Reviews written by Matt Thrower
Fun game, but early feeling is that all the power is in the hands of the overlord. He's pacing the game and - if he chooses to - he can make it near impossible for the heroes to win.
So it's pretty fun to go pointing foam guns at other people, and you can play your role and trash talk to your heart's content. But the actual underlying game here is a little bit weak, especially with a limited bullet stash. It's normally quite predictable who's going to get shot and when.
Carcassonne is an odd game. With two it's a definate strategy game at which I'm very bad, and with more it becomes more of an excercise in group art than a game. But I continue to own and play it because it's a brilliant utility game: it's easy to learn, quick to play and caters for a wide number of players and tastes. Virtually anyone can spend a fun 45 minutes playing Carcassone. So, in spite of my somewhat "meh" attitude to the game itself, this is a definite keeper.
I was wrong about this game. Having played the new edition I've suddenly seen that there is quite a lot more than other push your luck games hidden under the hood of Can't Stop. Not much, maybe. Nothing that'll leave you puzzling for weeks. But enough to make it the push your luck game of choice.
Clever design which seems very random and, to be fair, is very random, but which offsets this by offering the players a surprisingly high number of paths to victory and I'm fairly sure that making good choices will trump the dice the majority of the time. And for those times when it doesn't, the game is short enough to be enjoyed for the excitement alone, and for its stunning visual presentation which really is top-notch stuff. Plenty of re-playability with a number of scenarios on offer which do make full use of the rules framework to create different and challenging play experiences.
What I like about Brass is that it brings some genuine thematic feeling to the economic games genre, which renders it fairly unique. It is also undeniably deep. Unfortunately learning and playing the game is so vastly counter-intuitive (it's not that complex, it just messes totally with the sort of cause-and-effect chains usually seen in games) that I fail to see why, when there are soooo many games of this type around, I would spend the required time with Brass in order to get to grips with it properly. As usual with economic games, I'd rather play Puerto Rico instead.
I play using the living rules - check my comments for that. Overall Blood Bowl is a surprisingly analytical and sedate game given its wacky subject matter. The discrepancy actually hurts the game a bit, but it's still lots of fun to play.
Very good game, which I found thoroughly immersive in spite of no being a fan of the TV show. Reading the rules - and the session reports - would seem to indicate this as a largely psychological game, but it isn't. There's a good amount of strategy for both sides to explore as well. So, tense, tactically challenging, highly interactive, very social .. what's not to like? Well, the rather repetitive nature of the skills checks and the fact that the game becomes rather less interesting once the cylons are revealed. The 100% co-op and solo variants from the publisher aren't great - don't buy the game on the strength of these alone.
Surprising depth here for such a simple and quick game and at heart, that's the appeal here. The apparent military theme is a bit of a shame - it's mirrored in the gameplay not at all beyond the sense that you're gradually "outflanking" an opponent - this is really an abstract.
Given that I came to this *after* playing its big brothers C&C:A and M44, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. The various units behave differently to their WWII and ancients counterparts, they feel right and require different tactics to handle properly. The deck has some unusual cards too, and to top it all off the scenarios seem very well designed.