This week I have been sorting out some thing with the new
house; it’s an ongoing project and has left very little time for playing games!
Most of the games I’ve played this week have been board games, which is just as
well really, since as you all saw last week, I’ve got quite a few to get
through…
 |
| There's just something about that tin... |
The most significant one for me and Kirsty was Forbidden
Desert, which we played a few nights ago. This is a game in which you play a
team of explorers who have crash-landed in a city buried by sand, and have to
race against time and the weather to find the four parts of a flying machine
that can get you to safety. Once we’d figured out the game mechanics, how to
find the various parts and what to do with them, we beat the game on its
easiest setting – though not before an extremely tense moment where we would
both die of thirst if we drew one more Sun card!
I’m a fan of Matt Leacocks’s board games, and the very
distinct style of mechanic that comes with them. I also like the co-operative
nature of the games, as I often find with board games that the winner comes
down to the level of experience a player has with a game – not so when it’s a
shared objective. As we played Forbidden Desert for the first time, we found
ourselves making the comparison with Pandemic, and realising that we were
probably enjoying the Forbidden series more. Are the Forbidden games better
than Pandemic, which since its release has spawned a second edition, two Legacy
games and several spin-offs including the obligatory Cthulu version? That’s a
matter of opinion. But where Pandemic can be a stress-inducing headache where
you never have quite enough in the tank to do everything that needs to be done
to stop a global pandemic, (not to mention that the subject matter of Pandemic
is a little on the nose these days!) the Forbidden games appear to be more of
an Indiana Jones-style pulp-adventure. There’s not quite as much at stake;
you’re finding lost relics, and if you don’t manage to do it then you have
little to blame but your own hubris in looking for them in the first place.
Game mechanics are important of course, but I think in this case, the theme of
the Forbidden games may prove a more enjoyable experience for us.
 |
| Watch how you're spelling Dominoes, by the way. Otherwise all you'll get is pizza. |
One of the other games we’d played, that I’d not played for
a good long while, is Dominoes. We’ve all played Dominoes, but it had been a
while since either me or Kirsty played it; we had to look up the rules online
because our version of the game was missing the rules. (They were probably
there at some point but had been lost in the mists of time.) It was an
interesting experience, depending as much on luck as anything else. I won two
games and Kirsty won one, but it came down to drawing the right tiles! An
enjoyable game, if a little short.
We also had a go with Misty; the simple card drafting and
placement game Kirsty bought me for Valentines’ day. It’s an easy enough game
to play and understand but there’s a definite strategy for winning – making
sure all your moving cards are placed well and go in the right order – which
I’ve figured out, but Kirsty isn’t quite there yet. Also, I suspect that
playing the game with multiple players would be a very different experience –
hopefully we’ll be able to find out in the not-too-distant future!
 |
| You can only save at Castles, funnily enough... |
Finally, when I did manage to get one of my consoles
working, I had a go at New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. This
competently-designed and gentle platformer is always a good one to pick up and
play, and, as with many of the later Mario games, enough going on to satisfy
the completionists among us! Right now, I’ll be happy to get to the end of the
game, which at this point I’m not too far away from.
I also bought a new Xbox 360 so we’ll see what happens with
that…
No comments:
Post a Comment