by Surya Van Lierde is pure Eurosnoot and proud of it!
Race to the New Found Landtl;dr: Recycling at it's best
This game recycles a bunch of mechanisms we are familiar with. Build boats using resources. Use those to get more resources and score points. And the scoring of points is done by buying them with resources or settling tiles of land by moving there or discovering them. You know. A bunch of stuff that is tried and tested. But somehow Hans im Glück always manages to make these games so well put together. Everything fits well, everything flows well, the graphic design almost teaches you the game by itself... all in all an expertly put together game. That is not to say that this game is amazing. It's just very good at what it does.
One point, and this is not a knock on the game, is that the ending snuck up on us. It's not a long game and we all had a feeling of 'is it over already?' That being said: the length of this game makes sense if you look at the end result on the board.
Initial rating: 7.2/10
BGG scale: 7/10
Qwirkle Cards
tl;dr: take a good game and make it uninteresting
I love Qwirkle. It's one of my favorite abstract games. I know there is a significant luck factor in what tiles you draw when, but the joy of an excellent, smart placement is hard to beat.
This game takes the basic concept and gets rid of most of it. Gone are the chunky wooden tiles (no surprise) and gone is the grid of making rows (an unfortunate surprise) and gone is the scoring for the move you just did (a very unfortunate surprise). No, now you make individual rows of cards and you can reorder them at will and, what I dislike the most, you only score for making Qwirkles.
In the original you could do well by scoring well during the game but never scoring a Qwirkle. In this game it's the only thing that counts, and that is bad. Bad because being able to score a Qwirkle is not a good move, it's a luck you have to have. You have to luck in to drawing the right cards at the right time.
No, this was very disappointing.
Initial rating: 4.5/10
BGG scale: 3/10
Scandaroon
tl;dr: does not live up to it's
In this game you will try to play cards in front of you to maximise your score. To spice things up, cards have special abilities that allow you to improve your score, change the scoring values of suits or screw other players. This sounds like fun as you would think this allows for smart combos and such. Alas. You get 5 cards every round and if there are no combos that are of use to you, you're pretty much stuck. If most of those are 'end of row' cards, you won't be playing very many of them unless they have useful abilities.
So the main problem here is that you simply don't get enough cards to allow you to use the abilities fully. This is quite frustrating as it gives you the feeling it's a strategic game, but in the end the luck of the draw is a very influential factor.
A note on the rule book: this rule book is not great. It uses terms for different things and then fails to clarify the context when referring back to those things. It took some group effort and going back and forth to figure stuff out. Why don't the end of round instructions tell you to clean up your row of cards? It mentions somewhere they are used 'in that round' so I guess they are cleaned up, but are they? If there is ever a second edition for this game (that's a joke guys), I'l willing to help improve the rule book.
Disclaimer is someone who likes knob jokes a good friend of mine. He also happened to design this game. This has of course massively influenced my opinion on it and what I wrote here.
Initial rating: 5.5/10
BGG scale: 4/10