Hunting and gathering at light speed

[avram]

Actually played some games at Games Club tonight. First, a few games of Light Speed, a new Cheapass Hip Pocket game. Very cool. Fast (10-20 minutes), with decent replay value (didn’t get bored after playing three times), pretty simple, yet challenging. My only complaint is that the cards seem just a bit too small to work well with the standard glass bead counters that Cheapass sells and lots of gamers use. I’m definitely gonna pick me up a copy.

I also played in a five-person game of Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers. I really like the original Carcassonne, and felt this sequel was an improvement, even if it was a bit more complicated and less elegant. There were more, smaller, scoring events — I don’t think anyone got more than 14 points for any one thing, and little four-point scores were very frequent — instead of the big, game-unbalancing scores you get in the original. The scoring rules for rivers make them much more useful than the roads in the original, and the fact that unfinished forests don’t score balances them a bit, while the bonus tile mechanic gives your opponents an incentive to finish up your forests for you. My one complaint is that I wish there were more interesting bonus tiles.