The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 19th June – 2nd July

Moving house is definitely starting to impact our time available to play games. We have however built ourselves a new board game corner and are very pleased with our Kallax shelves! There’s even space for some new games now, which is a nice feeling to be able to start adding to the collection again! We had a small leaving gathering at Board in the City in Southampton and tried a couple of small games and have also had some charity shop and car boot sale success giving us another couple of quick titles to try.

Here’s are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

·         Stak Bots is a game I wanted to try because I have heard people talking about a new expansion on Kickstarter. Stak Bots is a small card game where you attack other players using the robot card on the top of your stack. They will take damage based on their relative strength and your aim is to eliminate all the cards in other players’ stacks before your stack dwindles. There’s a bit of a push your luck element, especially when you take out people’s robots and trigger entry effects on the new robot that is revealed. I think the game suffered with 2 players as you only ever attack one person and the stats of one robot vs. the other are essentially luck, but even so, the game was really dull so I don’t think I’ll be giving it another chance with a higher player count.

                                                                        

·         Why First? is a game that plays on a gimmick where you win by coming second in the race. Each turn you play a card from your hand either in front of you or another player to move the pawns forward and backwards on the track. The cards have things like +3 or -2 on them to move the pawns and you are trying to manipulate yourself to 2^nd place. After 5 plays the game is over and you don’t really feel you’ve played a game at all. The game feels pretty random, reactive and dissatisfying.

·         Ingenious is a game I’ve played a fair amount on my phone but admittedly I’ve never actually read the rules, I just kind of picked it up as I went along. When the opportunity came along to pick up a copy for £1 at the car boot sale, we were happy to give it a go. Ingenious is an abstract game when you place tiles to match lines of colours. The scoring is slightly different because you lose the game by having the lowest score with you lowest scoring colour, so you can’t just ignore yellow and max out on the other 5 colours in the game. For us, Ingenious fits the same category as Qwirkle and Blokus – none of them are games that will set the world on fire, but they add variety to the quick games we can play with my parents and can be the right game for the two of us to play when we just want to relax rather than get very involved in a game.

If any of our readers live in Surrey, please give us a shout – we need new gaming buddies. We’ll be checking out some of the local gaming groups just as soon as we’ve unpacked enough boxes and assembled enough furniture!