Games Played - 30 May 2018

Whilst over on the other table 2 of our most-played games at the Club, Power Grid and San Juan, got another airing, on my table (with Phil, Mark and Steve W) we tried 3 games which haven't been played here before.  Fortunately none of them were overly complex, so learning 3 sets of rules in a night didn't seem too onerous or time-consuming, although we did have a few minutes' play of the first one before we quickly realised we had the rules wrong but it was easy to start again..

There's a lot of games where you start with a few dice and then achieve goals to gain more dice, well Dice Forge adds a twist to that idea because you don't get more dice, you only ever have 2 but 'pimp' them with better faces which give you more of what you need.  How?  Well each die has easily removable clip-in plastic faces, and if you get enough 'gold' (which some of the basic and pimped die faces give you) you can buy new faces - click the old one out, press the new one in ready for the next roll.  Some faces just give VPs, some give 'lightning' with which you can buy cards to give abilities and extra VPs or extra turns, some give 'magic' with which you can buy cards, weapons and the ability to store extra gold/lighning/magic between turns, as anything the dice give over your tableau limit is wasted.  There's plenty of options, game length is about right, and there's a reasonable amount of replayability.

The theme to Barker's Row immediately grabbed us : collecting various freaks and curios to put together fairground carnival attractions to gain more customers ('rubes') and win the game.  Basically there are 4 suits of cards plus jokers, you have a hand of attractions (basically tells you the suit you need, and when you've completed that attraction it gives you extra abilities).  Every turn you draw at least one card into a central 'midway' of cards, and then if you can get enough suit+joker cards from there to complete an attraction, gatehr up all of those cards to claim your rubes, but every time you do so you need more cards to fulfil the next attraction.  The theme is great, and compensates a little for the rather repetitive nature of your turns, but we found a serious, but hopefully rare, glitch.  Because I, throughout the game, had attractions in only 2 colours, so it was more difficult to get large enough sets in the midway to pick up.  Other players kept beating me to them, so in a game of probably 15-16 turns my last 10(!) turns consisted of just drawing a card!  If this game gets regular play and it happens again the rules may need a tweak.

Finally Mutant Crops is not as funny as the name suggests, you're collecting cards with pictures of fruit with faces on them, but a competent enough worker placement /  commodity collection / task fulfilment game.  Nothing bad about it but not particularly distinctive as a 20-30 minute filler.