This is a clip of the episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUbOYvpAh4U
2021 was a difficult year, but I was lucky enough to try a ton of new games over the course of the year. Here are some brief thoughts on each of them!
##Not for me…
Roll To The Top! (3/10): Take this with a grain of salt, as roll and writes aren’t really my thing. However, this ‘back to basics’ take on the genre was probably the most bored I’ve been with any game I played in 2021. The dice switching mechanic is unnecessarily fiddly and slows the game down, which is a big problem when the best thing the game has going for it is how quickly it finishes.
Godspeed (3/10): I had high hopes for this one, but it fell completely flat. The semi-cooperative element (the ‘High Council’ event cards) just felt like they didn’t work at all. The rest of the game was more functional than this, but it wasn’t any more fun.
An Otter Won (3/10): Two-player trick taking that has some interesting ideas around set collection scoring conditions. Unfortunately, the actual trick-taking is dull and the only interesting decisions are in working out which card you should take as your reward for winning tricks. Some may enjoy it, but this felt far too mathy for us to get any enjoyment from.
Beyond The Sun (4/10): As someone with less-than-great vision, I will always consider games with vast amount of variable small text spread out across a big central board to be bad game design. I can’t remember too much about how it played to give any meaningful critiques, but I certainly found it a slog.
Fort (4/10): I’ve always been someone who enjoys building things in games, whether that’s decks, engines or anything else. Fort seems to actively push against building longer-term strategies, instead encouraging players to make the best of what’s available to them in the shorter term. Nothing wrong with that… but personally I didn’t like it at all. Fort doesn’t really have a ‘game arc’ and it made me realise how much I need that in my games.
Ghost Blitz (4/10): This is pretty much the same game as Dobble. I hate Dobble.
Oh My Goods! (5/10): We played through ‘Expedition to Newdale’ in 2020 and enjoyed it, but felt that a few of the elements added in (notably the map board) felt superfluous. Going back to Oh My Goods, the original card came Newdale was based on, quickly changed our minds. The game that’s left is slow, stodgy and not especially interesting.
##Inoffensive enough
New York Zoo (5.5/10): The polyomino puzzle is fine, and the race i
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