Cahoots

Another case in and this one was advertised as a hard one.

It did not disappoint.  We mostly got to where we needed to be, but there was some time critical elements that we missed and got let astray on.

Lesson learned – do not let just Harls read out the crime scene :p

Just from the base game experience (I have not pulled out any Kickstarter specific items or expansions yet), this is getting a great run – a couple more games and I will be ready for the review!

This was a fun little filler experience between Chronicles of Crime and Tiny Epic Galaxies.  Hadn’t played it for ages, so it was fun to pull off the shelf.

Yes, the theme of the game is dark and not something that should be joked about lightly, but if playing with people with a dark sense of humour can be a fun game experience still.

We played three players which worked fine, but it did bring home really wanting the higher player counts still.

Talking about games that haven’t come off the shelf for a while, we ended games night with Tiny Epic Galaxies: Beyond the Black.

There was a forgotten lesson relearned – if you don’t remember the flow of the game, it goes for a long time.  A really long time.  A 45-minute game went for the better part of 2 hours!

But even with this and a couple of initial rule missteps, we still had a lot of fun.  And that’s what playing games is all about, isn’t it?

You heard about this not long after we played it in yesterday’s Ramblings.

A novel yet brilliantly simple premise, you have a bunch of cards and you need to play out the important clues to solve a case.  It’s like playing Bridge but instead of playing for points, you play for much higher stakes – information.

After Alpal showed this one to me, I will be looking out for more in the series as I am sure she will.  For around $15 on the pricey side, how wrong can you go?

Another Alpal special, and a game I wouldn’t have looked at twice.  Kung Fu Zoo is a king of simplified Strike if you know the game.

Players have a number of dice that get flicked into the ‘arena’.  You can flick dice in from the centre point of any side, but it must be in the centre.  You are trying to be the last player with dice outside the cage (i.e. now knocked down the corner holes) or with their dice paws up.

I can see this being more fun with 4 players, but playing just with Alpal and I was still a fun and interesting experience.  You try to knock dice onto different sides while pulling off billiards shots – definitely something to get the crowds coming for a look!

So I have enjoyed games like The Game and The Mind.  Having a relatively simple task before you to be completed with the limitation of not being able to freely communicate is an interesting experience on multiple levels.

Cahoots keeps this kind of experience alive but adds a kind of quick progression system to the game.  In The Game, it’s not until the end you know how well you went.  In The Mind, you go up levels and have a goal with the previous successes behind you.

In Cahoots, you have a number of objectives that must be met in order to ‘win’, so you always feel like you are accomplishing something.  It was a lot of fun, but I wish the colours had suits on them as well as I had trouble with a couple of the colours.

A fine example of two-player dungeon-crawling done right.  Claustrophobia 1643 is a reprint and refinement on the game Claustrophobia, a highly regarded and sought after game for many years.

The catch with the initial run though?  Only a few thousand copies were being produced, and they were limited even further by region.  Alpal got in first with the Oceania pledge, and I lucked out when a few more were allocated.

It’s a great, fun and hectic experience that has been incredibly streamlined.  But I won’t go too much further into it here, because the last 2,500 copies are going up on Kickstarter on March 12th! If you missed out, here is your chance.

Yes, I platinumed Kingdom Hearts 3 the week before, but I haven’t finished the game.  Not yet.  Not the way I want to.

Even though I played through on a lower difficulty, I kept flying around in my Gummy Ship and picked the first galaxy as clean as I can of combat, items and challenges.

One down, two to go.  Finding these blueprint crystals is hard, even with the radar!

So now that I ‘finished’ Kingdom Hearts, it was time to go back to another game that I was looking forward to playing – the Resident Evil 2 remake!

I had finished the Leon A campaign before Kingdom Hearts 3 was released, but yesterday I got to smash out the Claire B campaign in one hit.  Well, a few deaths and reloads because of some “Come On!” moments, but all was done on Sunday.

Now that I have finished the story as such I can start with The 4th Survivor modes as well as some of the free what-if Ghost Survivors scenarios.  Even before I begin trying for those S+ rankings, I have a lot more game to play!