Drudd

I finally got a chance to sit down with my new copy of ‘Lords of Waterdeep’ last night! Lets take a look at the game in some detail:

COMPONENTS:

Lords of Waterdeep has EXCELLENT components.Evrything from the box itself to the bits you play with is very well made. One of my favorite things to do when I get a new game (and don’t get a chance to play it for awhile) is to sit down and organize the bits. Whether it is bagging them or seperating them into Plano boxes, I enjoy organizing them. Lords of Waterdeep has such a thoughtful/useful insert that I didn’t get the chance to do anything with the componenets but put them into their respective and completely useful places in the insert tray, and leave them there. Sigh. Everything fits well, is super easy to get back OUT of the tray, and is very well organized. Though if you sleeve your cards they won’t fit quite right. The cards aren’t handled a great deal during the game so I don’t have any problem with this personally.

The components themselves are very nice wood and cardboard bits, a sturdy game board with excellent art and some very nice(if a *bit thin) linen textured cards. The agent tokens and counters are smooth and feel nice to touch, and the cardboard is thick and durable. This game will last for many, many games.

Overall I would give the components a 10.

GAMEPLAY:

Lords of Waterdeep is an easy to learn, but surprisingly strategic game. My wife always taunts me when I say a game is ‘easy to learn’. Since she doesn’t play a ton of boardgames, some of the concepts that we gamers understand quickly are lost on her. In this case, when I say the game is easy to learn, I actually mean it! Here is the quick rundown:

1. Everyone has an oversized player card in front of them that is broken into 3 areas- Agent Pool, Tavern, Completed Quests. At the start of the game every player gets a specific number of Agents that they will send out into the city. The number of agents varies based on the number of players. These Agents will sit at the top of your player card in the “Agent Pool” area.

2. The players are all assigned a starting bit of gold, with the starting player getting the least amount, and each subsequent plyer getting one more gold than the person he is following. Everyone also gets a Lord card that has a secret goal listed on it. This is kept secret from other players, and if the goal is achieved will give you get bonus victory points at the end of the game. This hidden victory point mechanic keeps the end game scoring pretty tense. Two Quest cards and two Intrigue cards are also given to each player. Quest cards give you in game goals to complete for rewards, and Intrigue cards are ued to gain extra resources and occasionaly do bad things to your fellow Lords.

3. In turn order, everyone places one of their Agents on a different area of the city. Most areas are allowed only one agent per round, but there are a few that will hold multiple Agents at a time. Some of these city areas give you resources (different colored cubes that represent the different class types in D&D. I.E. Purple cubes= Wizards, Orange= Warriors, White= Clerics and Black= Rogues.) These cubes are used to fulfill the requirements listed on the Quest cards. The collected…people cubes…are placed into the tavern area on your player card, and collected until you spend them to complete quests. It’s that easy. Some areas allow you to build new buildings, which then become new spaces for players to place agents on, but the owner of the building (the person that paid to build it) gets a reward whenever another player uses that building. This is a very fun mechanic.
The last few city spaces allow you to either get new quests, play your Intrigue cards, and even steal the first player token.

4. When all Agents are placed, the round is over and the Agents go home and await the start of the next round. Rinse and repeat. You play for eight rounds, and then the game is over.

The winner is the person that scores the most victory points by the end of the game. There is a pretty cool scoring track that borders the city and lets everyone get a quick glance at where scores stand at the moment. With the exception of the hidden VPs that will be applied at the very end of the game.

Lords of Waterdeep plays very elegantly and smoothly and the rules are very wll presented and easily understood. As our first game, I think I consulted the instruction manual two or three times during the game, and that was it. We all figured out the flow and some of the strategy of the game by the second round and were off to the races after that.

I would give the gameplay a 10. It is complex without being complicated, easy to learn, and the playtime is surprisingly quick. (We played with 3 people, first game ever, and were done in about an hour and twenty minutes.)

THEME:

This is where a lot of people take issue with Lords Of Waterdeep. I would say that on the surface, the theme is pretty thin. Using blocks to represent people, and spending those people like currency to complete quests does not let you form much of a connection with your subjects. We had many jokes during the game about suicide missions and the like. Killing your tavern customers off is not very good for repeat business! BUT, the theme really didn’t bother me at all personally. A bit of imagination goes a long way in this game and the three of us that played were able to give some personality to our suicidal little cube adventurers.

The look of the game, and the theming on the board, tokens, coins and cards is solid though. The coins are shaped like squares and half-moons and are just fun to hold. The card art and quest titles help to build some sort of story, and the building names help immerse you as well. Not everyone will see these things as immersive, but the good thing is that there is a solid game underneath it all regardless.

I would give the theme an 8.

CONCLUSSION:

After reading all of that I am sure you can see that I really liked this game. It plays fast, is easy to learn, has great components and sets up quickly. There is a lot of strategy and choice, but not enough to cause analysis paralysis. I am going to play this with my kids next weekend (ages 11 and 13) to see what they think, but I am pretty sure they will grasp the concepts and gameplay pretty quickly. I would say it is a good gateway game with enough meat to keep serious gamers coming back for more. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading and have fun playing!

Pandemic. What is to be said about this gem of a game that hasn’t already been written? At the risk of repeating some of my fellow reviewers, let my give you my opinion of the game.

Who it’s for:
This is a great game to get people into the hobby. BUT, don’t let this game’s ‘gateway’ tag be a deterrent to you serious gamers out there. This game is a blast, and when played on hard will challenge any gamer. It is a great cooperative, social game, and really makes people work together. Yes you can get a person that tries to take over sometimes, but that has been a rare occurrence in my games.

Mechanics:
The game has a very slick set of mechanics. This is a cooperative game, meaning that the player work together to beat the game, as opposed to working to defeat the other players. To start, you select a role. Each role benefits your team in a different way, from being able to remove infection at a faster rate to dispatching people to various areas immediately, saving them a future move action. You perform 4 actions on your turn. Any combination of moving, removing infection, building research stations, swapping cards, etc. Then you draw 2 cards. And then you infect the world by flipping over cards from the infection deck and infecting the cities shown on the cards. If those cities already have three infections on them they outbreak to their neighboring cities. If any of THOSE cities have 3 infections already, then THEY break out…you get the idea. Then it is on to the next player.

Components:
The components for the game are functional. Wooden cubes and pawns, and some pretty nice cards. The art style is fine with me, it doesn’t add much to the game, but it doesn’t detract either. The aforementioned pawns are really fat at the base and take up a lot of real estate on the board, making two or 3 of them in the same city a tight fit. This is addressed in the expansion, but is an annoyance in the base game. Really, though, the components aren’t bad at all, just…functional, like I said before.

Ease of play:
Pandemic really is an easy game to learn and to teach! I love games that get new gamers involved from the get go and Pandemic is one of those types of games. I really enjoy watching a person that has only played once, have the ability to explain the rules and even some of the strategies to new players. Pandemic allows this in spades.

Replayability:
I really feel that this is where Pandemic shines. Every game is different, and every game is intense. I have played this game with new gamers as well as veterans. One thing that I have loved about it is how you can get your collective butt kicked, and yet there is still a unanimous cry to try again. Pandemic really makes for a fun, intense, teamwork based challenge every game. In the games I have played and won, we have literally won by one turn. Talk about edge of your seat!

Final Thoughts:
Obviously if you have made it this far, you can guess my feelings for Pandemic. Any game that allows the kind of quick to learn, team based, cooperative, intense, disease curing excitement that Pandemic brings to the table is a win in my book. If you are just getting into the board gaming hobby, this is a great game to seed your collection with. If you are an avid player, give it a shot with your group sometime. Pandemic is the ‘cure’ for your gaming bug.

Thanks for reading!

Quarriors! is one of those games that doesn’t come along very often. It has a ton of very nice dice (with a few exceptions), nice quality cards with a great art style, and a lot of built in fun.

Quarriors! is the new dice-building game from Wizkids. The game is unique in that everyone builds their specific bag of dice from the same pool of dice available in the middle of the table. Think Dominion, but with dice. One key difference though, is that each of the dice, having six sides, has the chance to give you one of six different results. For example, a dice that is representing a creature has only a few of it’s six sides with that creature on them. The rest of the sides may contain Quiddity (money) or even a special action.
What this means is that you won’t always get the creature, even though you have that creature’s dice.

I am normally not a huge fan of luck based games, but I feel that Quarriors! does an excellent job of using just enough luck to keep the game fresh and fun, but allows the player the ability to strategically build his bag of dice. It can be frustrating when you don’t get the dice you need, but when you do…Look out!

The fast paced game-play goes a long way toward keeping the luck part of the game from drowning it in frustration. You can play four players in about 25-30 mins. If you have a bad game, reset, get some new cards/dice on the table, and try again.

Quarriors! is a great game for gamers of all levels. It is my 12 year old son’s favorite game. (he has beaten me 15 out of 20 games.) And my wife even enjoys it. Give it a shot, you won’t be disappointed!

Game play: 9
The game is easy to learn, plays quickly, and is overall just a lot of fun.

Replayability: 9
There are three variants of each of the ten creatures in the game and four variants of each of the five spells. This means a different game every time you play!

Quality: 9
The quality of the game’s components is top notch. The dice are etched, not stickered, which is a huge plus for a game with over 130 dice. The only exception to this is that the portal dice are a bit hard to read because of the size of the die and the pattern they chose to put on it. The cards are of good stock and filled with nice artwork.

Sorry Sliders is one of those games that people walking by stop to watch…and then line up to play. My kids and I pull this one out when we have some time to kill, and sometimes even to decide who is going to do what chore. My 10 year old beats my 12 year old often, as well as myself and her Grandparents.

I won’t get into the step by step game play since Andy, in a previous review did a great job explaining it. I will agree with the criticisms of the components. While the pawns themselves work well, the game board leaves a lot to be desired. There is a little ‘lip’ at the end of your side of the board that your pawn drops off of when sliding, that can create some silly issues with pawns falling over, as well as affecting some of the strategy behind your slide. That being said, The game is still a ton of fun to play!

If you are looking for a fun little game that is easy to learn, plays quickly, and creates a lot of social interaction, then Sorry Sliders may be for you!