Tiniest Epics, vol. 5: It's adventure time!

One interesting trend that I've always enjoyed from game designers...

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I just played this one last night without Dark War because I didn’t feel like putting the wagons together. I really enjoyed it, it’s simple and fun to play, very straightforward. I’ll try Dark War tonight, it does look like a substantial addition.

We also played Mechs and Zombies and they were fun too. Quest is up tonight.

Here is why I like these games, which is kind of surprising. They are not stunning examples of modern design. They are not innovative. They are not bold or daring. The subjects are as run of the mill as they come.

However, a game like Defenders, in a small $20 box, offers almost everything you would get in a large $60-$100 Co-op. It’s very distilled, and really quite streamlined. Zombies plays out pretty much like any more expensive, larger zombie game. And you have tons of options and content right in the box with extra characters, two sided map cards, a variety of items and weapons, and multiple ways to play each game. And none of them are over an hour. I appreciate that these games value my time, money, and space. No, they aren’t the best in class. But they are -fun- despite some occasionally wonk rules (really struggling with the walls thing in Zombies) and they are easy to learn and teach.

Tactics is the one I’m really looking forward to though, I love the scope of it for such a little game.

Yep. That's exactly it. There's so much value there for ~$20 that it makes you look at other stuff on the shelf and think: "How much did I pay for that...?" There was a point last summer where I was showing up at the FLGS game night with just TE games because I could sit down and say: "What kind of game do you want to play? Co-op? Got that. DoaM? Got that. Worker placement? Got that."

Tactics is really interesting. One real upside is that it's intuitive enough that even people who don't like combat/tactical games are OK with learning and then find out that they really enjoyed it. I think it's reminiscent enough of many video games that people realize that they've played something like Final Fantasy Tactics on their phone or their computer and TET fits seamlessly in that mold. I think it will work even better if you have a regular or semi-regular group (like your kids) who will play it more than once and start to learn the nuances of the board and the different characters and develop strategies going into the game.

One warning about the wagons in Dark War: be very careful about fitting the tabs in the slots. The fit is VERY tight and it's easy to stub and then fray the tabs when trying to put everything together. Squeezing them down a bit before trying to put them in the slots might help.

LOL that is exactly why I didn't feel like putting them together. Did one, it messed up, and I was like "not tonight".