Last week I participated in a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise money for SpecialEffect, a charity who help people with physical disabilities to play video games. I played lots of games throughout the day, and I promised a short of review of all of them. Some of them I've never played before and only played for a short time, so I want to be clear that these reviews are very subjective, and I'll try to be clear what sort of experience I'm basing each on.
I mostly played board games for the first part of the day and video games for the latter part. I was lucky I declined to play Risk, since that particular game was interminable. They played with classic rules, hence there were no secret mission cards to bring the game to a conclusion - only complete elimination of all other players.
I'm going to split this up and do a few at a time, and I'll start with the first three games I played, while I was still fresh and alert and able to think.
Poo
Poo is a card game about monkeys throwing their poo at each other. I wonder if maybe the rules were also written by someone throwing poo at a page. It's charmingly illustrated, and thankfully does not actually feature poo on the cards, only the implication of poo. It's supposed to be a fast-paced game, but the rules and card wording leave a lot of situations quite ambiguous, with little to clarify them. Especially when a card affects multiple players, it's really unclear who can respond and how their responses interact. I think the underlying game is all right, and if you have kids who enjoy the idea of throwing poo it would probably be fun, but I just wish they had made the cards and rules a little easier to agree on. Before the gaming marathon I'd played Poo once before. I probably will not play it again. Still, I enjoyed myself well enough.
Tsuro
Tsuro is an abstract and beautiful game where each player follows twisty tracks on the tiles they play onto the board - the object is to be the last player to fall off the board due to the track in front of them being completed. Players must always play a tile to move their own piece, but that might also move other players or put hazards in their way. The board inevitably fills up and all paths will sooner or later lead to oblivion, the only question is who can last the longest. I'd never played it before and I quite enjoyed it, although I don't think I would get a lot out of repeated play. Most of your choices feel arbitrary and abstract, and while it's beautiful to look at, it does feel a bit empty and nihilistic.
Ricochet Robots
Ricochet Robots has long been one of my favourite games. It revolves around the mechanism familiar to many video gamers of characters on a slippery floor that can start moving in any of four directions but will slide in that direction until they collide with an obstacle, before they can move again. In this case, the characters are four robots: red, green, yellow and blue, and you need to navigate them in concert around a sparse metal arena to get a specific robot to come to rest on a specific tile on the board in as few moves as possible. The trick is that players compete simultaneously to figure out the best solution in their heads, with the player claiming the best solution getting the first opportunity to demonstrate it on the board.
I love the simplicity of the idea and the sometimes deeply complex solutions that are needed. I love that it's an easy game to watch and learn - if you're not sure whether you want to play, just watch while others play and see if you can solve it in your head. If you're not too fussed about the overall scores and just enjoy playing it's even quite a good game for people to drop in and out of. I used to play it during lunchtimes at work a lot.
Next time...
Love Letter, Forbidden Island and King of Tokyo.
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