Board games at pax unplugged, and not much else…
Time for another short flight, after a three day weekend at PAX Unplugged.
My friend was there with her new boyfriend, and he hadn’t played modern board games before, so much of this weekend was spent introducing him to various styles of games.
Friday we started with Azul, a tile drafting and placement game, which I like better than the second iteration, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, which I learned at BGG in Dallas. It’s a neat tactical game which has a strong ability to screw your left hand neighbor. I was the subject of some screwage by the new player, who enjoyed that aspect of the game immensely. I did well anyway, as I’m pretty familiar with the game, and I tend to be good at spatial games.
I forget the order of the rest of the day, but we played String Railway Transport, which is a Japan-only release, and a follow up to String Railways, which I’ve not played. I’m a big fan of this one, since it’s a pick up and deliver game without any economics. Each turn is represented by one of the six strings of your color, which you lay down carefully between scattered paper city squares to create routes. Then on your turn you can move cubes based on action points, then collect the cubes to make sets of different colors. I did well, but I never upgraded my train to gain more action points, which was intentional but probably led me to fall short of the win. I was very efficient with my turns, but it wasn’t quite enough.
We played Las Vegas, which is a light dice rolling game that’s easy to learn. It has a lot of table talk and lobbying, which is generally best ignored, but sometimes succeeds in changing someone’s decision. In this game you roll a handful of six sided dice, and then choose a set of them to put on a casino of the same number. So if you roll three threes you have to put all three on the 3 casino spot. Each turn you roll your dice again so there is no long term strategy, just tactical response. Once everyone is out of dice the round ends and the person with the most dice on a given casino wins the highest value scoring card. The second card, if any is taken by the next most dice, etc. The trick is that any ties are discarded, so when two people each have 4 dice and a third person has one, the one wins. This makes for some interesting interplay.
We played Spyrium, without the newbie, which is a worker placement game without any blocking. The placement spots are between the cards in a 3 by 3 array. You place meeples and later remove them to get money or cards in exchange for the money. I liked it better than I remember liking it.
We played On Tour, which is a new route building game. Each player has a personal dry erase board of the United States, with most adjacent states connected by dotted lines. Each turn three cards are drawn, showing regions such as “east” and a state such as Florida. Then two d10 dice are rolled, e.g. 37. Each player decides to put a 37 in one state in an indicated region, and a 73 in another. At the end of the game a route is drawn using only increasing numbers. It’s quite different and pretty fun. It plays any number of players, since it’s essentially a solitaire game, but the base game only comes with 4 boards. They sell more boards, but that quickly drives up the cost. I feel it should come with 6.
We played No Thanks, which is one of my favorite filler games.
We played Qwirkle after dinner, which is sort of like Scrabble with symbols instead of letters. You build out the same way in a common area, scoring points for added tiles similarly, though more simply. Tiles in a row must either be all the same shape or all the same color, with the opposite feature being unique within a string of tiles. It’s also a fun filler, though I think I like Qwirkle Cubes better, which allows rolling the dice on your turn to try for a more useful face.
Sunday three of us played It’s a Wonderful World, a card drafting game which feels a bit like a streamlined 7 Wonders. Cards drafted are either “recycled” for a displayed resource or moved into a production area to have other resources deposited on them. When completely filled they become part of a production engine. One neat feature is that production happens serially with each color going in turn, white, black, green, gold, blue. This means if you build a blue-producing card using a black cube then the blue card will produce later in the round. This is a fun puzzle! There are a couple of other rules but not many. It’s a very solid drafting game with nice art.
We got back with our group of five to play Irish Gauge, a train themed stock game. It looks like an 18xx game, but is much simpler and plays pretty quickly. It’s a lot more like Airlines Europe (or the earlier Union Pacific) than 1830 or Steam.
Last we played Queendomino, which is a more complicated version of Kingdomino. I enjoyed it, but I am more likely to play Kingdomino, since it’s simpler, with the same core mechanism. The complexity added in Queendomino is worse for new players and isn’t clever enough to engage heavier gamers. I lost horribly since I mostly ignored the new mechanisms.
Three of us played while two rounded up some food from Reading Market. We wanted to be sure they went since the other three of us had been many times in past years. It’s quite a spectacle, and the food is varied and good. It’s along the same lines as the Quincy Market area of Boston.
We ate quickly in one of the hotels, checked out and called a car. I watched some football with my friend before his flight to Seattle and mine to RDU.
Well, I’m back on the ground safely. That’s all for now.
H