First play: Isla Dorada...

... and boy did I have hopes for this one (see my excitement here).  Not to say they have been crushed, ESPECIALLY after one play.  But this game is very chaotic.  The random event cards can be a bit devastating when picked at the right times.  For example, by pure chance I drew a card before the final bidding round which allowed me to make two other players discard 3 adventure cards each.  This effectively locked one player out of the last round of bidding and cost her the game.  How arbitrary.

As well, I kept thinking of games like Ticket To Ride and Elfenland for which this game would share the same audience (and was definitely inspired by).  Both of those games seem to have an arc and climactic, nail-biting endings.  In this first game, I had played my winning cards by round 14 and couldn't improve my position anymore.  I basically sat quiet through the last two auctions before I could claim the win.  Hmmm.

Having said this, we were playing slow due to it being our first game and so it did seem to go on for awhile.  But we were definitely entertained and the artwork is fantastic but I'm just not sure there is enough control or long-term strategy to make this last more than a few plays.  I really hope I'm wrong because I could see this being quite a humorous, nasty little game.  We shall see.

Merry Christmas....

I am looking at copies of Bauza's 7 Wonders and Faidutti's Isla Dorada on my kitchen table right now.

It's going to be a really fun Christmas...  That is if I can stop playing Agricola long enough to get 'em both out of the box!

Getting excited...

There are honestly too many games being published nowadays to keep up with, let alone play them all.  W. Eric Martin (the OTHER Eric Martin) makes a valiant effort of reporting on all of them at his fantastic website BoardgameNews, a site that deserves way more recognition than it gets and has been nicely updated recently.

Since I can't even fathom playing all of the games that come out, I am just getting excited about certain ones.  Like Isla Dorada which I've mentioned before.  The other Eric helped translate the rules for the English version and has a lot more details on it here.  Can't wait for this one in October!

On The Horizon: Isla Dorada

I played the classic Elfenland again on Monday night with some newbies and forgot just how wonderful the game is (Alan Moon is an outright genius, in my mind).  Reminded me to mention the upcoming game, Isla Dorado, invented by Bruno Faidutti and being released this fall by Funforge.  The game itself sounds like a cross between Wildlife Adventure and Elfenland although he attributes many of the ideas to some others.  Read Faidutti's fascinating post about the development of the game here.  There is also a first review here on BGG - read it and start the countdown....