SquidWill

Terra mystica is a complex awesome completely fantasy version of settlers of catan with so much more depth. You choose one of 14 different races, and with different special abilities, and try and gain points by building the biggest city’s or completing little bonus tasks for the round, or advancing yourself in a cult. Problem is you need recourses, so build buildings to get them, next problem is you need resources to terraform a space to the environment that your race can build on, so you need more reassures so upgrade your buildings, next problem is they replace your old ones so instead of getting a worker for that dwelling it’s now a trading house so your get magic and gold, but you still need workers!

It’s all about balance, and figuring out what your race is good at, how you can get the most points, coz having the biggest city is just one way to get them, huge amounts of strategy and prior playing need to be involved.

One possible flaw with this game is lack of player interaction, you can pre-empt where they are thinking of building next and try and block them but that’s about it, there’s no other ways to directly effect another player, you just have to observe and adapt to claim more points that round.

The game is split into six rounds each with two bonus objectives to get more rewards during or at the end of the round, the six rounds will probably last about 45mins when everyone knows what they are doing, which sometimes feels a little short to me but once I get used to how most the races play I’m sure I’ll be able to accomplish more in that time. Is a great game and after the initial ‘Wow! There’s a lot of stuff going on here!’ Sensation play flows quite well and the phases of play make logical sense making the rules easy to memorise.

This is the first game I have bought out of the Arkham terror franchise and it’s awesome! It looks complicated to begin with but after one game you won’t need the rule book to hand, and if you do hit a snag the inclusion of a shorter reference book makes it easy to overcome any difficulties or disputes.

This a true co-operative challenge, I have only managed to defeat one old god in about 10 games haha. But even losing isn’t too bad because everything that happens is unpredictable and the theme, illustrations, and story are captivating. I have played with 2-4 people and the game is just as hard with any amount, as the difficulty increases with the players, and more monsters show up and more bad stuff happens… Which is pretty much all that happens, very rarely you’ll turn over a card that does you some good.

The game is long but not as long as some people seem to claim, I’ve not played for more than two hours since the first game, if everyone’s familia with the game the world 9 times out of 10 can be over quite quickly! All the characters are completely individual and good at different things, it’s important to pick a team that has a broad range of skills, if you have no one who can fight your doomed just as if you don’t have anyone clued up in lore.

Pick your team of investigators from all over the world and fight ungodly demons and travel nightmarish realms in search of clues to save the earth, and probably fail, but you will try again and again that is a promise.