Saturday; Day 2 of Geekway Mini 2019
Our last full day at Geekway Mini. As we normally do, our last full days start focused and end in inebriated laughter and shenanigans. This day was no different.
1. Key Flow (8)
I had read that Key Flow had some good press coming out of Essen and BGG.con so I suggested we play it. After a lengthy run through the rules we were able to get started. Key Flow is a worker placement / resource management and drafting game from Richard Breese. Several years ago we were lucky enough to have Richard teach us his other game Key Flower, and we really enjoyed it at the time. It was quickly evident that Key Flow and Key Flower have a lot in common. Key Flow seems to have simply replaced the particularly tense auction of Key Flower with drafting. Players draft cards then play them through four seasons. Players use the cards to build onto their villages or as workers to get building benefits, working through the seasons to get big pay offs in the final winter season.
I really liked this one compared to it's predecessor and can see us playing it more often. Replacing the auction with drafting shifts the decision making into a different mindset that allows players to make assumptions based on what cards they believe will come back around. Having players draft the same number of cards also helps to equalize the village potentials as well.
I really look forward to taking another shot at this one.
2. Walking Doggos (6)
This is an interesting trick taking game by Mattie Schraeder, who was in attendance at Geekway Mini. I've stated in previous posts that I am a huge fan of trick-taking games, but I also consider teams, bidding, and nill play an intrinsic part of the genre. This card game about being forced to walk dogs had none of that, but, was still fun in review. The trick-taking aspect of Walking Doggos is simple in the extreme. There are six suits (colors/breeds) an each suit includes ranks 1 -8. Breeds are ranked high to low (tracked by color) so that a Great Dane 1, will beat a Retriever 8, because all Great Danes beat all other breeds. Managing you hand is where this game becomes different. You start with your hand facing out to your opponents (similar to Hanabi) and players take turns giving opponents 2 hints about their hands. Hints can detail number ranks or breeds that are similar.
This is a fine game, as filler card games go. I generally think that simplifying trick-taking games leads to players, who are good at deduction, winning more often than not. This is still a decent filler game and it was nice to talk about it's creation with the designer.
3. Space Base (4)
Let's go back to 2012 when Machi Koro came out. Boardgamers everywhere raved about it. It was different and used dice and cards together and could be deep even if some of the cards were flawed.• Well, Machi Koro was well liked enough to be picked up by Target... however, if you listen to the Cult of the New on Boardgamegeek...
Cult of the New: "Machi Koro is game to be ridiculed and anyone playing it is obviously a noob that must have bought it from Target, because we now have the far superior and vastly more intelligent Space Base. "
Well. It's not. Machi Koro has it's flaws for sure, but it was never meant to be much more than a dice fest where you try to play the odds. Machi Koro had a relatively simple theme, but Space Base doubles down on the boring and here in this game, you are acquiring spaceships that have no visual linkage to what they do in the game, not to mention you can barely tell them apart.
Space Base does improve on the pure mechanics of Machi Koro, but does so in a departure from the chaos of the die roll, allowing players to now benefit from either the single or combined dice of the roll. So, now its easier to build a better probability engine, but its more boring and predictable.
Fans of Space Base will point out how stupid I am while holding up the end game cards... Ships that require multiple activations to deliver a massive effect. Again I point to the easier probabilities and more boring stretched out game... if all I need is 4 rolls of 12 in order to Win a game, I fail to see how that is better than the more chaotic and short game; Machi Koro.
In truth, I didn't mind this game during our play of it, though I do recall thinking that it was a little boring, overly long, (we stopped at 30 points), and was basically a solitaire game in terms of competition.
I hate this game now, based solely off reactions from the BGG Elite. Don't cut down another game to build up another... Both games have merit and neither game is perfect. These same people were jizzing all over Machi Koro before, and I just can't abide a hypocrite... even when I'm guilty of it.
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