The Games I played at Expo Part 2

Continuing my run through of the games I played at the expo...

The TL;DR

Megacity Oceania – beautiful, simple game but deviously brilliant
Dragon's Breath - Interesting twist on Kerplunk!'s mechanics
Namiji – spiritual descendant of Tokaido, but misses that game's gentle beats with some frustrating mechanics
Arkosa - in development engine building game where you try and impress the rescuers enough to escape the hostile planet
Silver - Hidden information card game with more to come
Sierra West – Game of the Expo, so much going on any to explore, but so cleanly done!

Mega City Oceania

The wise man built his house on the ocean... wait that can't be right?

This game was a wonderful surprise and hadn’t been on my radar before the con. As architects of a Mega City Oceania you collect contracts, building materials and the platforms to build on during your turns and while it’s not your turn though you build! This turn structure means you’re almost always involved in the action and has you sweating your build hoping to have it complete by the time your turn comes round.

The contracts you’re trying to fulfil make loads of demands, from the building’s height, to the number of pieces, which materials cannot to be used as well as insisting on arches and courtyards on different levels. Once you have all the features on your platform (which also adds requirements) you can stop the game and everyone remains motionless with baited breath as you carefully ferry the precarious structure you’ve built on your platform out to the centre of the table to add it to the city.

The mixture of planning and strategy with dexterity and a delicate touch is wonderful and the results of your efforts look awesome on the table!

My one observation would be that the neoprene mat we played on is a pretty vital part of the game, one we were told wasn’t going to be standard and I think that’s a mistake. Given the need to slide your platforms across the table, without this playmat there were will be a significant number of textured tables on which this game is simply unplayable.

One I hope to purchase, if it comes with the playmat.

Dragon's Breath

From the keen interest at the Habba stand and the fact they’d sold out on Friday its clear that this was a popular game.

A pile of gems are surrounded by a series of plastic rings in the centre of the board. On a player’s turn they remove a ring with gems spilling out, but before they do, each other player selects a colour of gem to collect this turn. In a great twist on the Kerplunk! mechanic players get to manipulate which gems fall (or try to). Vibrant and colourful, this game will appeal to kids, but has enough depth to appeal to adults as a fun dex game.

Not sure if I’ll pick this one up, but it certainly was a nice twist on this type of game.

Namiji

Hearing there was a successor to Tokaido coming out, this was a game I was eager to see. Still in prototype, the structure of the game was clean and you could see that it would have a look and feel similar to its predecessor, with the thematic change that in Namiji players go on a fishing trip.

I love the change to the movement mechanics providing real choice and incentive to rush ahead. Arrival at the ‘Inns’ doesn’t automatically place you next in line, but offers you the choice to place yourself where you’d like in the order. Place yourself first and you’ll get the best bonus selection, but place yourself last and you get to move ahead first, perhaps snagging the next spot you need. The shrimp mechanics are also great with a push your luck element as you try to avoid catching the crabs. Overall I like most of what I saw with the game except, somewhat unfortunately given its theme, the fishing mechanics.

The game makes quite a lot of fishing, with your player board dominated by a 4x3 net. You score victory points for filling in horizontal or vertical lines with the same colour or type of fish. There are also 12 spaces around the board given up to fishing as well as 4 or 5 net spaces not to mention the numerous goal and bonus cards that interact with these two options.

The first player to land on a fishing space draws a blind tile from the ocean to be added to their ship’s net and are then required to turn another tile face up. The next time someone fishes they can either take a blind tile or select a previously revealed tile, and then they also flip a tile. On your first fishing action you can add any fish to your net in the top left corner, but from then on you must be able to match colour or fish type to an exposed edge in your net. This means your next blind flip may provide a non-matching fish that you must simply throw back, face up. The net spaces are even more punishing as you reveal the next face down double tile in a pile and simply hope that it matches something you already have, if it doesn’t it's simply returned to the bottom of the pile. The result is a mechanic that is set up to ensure you have turns that achieve nothing.

What Tokaido did masterfully was allow players to block and hamper each other indirectly and always leave you feeling that your desire to take advantage of other opportunities is what resulted in you missing out. Namiji does that in a bunch of places, but unfortunately the fishing mechanics themselves seem destined to serve up moments of disappointment. In its current form one I’d skip.

Arkosa

Created by a designer local to me, I had to stop by and try out her new game in development. Light-hearted and fun, this game has a darker side as each player takes control of a bunker on a hostile world, hoping to be the ones picked up by the rescue ship that’s on its way. You can ensure your colony is the one rescued by being popular and treating your colonists well, or burn the resources they need to survive to pander to the egos of the rescuers.

Still undergoing iterative playtesting, this one looks like a well themed euro, blending resource management and engine building. Its theme though makes me want it to have more player interactions, but I’m not sure where they’d fit in.

Silver

Bezier's usual comic art graces the cards

New from Bezier and apparently part of a series of games due out over the next couple of years this simple card game blends hidden information with a push your luck mechanic as each player try to have the least important villages at the end of the round, with a game played over several rounds.

You begin knowing the identity of two of your five face-down villagers and through play either discard these or exchange them with face-up cards from the discard pile or cards drawn from the deck. Each character card has a different value and an ability that is triggered either when it is discarded or when it is face-up in your village.

As the round progresses you gain more information about your village, but your opponents are doing the same - the trick is to realise when you have a low enough total to call the vote ending the round. If you have the least you score nothing, while opponents score the total on their cards, if you’ve not got the lowest though you score your cards plus a 10 point penalty.

While I greatly enjoyed the game I played and the idea of a range of versions that are interchangeable is appealing, I worry that from a strategic perspective you’re incentivised not to call the vote and I’d want to play a bit more before I committed to buying it.

Sierra West

I only finally got a chance to play this late on Sunday as the demo copy was constantly in use all weekend, but it was worth the wait; this was my game of the con.

Featuring just two, no wait three, errmm sorry four, worker meeples, this game manages to get them to do a lot!

First off you have a worker exploring the mountains, finding new resources (cards) for you to add to your deck and expanding the orchard. While this makes it sound like a deck builder that is only a small part of the game as I only went through my deck once during the demo and I imagine that a longer game wouldn’t see you clear your deck more than 3-4 times.

Next up is your wagon which controls how many apples you can collect from the orchard, the further along you progress the more you can collect, but only if the orchards have been revealed by the explorers.

Finally there are the two I was originally thinking of who control most of the actions you take. They stay on your personal board, except while they’re doing summit actions I guess. These two can be used to activate buildings in your camp or capitalize on opponents actions, then progress on your turn across two distinct tracks made up of the cards you drew at the end of last turn. These cards allow different options depending on how they are arranged and provide the summit actions you can take at the end of your turn… okay let me stop I think I have this confused.

There is an amazing amount of choice and decision making in this game, but all of it is handled so well and defined so cleanly. The icons make sense and the actions are clean and staged so that you can manage one action at a time.

Oh and all that stuff I mentioned about orchards and apples? That would have made a wonderful and deeply replayable game, but that’s only in one of four different modules provided in the box. Each module subtly changes the game while maintaining the core mechanics and there are already plans afoot for modules in the future.

The only reason I didn’t leave with a copy of this game is that it wasn’t available.