AMK's Journal

BEYOND THE SUN is a tech-tree game, where players are factions striving to build an interstellar empire. Developing a level 1 technology, like robotics, clears the way to develop a level 2 tech such as Psionics or Spacetime Anomaly Studies, up to level 4 techs like Megafleet Construction or Parallel Universe Generatory. There's also a small exploration board where you move spaceships to get a majority on a star system card and can colonize a system to claim it permanently for points. It's a brain-burning series of decisions about converting resources between Ore, Population, and Spaceships, which techs to claim, and which planets to choose.

(We also played a much lighter tech-tree game, TRIBES: DAWN OF HUMANITY, where you develop cooking, smelting, and agriculture. It was OK, but we played it after BEYOND THE SUN, so it felt too simple.)

CIRCADIANS: FIRST LIGHT has a similar interplanetary exploration theme, but uses dice management and worker placement as its primary mechanic. You roll your worker dice, and send them to different locations where they can produce resources, improve the player board representing your exploration base, or earn you more dice. Getting more dice is important because you earn points by permanently committing dice to different locations. It's hard to recover if someone takes the spot you wanted; on a few occasions Barb took a location first and then I couldn't find anything to do with the die earmarked for it. The game is a constant struggle to meet your goals.

Another one we liked: WISHLAND, where you assemble a tableau of cards and move up several scoring tracks to score points. Barb is a sucker for a circus or amusement-park theme, and some of these games aren't that great, but WISHLAND gives you many choices.

On the lighter side:

CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS is a card-drafting game by Richard Garfield, who apparently really likes drafting as he also uses it in MAGIC: THE GATHERING and BUNNY KINGDOM. Here you collect terrain in order to get monsters as well as final-scoring cards. It moves quickly since everyone makes their choices at the same time, I enjoyed trying to plan to collect the cards I reserved, and I like its monstrous-Victorian aesthetic, though some of the art is a bit cheesecake-ish.

CORALIA is a set-collection game where you roll dice to occupy spaces on the reef and collect fish cards. It's comparable to OCEANOS in both its underwater theme and being quick to play, and I often enjoy dice games.

We found two good Pandemic-type cooperative games:

In THE LOOP, you need to travel to different time eras pursuing the villainous Dr Faux, removing the duplicates of himself and repairing the rifts in time that he constantly spawns. Once an era gets its fourth rift, it collapses into a time vortex and you get more desperate. We battled valiantly but lost, probably because we chose our roles poorly, but had great fun.

ENDANGERED was similarly harsh. Tigers are scattered on a board where they're threatened by deforestation. You need to keep the tigers alive while also applying influence cubes to 7 countries, in hope of meeting 4 of their required conditions to pass a vote protecting the species. We won on our first vote thanks to a lucky die roll, but it was difficult.

And two physically-based games:

DIVE is a programming game where you have a stack of 60-ish transparent plastic tiles that you stack and then peer at. Each round, you predict which of the first five tiles are hazardous due to a shark image on the tile and which ones aren't. How buried does that shark look -- is it on level 3 or 4? For each correct prediction, you move a step along a racing track. I was terrible at this game, usually off by one, but it worked really well.

The other game, THE FACELESS, is a less successful experiment, though I'd love to have a copy for a weekend to see if we could get better at it. It's another co-op game, where you move a team of kids through a Tim Burton-esque nightmare world searching for the 8 memories to rescue their friend but threatened by the creepy Billygoat and his three hench-demons. Your team is represented by a compass and the demon miniatures all have magnets in their bases; when you move N steps, you always move in the direction indicated by the red end of the compass needle. Cards let you reposition and rotate the monsters to steer your team. At times this was too random, because the magnets don't affect your compass when they're far away, but it was an intriguing idea, and I wonder if more practice would let us avoid this.

Finally, we played two introductory games:

THE PRINCESS BRIDE ADVENTURE BOOK GAME is a hand-management game where you have a hand of cards in the suits Love, Intrigue, Revenge, and Adventure, and play them to move the characters over a map in a book and meet goals, like having Buttercup and Westley on the same space and discarding two Adventures and a Love. It was a clever adaptation of the movie storyline and we had fun, but it was pretty easy: Barb and I played straight through all six chapters without ever failing one.

SCOOBY-DOO: ESCAPE FROM THE HAUNTED MANSION was also fun and simulates a point-and-click computer game. Each character in the Mystery Gang has a standee with a number: Velma is 1, Scooby is 4, etc. Objects in a room have numbers, like an armoire with a code of 418. If you want to have Velma investigate it, look up entry 1418 in Velma's book; look up 4418 if you want to have Scooby sniff it, or 2418 if you want Shaggy to try eating it. ("Like, I'm hungry man, but not that hungry.") We got stuck a few times, in a game aimed at 10-year-olds. At least we identified the culprit posing as the ghost of the deceased Lady Fairmont? It's a play-it-once game, so we don't need to play it again.

That's not every game we played -- we played 30 new-to-us titles -- but these games were the highlights.