Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer: Deck building yadda yadda yadda cards as currency yadda yadda yadda special powers yadda yadda yadda VP engine yadda yadda yadda. It’s fine, really. If I were fourteen or if I was new to designer games, I might love this. I don’t think Dominion has explored everything that can be done with deck building mechanics, and I’m fine with designers continuing to refine and innovate within the genre. But Ascension doesn’t add anything new.
Era of Inventions: It’s got a long way to go to overtake Ancient Egypt and Renaissance Italy, but the Industrial Revolution has become a popular setting for game in recent years. EoI is your basic “covert various flavors of wood to VP” game, but it has a couple of neat little mechanical flourishes, including royalties, knock off products, and patents that really sell the invention theme. Unfortunately, we got a rule wrong that made money and “cogs” (the resource needed to invent) even tighter in an already tight economy, so everyone’s successes were painfully incremental. So I need to play it again, but I think even with the correct rules it’s going to be a little too medium weight and tactical to appeal to me as an economic engine game.
Merkator: I like pickup and deliver games, but initially Merkator felt a little abstract and generic. But about halfway through the pieces came together and it got very tense and fun. There are a lot of decisions in the game: where to pickup, where to deliver, when to use your emergency supplies or trade 4:1, when to sell contracts, what cards to buy. Most of these decisions are small and not analysis paralysis producing, but they’re consequential and in retrospect I can see a number of opportunities for optimizing that I missed. The one aspect of the game for me that felt superfluous was the hourglass economy; having, needing, or denying hourglasses never drove any of my decisions. But it’s only one play; maybe I’ll have an hourglass epiphany on subsequent goes.
Grand Cru: The wine theme and elegant presentation suggest a fairly light economic game, but Grand Cru is actually pretty brutal. You start with no money and must take loans at the beginning of the game, which cost you fairly usurious interest payments every turn; if you can’t make those you have to take out more loans at even worse terms. Several players in my game invested initially in valuable grape varieties that took a long time to mature; while waiting for their big payout that got hammered by shortfalls in their short term income. The game ends when one player has paid off all of his or her loans. I managed to pull off a couple of strong turns selling off medium priced grapes to earn enough to pay off my loans and end it unexpectedly. I think I played a good game, but it felt a little cheap. While I have used the tactic myself more than once, I don’t generally like games that force players to be wary of untelegraphed endings. I’m curious about what the shortest possible game is; with the right special action tiles and conservative bidding, I think it could be quite short indeed.
Travel Blog: There’s a card naming a European country in the middle of the board, surrounded by eight other country cards (there is also a deck for US states). Your goal is to put your marker on the country closest to the center country that doesn’t actually boarder it. The more successfully you do this, the less money you lose. Later rounds force you to choose multiple countries and incorporate a second endpoint country. As an educational activity, it is terrific; I have no doubt that you’d get a good feel for European geography if you played repeatedly. As a game, it’s pretty dull.
