In the past week I passed an important irrelevant milestone in my board game career...1000 plays logged on BGG. I started logging my plays fairly early on so this is a good indicator of how much gaming I've managed in the 3+ years since I entered this wonderful world. Just recently I've been using ScorePal on my Android phone to log plays as I game and it also provides some useful at-a-glance statistics like, for instance, the fact that I have played 236 different games in that time ranging from Pass the Pigs to The Colonists. One of the benefits of Bromsgrove Board Gamers (among many) is that we have a large and diverse group of attendees who appreciate all sorts of different things and also a healthy appetite for new games. While sometimes this can feel wearing, when the owner of the game spends 30 minutes explaining it to all new players, it does mean that our thirst for new experiences is constantly satiated. So here are a few games that I have recently enjoyed for the first time.
First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express
First Class is a game I've seen a fair bit of buzz around. Supposedly this is Russian Railroads: the card game and after my first play it certainly seemed like deja-vu. Russian Railroads (more often with the German railroads expansion) is a game I have played a lot, enjoy a lot and suck at a lot. I just cannot seem to get any better at it with repeated plays, 13 at the current count, and eventually this might become tedious for me. I don't mind losing but I do mind never improving at specific games and this can lead to disillusionment after a while. First play I didn't get going at all and it felt merely passable but after the second play I managed a massive improvement, felt like I was starting to "get" the game and even got a convincing win. I enjoyed it immensely and cannot wait for more plays including trying some of the different modules.
Ave Roma
I'm starting to make a habit of picking up Kickstarter creations after the fact- Above and Below and Crisis to name a couple- and last month I added another in Ave Roma. There's a lot of game here and it feels like repeated plays will be necessary to fully appreciate the subtle nuances and tactics hinted at just below the surface, not to mention the five mini-expansions. With just a single play so far I look forward to getting this to the table again soon.
Pandemic: The Cure
Believe it or not, and many reading this may consider this sacriligious, this was my first experience of any of the multitude of Pandemic games on the market. I will admit to being a little cool on the prospect of ever playing the original Pandemic as co-ops are not my favourite genre and this one in particular just does not excite me. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this quick-playing dice chucker and it fit the end of evening bill perfectly. I wouldn't play this 13 times in a row, as Matt and partner have done, but our quickfire 2 attempts were satisfying. I would happily play this again, especially as it seems tough to win.
Quantum
Although I do a lot of reading, and watching, around the subject of board games there will still be those games I've never heard of. Often I find I have preconceptions, rightly or wrongly, about what a game might offer; sometimes I expect to like/dislike a game and do, and sometimes they can surprise me one way or the other. But when you sit down to play a game that you know very little about then I find these can elicit the most interesting reactions. Adam in my group is a big proponent of Quantum and though I had watched part of a run through I didn't really know what to expect from this. I can't categorise this one easily; all I can say is that it was brilliant. If you get the chance to play this then do not hesitate!
A Feast for Odin
And lastly, I got to play one of the massively-hyped games of Essen 2016: A Feast for Odin. I will admit to worrying that it could leave me uninspired, a bit like I found the Caverna: The Cave Farmers experience, which seemed to me like an unfocussed mess of resource collection, feng shui and dwarven raiding. I have also previously found Agricola nastily difficult and on my small but growing list of never-to-be-repeated board games. One play is too soon to cover this game in glory but I do believe this might be the best Rosenberg I've played yet, even potentially moving ahead of Le Havre which I rate highly and is comfortably in my Top 10 games. The blend of several mechanisms from contrasting games, like Caverna, Le Havre and Patchwork, seems to work beautifully, however improbably, and the realistic chance of different strategies proving equally lucrative means this could stay very fresh and high up on my 'To play' list.
If you enjoyed reading this then please subscribe. I welcome your comments below.
First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express
First Class is a game I've seen a fair bit of buzz around. Supposedly this is Russian Railroads: the card game and after my first play it certainly seemed like deja-vu. Russian Railroads (more often with the German railroads expansion) is a game I have played a lot, enjoy a lot and suck at a lot. I just cannot seem to get any better at it with repeated plays, 13 at the current count, and eventually this might become tedious for me. I don't mind losing but I do mind never improving at specific games and this can lead to disillusionment after a while. First play I didn't get going at all and it felt merely passable but after the second play I managed a massive improvement, felt like I was starting to "get" the game and even got a convincing win. I enjoyed it immensely and cannot wait for more plays including trying some of the different modules.
Ave Roma
I'm starting to make a habit of picking up Kickstarter creations after the fact- Above and Below and Crisis to name a couple- and last month I added another in Ave Roma. There's a lot of game here and it feels like repeated plays will be necessary to fully appreciate the subtle nuances and tactics hinted at just below the surface, not to mention the five mini-expansions. With just a single play so far I look forward to getting this to the table again soon.
Pandemic: The Cure
Believe it or not, and many reading this may consider this sacriligious, this was my first experience of any of the multitude of Pandemic games on the market. I will admit to being a little cool on the prospect of ever playing the original Pandemic as co-ops are not my favourite genre and this one in particular just does not excite me. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this quick-playing dice chucker and it fit the end of evening bill perfectly. I wouldn't play this 13 times in a row, as Matt and partner have done, but our quickfire 2 attempts were satisfying. I would happily play this again, especially as it seems tough to win.
Quantum
Although I do a lot of reading, and watching, around the subject of board games there will still be those games I've never heard of. Often I find I have preconceptions, rightly or wrongly, about what a game might offer; sometimes I expect to like/dislike a game and do, and sometimes they can surprise me one way or the other. But when you sit down to play a game that you know very little about then I find these can elicit the most interesting reactions. Adam in my group is a big proponent of Quantum and though I had watched part of a run through I didn't really know what to expect from this. I can't categorise this one easily; all I can say is that it was brilliant. If you get the chance to play this then do not hesitate!
A Feast for Odin
And lastly, I got to play one of the massively-hyped games of Essen 2016: A Feast for Odin. I will admit to worrying that it could leave me uninspired, a bit like I found the Caverna: The Cave Farmers experience, which seemed to me like an unfocussed mess of resource collection, feng shui and dwarven raiding. I have also previously found Agricola nastily difficult and on my small but growing list of never-to-be-repeated board games. One play is too soon to cover this game in glory but I do believe this might be the best Rosenberg I've played yet, even potentially moving ahead of Le Havre which I rate highly and is comfortably in my Top 10 games. The blend of several mechanisms from contrasting games, like Caverna, Le Havre and Patchwork, seems to work beautifully, however improbably, and the realistic chance of different strategies proving equally lucrative means this could stay very fresh and high up on my 'To play' list.
If you enjoyed reading this then please subscribe. I welcome your comments below.