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New (and second-hand) games
Jul. 25th, 2009 02:19 pmDo you find to tend to spend money in bursts? I go for ages not buying (e.g.) a new game or new music, then suddenly something piques my interest and I buy a load at once. Which usually leaves me with a pile of new items to work through, rather than the more sensible approach of buying one every so often.
In this case, the burst was triggered by the second-hand games stall at Manorcon, where I picked up a few goodies. At least, I hope they turn out to be good; I've only played one of them before. That one is the classic Hare and Tortoise, which is usually sold as a kid's game but is good fun for adults too. The gimmick is that you can play cards individually to advance slowly and steadily, or you can advance further by spending more cards but this will leave you needing more cards, which you can only collect by going backwards. There's a little, but not much, more to it than that. At heart, it's a simple race game but with enough tweaks to be quite challenging.
There were a lot of small games for sale and I didn't recognise any of them. I took a punt on Bazaar, by Sid Sackson, which seems quite simple. I've no idea how good it is.
I bought one larger game which was on my list of games to try sometime, which was Byzantium by Martin Wallace. His most popular games are probably Age of Steam and Brass, which have economic themes. I'd like to try those sometime but for now I'm more interested by his teaks on war-based games. We've played Struggle of Empires a few times and it works well (barring one rule which has too much luck involved). The twist to that game is that, in each turn, players must form alliances and allied players cannot attack each other. In Byzantium, the twist is that the players don't represent individual sides in the war (Arabs vs. Byzantines). Instead, they can control armies on each side and accumulate two sets of victory points each. At the end of the game, if your two totals are sufficiently close, you add them together; if you've favoured one side over the other, you score only the highest value. It seems interesting.
Finally, someone was selling excess stock of the Sauron extension to Lord of the Rings, still shrink-wrapped, for £3, so I snapped up a copy.
Since returning from Manorcon, I've also ordered the two expansions to Race for the Galaxy. Since we play that quite a bit, it seems a worthwhile investment. I've also bought Citadels, which V&A played with us at Xmas. This could make a good holiday game, I think. It's simpler than Race for the Galaxy while being in the same vein. Finally, I picked up a copy of Guillotine, for a fun filler game.
In this case, the burst was triggered by the second-hand games stall at Manorcon, where I picked up a few goodies. At least, I hope they turn out to be good; I've only played one of them before. That one is the classic Hare and Tortoise, which is usually sold as a kid's game but is good fun for adults too. The gimmick is that you can play cards individually to advance slowly and steadily, or you can advance further by spending more cards but this will leave you needing more cards, which you can only collect by going backwards. There's a little, but not much, more to it than that. At heart, it's a simple race game but with enough tweaks to be quite challenging.
There were a lot of small games for sale and I didn't recognise any of them. I took a punt on Bazaar, by Sid Sackson, which seems quite simple. I've no idea how good it is.
I bought one larger game which was on my list of games to try sometime, which was Byzantium by Martin Wallace. His most popular games are probably Age of Steam and Brass, which have economic themes. I'd like to try those sometime but for now I'm more interested by his teaks on war-based games. We've played Struggle of Empires a few times and it works well (barring one rule which has too much luck involved). The twist to that game is that, in each turn, players must form alliances and allied players cannot attack each other. In Byzantium, the twist is that the players don't represent individual sides in the war (Arabs vs. Byzantines). Instead, they can control armies on each side and accumulate two sets of victory points each. At the end of the game, if your two totals are sufficiently close, you add them together; if you've favoured one side over the other, you score only the highest value. It seems interesting.
Finally, someone was selling excess stock of the Sauron extension to Lord of the Rings, still shrink-wrapped, for £3, so I snapped up a copy.
Since returning from Manorcon, I've also ordered the two expansions to Race for the Galaxy. Since we play that quite a bit, it seems a worthwhile investment. I've also bought Citadels, which V&A played with us at Xmas. This could make a good holiday game, I think. It's simpler than Race for the Galaxy while being in the same vein. Finally, I picked up a copy of Guillotine, for a fun filler game.
