Review Roundup 2

There are a lot of board games out there and, unfortunately, not all of them are good.  While we here at Polyhedron Collider try and write well-balanced reviews based on multiple play-throughs and with different groups, there are those game were doing is so torturous we end up alienating our friends and family. So we present the second part of our Review Roundup series, a set of short punchy reviews for games we are never going to play again.

Table Tantrums

Anyone who has planned a wedding knows the stress of trying to organise a seating plan. Uncle Owen and Aunty Margaret have a long standing feud so they better not sit together, Great Aunt Mable will be deeply offended if she isn't right next to the top table and Andy's sense of humour is likely to offend everyone.

Table Tantrums replicates this stress but takes the story to Renaissance Italy where you will be attempting to seat your guests at a grand banquet. It's a great idea for a board game, but unfortunately Table Tantrums doesn't really follow through with its promise.

For starters the art throughout Table Tantrums is pretty terrible, but art alone should not determine your enjoyment of a game. Table Tantrums’ main issue is that the game starts with an empty table, so most players can seat 75% of their guests without issue. The result is 15 minutes of going through the motions followed by 5 minutes of actual game. Even then there is a lot of luck, you could be waiting for your opponent to seat a key guest or you could just have a hand of easy to place guests and seat them in no time.

Table Tantrums has the potential to be a great game, it just needs some tweaks—such as randomly seeding the table with more guests—but as it currently stands Table a Tantrums is lacking in depth - Steve

Hipster Teenage Wasteland

The name Teenage Hipster Wasteland should turn away all but the bravest gaming enthusiast. Can you collect all three of the latest hipster items before they are no longer cool or before another player changes the rules of the game? Can you actually muster enough interest to continue reading this extremely short review? 

Hispter’s problem is not so much that it's bad; it's that it feels so horribly familiar and ultimately bland.  There is very little to distinguish it from the Exploding Kittens and Munchkins of this world, with the added downside that whereas the previous two mentioned games my raise a sensible chuckle from their humorous card design, Hipster is barely able to raise a subtle smile. In a market full of low price but silly take-that card games, a watered down Fluxx with terrible art quite rightly struggles to be noticed.  - Steve

Burn the Heretic

I think it’s fair to say that here at Collider Towers we like a drink or two. We’ve even played drinking games at times, Fuzzy Duck being a tried and tested one that’s lasted the ages. I’m not a fan of them myself as I’ve never felt the need for help to get drunk, I’m perfectly capable of that on my own. Burn the Heretic is basically a drinking game—not unlike Fuzzy Duck—but without the mind altering effects of copious quantities of alcohol.

The point of drinking games is that they rely on the participants making mistakes as they become more addled with John Barleycorn’s nectar (or a bottle of Jon’s Binger - a ridiculously strong ginger beer). Without that element, Burn the Heretic and other games like it fall flat because everyone can see, count, speak and above all pay attention. Lacking that all important brain failure, Burn the Heretic is just a card game we’ve all played before, without any cards I might add, and done far better before it turned up late to the party. - Andy

Drinking Quest: Journey into Draught

Talking about drinking games, Drinking Quest attempts to inject some much needed dungeon delving into the art of inebriation. It's a simple game where you will draw a card, roll some dice and if you roll badly and lose all your hit points, you are required to down your drink. The ultimate goal is to be the last one standing, quite literally.

Drinking Quest’s ultimate demise is that it fails to understand what makes drinking games fun. Games like the aforementioned Fuzzy Duck and Ring of Fire (aka Kings Cup) often require some form of physical or mental action that becomes more difficult the more you drink. The problem is that Drinking Quest fails at the most fundamental level - there are no decisions to be made and no challenges, it's quite simply drawing a card and then rolling some dice.  Whether you drink or not is purely at the fate of the dice and your inebriation level has no effect on the game.

It does however, have a sexy Cthulhu card - Steve

Oh, well that’s ok then! - Andy

Wild Fun West

It's a dangerous idea putting the word fun into the title of a game, it suggests that you don’t trust the fun to come out naturally and feel the need to remind your players that this game is ‘fun’. Look its say it right there. But Wild Fun West is neither wild nor fun.

Image from Casual Game Revolution

It's all about building a town in the old west and this requires building up a nice set of characters in front of you and bidding on the building of the town’s landmarks.  Each character however, effects which other characters are currently in play and so Wild Fun West, especially at the full 8 player count, devolves into constant checking of everyone's cards.  The result is a slow painful descent into chaos as players struggle to keep any form of strategy as cards are constantly being shot or denied entry into the game.  To me an 8 player game should be easy to get to the table, but Wild Fun West results in confusion and is far too complicated for its party game mantle.   - Steve

These reviews are based on a full retail copies of the game provided by the publisher.