Flux (Zombie)
- I had previously played the base game of Flux last semester and I had enjoyed what I played. The idea that the rules continually shift as the game progresses interested me. This was my first time playing the Zombie version. One thing that I did not like was the pacing of the late game. Everyone took a long time to reacclimate to rule changes and to consider their options which made it boring to wait for your next turn. Our group made an adjustment for the subsequent playthrough that I deemed “Speed-Flux”. I started a 20 second timer on my phone and each player had exactly that long to complete their turn. This was especially frantic because sometimes you would draw a card that you were not familiar with that had a lot of text that you would need to read so this rule forced you to skim read in order to complete your turn. The chaos that this created was fun although I think a slightly longer timer would be good if it was being used in a more serious setting.
Love Letter
- This game was great! We got a grasp of the rules really quickly and were underway within a minute. On the first turn I had two of the highest ranked cards, meaning that I was forced to play one of them which is an automatic loss, however I was not perturbed by this because the length of the round is so quick. I particularly liked the strategy element of deductive reasoning trying to figure out what card your opponent(s) have.
Munchkin Gloom
- I have played the original Munchkin game in the past although it has been at least several years since then. This was my first time playing the “Gloom” variant. The most notable thing about this game is the quality of the cards. These things are awesome! The transparent plastic lines up when you stack the cards on top of each other to make adding up character stats very easy. In terms of gameplay, there was some confusion and frustration within my group regarding the objective. By the time we were underway, people seemed to be mostly over this game. I think this would have especially benefited from having one person in the group who has played before, and I would be open to trying to play again, although my group only had the one playthrough.
Tokaido
- This game was especially unique compared to what we have played this semester. Players progressed across the board and stopped wherever they chose in order to collect cards, money, and other such things. No one was exactly sure what the winning strategy would be for this so all players seemed to focus on different things. Although players are competing against each other, it usually didn’t seem to make sense to pursue the same objectives, like for example, the panels. If one player had already collected two out of four of the panels, other players were disincentivized from trying to collect them as well because only the first player to complete it would score the bonus. Perhaps a more obvious strategy would arise given the opportunity to play this game more than just the one time. Overall, in my opinion, it wasn’t very fun although the cool theme did make up for this slightly.
Dominion
- We played an abbreviated version of this game, having only cheap cards available to purchase and stopping before even reaching the endgame. From what I saw of this, I really liked the concept. The idea of making choices to build a deck from cards that are available to all of the players is very interesting. I also really like the progression of currency where later in the game, it becomes possible to get cards that are worth more. I especially like that you can replay this game with different cards available because this opens up so much in the way of replayability.
Takenoko
- I am still not entirely sure that we played this correctly. The premise of this game is that players build out the board and grow bamboo that is later collected and used to score points. It was never clear what the dominant strategy was for this game. Points could also be scored based on score layout so depending on the state of the board, you could draw a card that immediately scores points. I would be interested to see this game played out multiple times to see what the average number of tiles that are played is. I couldn’t tell if our game would have been more fun if we spent more time placing tiles or less. Overall, this is another game with a fun theme that I am not totally sold on mechanically yet.
Bang
- This game combined a lot of elements from previous games that I had played including hidden roles, drawing cards and hand management, and special character abilities. I particularly enjoyed the theme of the country western art and having text written in the Italian language in addition to English. An enjoyable development that happened in our playthrough of the game was that players would attack each other for fun, even if they knew that their roles were working towards the same goal. Having people be “traitors” was honestly very on brand for the game theme and it made gameplay seem a little more intense because it was every person for themselves.
Splendor
- The premise of collecting gems and accumulating points with the cards in the middle is very simple but . I found this game interesting because every player has an equal opportunity (at least in the start of the game) to pick whatever they would like. As the game progressed, certain gems would get kind of gridlocked because two players were both trying to collect that color but neither had enough to score in order to return theirs to the circulation. Multiple people in the class have games that involve collecting resources and crafting so I highly recommend that others try this out to at least get a sense of it.