Yep! Time for another batch of game reviews that I’ve been playing recently.
First up we have Arcadia Quest. This is a campaign/skirmish game that’s all about rolling dice and killing the other players. The campaign mode is made up of six scenarios, and after each one you get to level up your characters with new items. Each character has their own special ability, and each scenario has a specific quest that may grant a reward or title that will have a benefit later on in the game.
There’s so much variety in this game its unreal, and it’s so much fun. You move, roll dice, die, do it all again. And when you die you’re only out of the game until you rest (and even then you have three characters in your guild so if one of them dies you still have two to move around). There are some really cool mechanics in the game, like when you die you get a death token, and this means that you’ll get a death curse that may affect you in the next game. The monsters can respawn, the dice explode (when you roll a critical hit it counts as a hit and you get to roll it again). The upgrade phase is great as you draft equipment, so you see things you want but also things that you don’t want your opponents to get.
Sometimes turns can get long, for example at one point my friend was rolling 14 defense dice, so it can bog down, but otherwise it’s a fun, fast-paced game, and I love that you can have little vendettas with your opponents but they never last. It does require a lot of set up time and take down time, and it can take a while to explain the rules (even though once you get started its pretty straightforward).
Biblios –
A change of pace now as you’re abbots in a monastery sorting books! The game is played in two halves, the first being a kind of drafting mechanic, you draw cards (number depends on the amount of players), keep one for yourself, send one to an auction, and then give the rest to the other players. Once you’ve gone through the deck you use the cards you collected in the auction, and at the end of the game you’re trying to have the most cards in a set. The cool thing is that the points value of each set is based on the face of a die. Each set starts as three, but you can manipulate them as you go through the game, and this adds a little bit of depth. It’s a very quick game as well, plays in about 30 minutes, and it’s pretty cool!
Lost Legacy –
This is like Love Letter. It’s a small card game where you’re trying to guess what your opponents have, but this time there is a ruin pile where cards can go face down. It was pretty good, but I still prefer Batman Love Letter.
Blueprints –
This game consists of three rounds in which you’re collecting dice to build a secret blueprint. You get bonuses for the types of dice you use, and whether you’ve actually succeeded in building the blueprint or not. It’s fun and quick and I was completely terrible at it, but it’s cool to build a little structure with dice, and there’s a lot of decisions that have to be made when you’re choosing the dice. There’s also turn angst as well, as the other players go around and you’re silently thinking ‘don’t pick that die don’t pick that die don’t pick aaahhhh why did you pick that one!’
