. I think our verdict is that we really like the puzzle, but not so much the game. The puzzle is really innovative and the hard cards in particular have the ability to really challenge so, although there's a pretty small quantity in the box. As a race game for two players it's just a bit dissatisfying because only one person completes the puzzle each round. I think I'll play through the deck of cards as a solo puzzle, but then Fold-It will probably not stay on our shelves.

• Custom Heroes is probably one of the first trick-taking games we've played and although it's really ladder climbing it's good to finally get our heads around what a trick-taking game actually is! Custom Heroes uses AEG's card crafting system to allow you to boost or change cards in order to help you shed cards from your hand faster. The cards also have some interesting special abilities, but each round the cards will be shuffled, so you won' always get to keep the cool special abilities you add. We found that the game was a little bit long, and although it played perfectly well at two-players, the end game was drawn out by the fact that the were only two potential outcomes at the end of each round. Nevertheless I'm excited to explore Custom Heroes some more and I still really enjoy the card crafting system.

• Codenames Disney is another game in the very popular Codenames line. In this game there are both words and pictures, with each card having a Disney picture on one side and the corresponding word on the other side. Neither myself, nor Amy are huge Disney fans, but themed versions of Codenames really intrigue me because of the opportunities to talk about the character to make links or just the word as an alternative. We combined Codenames Disney with Codenames Duet into a game we really enjoyed because of those different layers and clue opportunities.

Earlier in the week I visited a new board game meetup close to where I work - it was only small, but I as happy to teach Capital Lux and play Indian Summer again. It's also work board game night this week, which means I'll probably bring Kokoro again as that was a huge hit last time, as well as also trying to introduce a few lightly more complex games to the group.