Games Club
Jul. 9th, 2005 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramI’ve been skipping out on games reviews, haven’t I? Actually, I’ve been kinda lame about playing games for a while. But here are a few new ones:
Ticket to Ride: Europe
Not just a sequel to Ticket to Ride, this version improves on the original with a better balance of routes, station pieces that let you use another player’s lines to fill your tickets, and special routes that require wildcards or can take a random number of extra cards to build.
Santiago
Yet another German game about colonization. What’s up with that? Now that I think about it, I’ve got a really nasty idea for a German rail game.... Anyway, Santiago is a tight, challenging game of limited resources with clever auctioning rules. Each round starts with an auction; high bidder gets first choice of farm tiles to place and control, low bidder gets to be canal boss for the round. Then there’s the canal placement phase, where players bribe the canal boss to irrigate their farm tiles. Unirrigated farm tiles wither and die, living farms are worth points at the end.
Carcassonne: The City
Lots of wooden bits in this stand-alone addition to the thriving Carcassonne line of games, and a much faster endgame. In this version, players get to place wall pieces around the edge of the developing city to close off further expansion (and complete features). They can also place guards on the walls; each guard scores points for special buildings in his straight line of sight. This makes paying attention to the overall board and what other players will be able to do much more important than in original Carcassonne.
Speaking of original Carcassonne, anyone played with the Princess & Dragon expansion?
Ticket to Ride: Europe
Not just a sequel to Ticket to Ride, this version improves on the original with a better balance of routes, station pieces that let you use another player’s lines to fill your tickets, and special routes that require wildcards or can take a random number of extra cards to build.
Santiago
Yet another German game about colonization. What’s up with that? Now that I think about it, I’ve got a really nasty idea for a German rail game.... Anyway, Santiago is a tight, challenging game of limited resources with clever auctioning rules. Each round starts with an auction; high bidder gets first choice of farm tiles to place and control, low bidder gets to be canal boss for the round. Then there’s the canal placement phase, where players bribe the canal boss to irrigate their farm tiles. Unirrigated farm tiles wither and die, living farms are worth points at the end.
Carcassonne: The City
Lots of wooden bits in this stand-alone addition to the thriving Carcassonne line of games, and a much faster endgame. In this version, players get to place wall pieces around the edge of the developing city to close off further expansion (and complete features). They can also place guards on the walls; each guard scores points for special buildings in his straight line of sight. This makes paying attention to the overall board and what other players will be able to do much more important than in original Carcassonne.
Speaking of original Carcassonne, anyone played with the Princess & Dragon expansion?