Gameweek with two live sessions and some games at yucata.de.
Firstly, I attended the N-BGC session on Monday where we played two games. Langfinger was the first game on the table and it has been waiting it’s turn on my car’s trunk for a long time. I bought it with 3 euro maybe a year ago so I did not have huge expections but suprisingly my expections were easily met.
Langfinger is a relatively easy worker placement game with a crime theme. Players gather up resources and loot and use the resources to open their loot and gain points by doing so. There’s quite a lot of luck involved in the process but in a short and simple game such as this I did not mind the luck factor too much. Scores were also quite close with all 5 players playing the game inside three point marginal which intensified the game nicely.
Second game we desided to play was The Manhattan Project which I knew by reputation but had not played before. Building nukes is for sure a huge negative for some players but for me the theme rocked. The Manhattan Project is a worker placement game where players score points by developing their bombs as big and ugly as possible. Players gather up the resources with workers who come in in three different profession and many of the actions in the game require a spesific worker in order to activate. TMP is a pure worker placement game and I really liked what they had done with the mechanism – nothing particularly new and innovative but finding a good way to use old innovations in a interesting way.
I liked TMP in general but feel that the direct interaction between the players via military operations is totally unnecessary and it slows the game down too much. Worker placement is an interactive mechanism in itself thus the need for a second direct medium for interaction isn’t there. Direct attack in The Manhattan Project will also leave attackers back door open for other players’ attacks which they will utilize when the opportunity rises. Without the direct attack mechanism I would have given the game very good review but now it just a good game.
After the good but not great games at the N-BGC meeting I had a chance to participate in a developing session of a great game – Eclipse. I had an invitation to test some new features for a (possible) coming expansion of the game and I gladly took part in the session. I got Hydran race to play the game with and a brief info on what were the new mechanisms we were testing out. This time there was a new mechanism to the core system which seemed to be a game changing mechanism and some more minor additions to the existing rules set.
I had fun playing the game and did very well (ended up winning the game) even though the start of the game could have gone better for me with the discovering of new systems. I was lucky to get the advanced hull tech and found some superb alien systems to spread my influence. I also researched the only computers of the first 5 or so rounds which made my rise to the power possible. All in all I think the new mechanisms were quite close of being ready for publication but I suspect there will be some polishing to be made before the design team gives more information out to the public about them.
Fun times and interesting games which means that the week of gaming was solid.
PS. Look at that table cloth. It’s hard to find a worse cloth to play Eclipse on since it blends the game in extremely well. I spent probably 2 minutes just to spot the tech board on the table before we started he game…