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September 12, 2005

A bunch of new games

Played a bunch of games new to me over the weekend and several were good or interesting enough to mention.

The best game I played was the new release in the Kosmos 2-player series Jambo, which I only played once but might be my favorite 2-player game (caveat needed because I really like Rosenkonig played with the not-included Texas rules for a 4-player partnership game) in the series. The decisions in the game are very interesting and really nice artwork to go along with that. A couple of people there have already played it in the short time its been released like 40-50 times and it is not a super-short game. Definite buy and initial rating of 8.5.

Second best was Ars Mysteriorum which is the first Alan Ernstein game I've liked. It is basically an economic game with players as alchemists learning alchemical recipes. It uses a blind card placement mechanic to acquire resources similar to that in Aladdin's Dragons but somehow here it seemed to work better and rarely did one get an amount significantly different than one expected to. The recipes chart was also interesting where some recipes pay out much better early while others pay out poorly in the early game (but are also a bit cheaper to acquire) but can give a big bonus at the end. I ended up going for the latter group and amazingly won the endgame bonus in the top 3 of 5 categories in a 4 player game to let me run away with the game at the end. I probably won't make an effort to get this one (and it is rare) but would definitely happily play again - 7.5.

The only other of the new games that I'd have any interest in playing again is the new Hasbro Avalon Hill game Nexus Ops which is a light wargame. Players get income to buy units which they use to take over more income-producing spaces and to kill other players and gain victory points. Has some of the usual multi-player wargame problems but the reward for winning battles helps. In our game Brian got a lucky turn order enabling him to take the Monolith first and then got lucky (as well as taking advantage of the Energize cards rewarded for being first to the Monolith) to beat me when I attacked. This basically took me out of the game and then Matt decided to fight with the 4th player in the game rather than attacking Brian, basically letting Brian just cruise to victory by controlling the monolith the whole game. Rating 6. The components of this one are very nice and apparently it is currently available for $16 somewhere online which is an excellent deal but I don't want to own it.

On the poor side of games were Bedlam, a mediocre Pit variant, and the very random and just not very interesting die-rolling game Lucky Loop. Neither are worth playing again.

The final game which I hadn't played before was the very odd dexterity game Polarity which involves placing magnetic pieces on a board in a manner so that, because of magnetic repulsion a piece is leaning but not touching into another piece (follow the link to see a picture - hard to explain). I not at all surprisingly was terrible at this game and got absolutely crushed by Brian who I don't think made any mistakes.

Ended the night with the excellent The Great Dalmutti and quite good old Dirk Henn game Spekulation

Posted by aarondf at September 12, 2005 12:59 PM

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