Three Games

 My good friend lent me three games- brand new ones that were still shrinkwrapped- and we finally got around to playing all three. I don't want to review those games, but just talk about general impressions and insights I gleaned from playing them. I only played them once each, too, which is a pretty big caveat that if you want actual good reviews of these games you will not find them here!

Obsession has a pretty cool concept- think Pride and Prejudice or maybe Downton Abbey (neither of which i've read or watched lol). It's worker placement with deck building and tile laying, sort of,  I suppose. You have different coloured meeples who have specialized tasks they can do, and some colours can be substituted for others. You're trying to rebuild your estate and attract suitors and stuff. It's fine- I liked it. The rulebook was very thorough- including tons of info on Victorian society but I found it a little hard to parse as far as actually playing. Gameplay is simple enough once you figure it out, but each turn has many many steps, and those kinds of games are always harder to learn, I find.

Lost Ruins of Arnak got a lot of good buzz in the gaming community, and so I was very excited to try it. Very beautiful game, I really like the aesthetic. Nice components and art. Quite simple to play, and like Obsession it's a deck builder with worker placement- but no tile laying. I was surprised to find it was a family-weight game, I thought it might be a bit heavier. Having played Darwin's Journey first, maybe Arnak suffered a little in comparison. 

Beyond the Sun was a pleasant surprise- for Pallas and I both. Didn't know much about it, it was just the third game Kafir threw at me. Space theme, I like space. We decided to just watch a YouTubeo rather than wade through another rulebook. And once we got the flow of the game it was very easy to play. Super simple flow. Move your pawn, do the thing, then produce stuff, then check to see if you accomplished anything to help you win, now it's your turn! For that reason Pallas and I very quickly got immersed in the strategy and trying to plan moves when you don't have enough resources or people or argh! Wait! I can do this other thing but I need another turn to make it work...

I always say I like games where it feels like you're doing what you're doing, like it's a little microcosm. But to compare Arnak and Beyond the Sun, kind of puts the lie to that, or at least there's more to it than just that for me. Beyond the Sun has very little art- almost as though the designer (A very nice man named Dennis K. Chan) handed in his prototype and the publisher was like perfect, print it! (Usually game designers are discouraged from adding any art or anything as the publisher will do all that with their vast resources.) Don't get me wrong - the components are very nice, little dice and recessed player boards and all that. The theme of the game is all about unlocking new technologies to help you get out to the wider galaxy faster than anyone else. It's all done with iconography. And I found it didn't matter- we were having so much fun working out the puzzle of how to make the most out of our very quick turns. And we made our own terms that added some unintended immersion- you can trade in a "person" to make "ore" so we were very quickly saying "I squish this dude into coal" and that was pretty fun. Sorry Dennis!

Arnak, with all the great art and world-building, the turns never felt all that challenging. Like it was just a touch too easy to do whatever it is you wanted to do. Fight that monster? Here are the cards I need, yay! Now I will go up the research track, that was easy! Etc etc. I kind of wonder if maybe we were playing it wrong- always a possibility with me. 

So yeah, out of the three of these games, Beyond the Sun is the one I most want to play again.