finally got to play some of my Christmas haul last night:
Iota:
Okay, this game is just...
wow
. It's a tiny game and it's deceptively easy to explain/understand, but my god I could almost feel my brain heating up from how hard it was having to work. The colors and shapes and numbers were all swirling around... wow. It feels like a super genius version of Scrabble. Playing this game is like learning to speak a different language in how your brain has to process and view the board and line up plays. I don't think this will get a TON of play but it will probably get some of the, "waiting around for people to show up" play.
Sushi Go!:
The drafting mechanic is so simple... this is basically 7 Wonders for babies. Not that it's a bad thing at all -- it just didn't feel like there was a whole lot to it. Granted, maybe things become a little more evident in future playthroughs (like how many nagiri cards you should take on average) but the fact that it doesn't really evolve over its three rounds makes me a little sad. If they even through in a few big score cards near the end based on your first two rounds/sets, I think it'd work. But it's quick and painless to setup and play, which means it'll probably see a ton of "downtime between games while people mingle and smoke" play at our house.
Suburubia:
Ho. Lee. Fuck. This game. This fucking game. First off, WOW it takes way longer to complete than I originally thought it would. It took us about 2.5 hours to play, with a quick 5 minute smoke break in the middle. But that first playthrough was like constant revelation after revelation. I can see how deeply strategic this game is... and the way it takes the drafting mechanic from Smallworld and re-appropriates it here is absolutely beautiful. What a gorgeous game, by the way... it's so well designed. It's a game where the theme/flavor is equally as strong as the mechanics, and I fucking LOVED it. While waiting for my turn, I'd just read through the different tiles and chuckle at how clever some of the flavor -> mechanics translations were. The last round, when we were in the C tiles, everyone was jittery and nervous, waiting for that 1 More Turn tile to flip. And when it did... man, everyone went into a panic on the last turn. And man, the reveal of the secret goals at the end was fucking great! I sort of wish you had more than one secret goal to go for, a la Keyflower, because only having the one feels a little bit like... the game is decided before final scoring. But this was great, and the mechanics were great, and while it took a little bit too long (compared to Keyflower, which takes like an hour tops) I think part of that might've been us not knowing the tiles and having to read them all over and over again.
Oh yeah and the speedbump mechanic... holy shit, that is GENIUS! Not only does it stop games from becoming snowball runaway victories, but it forces an interesting balancing mechanic in your strategies. I accidentally (seriously, without trying) kept getting reputation gains in the early game, so eventually my reputation was at +6 while everyone else had +1 or 0, which meant I was hitting tons of speedbumps. Eventually I had to buy a tile and place it STRATEGICALLY for the negative effect to bump down my reputation so I could build up a little bit of income.
Just... what a brilliant fucking game.
Sheriff of Nottingham arrives next week.
