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and promptly gets sent back into the ooze.
We played Urland on Sunday night. Five players,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alaimacerc, sammywol, Marie, Utz and myself. We chose our little coloured Itychostegas and plonked them down on the board and got playing after a slow recap of the rules long forgotten by the few of us who had played the game before.
General feeling by the end of the game was 'poo'. Things ran too slow, the scoring is not much better than random (at least for the active players) and the mechanics meant that two players did nothing each round apart from some bookeeping and selecting the new area to be scored from one of three randomly chosen tiles.
I came last by a large margin, and never really had the opportunity to catch up after the first round of scoring. It's an odd game, with some nice bits: the theme, the hard choices balancing movement, breeding and claiming land, and some crap bits: the two players doing nothing each round, the 'to those that hath shall more be given' scoring and hard cut-off minimum for breeding. I think this one will return to the ocean and forget its ill-advised flirtation with legs for a few more years.
I don't recall the final scores but it was Marie,alaimacerc, Sam, Utz and myself in descending order. I was way back on the scoring track, having fallen behind early and then unable to use the leapfrogging rule to keep up with the pack.
We played Urland on Sunday night. Five players,
alaimacerc, sammywol, Marie, Utz and myself. We chose our little coloured Itychostegas and plonked them down on the board and got playing after a slow recap of the rules long forgotten by the few of us who had played the game before.General feeling by the end of the game was 'poo'. Things ran too slow, the scoring is not much better than random (at least for the active players) and the mechanics meant that two players did nothing each round apart from some bookeeping and selecting the new area to be scored from one of three randomly chosen tiles.
I came last by a large margin, and never really had the opportunity to catch up after the first round of scoring. It's an odd game, with some nice bits: the theme, the hard choices balancing movement, breeding and claiming land, and some crap bits: the two players doing nothing each round, the 'to those that hath shall more be given' scoring and hard cut-off minimum for breeding. I think this one will return to the ocean and forget its ill-advised flirtation with legs for a few more years.
I don't recall the final scores but it was Marie,
alaimacerc, Sam, Utz and myself in descending order. I was way back on the scoring track, having fallen behind early and then unable to use the leapfrogging rule to keep up with the pack.
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On the evolutionary theme, do you know anything about either Evo or Trias? I've looked at the various reviews and descriptions on the web and they both sound appealing.
I still have a soft spot (in my head) for American Megafauna, but none of my friends would even contemplate setting up a game let alone playing it.
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I own both, but have never played Evo. I understand that Evo is more crunchy than it should be, but it's just never made it onto my game table, and now that it's moved into the grand game vault that is my basement, I doubt it ever will.
Trias I've played once, and it was rather good. Very "take that" and, again, more complicated than it possibly should have been. But it was still a decent game. It's greatest downfall is that that gameplay could have been vastly smoother if the publisher had provided a hex-grid "tablecloth" or board on which to put the playing pieces, as one of the features of the game is the slow breaking apart and spreading out of a Catan-like hex-blob continent, and it's important to accurately handle the number of empty spaces (the ocean) between the shards. A large hex "ocean" on which the shards could be shifted would have been very valuable, but also perhaps a bit costly. Oh well -- play it on a table that's relatively non-slip, and be careful as you move the shards, and you should be OK. (Oh, and if aesthetics are important to you, then make sure not to buy the first printing of the game as it just had plain cubes; the reprint came with little dino-meeples as also showed up in Urland.)
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Thanks for the warning on the dino-meeples. I'd hate to miss out on the little dinos.
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