TheMaka

I demoed this game at Gencon 2012 and then played two or three games with the people there. The mash-up of the various factions is very amusing (Ninja Aliens, Zombie Pirates, etc …)

It’s very easy to learn and we had a mix of players from 12 to 57 years old, all having fun while playing.

However, some of the factions have better synergy with other factions, which means you can end up with an unbalanced game. Zombie Aliens, seemed particularly powerful. Robot Wizards, on the other hand, seemed to lack any real synergy.

The Smash Up box is designed to hold a lot more than the eight faction decks included in the base game, so it seems obvious that the plan is to put out more and more faction decks. Once there are enough decks that everyone can pick out faction pairs with some synergy, the game may not suffer (as badly) from imbalance.

All in all, I enjoyed the game. I just wish it was better balanced.

Castle Panic is a tower defense style of game. Waves of enemies attack and each player uses attack cards to damage the oncoming enemies.

The game is surprisingly hard, and seems nearly impossible if you are playing competitively (for victory points).

The kids I was playing with told me they rarely won, even when playing fully cooperatively, but this didn’t stop them from wanting to immediately play again.

This seems like a good purchase if you’ve got board game playing children.

The game can change so quickly that you may not notice you’ve won!

Fluxx is a good game for explaining game mechanics to people who are new to the gaming world. The ever-changing set of rules means you have to pay attention though, so it isn’t what I would call a game you can play casually.

Some people find the changing rules very frustrating, so I wouldn’t bother showing this to inattentive players or you’ll spend a lot of time responding to questions like, “What, so what’s going on now?”

I found this game very frustrating. WIth too few players, the adversary just rolls over the players. With four players, they roll over the adversary. The game feels incredibly unbalanced.

We started house ruling it to fix some of the issues and realized it would be quicker to just play D&D.

I’ve also been told there are fixes available online, but again, if it requires that much work, we may as well just play D&D. The components are really nice, and may make the game worth the price for some players — they’re easily used in D&D games, for example 🙂 …

I’ve been told the 2nd edition is an improvement, but I do not have any direct experience with it yet.

I enjoy the game, but it seems to require more luck than skill.

This is a good adaptation of the board game.

This is a fun, surprisingly complex, game. Not only do you have to manage your resources, you have to watch what the other players are doing so they don’t swoop in and grab something you were eyeing.

This game is a lot of fun and very thematic, but so very slow to play. I’ve never come close to the 2 to 3 hours listed on the box, especially if we have new players.

Fun expansion.

Dominion was my first deckbuilding game. I like that the game can be different each time you play based on the cards involved in the game.

My favorite part is that the game is very fast and the more experienced the gamers are, the faster it can be. This is a great game for “we’ve got 20-30 minutes to kill.”

First a disclosure, I’m one of the play testers/developers of the game and a play tester/game developers for several other games by Andrew Parks (and Quixotic Games – http://quixoticgames.com).

That said, I really enjoy Core Worlds.

I really enjoyed Dominion so I was very excited to see what we could do with a deck building game.

I love our addition of the tableau, as it removed (what I thought was) the worst part of Dominion, getting a great card when you couldn’t use it, because you can keep one card in your hand each turn. I also think the limited amounts of each specific card makes draft choices more strategic.