Carnivals, Campiness, and Craziness! Oh My!

Since this is my first post on Fridays for the games that I have been playing, I thought that I would give a basic rundown of how these posts will work. I'll generally try to pick two or three games that I played this week and provide some deeper thoughts on what I played. Since I log my plays weekly on the weekly What Did You Play This Week (Last week's WDYPTW), I'll try to be a bit more thorough with some of my thoughts, but you can always check out my logged plays and weekly WDYPTW for a full list of what I played along with scores, who won, etc.

I only started tracking my plays back in August/September of 2023 and while part of me regrets not having done so earlier, I also wasn't as active here on BGG before, so it probably wouldn't have been done anyways. Since then, I've tried to keep my list updated fairly regularly and will attempt to log any play immediately after completing the game. I'm not great at taking photos during setup, or remembering to take them at the end of the game, but now that I'm blogging here, I'll start being more regular with my photos and will try to snap at least one or two of my plays.

I do want this blog to be one that promotes community engagement, so feel free to comment your thoughts on the games that I played. I know that we all have very different strategies while playing games, so I'm curious to see what everyone's thoughts are in regards to strategy. We are a community after all and I definitely want to foster engagement here.

A Pence a Dozen

While I did mention that I had played Tenpenny Parks in my weekly WDYPTW update, I didn't really dive into the game and my thoughts on it after playing it for time's sake. But with this blog, I can absolutely dive into the game a bit more and talk about my thoughts on how it played, how I played, and what the ultimate conclusion of my play was.

First and foremost, I will say that I had never played Tenpenny Parks previously. I was attending 2D-Con Unplugged with my friend, Anthony (whom I have previously mentioned in past posts) and he had brought his two eldest kids along for our Saturday excursion into the wild world of board games. He had mentioned that he would like to play Tenpenny Parks as he had previously played Meeple Land and wanted to see how they compared. I myself am a huge fan of theme-park related games, having played hundreds of hours of RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on the computer.

We launched into the game after setting it up, and I must say that the chonky cardboard pieces felt great. They were much thicker than regular cardboard pieces (by about double) and everything felt nice. However, good components a good game does not make.

The game itself was decent. There were some light worker-placement elements along with managing your resources (playing with low dollar counts to build roller coasters was very odd to me) paired with some light tetromino placement and land management pieces. There were some odd rules that the game played with (rides couldn't touch orthagonally via edges and could only touch on corners) which I understood due to the layout of the boards, but still felt odd even when I began to understand the "why" of the rules.

Upon completion of the game, we tallied our scores and I had won the game by only a few points. I started to think about what I liked and didn't like about the game as while there wasn't anything glaringly obvious about what I didn't like about it, the game itself didn't immediately stand out as one that I absulutely had to have.

Player turns felt ok, but it sometimes felt like I needed an extra worker or two in order to complete what I wanted to accomplish with my park. The different meters at the bottom of the board (represented by a lightning bolt, star and heart respectively) were fairly decent at what they were attempting to represent, but I would have appreciated a visual on the meters to show when you had surpassed the 8 required for extra victory points.

All in all, Tenpenny Parks was fun while I played it, but I don't know if I would really choose it over something else, such as Dinosaur World or Everdell that feel much better with their worker placement/resource management. Each player turn feels too short and there doesn't seem to be significant consequence with each action chosen, leaving me wanting more than what the game allowed for.

Horrified With the Results

On Wednesday night, I had wanted to play something that was fairly light enough that I could be done with the game quickly, but also was part of my 2024 10X10 Challenge List. With most of the games on the list being heavier in nature due to what I like to play, and the lightest game being completed (looking at you Welcome to the Moon) for the year, I settled on Horrified. I had previously played several of the monsters and even followed the solo rules a few times to give myself the extra challenge, so I was feeling pretty confident.

I had played several of the monsters so far and I had several thoughts on how they were played. I loved the way that Dracula had the players go through the process of finding and destroying his coffins to remove the locations that he could fly back to. The Thing From the Black Lagoon was fairly easy to complete, but his nature of using the water locations on the board led to some creative movement around the board to not only avoid him, but also defeat him when his lair had been located. The Invisible Man was clever in the implementation of having to use items with a specific location to point out his crimes that really fit with the theme of the character. My personal favorite so far had been The Mummy (and not just because of the awesome 1999 Brendan Frasier movie) because of the clever puzzle nature of how players had to move scarabs around his board to their respective final locations in order to defeat him.

I decided after some thought (and not wanting to take too much time to set up the game so I could play and talk with my wife while playing) to play with the Invisible Man and the Wolfman to introduce myself to the new monster. I had yet to play with the Wolfman, but I knew from his cards that he had a "hunter emblem" that he would chase after during the game.

I picked a random character and ended up playing as the investigator, a character that while I had played with previously, had not done a great job of utilizing her player power in the past game. My hope was that I would have an easier time now that I better understood the character powers and despite starting two steps away from the Invisible Man, I was feeling pretty good about the game.

A few initial turns that resulted in some bad luck and monster attacks resulted in me losing all four of the items my character had managed to pick up and a visit to the hospital which resulted in the terror meter stepping up one tick. Some unfortunate card pulls resulted in a "place villager only to have them immediately ko-ed by the monster" putting my terror meter closer and closer to the final loss. I managed to defeat the Wolfman and after getting all I needed to defeat the Invisible Man on the next turn, I ultimately lost to a very bad card pull that resulted in my villagers advancing one space towards their preferred final location. This resulted in the villager I had been attempting to escort with me moving directly into the path of the Invisible Man and him KO-ing the villager resulting in a final loss.

After reviewing my play, I realized that there were several times that I had taken actions that could have been saved for later or left alone entirely. My choice to bring the villager ended up with the Invisible Man having easy access to the villager and the final KO, but if I had left the villager at the Tower, rather than bringing him with me to the Precinct, I would have won the game the next turn.

Overall, I've been very impressed with Horrified and the implementation of monsters. I've still yet to play Frankenstein's Monster and Bride of Frankenstein, but from what I can see of them, they look like a very fun monster to play against. I appreciate that each character has their own powers that allow for separate strategies and I cannot wait to play this with someone else, as I've only been able to play solo so far.

Chaos Ensues in the Meantime...

I don't want this post to be too long as I've already gone on far too long about two games only. I'll add some quick thoughts about some other games I played this week here:

1)Thunder Road: Vendetta remains my favorite game of 2024 so far. I have talked about it at length in my previous posts so I'm not going to add any more here, but I am absolutely looking forward to playing more this year.

2)Lost Ruins of Arnak was suprisingly deep and is definitely not what I expected. I had seen mixed reviews about the game and despite it being so high on the BGG Top 100, I still had reservations about it because I find that my tastes tend to differ from many games on the list. However to my delight, I found that the game was crunchy enough for me with all the decisions that could be made, but easy enough to play that I didn't feel crippled by indecision and could pivot on what my choices of move were.

3)Clank!: A Deck-Building Adventure was definitely not what I was hoping it would be, and I think that's because my expectations were too high. I loved the deckbuilding aspect of the game, but it just felt too light for me and dropped off my wishlist as there are other games that I'd prefer to get over it. Sort of dissapointed about that one to be honest as I had expected more.

These of course are just my opinions on these games and the great thing about board games is that we all have games that we enjoy that others might not necessarily find their cup of tea. I've been encouraged to find games that I enjoy and I'm glad that I got the opportunity to try a few games this weekend at 2DCon Unplugged as it really allowed me to get a feel for them. I know in the future, I'm going to be a bit more hesitant to purchase anything until I'm able to play it as space (and funds) are limited.

Closing Thoughts

And that's it for this week. Like I noted above, I don't want this to be too long and I'll try to keep it to a maximum of two to three games that I really dive into with this Friday post. I'll try to add a deep dive into at least one game and my thoughts on at least one or two more games with a simple review on how I enjoyed them.

What are some games that you played this week that were different (either bad or good) than what you expected? Were there any stand out games that you got to play that have made it to your "I must have this game" list?

Keep on playing everyone and have an excellent rest of your week!

*Originally posted 9/2/2024 on BoardGameGeek*