by Surya Van Lierde is pure Eurosnoot and proud of it!
Blood Ragetl;dr: an overproduced, more aggressive Midgard
I always thought Midgard was an underappreciated design. It is a very clean, streamlined area majority game. Thanks to this new implementation, it gets more attention. Too bad, in my opinion, they made the design less clean and made it more of a conflict game and less of an area majority game.
It is still a very good design, but it does move away from the aspects I respected the most about it.
The minis seem to be there mostly to sell more copies. They are very nice, but I would have preferred wooden pieces. Also, the minis sometimes make it hard to tell what figure you're looking at.
I haven't played Midgard in years, but playing this, I want to try it again.
As for this version: I wouldn't mind playing it again, but there's no way I'm paying for a copy of this version.
Initial rating: 7/10
BGG scale: 7/10
Goldland
tl;dr: another solid game from Kramer
Wolfgang Kramer is incredible. He has been designing games for decades, and his games range from good to amazing. Contrast that with other designers who have been doing that for so long. In most cases their later output is... less than we would expect from them. But Kramer, while he hasn't designed a masterpiece in recent years, has been continually putting out very solid designs year after year.
But let's talk about this game. It's one of those games where you have tiles that let you move towards your goal, a bit like Tikal or Im Reich der Jadegöttin. There is a lot of planning needed for how you manage your resources. You really need to manage them well to be able to progress and score points.
It's a clean design, just like many games from that era (2002) and plays pretty fast. Every now and then you might need to puzzle over your resources a bit longer, but most of the time turns go pretty fast.
All in all a solid design. No where near his best work, but certainly worth playing.
Initial rating 7/10
BGG scale: 7/10
Hellas
tl;dr: clean design, not my style
I don't play many 2 player games because I prefer the dynamics that you get by having 3 or more players. But every now and then I do play games 2 player. I do have acouple of games I really like with 2 though.
This games pits 2 players against each other to discover and conquer the world. The first player to control 10 cities wins. You can get there by just exploring, but that would make for a very boring game. You can also take over cities by plopping more (plastic, ugh) unites there and playing cards to improve your chances. This makes the game more interesting, but it's not something that gets my juices flowing. At least not in a way that I seek out.
It's a very clean design, and if you like this style of game, you might really dig this, but it's not for me and the fact that I never felt that I, as starting player, had a chance of loosing didn't help. The other player seemed to always be playing catch up to counter what I did on my turn and get to the same level as me.
Initial rating: 6/10
BGG scale: 3/10 (willingness to play) 6.5/10 (quality of design)