For me this has been a cardgame-centric weekend. Why? Well, for one, they
were dirt cheap looked interesting. Plus, I've been playing BSG and RftG way too much, I needed/wanted some fresh air.
I played:
Lost Cities [
BGG]
Deliciously simple rules. One could probably condense them into five sentences or so. Awesome. The resulting gameplay however is far from simple provided you play against someone with a sense of tactics.
I just kind of wish there was a way to get around doing all that math at the end. 4*28-20+2*19-20+1*3-20+3*26-20=...? (even with formula optimisation this doesn't get much quicker)
Still, very fun. I need a neural reprogramming though, playing a card
before drawing one is just physically impossible for me by now. I wasn't alone with that though, most of the guys I played with instinctively reached for the stacks first before even realizing it. Also, I'm a sucker for those humongous cards.
Finally something that actually fits in my paws.
The German version comes in a very nice tin box. Me likes. A bit oversized though.
Zombie Fluxx [
BGG]
This was actually a letdown. On paper it sounded awesome, a game where you add and modify the rules and goals as you play! Fun! It kind of was, but something was amiss. It always ended with someone randomly drawing and playing the goal card that fit his Keepers. Once that happens it's over, and there's nothing you can do. Extremely anticlimatic compared to the game itself, which is pretty fun.
There were also times where a player would play draw 5 and play 5, then play a few draw 3 play 2 actions (etc), then play the card that let him take another turn afterwards, which he'd promptly re-play from the discarded pile with the appropriate action card - and overwriting or destroying the draw/play rules before ending this gargantuan turn. This needs house rules, methinks. Multiplayer games should be multiplayer, not serialized singleplayer sessions.
I liked the rule that a player could join at any time by drawing a starting hand and sitting down at the table. Never actually happened, but it's nice to see this problem tackled "officially". Flexibility with the player count is nice - and rare.
Maybe I oughta plunk down and buy the other versions (Monty Python! <3 ). Maybe it's a "not enough cards" thing. I want to like this, for some reason. A bunch of different editions mixed together could be better..... right?
Fairy Tale [
BGG]
I loved this, even though the icons and card layout took quite some getting used to. The rules aren't hard, but without a card index it's quite hard for a newb to grasp the importance of some cards. Still, I really dig the artwork and the rather quick gameplay once you get used to the game. Plus it scales quite well. I had several two-player games, and some with four or five guys, and everything worked smoothly (with me losing spectacularly more often than not). You only lose the mindfuckery in the draw phase because you don't get your stack back, which is pure evil in two-player mode.
Weekend was fun. CTLance approves.
