Last Sunday turned out
to be a very successful day in gaming. In spite of me having an awful hangover
and Amy starting with a cold, we soldiered on to try out two big new games. We
also ‘completed’ our collection of Marvel Dice Masters (as far as we care to at
least) by raiding a friend’s spares.
Here’s are Yellow
Meeple’s first impressions;
·
Imperial Assault is a game that Amy
played extensively before Christmas as she was doing a campaign with friends,
but we only acquired our copy a month back and I’ve been waiting for an
introduction to skirmish mode. After a quite lengthy rules explanation and then
being asked to deploy my characters based on very little understanding of
tactics, I really thought the game wasn’t going to be for me. However, after
the first round let me realise that moving is actually pretty quick when you
can move diagonally and that Darth Vader is absolutely awesome, I was
definitely gripped by the game. It took a few tactical hints from my much more
experienced opponent but I made short work of the rebels with some help from
good dice rolling. The game must be pretty good if it’s won me over against the
adversity of me not being a Star Wars fan and having had bad experience with dungeon
crawl type games. Plus we were really surprised that the whole game including
setup and teaching probably took an hour, so it might see a fair amount of
table time in the coming months.
·
T.I.M.E. Stories – Under the Mask is
the fourth case in T.I.M.E. Stories. After
getting very lucky in our last two cases, I had a feeling that this one might
be a lot longer and I wasn’t wrong when we finally won on our fourth run. This
story definitely felt different. Unlike previous expansions we really did need
to explore every location on the map and remember a lot about the sequence of
events to even have a chance of completing all the required steps efficiently
in one run. With an ancient Egyptian theme I might have a expected a few more
puzzle elements than just the one very simple puzzle and we could’ve been made
to think a bit harder. For me, this was my least favourite expansion so far and
the main reason was just that for the first two runs we really did feel like we
were wandering round aimlessly, turning over a significant number of cards that
required no interaction. The four runs meant that there were some locations we
saw multiple times and therefore some of the excitement is taken out of the
game when you barely even need to set up the location to know what you’re going
to do there. I’m sure it will appeal to many people and might not feel that
different to people who didn’t get super lucky and do Prophesy of Dragons in a single run. It’s not put me off playing
more T.I.M.E Stories but I am
slightly disappointed.
·
Blokus 3D is a game I bought on a
whim since I’ve had a lot of success with my parents playing the original Blokus. The reality is that other than
being an abstract game with 4 colours there isn’t that much in common between
the two games. In Blokus 3D you must
add 3D pieces to the structure whilst obeying the height restrictions dependent
on number of players and only placing pieces touching your other pieces on at
least one face. The goal when no-one can place any more pieces is have the most
squares of your colour showing from a birds-eye view. More than Blokus, this game takes real spatial
awareness and planning and awareness of your opponent’s remaining pieces. It definitely
felt more like a puzzle than a game, but it’s staying with us for now as it
definitely scales better then Blokus
for two players and I think we’ll enjoy playing it a few more times.
I expect it will now
be two weeks until my next first impressions blog – there’s a scary exam on the
horizon and at some point I need to start cramming. We’re also putting quite a
bit of time in to trying some of our more unloved games off the shelf and
giving them a play to check if they deserve their place in our collection,
before we decide to move them to our new house. So far I think Steam Park has made the cut.
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