Polyhedron Collider

Polyhedron Collider proves it is, as always, on the bleeding edge of new releases and the new hotness… by talking about Lords of Waterdeep and Android Netrunner, games that came out about 5 years ago.

We also agree the Echidna Shuffle is a great game, admit that we are terrible at Pandemic Legacy and should never be left in a position of responsibility and get all paranoid over The Thing.

Those of us who lack the always enviable skill of artistry, especially that skill of painting can rejoice, finally, that there is now an alternative to colour-by-numbers and those adult colouring books (which failed my expectation on the adult front) with Sunset Over Water, a lightweight, quick game of painting landscape masterpieces and selling them off.

Our game of Nine Worlds has stalled, my troops are scattered to Midgard, Alfheim and Norheim, their grasp on these realms would seem strong but in reality it is tenuous at best, because it is no longer my go and now I must wait. Tick follows tock, as my opponent's later on in the turn order mull over every option available, consider every possible avenue for points, and weigh up every possible combination of actions available to them with their limited resources. Time itself has slowed to a stop. I can do nothing, only wait and see what my fate becomes.

And thus Nine Worlds has committed a cardinal sin of modern board games, for I am now bored and I might as well play on my phone, go to the toilet or start peeling the spuds for the Sunday roast. I currently have no viable input into the game, until it all comes back round to me again.

Nimble is a game that will present you with neither interesting nor agonising choices. It will not test your resolve, or your ability to read a bluff in a friend's face. It will—as the name may hint at—test your reactions, your nimbleness if you will.

The rules and gameplay are very simple; all you have to do is draw a card from the top of your player deck, briefly place it on your discard pile and then place it on one of the central piles, where you will match the frame of your card to the circle of one of the central cards.

The first person to burn through their deck wins, if they haven’t made any mistakes that is.

That’s it. That’s the entire game mechanics.

There are things in life that are perfectly understandable. Things like buying German cars because they’re well made and can go round corners; wearing a crash helmet when riding a motorbike; sacking work off to go to the pub and drink in the beer garden because it’s a nice day or avoiding old people on the pavement as they dawdle and you’ve got places to be. There are also things that make less sense. Like Brexit or Donald Trump.

I feel that the subject of this review falls into the latter category, although purely in name alone. Rise to Nobility for me conjures images in my mind of a pleb trying to become more than they are. Earning money, working hard and gaining a title. A bit like Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale. What doesn’t spring to mind on hearing the title, is the strife involved to become the next Town Clerk to manage the organisation of inhabitants in a new city in the Five Realms and succeed a particularly bungling, but delightful old chap called Berk. Perhaps “Rise to Administration” would be more appropriate.

But, like a drunk trying remain focussed on explaining the finer points of Quantum Theory, I digress.

Apparently, Ragusa is the name of a port city now called Dubrovnik. I've learnt something new today and hopefully so have you. Well at the UK Games Expo 2018 I had the chance to play Ragusa with the game's designer and a lovely little euro game it was too.

The aim of Ragusa is to build the titular city and you'll do this in true euro fashion by gathering resources and exploiting locations. But instead of this game being the rather common worker placement game, this is a house placement game. Each turn you'll claim a location on the board and your little house will permanently remain in that location. This house gives you access to a variety of resources, including your basic wood and stone for building but also including things like olive trees, silver and grapes, all of which can be processed later in the game and sold for huge amounts of profit, or at least that's one of the aims of Ragusa.

There are but a few hours left, then, and then it’s all over. Everything. No more light, or dark, or time. Just the end. No one knows why. Or how. So before all the questions are gone too, all we have left is “what”. What are you going to do in the last moments of your life?

So Long, My World from Axis Mundi, is a game bleak in concept, bleak in themed, and yes, you guessed it, bleak in art. It is the theme, rather than its execution that will get under your skin, that will leave a taste in your mouth after the game is done and put away. In it, you’ll find a little bit of deck drafting, bidding and a sort of tableau building that all coalesce over a Matrix-esque end-of-the-world story that isn’t quite a story.

In this week’s episode we talk about a whole bunch of family games we have been playing, which means we have to counter balance it with more filth and swearing than a normal episode. Andy educates us on the difference between sonic and knuckles with Echidna Shuffle, Steve tells us about a hangry dragon in Beasts of Balance and Jon blind bets on peacock based trick taking game Pikoko.

We also have tickets for Knighmare Live up for grabs in our very first competition.

Connect to Polyhedron Collider

Search

Popular Posts

Blog Archive

A proud member of...

Connect With Us