Hello and Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadian readers. I chose a song with turkey in the lyrics for the title this week just for us. That said, let’s blog!
I was up super late last night. I got together with Frank and Melanie for an evening of board gaming and we sat around talking for a couple of hours afterwards. There’s just nothing like getting together with friends. We played Star Wars Timeline and we actually got some of the cards wrong. There are some cards that are trickier than I expected, mostly from the middle sequence of The Empire Strikes Back. In addition, we played The Hare and the Tortoise, Star Wars Carcassonne, Age of War and Dice Town. That’s a pretty charged evening. It helps that these are all shorter games (Dice Town takes the longest to play). It was totally worth not watching WWE No Mercy live for sure.
Today I completed the Masters of the Universe flashback set. That’s 18 pictures in 10 weeks. A pretty decent clip. Of course, I had some longer weekends in there where I was able to produce two pieces per week (like this one). I’m not done with the Masters of the Universe yet though. Chae and Skitter will be getting all new pieces as well to bring the total up to 22 mash-ups. I’ve had a lot of fun drawing this set. The weakest ones have already gone up (Mekaneck and Tri-Klops) so it’s even better stuff from here on out.
New games tried this week: Cacao, Yggdrasil and Letter Tycoon. Cacao is a tile placement game reminiscent of Carcassonne with a light worker placement theme added in the mix. It was alright. Yggdrasil is a cooperative game with a Norse mythology flavor. Despite playing sub-optimally and being very unlucky with our die rolls, we still managed to win without too much difficulty (we played with the easiest set-up for our first game). It also left me feeling kind of cold. Neither game is one I’d seek out, but I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand if I was asked to join in.
The real fun discovery was Letter Tycoon. My mom plays a lot of Scrabble on her smart phone, so I thought it’d be an interesting game for us to try out. Each player draws a hand of seven letters and with the community pool of three letters tries to make the longest word possible. Words bring in money and stocks (points) depending on their length.Each dollar is worth a point at the end of the game but can also be used to buy letter patents which will bring in money when other players use them or grant special powers which will make it easier to score bigger words in subsequent rounds. The game ends when one player has acquired a set value in letter patents, but with stocks and money, it’s not necessarily the player with the most patents who wins. In fact, in the four games we played, I think the player with the most patents only won once. In one game, I had two powers that worked well with each other, I scored double if my word began and ended with a vowel and doubled again if at least half of the letters in my word were vowels. I got cards that would spell the word “Acute”, which as a five letter word would score 3 dollars, doubled twice to 12 dollars. Nice, but not great. With an L and a Y, I would spell “Acutely”, which as a seven letter word would score six dollars and a stock, doubled twice to 24 dollars and four stock. I spent several turns discarding and drawing to try to get the letters I needed, letting my mom accumulate more and more money. I just wanted to get that sweet score. And eventually it all fell into place and was enough to push me ahead for the win!
Lastly, I finally bought last year’s Skylanders release, Superchargers. It was on sale at Walmart for under half price as they’re making room for the new Skylanders game that actually comes out next weekend. I’ve been out of the Skylanders fold for the year, so I’d completely lost track. Walmart also has reduced the figure and vehicle prices to reasonable levels so I can at least look to get a water and sky vehicle to be able to unlock all the areas in the game. After the huge buy-ins necessary to go through Trapmasters, Superchargers is surprisingly light on required purchases. The price hikes just left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ll no doubt end up buying Imaginators as well eventually, but I think I may finally be over the “gotta buy them all” craze. I’ve read that Superchargers hasn’t sold as well as previous Skylanders titles and it is probably the weakest installment thus far, so that’s not shocking. Toys for Bob is doing Imaginators. They alternate with Vicarious Visions for each Skylanders game so they can release one each year but still give a decent amount of time to work on each. The Toys for Bob installments are generally stronger, so it’s looking good for the next game which will allow players to design their own Skylanders and store them on data crystals.
Lego Dimensions is pushing out a lot of new content as well with A-Team, Knight Rider, Gremlins and Teen Titans expansions to name a few. There are some eclectic choices there. I don’t know any kids that will be clamoring for K.I.T.T. or B.A. Baracus. It’s clear Lego is plumbing the depths of the Warner Bros. catalog to try to attract older gamers to the series. They definitely have the deeper wallets, but the gameplay isn’t what older gamers typically are after (myself excluded) so I don’t know how that strategy will work out. If the game and the sets weren’t so expensive, I’d be all over it though.
Okay, I believe that’s all I’ve got to blog this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.
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