Blue Meeple

Gloom

Game: Gloom with 4 players

Play: You have a family of 5 (cards) down in front of you and your goal is to make them die as miserably as possible. The cards are transparent, so stacking cards from your hand on top of the family cards changes various attributes (cards like Chased by Children, Contracted Consumption, Pursued by Poodles). An Untimely Death card kills them, but can be removed by some action cards. You can play on your opponents families as well as your own. The game ends when the whole family in front of any one player is dead. The player with the lowest score wins.

Art: The absolute best thing about this game is the wonderful Edward Gorey-esque art. 

Conclusion: What makes Gloom fun is the unusual mechanic with the transparent cards and the Edward Gorey theme. I would play it again for those reasons, not because I thought it was a particularly good game.

Phase 10 Dice

Game: Phase 10 Dice with 7 players

Play: Roll ten dice up to three times to try and get the required sets and/or runs for each phase. You must complete each phase in order, so if you don’t get it, try again next turn. The phases include things like two sets of three of a kind, a set of four and a run of four, a run of 7, etc.

Your score is the sum of the numbers used. Unused dice and wilds are worth zero.

Art: The dice are colorful with bold numbers. They’re small enough that holding ten dice isn’t difficult but large enough to easily read. The scorecard, on the other hand, is tiny and difficult to fill out, especially since scores quickly reach triple digits.

Conclusion: It was amusing enough for a dice game, which is not my favorite genre. The advantages of this kind of game are the number of players it accommodates and that waiting players can socialize freely without having to plan upcoming turns.

Starship Catan

Game: Starship Catan, 2-player game

Play: Visit planets, fight pirates, collect resources, improve your starship’s engines and cannons, and build Colony and Trade planets.

There is a die rolled in order to fly through one of four planet decks of cards (in conjunction with your engines) and a die used to fight pirates as they come up (in conjunction with your cannons). The flight die can also get you and your opponent resources from your colony planets, depending on the number rolled.
 
Your opponent flips cards from the planet deck of your choice (as many cards as the die rolled plus your engine capacity) and you take two actions (or more, with the command module). The actions include buying or selling resources or science, building a Trade or Colony planet, and special events from Pallas, Hades, Posiden, or Picasso. Dealing with pirates doesn’t count as an action.

After that, you can buy and sell resources using any Trade planets you own, and upgrade your starship.

Endgame is 10 points. You get points from buying the upgraded modules, winning lots of pirate battles, and a few other things. Most regular actions aren’t worth points.

Art: The art on the cards is nice. The art on the starship itself is way too busy. In fact, I found it overwhelming. The background art, what’s around the important bits, should be paler or darker - somehow less obtrusive - or even just not there.

The shape of the starship is clever and fun and makes up for a lot of the flaws.

Conclusion: I’d like to try it again, if only to not lose by quite so many points. I’m not sure I’d want to play it much more than that, but I reserve that judgment until I play it at least once more.

7 Wonders

Game: 7 Wonders with 5 players

Play: 7 Wonders is played over 3 ages. In each age, you’re dealt a hand of 7 cards. Choose one to keep and pass the rest to your neighbor (clockwise the first and third ages, counter-clockwise the second age). Everyone reveals their card (or sells it for gold or uses it to build their monument), makes any necessary payments and collects any applicable rewards, then looks at the hand their neighbor passed them and does it all over again. Keep doing it until there are two cards left, at which point you pick one card to keep and one to discard.

The cards are a variety of categories such as resources, which are necessary to play most other cards and build the monument; military, which gives positive or negative point chips at the end of each age by comparing your military strength to that of your neighbors; blue cards (“civilian structures”), which give points at the end of the game; green “scientific” cards, which give points based on the having both multiples of the same cards and different kinds; and even cards that give you points based on what cards your neighbors have.

It all makes sense once you’ve played it.

Art: Although some of the iconography was not especially intuitive, resources were easy to tell apart, most of the cards could be figured out once a few had been explained, and the art, including the images on the Wonder boards, was quite lovely. There were bold colors that made the different kinds of cards easily distinguishable, which was useful.

Conclusion: I very much enjoyed 7 Wonders, turns went much quicker than I expected (and since they happen simultaneously, even playing with the maximum of 7 players shouldn’t take much longer), and I’m looking forward to playing it again soon.

Defenders of the Realm

Game: Defenders of the Realm with 4 players

Play: Each player is a character with certain abilities that help with the fight against the four monster Generals and their minions (minions!). Each General has a number of hit points, and certain abilities that you have to take into account when attacking it and penalties if you lose. Darkness Spreads cards (drawn at the end of each turn) cause minions to appear on regions around the board and the Generals to move from regions near the edge of the board toward the city in the center. Hero cards help players do things like travel quickly around the board, and are necessary to attack Generals. Quest cards can get you cool stuff, if you get around to completing them, and are worth points at the end of the game.

Fight minions by stopping in the region they’re in, use an action, and roll dice to try and kill them. There is a maximum of 3 minions per region but they can be different colors, so there are three dice for each General’s color provided, to mix-and-match depending on what you’re fighting. That turned out to be much more useful than we originally expected, since different monsters require a different number to defeat (orcs 3+, dragons 5+, etc).

Art: Fabulous minis with amazing detail - the Generals even have crests on their flags! The character cards are gorgeous (I could do without the ’80s hair and metal bikini on the Barbarian, but on the other hand, half the characters are female!). The map is enormous - the only one I’ve ever seen bigger is Arkham Horror - but the art is lovely and it’s easy to distinguish the regions (the spaces you move on) from the background.

The dotted path that shows connections between regions isn’t always easy to see, and finding regions would be easier with a coordinate system like some other boards have. Also, the font on the board isn’t the easiest to read, though we got used to it eventually, and the text on the cards was sometimes too small to easily read, particularly on the Darkness Spreads cards.

Conclusion: The rules could use some editing (for punctuation as well as to streamline them and make them easier to understand) but are generally not bad. There are a few bits included that sound like the Generals mocking the puny humans who come to face them, which are funny and I rather wish there were more.

We played twice, we lost twice. The first time, the cards were against us (or we hadn’t shuffled enough…) plus we didn’t know what we were doing, and we lost pretty quickly. The second time, we were so close! We’d killed three of the four Generals, and then unfortunately I had a totally failed roll against the final general (five dice and not one hit! ouch!) and then everything just collapsed.

It’s essentially Pandemic, with monsters instead of diseases. There are a few twists, but the basic idea is the same. Although there are enough differences that if you don’t care for Pandemic but do like monster-killing games with intricate minis, you might give it a try anyway. I definitely plan to play this again, although because it’s so long (3+ hours) and has a max of 4 players, it takes special scheduling to do so.

Felinia

Game: Felinia with 4 players

Play: Purchase goods in the market, use the goods to board ships in the harbor, sail the ships to the neighboring island, and exchange the goods for tokens that give you points.

Art: It was pretty, but sometimes that’s not enough. There are definite problems with this game’s design - orange goods blend in with the market background; the colors on the island, the ships, and the goods are all supposed to match but they don’t at all; there are fun little images on the goods (clothes, food, wine, etc) but those images aren’t anywhere else so they’re not useful for color-blind people or when the colors are hard to distinguish.

Also, there are 3-dimensional ships that are entirely superfluous, they’re awkward, they get in the way, they’re not even particularly cute. I would prefer, instead of 3D ships with changing deck pieces to distinguish what goods go on them, they’d used just the deck pieces as flat representations of ships and made the squares indicating the goods larger and easier to see.

Conclusion: Speaking of superfluous, this game is - sort of - cat themed. The market is in the city of Katzburg and the island is Felinia and each player represents a family of - cat merchants? But it’s all in name only; none of the goods have any cat themes and all the cat stuff could vanish and it wouldn’t change the game a bit.

Overall, it was kind of mediocre. There were a lot of fiddly, over-explained rules that could be stated much clearer. Having “gold” and also “money” as separate things was perhaps not the best choice, when in many games money is gold. It took about two or so hours for a run-through with 4 beginners. It might be more fun a second time, but I’m not in a hurry to find out.

Small World

Game: Small World with Tales & Legends expansion and 5 players

Play: Choose a race/special ability combination from the visible cards, then use it to conquer regions on the map, which often involves defeating other players’ races (and what’s not fun about that?). At the end of your turn, you get coins (points) for every region you occupy, sometimes with additional bonuses because of the race or ability. The game ends after 8 rounds.

The Tales & Legends expansion is a pack of cards that add twists to each round. Some are helpful (Baby Boom gives each player an extra race token) and some may cause problems (Malediction forces each player to abandon an occupied region). There are 54 cards to choose from and 7 cards are used during a game.

Art: I love (most of) the art for Small World. The map is amazingly detailed, the races are hilariously and beautifully illustrated, and even the coins are different metallic colors for different numbers (which is unusual enough to be noteworthy).

I’m not fond of the ridiculous art on the Amazons, the sole race with a female depicted on their tiles. They are powerful, which is cool, but wearing only leaves and tattoos to battle is ridiculous; give the girl some armor! There is a mini-expansion which I haven’t used called “Grand Dames”, which adds three more races represented by (albeit also scantily-clad) females. It’s something, I guess.

The art on Tales & Legends was also well done, and very funny - for example on the Baby Boom card, there is a baby Sorcerer that has a goatee and funky eyebrows (think evil Spock) just like the adult Sorcerer.

Conclusion: Beautiful, fun, and works well for many or few players. I really enjoy playing it occasionally.

I would play again with the expansion too, although some of the wording on the cards is unclear (for example, whether a card takes effect at the beginning of a round or the beginning of each player’s turn) and I could imagine a group agreeing to leave out certain cards if their effects were too powerful (as we have done in other games).

Dungeon Lords

Game: Dungeon Lords with 4 players

Play: Prepare your dungeon for the oncoming adventurers by digging tunnels and rooms, acquiring monsters, and setting traps. Make sure you don’t get too evil, or the Paladin will come!

Art: Love it. Love it! It is gorgeous and hilarious. There is an evilometer with a fangy smiley face to track when your evilness raises and lowers. There are little plastic imps that dig tunnels and activate rooms. There are cards for all the different monsters and adventurers with wonderful pictures.

Conclusion: Dungeon Lords is lots of fun, very entertaining, and I would definitely play it again. I didn’t read the rules myself (my friends had played it before) but I’m told they’re just as witty as the art.

Game: Android with 5 players

Play: Arkham Horror-type game with a Blade Runner-type theme. Beyond that, too complicated to even begin to describe.

Art: Fantastic. The board was gorgeous, the bits were gorgeous (and plentiful - oh, were they plentiful!), the cards were gorgeous.

Conclusion: There were things I really liked, such as the mechanic for moving around the board and the way we had to deal with our characters personal issues as well as the murder mystery. However, it took us almost three hours just to set up and read the rules, after which we barely had time to get through half a game. I am willing, but not especially excited, to try it again.