Had a mixed boardgaming evening tonight. The games I played seemed good, but we had a fourth nonregular player turn up (one of my regulars’ friends) and although she is a nice enough person, she was not exactly helpful to gaming - she wasn’t paying very much attention, was distracting the other players, got many of the rules confused, and then left halfway through the game at which point we just called it and tried another game. Which two of us really liked and was way too cerebral and pre-planning oriented for our third, so he kind of checked out pretty early.
The first game was Among the Stars, a drafting game not dissimilar to 7 Wonders except that you are building a space station so the cards are various locations on the station with positional bonuses and requirements. The optional content includes events that trigger every round (not turn - there are four rounds in the game, six turns each), objectives that give bonus points at the end of the game, ambassadors that you can invite to your station in place of building, alien racial abilities that slightly alter how you play, experimental power reactors that vary from the standard with both bonuses and drawbacks, and conflict sets (the only mechanic we did not use) that change the default peaceful play to something more aggressive. It feels flavorful and thematic and I thought there was a nice range of options, but like many games, it doesn’t really work if people aren’t paying attention and don’t seem to grasp the “play and pass” core mechanic. And we probably shouldn’t have started with all the extras in play. It wasn’t really that big an issue for me personally, once we sorted out what the various extras, y’know, looked like, but it meant more rulebooks to check and more stuff to not quite take in for the folks who weren’t as attentive.
Lagoon: Land of Druids was our second game of the evening, and man, what a funky design. It’s a game of druids structuring a magical land towards one of three underlying energies. Each player has four regular druids and one “Eldrid” archdruid. On your turn you refresh up to three of these druids in play and then can exhaust them to move, summon a druid that’s not in play to a “haven” tile (they arrive exhausted), explore to place a new tile adjacent to the tile the acting druid is on and gain a “seed” of the new tile’s alignment, or, if you have the right prerequisites, “unravel” an existing tile to remove it from play and place it in your scoring pile. The tiles all have an energy alignment, and when you’ve run out of tiles to place, the energy that has the most tiles present becomes the dominant energy and you score accordingly - 1 point per seed of the dominant alignment, 2 points per unravelled tile of the non-dominant alignments. So if that were all, it would be kind of neat but basic - drive the alignment by exploring for seeds of your desired color and unravel tiles of the nondesired colors, both of which score for you. But that’s not all. To unravel a tile you need access to three energy of the alignment that wins in the little rock-paper-scissors circle of alignments over that tile’s alignment (either by having druids on tiles of that color or spending seeds of that color, in any combination), and it kicks that druid back off the board, plus you can’t do it if it would either split the board apart or remove the last summoning spot (“haven”). So that’s a wrinkle. Plus, every tile is double-sided and a different alignment depending on the side…and the exploring player decides which side is used. Finally, every tile has a unique ability of some kind, either actively used by any druid or specifically an Eldrid, or passive and triggered at some appropriate time. And as long as you have a druid on that tile, you count as having access to both the ability and the tile’s energy for use with any of your eligible druids, no matter where else on the board you may happen to be. This rapidly escalates matters to pretty brain-burning intensity.
