The Yellow Meeple's First Impressions 16th - 26th April

Unfortunately the last couple of weeks have been quite stressful at home and gaming has had to take a back seat. A lot of new games have arrived but our unplayed pile is mounting. Hopefully things will turn around soon! This week we've only had the chance to try two of our new games, and they're not our biggest hits, but at least one has our interest.

So, here are the Yellow Meeple's first impressions;

• Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective was definitely going to be a love it or hate it game for me. We've never played a pure deduction game and Sherlock Holmes is just that. All that the games gives you is a story, laden with names dates and clues and then it's up to you to work your way around the clues, going to different locations and looking for different people who will give you different snippets of information. The game is very freeform and I think the lack of structure makes it hard for me to enjoy. In the first case we were frustrated by the slow progress, the lack of ability to locate the people and places we wanted to talk to and the story wasn't that compelling. Needless to say, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is not for us. I imagine if you're a big fan of story driven games or the Sherlock Holmes theme, then maybe this game could be really fun and a challenging puzzle, but for us the puzzle was just too fuzzy and boring.

• Reef Encounter is a tile placement game with the unique theme of building a coral reef and using it to feed your parrot fish. What seems like a light theme actually makes for probably the most complex, think-y tile placement game I've ever played. There are ten different actions you can take on your turn and you can take as many or as few as you like in order to place polyp tiles on the board, consume other tiles, place shrimp to protect different areas of polyp or obtain more tiles. There's a lot to take in from a rule book that definitely shows its age, and it's definitely a challenge to understand how too play well. I found Reef Encounter really interesting and I definitely think I'll get more out of it next time we play. My only concern is that it isn't gripping or interesting enough to get to the table very frequently.

There's a lot of gaming possibilities coming up this weekend. Saturday is Tabletop day and at least one of us will be heading to the day hosted by The Ludoquist - a board game cafe hoping to open nearby in Croydon. On bank holiday Monday I'm hoping we either have a day of gaming at home together or invite some friends over for some longer games.