When Mystery Express was announced by Day's of Wonder I was immediately intrigued and it became the main game I sought out at Origins 2010. It has since become one of our families gaming staples, supplanting Clue as our mystery board-game of choice.
In Mystery Express, you are a detective on the Orient Express attempting to solve a murder (should sound familiar). Mystery Express is a bit like Clue, in that you are trying to solve a mystery, the solution of which is contained on cards which have been removed from the game. There are five ingredients to each mystery: Time, Modus-operandi (how was the murder done), Motive (why did they do it), Suspect (who-dun-it) and Location (which train car was the murder committed on). Here is where the similarity to Clue ends. For one thing, there are two of every card, only one of which has been removed. For another thing, you get to choose the methods of your investigation using a variety of card-exposing choices. Each turn (there are 5 turns in each game) each player has a certain number of “hours” to spend in investigating and each method of investigation burns a certain number of hours so that you have to carefully manage your choices from turn to turn.
Game play is mildly-complex and there is a one-game learning curve. After the initial game, subsequent games go fairly smoothly taking about an hour to finish. Unlike Clue, it is rare that any investigator completely solves the mystery. The winner is the person with the most correct assumptions and generally you are forced to make an educated guess on two of the five missing cards. Despite this, the game is fun, especially in subsequent games after your first. It can be played by 3-5 players but is probably best with the full 5. Our 10 year old daughter plays it but it is probably not for players much younger than that.
Game components are well done. The game includes plastic investigator busts, a solid plastic whistle and traveling bag, game cards, deduction sheets and “telegram” sheets. The cards hold up well and the plastic pieces are quite nice. I do wish they would have provided a greater number of “Telegram” papers, but post-it-notes make a decent substitute for this particular game item after you run out of them.
I suspect the game is not for everyone. But its a solid 4+ star game and one that will certainly appeal to those that like interactive games, logic puzzles and deduction. I am certainly glad to have added it to our game library and it is a game that will see a lot of use in the years to come.
I received Cthulhu's Rising for Christmas because my wife knows I enjoy mythos-related games. Unfortunately, the lovecraftian flavor does not extend past the game description and the artwork. Don't let it fool you, and if you are buying this game because you anticipate a bit of insane, tentacled fun, you might give it a pass.
Despite this disappointment, there is a decent game in the box. The game board contains a counter running from 10 to 0 and then back up to 10. It also contains 2 5x5 grids. The number track is for keeping score and the game-play occurs on the grids. Each player has thirty colored tiles (red and blue). The tiles are numbered 1-10 and each color has three of each number. The tiles are seperated by color, turned upside down and scrambled. Each player takes his turn by choosing one of his own tiles and placing it on one of the two grids on the board. The goal is to complete rows or columns of five, predominately in your own color and containing multiples of the same number. Points are scored each time a row or column is completed. A pair on the column gains the predominate color one point, two pairs two points, three of a kind three points and so on. If a row or column is all one color there are bonus points. The points move the scoring counter up or down on the track and the first player to 10 points wins (alternately, if all the tiles have been played the player whose side contains the scoring counter wins.)
Game play is quick and relatively engaging. The box says 20 minutes for a game but 10 is probably closer to the truth.
My main complaint, as stated above, is that the game is sold as something its really not. Just a little more effort on the part of the publisher could have helped. The scoring token, for instance, is just a standard black game pawn. Just making it a tiny Cthulhu statue would have been a vast improvement. Maybe have green as one of the primary game colors would have helped as well. Granted, the number tiles have some suggestions of monstrous madness below the numbers but the art-directors wisely did not allow this to be so bold as to make the numbers hard to read. Which means that you scarcely notice this artistic embellishment. One other complaint, the sixes and the nines are too alike. Me and my wife played two or three games before we realized we were failing to properly differentiate between the two.
So to sum up. Not a bad game. If not for the misleading premise I would probably give it a four. But the fact that it really has nothing to do with Cthulhu other than artwork is a major downer with me, so I'm giving it 3 stars.
Ticket to Ride is the 2004 winner of the German Game of the Year award and is, in my humble opinion, one of the best games ever designed. I say this, not only as someone who really likes the game, but as someone who has introduced it to several people, all of whom, after one play, without exception, also really liked it. (This was true of gamers and non-gamers alike and this is an excellent game for gamers to play with non-gaming friends.) It is easy to learn and easy to play. It's essentially a well designed game of resource and time management, understandable by a child as young as 8 but enjoyable by an adult of 80+.
The game-board is a map of the United States with labeled cities, each one connected by "train routes." The goal of the game is to make connections between the cities in order to score points. Points can also be made by completing longer routes, as provided on "Ticket Cards." Connections are formed by completing sets of colored "Train Cards." On your turn you may do one of three things. 1) Draw Tickets, 2) Draw Train Cards, or 3) Play Train Cards to make connections. Play continues until one player is nearly out of train tokens. There are a few other minor complications, but this is the game in a nutshell. (Gameplay can be taught to a novice in under 5 minutes.) The winner is the player who scores the most points. Game-play, once the game has been learned, takes about an hour. The game is suitable, as is, for 2-5 players. My family has played it for 6 (by purchasing additional tokens), which makes it much more challenging.
The basic design of the game is, as I said, excellent. My praise for the original game and game-board, however, has one caveat. The basic game is excellent but the original ticket cards lend themselves to about 3 basic winning strategies. The replay value of the game is greatly magnified by the add-on of the 1910 expansion. This expansion increases the available winning strategies and is well worth the purchase. Despite this, the game is simply one of the best and should be in every gamer's library.
I'm suprised no one has written a review for Dominion yet. The 2009 winner of the German game of the year, Dominion is a card game, not a board game.
The basic gameplay is simple and can be taught in a few minutes. You begin paly with ten cards, 7 of which are money cards. You use the money cards to purchase new cards. When you have played through all the cards in your deck you reshuffle and start again. Basically one can think of it as growing an economy through the purchase of new wealth and land. At the end of the game, the one with the most victory points (i.e. land) wins. The purchase of action cards creates the variety which makes the game interesting. Moreover you use only ten kinds of action cards a game; but the game comes with about 25-30, so there is a good variety of gaming options and styles and just changing up one or two of the action cards makes the game play different.
Overall it is a great game: Well deserving of its Game-of-the-Year Status. This game should be in every gamer's library.
I was very excited about this paper and think it will make an excellent paper for wrapping gaming related gifts. Stan's artwork is whimsically good and quite appropriate. My one complaint however is that the paper is quite thin, see-through thin, which for gift wrapping paper is a bit of a no-no. I easily solved the problem by wrapping the gifts first in white butcher paper I use for mailing packages, but any colored or printed paper you might choose to use first would ruin some of the effect of Stan's drawings. If the paper was thicker, it would be a solid 5 star item. As it is, I go with 4 stars, though 3.5+ is my real grade.
The maps in this folio are basically identical to the maps that you get with the adventure itself. The first exceptions are the two 'poster' maps, which are four times larger than the two identical maps on the inside of the Player's Guide. The map of Magnimar is also the map from the blog, not the map from the AP itself. The paper, glossy, is a bit thinner than I would like but that's a minor complaint. My only other complaint is that I like bigger poster maps. Other than that, the map quality is better than I can print myself with my ink-jet.
If you want to save ink and like not having to flip back and forth in your module between the maps and the room descriptors than this might be worth the money for you. I cannot imagine why anyone would want the PDF of this product if they already have the AP itself. Overall, I am pleased with my purchase, but I would be reluctant to pay much more for it.
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