New-to-me games played recently include …

CATAN: NEW ENERGIES (2024): Rank 7470, Rating 6.9 – Teuber / Teuber

I have a nostalgic liking for Settlers but not enough to need to play 783 versions. This one appeared from the ether though so on we went. On top of the basics you know, cities now provide science cards which are used to build power-plants. These hang off cities and towns (in hexes) and generate energy during production rolls. Energy can used as a wild resource or to remove robber-like hazards. The twist is that each turn you pull event discs from the bag which usually helps those who’ve build clean higher-cost power plants and hurts those who’ve built dirty lower-cost plants. It’s the usual first to 10 VPs wins unless the event bag runs out, and then the winner is the player with the best clean-to-dirty power plant ratio. Which means it’s a race for the VP leader(s) to get to 10 in time. My only game was tight – one more turn and it would have ended a diff way with a diff winner. That’s a pretty neat variant, and wholesome as well.

Rating: 7

INDIGO (2012): Rank 1783, Rating 6.9 – Knizia

An abstract tile playing game that reminds me of Ta Yu, always wanting to build paths (using Tantrix style tiles) towards your exit spaces and away from opponent’s exits. Point scoring pieces move along the paths as they’re built (Tsuro style) and you’re aiming to move these off the board at your exit spaces for points. Your main decision is what to prioritise – you can’t win everything, especially given you have a 2 tile hand so you may be hamstrung re choices anyway. 2p it’s straight-forward. Multi-player is a negotiation whine. It worked, it was fine, but I don’t need to explore further as it’s going to all be the same game next time.

Rating: 6

MADA (2022): Rank 6420, Rating 6.8

Cute little cardie. Cards are numbered 1-13. Either draw one (If your hand < 3) or play a card >= your previously played card. If you can’t, pray for a miracle and flip one from the top. If it’s lower, you’re gone, everyone else scores their last played card, start another round. There’s joy in drawing into a re-set card or a swap card that gets you out of impending trouble, and joy in being able to keep playing when everyone else has played high expecting you’ll bust, only for them to bust instead.  It’s very light, fast paced, and features some nice moments.

Rating: 7

PAX ILLUMINATEN (2024): Rank 6257, Rating 7.4

Is it really a pax game? It does have some weird rules: half-tick. It does have some change-result dynamism: half-tick. But there’s no sense of the mechanics or the cards bringing a well-researched theme to life. It uses decktet cards and it’s mostly about colour-matching resources to cards to put out influence markers on the card grid. These will generate in UI come to allow putting more influence markers out for area control point-scoring purposes but also to satisfy end-game winning conditions so you have a shot no matter how the game ends. It does at least feature the traditional Pax feel of fumbling your way through the first game trying to work out how to make good things synergistically happen and then being dis-concerted with the way it ends.

Rating: 5

PINA COLADICE (2024): Rank 6412, Rating 6.8

Basic Yahtzee variant. 16 contracts of various dice combination requirements are arrayed in a 4×4 grid. Roll 5 dice, 2 re-rolls, place a token on a contract you’ve met to score its points. Try and get 4 contracts in a row, column or diagonal asap for the instant win, otherwise most points after the required number of rounds wins. There’s nothing you can do on other player’s turns except sit and watch, nothing clever. Just make decisions on the odds and hope for the best. But dice rolling is fun at least, there can be little races for the contracts you want, and it’s over quick enough.

Rating: 6

RAILROAD REVOLUTION (2016): Rank 1283, Rating 7.3

There are only 4 actions – build rail, build a station in a city you’ve reached for reward, build a telegraph station for reward, or get money. Which doesn’t seem enough to sustain a game but it’s enriched by the oft-seen reward of gaining colour meeples which improve each of these 4 actions in different ways (but which slows the game as you’re now contemplating 16 actions). A main thrust is building the stuff required to meet personal objectives for major points, but these require throwing away colour meeples (and sacrificing action power) so decisions come regularly on when the right time for that is and that was the most interesting part of the game. It was all fine but it became repetitively grindy spending every third action getting the money needed to conduct the point generating actions for 90+ minutes.

Rating: 6

VEGETABLE STOCK (2019): Rank 2851, Rating 6.8

Each round, pick a card showing 3 vegetables. Each vegetable on the card not taken will have its VP value driven upwards. But if it goes over the top, the VP value re-sets to the bottom. That’s not an insignificant swing in points and it’s usually outside your control – it’s good to have the last pick so you a little control at least but that pesky start player marker just keeps moving on. The game is really really random. Its major saving grace is that it’s all over in under 5 minutes but that begs the question of why bother in the first place.

Rating: 5

ZOMBIE DOT (2023): Rank 19082, Rating 6.5

A 1 v 3 challenge. The 3-strong escape team each play a path tile within the 7×7 grid trying to keep as many path options open as possible. The zombie player plays a zombie tile through which the escape team can’t travel or extend a path, closing it off. The escape team wins if they can all legally play in round 10. There are special power tiles that remove or flip zombie tiles, re-opening options, and I suspect the success of the escape team will depend on how many of these they draw into. It was neat enough working out the best plays to ensure the future stayed alive, but it felt more puzzle-y than game-y which isn’t quite my thing.

Rating: 6

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Larry:  I was very disappointed with Railroad Revolution.  It looked really interesting and the designers had produced good games in the past, but it has a dominant strategy.  What’s worse, it’s an obvious strategy to try and really cannot be beaten.  It was honestly hard to understand how this wasn’t detected during development.  Anyway, an expansion was released in 2019, called Railroad Revolution: Railroad Evolution which, supposedly, fixed the issue, or at least made the strategy not quite so dominant.  Unfortunately, the first copies were snapped up almost immediately and the publisher, What’s Your Game?, has done a terrible job with releasing their newer games and may or may not still even be in business.  So there’s real doubt that I, or anyone else I know, will ever get to pick up this expansion.  It would be nice to finally get to play the game in a way that doesn’t have an obvious path to victory, but it’s been almost 10 years, so I’m not exactly holding my breath for something that will probably never happen.