Posts Tagged: board games
The Grizzled — fun but unwinable
The Grizzled is a co-operative card game set in the trenches of World War I. This is not a combat game. The focus of this war game is to help each other survive the terrors of war and come out of the conflict alive. There are basically three “suits” and three values of cards and during play your group may only play at most two of any suit or value. The suits are weather related: Snow, Rain, Night. The values are: Shells, Gas, and Whistles. Each card has at least one set of suit and value; others have multiple of these and create quite a problem for the team. The team must play cards from their hand with little/no table talk to see how many cards they can get out of their hands. The goal is to end the round with an empty hand. Good luck with that! There are also hard knock cards that represent wounds and mental problems that manifest during the conflict. These hard knocks modify player choices and create more trouble for the team. For example one hard knock card makes you retreat when any pair of suit or value is in play. This makes you stop discarding cards and sets you up for a more challenging next round.
After everyone retreats or runs out of cards in their hand you have a Support phase and you lend your support to a teammate. Whoever gets the most support gets a benefit. If there is no most supported person there’s no benefit for anyone. This creates more interesting choices and some social cooperation.
The game is excellent and the theme is surprisingly emotive. The game makes you feel like you want your team to survive these awful missions and make it out alive. If anyone dies the game is instantly over. This makes for good game play and when things go bad you know it and are finished soon. It’s not like Eldritch Horror where you know you cannot win but still have 2 hours of game to play to prove you’ve lost. In The Grizzled if you have a few bad missions you’ll be dead soon and then it’s time to shuffle the decks and try again.
That’s one of the great things about this game. Even after being beaten up several times we wanted to play more. Some games that are hard to win eventually stop showing up on the table because everyone knows, “yep here comes another beating, let’s play something else” — with The Grizzled there’s always that urge to try just one more time and see if we can’t make it out of the trenches alive this time.
Machi Koro — review
Machi Koro is a card/dice game that sets you up as a mayor of a tiny vIllage. You have a wheat field and a bakery and the townsfolk want you to build four things: a train station, a shopping mall, a radio tower and a theme park.
Your one wheat field and bakery aren’t big enough revenue generators to accomplish this so you spend your turns rolling a die (or dice) to see which buildings in your town activate and then you buy a new building. When you generate and/or save enough cash you can build the required building. First player to build all four is the winner.
The game play is simple. On your turn you roll a die and look at the cards in front of you. If the die number matches the top of the card that building activates and you follow the text on the card. Some buildings generate cash, some allow you to take cash from other players. After you resolve all the building actions you get to buy one new building and add it to your town.
Some buildings (the blue ones) generate cash even on someone else turn. Red buildings take cash from other players when they roll. So there isn’t any down time between turns. You have to watch each die roll to see if you get money. The more money you have the faster you can win.
Red Dragon Inn 4 Review
The Red Dragon Inn series of games is a card game where the players are sitting around in an Inn drinking, gambling, and rough housing. If you drink too much, lose too much gold, or get too beat up you’re out! The last person standing wins.
Number four is pirate themed. That’s an almost must buy for me. I wanted something fun and easy to play with the kids.
There are four big box sets, each with four characters, and five single character expansions. The box contains:
- a deck of cards for each player
- a nice board you can use to track your health and intoxication level
- a clear and red glass bead to use on the board
- a drink deck
- gold coins (cardboard punch out pieces)
Number four also includes some extra tokens for one of the players, a sea deck of ocean encounters, and ship tokens.
Game play is pretty simple. On your turn you discard any cards from your hand you don’t like and draw up to seven cards, you play an action card, you buy someone else a drink, and you drink a drink from your pile.
Actions include things that typically hurt other players (loose cannon balls, playing darts and getting poked, having to pay gold, etc) or help you (reduce your intoxication level, heal — aka gain back fortitude, gain some gold, etc) Another action allows you to start a round of gambling in an attempt to win gold away from other players.
After the action phase you buy a drink for another player. You take a drink card off the top of the drink pile and drop it on whomever you like.
Then you take a card from your drink pile and resolve the effect. Typically your intoxication level is going up.
Many of the cards have anytime or sometime keywords. Anytime cards can be played at anytime. Sometimes cards are played in response to something. It’s important to read the cards carefully to see if you can avoid taking damage or drinking when you might have a card that prevents it.
The artwork is a little risque. There’s nothing overtly sexual, but there are well endowed wenches with some cleavage showing on several cards. Alcohol use is central to the game. I play this with my middle school, high school, and college aged children. What better way to learn moderation than a game where if you over drink, you lose.
Apart from a more mature theme the cards have a lot of text on them and required strong reading skills. This definitely isn’t a game for younger kids. With the right group this is a blast.