Welcome to The Game Shelf!

After getting into the board game hobby at the end of 2014, we've decided to share our thoughts on the games we're collecting on our shelves. The collection has certainly expanded over the last few years and we've been making up for lost time!

Sometimes our opinions differ, so Amy will be posting reviews every Tuesday and Fi will post on Thursdays. We hope you enjoy reading some of our opinions on board games - especially those for two players.

Get in touch by emailing thegameshelfblog@gmail.com

Saturday 7 November 2015

The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions:- Week Commencing 31st October 2015

New games!!! |There are so many new games coming into our collection recently, but not much time to play! This week, just 3 new titles have hit the table.

·         Stone Age is a worker placement game that I feel we missed out on when we were getting into gaming. Most people seem to call it a gateway worker placement, and we just skipped ahead, but I am enjoying slightly lighter games recently and was happy to get the chance to play. Much like games like Agricola, you have a tribe of workers who you can place in different locations on the board to obtain goods, build huts, obtain tools, get better at agriculture etc. However, unlike many euro games there is an element of luck, in that the number of workers you place to obtain food and goods represent the number of dice you will roll. How lucky you are with the dice and the rarity of the element you are rolling for will together determine how many of each resource you will receive. The aim of the game is, of course to have the most victory points, which I generally obtained during the game by building huts using different combinations of resources. However there are cards you can buy that also give you end game scoring either for set collection or other things you’ve achieved throughout the game, such as growing your number of workers or improving your agriculture. I think the game has a good mixture of strategy and luck and I like the mixture of in game and end game scoring. We probably don’t need another worker placement game, but I’ll happily play Stone Age again when I next get the opportunity.

·         Valley of the Kings is a deck-building games. I normally love deck-building games because I stand a very good chance of winning when the two of us play together. Valley of the Kings was fortunately no exception! In this game you are trying to balance building a strong deck by getting rid of your starting cards and having useful card powers and high value cards, with the need to gain victory points by removing cards from your deck and placing them in your tomb. At the end of the game, only cards in your tomb are scored mainly based on set collection – a set of 1 scores 1, a set of 2 scores 4 and so on. You also need to be mindful when taking cards from the pyramid of giving your opponent access to cards they may desperately want or that you desperately want to save for yourself. Each turn you can usually only buy cards from the bottom row of the pyramid and if you take a card, the cards above fall down to fill the empty slots. In particular, the tomb element makes this game a unique deck-builder in our collection and we really loved this game! It’s also great to have a portable deck-builder for travelling.

·         Brew Crafters Travel Card Game is a game about building a brewery and brewing beer. Honestly I bought this game solely for the theme and knew nothing about the game play. The game is a simple card game in which each card has two uses – it can either be played for its ability, which is generally either a boost to your ability to brew eg. a free ingredient, or a boost in what you get paid for brewing certain types of beer, or you can play the card as the ingredient depicted in the top left of the card. Each different beer requires a different combination of ingredients and those which use rarer ingredients, such as coffee or fruit are more valuable. The first player to reach 21 points triggers the end of the game, but end game scoring and a final brewing round for the other players may mean that other players win the game. I definitely took the wrong strategy in my first game, but the game is a good combination or a light card game and some easy tactical and strategic decisions and will become a good addition to our micro-game collection.

We’ve got some free time this weekend and I really want to get some longer, deeper new games to the table, perhaps Tzolk’in or learning to play Android Netrunner. But we’ll also see what gets brought along to groups, hopefully on Sunday and Monday this week.



No comments:

Post a Comment