Tuesday’s child is full of… whatever the hell Tuesday’s child is supposed to be full of full of. Or maybe it’s round of face. Likes Ace of Bass? Meh. Tuesday’s games were full of fantasy. I realize that the sentence doesn’t rhyme like the traditional verse, but at least I can remember it.
We started with Fredericus, a small box game from DaVinci/Mayfair that Dana bought me from the deep discount shelf at Hobbytown USA. The
game seemed to perplex her a bit, and it’s not the most readily available theme
or ruleset.
I would describe it as one of those games where the algorithm is
hiding just below the cards and play. In Fredericus (the picture is from RPG.net), you play a falconer with a
goshawk and a peregrine. You move to “towers” set on each side of an
eight-sided figure and send your bird out to hunt entirely fantastical
creatures (in other words, made up entirely for the game). Spreading out from
each side is the countryside (forest and air cards), the wild creatures (more
cards), and places to curry the king’s favor (king Fredericus represented by
more cards). On a turn, you move your falcons, shift the cards, try for a hunt,
hood your enemies birds, or gain favor. A separate deck of goal cards counts
down the game, which ends when Fred himself is revealed at the bottom of the stack. And there's a bit of betting going on, too.
Solid little game. Very few rules, easy to grasp, but the interaction of the
players through the constant shifting of cards makes for tight tactical play.
Which left Dana scowling the whole time.
So we moved to a familiar kid’s game as a palate-cleanser:
The aMAZEing Labyrinth. It’s a maze game with a gimmick: the board moves with
each turn (another tip of the hat to Kilroy_locke). A central grid of corridors is glued to the board, but the rest of
the board comprises chunky tiles that get pushed around with each player. You
have a goal card (a series of them, but no entirely one-off creatures)
representing one of the bits of loot illustrated on the board.
You move a row
or column and then move your pawn as far
as it can go. If you land on your loot, you flip your card over, draw a new one
(no, keep it secret), and play passes. Cute art. Great bits. Readily available,
and it beats the everloving life out of Sorry! Just to name one tedious
American classic.
We’ve been having an assortment of slightly annoying trouble with our electronics. The slightly sour RAM. The first incident with the DSL (really? seven thirty on a Sunday morning?). And now the Second Incident with the DSL (Wow. You’ve had 100 dropouts in fourteen days. That’s not right.—No doubt.). But the boardgames go on. Why not? At worst, we have candles, a lowly technology. But just high tech enough to let us keep playing.
There's more to say on this topic--the iPad, the MS Surface--but we'll come back to those issues, as well as issues about, say, the kind of industrial production that allows for all these different boardgames. That topic brings up some environmental impact questions, too, but all in good time.
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