Straight on til morning

Smash up

This game! This is my favorite to date. The art work is fantastic and the cards are funny themselves. There are so many combinations that can be used when starting a game that it doesn’t get old. 

Each turn you play an action and a minion on a base. The power of the minions go towards reaching the base’s Break Point and depending on the power of your minions you gain Victory Points from the game. This game works well as a two player but is also really fun with more. And the expansions to this game are equally fun (we had pretty pretty and awesome level 9000 in the end). This takes a bit of thinking and a lot of forward planning, but it’s super fun.

Boss monster

This game was a very quick one.

I think of it as tower defense. You use your turn to play rooms in front of your monster, sacrificing cards to do so. Each card has a symbol on it and if you have the most of that symbol then you attract that type of hero card. Each turn two random heroes are played and, once rooms are placed, they head towards the player who baits them. The hero moves through each room, taking damage as they go and either gets defeated (in which case the player gets his soul) or fights through (and when a certain number of heroes get through your boss is defeated and you lose).

One of my favorite parts of this deck are the cards, the art and descriptors are full of pop culture. There are cards referring to Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Zelda and many more.

Race for the Galaxy was another easy game to pick up.

Each turn you pick an action (explore to gain more cards, settle to build planets, build to create cities) and the aim of the game is to have the highest ranked land cards before a player reaches 15 lands.

This game was a little boring, with some turns needing to be repeated in order to get the cards desired to build better lands. Over all it was a good game, mostly due to the need to serve customers between. 

Viticulture

This was a new game that came in and we wanted to have a go at it so that we could sell it. Viticulture was one I had heard before as a request from a few customers.

This game was fairly more strategic than the last and takes a lot more forward planning. Each turn you may play your workers in different places. These places have certain actions which help progress the game. Each turn takes a summer and winter cycle in which the men prepare and harvest crops and use the grapes to create wines and fill orders. 

I lost this game, again, beating my workmate is hard, he’s been playing strategy games a much longer time than I. 

Again the game would have been simpler if we had read the instructions more closely at first, as we would have seen that grapes and wines age over time much quicker and the game would have progressed much more smoothly. 

Carcassonne

The first game I’ve played in store was Carcassonne. A box got damaged in transport and so we got to play with this on the counter.

It’s a relatively simple game, you draw a tile, you place a tile, you decide if you want to put a man on the tile or not. It was quick and easy, I lost of course, but I put up a good fight. We played with house rules, not on purpose, we simply weren’t scoring correctly, if either of us had done more than glance at the rules we might have known this.