by IrishFire
I was shopping for [thing=2655]various[/thing] [thread=493034]tiles[/thread] through most of the day (is it still thrifty if you waste an entire day on it?) and decided to swing through B&N after I'd been kicked out of what the family drunk refers to as Hobby Robby. I'd heard of the 50% off sale and had already sent two of my minions to peruse the wares, but thought I'd better have a look for myself.
I found a small box with intriguing art that no one had mentioned. Undersea gnomes trying to stave off death, hmm? And isn't that designer Geek of the Week right now?
It sounded interesting, but I've been burned before, so I decided to give the much-lauded [thread=427571]BGG app[/thread] a try. It worked a charm! The rating is over 6.5, so it was a toss-up, and the comments were even iffier. 'Not as good as [thing=37111]Battlestar Galactica[/thing].' Ok, someone is going to have to show me why I have no fun whatsoever with that game. It's fun for the first ten minutes as I talk about how much I want to fight and frak everyone, and from there I just spend the whole game in the brig. The whole game! Human, cyclon, doesn't matter. There is no fighting OR frakking in the brig, so unfun.
But I digress! Right. Not as good as Battlestar, which seems good enough if you're a slimeball terrorist. Not as good as [thing=30549]Pandemic[/thing], which my group has only played once, overly successfully, and won't judge until we've had another go. So very much like, but not as good as, two brilliant game concepts that we haven't quite had work out for us? Ha, what do those BGGers know anyway? Imma buy it!
*sigh*
When will I ever learn?
Anyhoo, as this has become a review-and-session-play in one, let me state that the game bits are glorious. They all fit in the itty bitty box if you rip out the attractive but hindering insert, and they're purrrrdy. Very clever. No extraneous bits, no bits that were lacking, and not a single bit that made us say 'awww, I wish these were . . . ' A+ for construction. I must admit, as the primary game-schlepper in my various gaming circles, the petite size of a game that nevertheless packs a punch was a huge draw.
My
And OH, the rules. Let it be said that most of my favoritest games have less than five pages of rules. Days of Wonder gets a pass every once in a while, but for the most part? SHORT RULES. My friend had already freed the majority of little bitty bits (no small task, mind you) and was starting to poke me with the 'k, can we play now?' type of needling. I was about 1/4 of the way through.
The rules are a bit thick--though I've seen worse--AND they are redundant. Sometimes it would tell me the same thing on the same page. Ouch! And then there were these bits we needed to know that simply weren't there. By the time we were twenty in-game minutes in, we already had three questions we couldn't answer, and needed to. We also consulted the rule book so often and for so long each time that I started sighing and saying, 'House rule is now X, and we'll look up the real answer before we play again.'
I've seen worse, but C- at best for fiddly rules. Solid D if the teacher doesn't like you, or if she's as cranky and tired as I was when I played.
Or to put it in gamer terms, 'Not as convoluted as [thing=15987]Arkham Horror[/thing], but not as easy as Battlestar Galactica.'
Right. Moving on, then: mechanics. These were . . . elegant. No, these were beautiful. They deserve their own paragraphs.
I've never encountered a time system like this before. It works like a novel or TV drama that endeavors to show you what each character was doing at a certain time. If you've indulged in the empty romantic calories that are NY-LON on Hulu, it's just like that: You see what handsome vampire-face is doing, and the results of what he did, and then the time ticks backwards and you see what she-who-screws-it-all-up was up to at the same time. It's simply marvelous . . . and simple, at that! Color me impressed.
The time and the disasters that occur in that timeframe work together seamlessly, as does the disaster integration with the bits, the effort it takes to manage them, and the culmination of said disasters. The various mechanisms of the game work together so brilliantly that I really want to like the darn thing.
But, well . . . 2.5 hours to play a 60 minute game? I think BGG and the box are both stretching it when they say the game can sometimes be played in 60 minutes, as it means each and every player would have to average 20 seconds per 'move' (I use that term loosely, but it works) at an absolute maximum in a 3-player game, the minimum number of players printed on the box.
I will say that the game, if you ignore the head-scratching over rules, played the way it was supposed to: we cruised through the first 20 in-game minutes of disasters wondering how seriously we should take them, then triggered two disasters too many rushing over ourselves to literally put out too many fires, until we were finally crushed under the weight of our own failure ten minutes before we would have been rescued.
Final score, then:
Construction: A+ It could hardly be better. Sure, the gnomes are plastic, but the detail on the visage rivals that of the monks in [thing=915]Mystery of the Abbey[/thing], and their form is even better.
Mechanics: A++. Just wow.
Rules: D to C-, depending on how gracious I want to be. Maybe this can upgrade to a C- by the next time we play. I DO hate complex rules more than the average gaming bear.
Theme: I don't need themes, but since this one has one, and since it's more or less dictated by the mechanics, A-. Everything works. Everything. But . . . gnomes? I don't mind gnomes, but it's the only extraneous feature in a game where absolutely everything else fits to a T. The only reasonable explanation for the gnomes, then, is that Jules Verne came crawling out of his grave to complain about copyright infringement. Clearly his case is frivolous, but they didn't know that. Otherwise they wouldn't feel the need to make such a strange change to what could otherwise be called '20,000 Leagues Under . . . Oh Crap, This Boat Isn't Built So Good.'
Fun: the jury is OUT. We need more evidence. Mistrial. I think it's guilty of being slightly unfun, but we'll try again with better rule comprehension and see how it goes. How can something with such beautiful mechanics be anything less than bliss? I must be doing it wrong. I swear I didn't play as Starbuck this time, though, so what could it be?"
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