The day after Dragonmeet I met up with friends and played some boardgames. Just capturing a few impressions here.
Sentinels of the Multiverse
A co-op card game in which a troop of superheroes battle a villain plus cohorts. You each choose which hero you’d like to play (from a cast of several), with each having their own deck of cards – abilities, equipment and so on. And there are several different villains each with their own deck, and you fight in different environments each with their own deck… there’s enough variation to stop it being too samey, and if you picked randomly it’d take quite a while to get on top of the tactics for all combinations. And of course it’s easy for the publishers to issue add-on material of various kinds. A clever design which, although it’s not my favourite kind of game, shows a different kind of approach to the co-op challenge.
Darjeeling
A Eurogame about trading tea. Interesting, with some ingenious mechanisms and a nice cardboard slide. Judging when to time one’s big push for victory points seemed very important. I won, but I’d have to admit it was more by hit-and-hope than skill. This is going to need some replaying, possibly accompanied by the drinking of tea as appropriate.
Saboteur
A ‘traitor’ game in which some members of a mining crew may not really be trying to help find the gold nuggets. Simple and fast-moving, but I wasn’t quite convinced – it seemed very difficult for the traitor to succeed, but even when they failed miserably they could still end up scoring quite well for no very good reason, because of the way rewards were handed out. The bluffing and accusation element was fun, though.