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Tabletop Weekly Discussion #4 - What's the last game you played?
This is a recurring thread in ~games.tabletop where we can talk about board games in a fun way. Feel free to discuss boardgames in any way you want! Each week I add a guiding topic / question, just to help things along:
What's the last game you played?
I have not played this yet but I just saw this on my news feed and now I have to know.
This is amazing!
I finally got the chance to play Lost Cities! I've heard it was a classic two player game for years, but could never find it. Then I found it and bought a copy, but never had a chance to play it for months. But, this weekend I got to play it!
I don't think I have much to say that hasn't been said by everyone else who's reviewed the game online. It's an elegant two-player card game with a surprising amount of depth. It's a lot lighter than another one of Knizia's two-player card games I've played, Battle Line/Schotten Totten—and that's a good thing, since Battle Line would give me a headache after one game. :p Each turn is an interesting decision to be made despite being simply "play a card, draw a card," with a particular focus on risk management.
If you want an easy to teach, quick, and satisfying two-player card game, Lost Cities does what it does very well. Unless you like really thematic games—the artwork is super pretty, but the theme is paper thin. Overall, I definitely recommend it.
Finally played Brass Birmingham. Ordered one for myself. Wonderful! Everything i was hoping for.
A little fiddly on some rules, but what heavy games doesn't have that? 9/10 easy.
The last game I played is unfortunately the same answer to last week's discussion for me so I'm going to pick the second last game that I played, which was Castle Panic!
Castle PanicQ is a very kid friendly game that claims to be good for ages 10 and up, but my 5 year old son had no problem playing it. It's a cooperative game for up to 6 players; there's a pool of monsters surrounding your castle, which is in the middle of the board, and every turn more monsters spawn and march inexorably towards you. You get cards, which you play to kill monsters; if the monsters swarm the castle, you lose. There's a secondary objective to be the player to kill the most monsters (if you want to keep score).
This isn't a game that I would play with a group of adults. It has very little depth, but as games you can play with five year olds go, it's enjoyable. The mechanic mostly revolves around drawing cards and trading them to your friends accordingly so that they can kill monsters at the right time. Each card typically deals 1 damage; monsters have 1 to 3 hit points. Some of the monsters have interesting abilities that will wreck your board state, so sometimes all the planning you make is for naught; you don't always win just because you played well, so there's a bit of an opportunity for kids to learn about that. Not trying to hammer on this too much, but this is definitely one of our go-to games for kids, because it's a great "intro to strategizing" sort of a game, and also serves as a good introduction to co-operative gaming.