Last week we went on
holiday to Valencia, Spain, like the good gamers and safety conscious sun
seekers that we are, we made sure we had a list of local gaming highlights to
check out when the heat of the day got too much for us. Mainly, we were keen to
try “La Base Secreta” game cafe, but
holiday openings hours meant our first call was Homoludicus – a very well stocked board game store
where we picked up a multilingual copy of Looney Quest. “La Base Secreta” turned
out to be a very modest game cafe with a pretty small library compared to those
we’ve seen in the UK. There was enough choice to keep us going and City of
Iron was a particular highlight, thanks
to the kindness of the man running the shop who leant us it out of his personal
display games.
Here are Yellow
Meeple’s first impressions;
·
City of Iron is the first big box
game from Ryan Lauket that we’ve managed to try. These games seem to get a lot
of buzz and positive feedback, so we jumped into this one and didn’t really
know what we were letting ourselves into. City of Iron has you using a hand of
cards representing different people with the ability to purchase locations for
your city or attack locations to get those into your city also. You also need
to save up to add additional people into your two decks, but for me this feels
less like deck-building and more like an immediate response to the actions
you’re planning to take next turn. I imagine that it could be more like
deckbuilding in future games where you might plan your strategy in advance once
you’re familiar with the gameplay. Your long term goal is to have the most of
different resources in the game, which seems a bit weak when compared to most
other euro games where resources are something you use to achieve your goals.
There’s nothing that unique about City of
Iron, but it does look very good on the table and mixes some mechanics very
cleanly. I’d play it again, but it’s not special enough to make me need it.
·
Carcassonne Hunters and Gatherers is
a standalone game in the Carcassonne
series. The basic mechanics are the same – draw a tile at random and place it
so that it matches the tiles already placed on the table. The original roads
become rivers, the original cities become forests and the original fields
become plains filled with animals. The rules tweeks definitely make this game
quite unique from the original and probably slightly more complex. On the
rivers you score based on the fish in the pools at the end of each river,
however if you place a hut on the river network, there are end of game points
for the total number of fish in the network. For the forests, they are quite
simple in terms of scoring, but if you complete a forest with mushrooms you get
to draw a bonus tie, which can often have more powerful abilities or scoring
opportunities. Finally, at the end of the game, the person with the majority of
meeple’s in the plain scores for the number of animals that haven’t been eaten
by tigers! I like the added complexity, it makes a change from the original
Carcassonne – I’d be happy to play either but don’t think I need to own both.
·
Flash Point Fire Resuce: Veteran and Rescue
Dog is a mini expansion to Flash
Point: Fire Rescue – one of our go-to co-operative games. It only adds two
characters, but they’re very unique compared to those you get in the base game.
The veteran is very much about buffing other players in close proximity,
whereas the god gets loads of action points, but for obvious reasons can’t put
out fires or get through closed doors and spends more AP to drag people out of
the building. I really like these new characters and their miniatures and a
good first impression is always made better by the rescue dog’s first actions
being to save the puppy!
The eagle eyed amongst
you might have noticed a lack of a full board game review this week. Don’t
worry, we’ll be back next week, life just got in the way of writing time! We’re
still playing and reviews of The Bloody Inn and Mice and Mystics are on
the way!
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