The Yellow Meeple’s First Impressions 22nd January – 11th February 2017

There’s not a huge amount of new games to talk about this time. In fact I’m trying to not buy any new games during the month of February, which is proving really difficult! At least this is giving us the opportunity to try and reduce the number of sad, unplayed games on our shelves. We’ve gone from 20 to 18 in the last few days!

Here are Yellow Meeple’s first impressions;

·        The Castles of Burgundy has been lent to us by a new friend. I’ve heard great things about it as one of the classic games that plays well, and possibly best, with two players. The game certainly doesn’t look like much with a lot of fiddly components, but the mechanics are really well thought out and the game really flows. Essentially on your turn you roll dice and their result determines which actions they are applicable to. On my first turn this was a completely paralysing problem, but quickly you start to develop a series of short and long term goals and the game flows really quickly. For a medium weight euro game, we were very surprised that it played in under one hour. We’re going to try and play this lots whilst we have it on loan an then if we miss it I imagine well be very happy to buy it for our own collection.

·        Village Port has been on our shelves for a very long time. We really enjoyed the base game of Village and decided to expand it for more variety. Since we bought the expansion I don’t think we’ve played Village at all...The Port expansions adds two modular element – one is life goals and the other is a voyage that replaces the standard travelling element of the base game. The life goals typically need you to acquire a specific set of items or conditions at the same time to gain a victory point bonus. The voyages are definitely more complex than the original travelling, rewarding points for loading your boat with up to 3 unique items and delivering them to different islands. In addition you can then pick up commodities, bring them back to port and then sell them at the market. I learnt at my expense that you have to start planning and travelling early on to really make the most of it. It’s a nice expansion but it only adds a game alternative rather than extra content. We’ll probably keep it separate from the base game and switch between the two variants when we play.

·        Greed was first recommended to me at a local game store as an introduction to drafting. At the time I turned it down, but having played and enjoyed many drafting games since, Greed has always been in the back of my mind. Greed is a very pure drafting game, pick one card for your hand, play one card from your hand and pass the remaining cards around the table. What provides the real gameplay here is your ability to create winning combinations of buildings, people and actions. Many cards have a need or payment which allows you to play them which typically relys on previous plays. Very quickly your tableau of cards can dwindle, destroying some prior planning. The game is very simple, but personally I found it hard to lock on to a good strategy. I’d like to try again, but I feel there are many drafting games I’d rather play.

There’s so little time to play new board games at the moment. This weekend my parents are visiting so there is an opportunity to introduce them to new games – I’m thinking of Potion Explosion and Codenames as good candidates as well as their usual favourites like Ticket to Ride, Blokus and Qwirkle. We’re also still waiting to finish Imperial Assault so we can start on Mechs vs. Minions – I’m so excited, we might have to play it 2-player rather than wait for one meet-up every fortnight.