12/19 - D&D FAIL

Went over to John's on the 19th to play in the D&D game he runs. Unfortunately, Ian ending up having to work due to a work crisis, we didn't have enough to play, so we hauled out a few games to play instead.

Monsters Menace America

Jake is not generally a board game fan, find them a bit dry, so we wanted to find something with an interesting theme. Monsters Menace America, in which players take control of a sci-fi movie style monster and basically try to destroy as much stuff as they can. Each player also takes control of a branch of the military to try to put up some resistance against the other player's monsters (they are roughly as effective as the military is in most monster movies).

The game is not without its problems - the entire "run around the board smashing stuff" part of the game is rendered somewhat moot by the "battle royale" at the end of the game where the monsters duke it out for supremacy, but it is reasonably light on rules, not too long, and it looks fantastic. We played two games, of which I won the first and Grey the second.

Race for the Galaxy

After the second game of Monsters Menace America, Grey and Jake went home, but John and I played a few more games. We started with Race for the Galaxy, which I brought over. One problem with having played this game 100+ time is that the games tend to run together, so I don't know what happened in this game, but John won 37-34.

Attika

Not a prison-riot simulation, but a game where players are building Greek city-states by gathering resources and placing tiles. With more players Attika suffers from a bit of kingmaking - often one player will be in a position where they are forced to stop another player from winning, but in so doing they slow themselves down enough that they take themselves out of the game as well. No such problem with 2 though, where the game is probably best. I edged John out in this one.

Elfenland

Older Speil des Jahres winners are sometimes a mixed bag as they tended to be directed even more so than now towards "games that a German family might want to play with their kids" rather than "gamers" per se. That shows up in the art for Elfenland, which is not quite as saccharine as My Little Pony, but it definitely has leanings in that direction.

It was designed by Ticket to Ride designer Alan R. Moon, and like that game it centers around building routes. There's a lot more going on here though than in the simple rummy-mechanic of TTR. However, as a 2-player game it felt a little empty, but John and I both thought that our wives might like it and decided we'd pull it out the next time the 4 of us got together.