I went to Dice Tower West again this year – with Ellyn! Hung out with friends. Played a whole bunch of games. Had fun! Game highlights include Scout (card game we bought last year) and Fury Road.
Games!
I’m not sure how to describe this game. A lot of the experience is the giant board and felt rugs that you lay down on the giant “board”. I’d play the first retry just to figure out if there is a valid strategy to do better.
Kind of a card combo game – a little like Dominion, but with a deck you’re going through instead of a known set of cards to draw from. I worry that replays will make a big difference in how well you can build your power set and that will be a giant advantage against new players. I’d play it again.
Another card combo game. It’s cute – you place tree cards and then associate various animals (mostly) with those trees. It has an interesting mechanic for the animal cards – they are all split in half either horizontally or vertically (with different animals on each half) so you only use one half of it. I’d like to see that mechanic in another game. I’d play it again if others wanted to.
If you’ve played Wingspan then you’ve just about played Wyrmspam. It’s about the same game with a couple of tweaks. And without the birds. Folks that like Wingspan for the birds don’t care for Wyrmspan. Folks that like Wingspans mechanics maybe like Wyrmspan. I didn’t care for Wingspan and don’t care for this one. I would avoid this game.
This is RoboRally for 8 year olds. It was not horrible. I’d play this with 8 year olds. I would totally play RoboRally.
Co-op survival game (which is kind of my bag). It was complicated, took too long, was hard to read the type on the cards. We lost at the very end but realized after the fact that we had a few abilities/cards that would have let us win. It was just too much of a pain to keep track of. Won’t be playing that again.
Card-combo with a splash of Settlers of Catan. This is another card combo where it seems like knowing the contents of the deck would be a huge advantage. It didn’t help that we started playing with the contents of one of the expansions – but we didn’t know that – and we didn’t have the rules for the expansions. Either way, I would avoid this game.
This was a con highlight! A bit like car wars light. It has some obvious mechanical flaws – you can gang up on folks, so it’s subject to the popularity contest. That said, if you heard a bunch of folks hooting and hollering and having a great time at the con, they were playing this game. I hear there is an expansion that adds more silliness and no real complexity. If the box were not big, I would buy this game. I would jump at playin again.
Competitive solitaire. Building and road placement on your own board but competing for tile draws. Ellyn really dug it and got a copy. I got thrashed at this the only time I played it. I’ll be playing it again, though I generally like my competitive solitaire to be more competitive.
Card combo and worker placement. Yet another combo game where knowing the deck is a huge advantage. I’d play this again if others really wanted to, but I’d aim away from it. Though the art is super cute.
Often compared to the game “No Thanks” – anti-auction game where you bid on NOT taking the disasters. The person who takes the disaster then gets all the bids that were made to avoid it as well. I just don’t care for fail games as a rule – where you’re trying not to do the worst.
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