You are Fennel!
You're a cool cat. Crisp, clean, fresh, and extremely complicated. You're like quantum physics or modern jazz. Think Niels Bohr meets Ornette Coleman. You may look normal now, but once you sprout, you look kind of, uh, funny.
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It’s been a few months since I posted about new games at Games Club. I think we fell into a habit of playing mostly old games for a while, and then bugsybanana and I skipped going for most of this summer’s exile period. But now, here, some games that were new, or at least new to me, from this semester:
Maharaja
I barely remember this now; we played it back in September. It involves moving around a board building palaces, with money generated at the end of each turn based on what you’ve got in a particular city, and it costs money not just to build houses and palaces but also to move your architect token around the board. First player with seven palaces wins. Challenging, but we haven’t played it again since.
Clans
A pretty simple movement-based game. I’ve played it a couple of times now, and while it’s not great, it’s pretty simple and doesn’t take long to play.
Arkadia
I’ve played this twice, and both times came in second one point behind mnemex. It’s a pretty good game based on construction, worker placement, and earning colored seals which have varying values. One of the challenges is that you have only five opportunities to cash in your seals for victory points, and you get to choose when four of those happen (the fifth is at the end of the game), and have to time them for when the seals you have are at maximum value. But those cash-in phases are also the only way to get the workers you need to earn more seals….
Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is a new game (just shipped a couple of weeks ago) based on the original design for San Juan, and incorporating more elements from the parent game, Puerto Rico, like exchanging goods for victory points. It’s about as complicated as Puerto Rico, though it seems more intimidating because of the variety of strange little icons on the cards, but it plays faster. We played it four times in five hours last night, and that included learning the rules and explaining them twice.
Like San Juan, it’s plays pretty quicly and is easy to set up. Like Puerto Rico, it supports more strategies — not just a shipping strategy, but multiple build strategies. Because play within a phase is simultaneous, you’re not screwed if the player to your right is following the same strategy you are, as you are in Puerto Rico.
I’ve got one big complaint about the card design: The card titles are printed in black, on top of a dark gray gradient. But the title is the least important part of the card, so it’s not that big a problem.
Update: One of the developers posted a “periodic table” of the cards. (That’s the large version. You need to be a member of BoardGameGeek to get at the super-large version.) A few observations:
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