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$20 board games: Fjords and Gold Train
Oct. 30th, 2006 07:38 amI was dragged to Games People Play against my will! It was terrible! I came away with two small things...
Fjords. A two-player tile-laying game, kind of like Carcassonne with hexes. Each player has four farms which can be laid on the tile just played; it's somewhat more likely that a tile will become unplayable but then you can later play one of the discards instead of drawing. After you run out of tiles, there's a second phase which involves growing fields outwards a tile at a time from your farms, and your total score is the number of fields. Looked and felt like a German game, seemed to work somewhat better than other small Carcassonne variants I've played (in particular Carcassonne: the Castle).
Gold Train. "Game-in-a-bag." Very low production value, which means you need to cut out all of the little cardboard bits yourself (and cut, not punch), and when you're done you have a not-very-attractive cardboard-markers-on-plain-hexes game. (Redoing it with Settlers-style hexes would improve the aesthetics a lot.) Players are exploring a mineral-rich mountainous area; you need to open mines and connect rail to them, but you need labor to build rail and the labor runs off to the mines when they're discovered. Very luck-oriented with two; I reserve judgement until I can play a 4-6-player game, it seems like a lot of the mechanics would work better if the eit could get spread around more.
Fjords. A two-player tile-laying game, kind of like Carcassonne with hexes. Each player has four farms which can be laid on the tile just played; it's somewhat more likely that a tile will become unplayable but then you can later play one of the discards instead of drawing. After you run out of tiles, there's a second phase which involves growing fields outwards a tile at a time from your farms, and your total score is the number of fields. Looked and felt like a German game, seemed to work somewhat better than other small Carcassonne variants I've played (in particular Carcassonne: the Castle).
Gold Train. "Game-in-a-bag." Very low production value, which means you need to cut out all of the little cardboard bits yourself (and cut, not punch), and when you're done you have a not-very-attractive cardboard-markers-on-plain-hexes game. (Redoing it with Settlers-style hexes would improve the aesthetics a lot.) Players are exploring a mineral-rich mountainous area; you need to open mines and connect rail to them, but you need labor to build rail and the labor runs off to the mines when they're discovered. Very luck-oriented with two; I reserve judgement until I can play a 4-6-player game, it seems like a lot of the mechanics would work better if the eit could get spread around more.
