Introduction
Every year hundreds, if not thousands, of games get published across the world. When Reviews Coast Spas is not in the hot tub, we are busy playing games with our friends. Sometimes it is hard to get a group of people together to play and you need to settle on a 2-player game. We have played our fair share of 2-player games and have found these to be our least favourite.
The Flops
Now we are not saying that these games are not fun for some people, we are simply letting you know what games we disliked and the reasons we did not care for it.
- Ticket to Ride: Rails and Sails – Unlike the other Ticket to Ride games and versions, this one just seemed a little clunky. Instead of just having train cards they have both train and ship cards. Known for their colour-blind friendly cards (they have symbols as well as colours on both cards and boards) this one really missed the mark in that ability. It is often hard to differentiate between the ships and train cards. We will have to stick to the original games and sail away from this one.
- Tatsu – Really nothing more than a reboot of the classic Backgammon. It is placed in a circle instead of the traditional rectangle and it does not have the added bonus that most Backgammon games have of being able to carry the game and play the game in a single box. We will have to pass on this game.
- Hellas – Coming from the mind of Stefan Dorra, you would expect a little bit more out of this worker placement game. However, we found the board to be very busy and the mechanic of the worker placement to be a little forced. It did not seem like your traditional worker placement in that the board just has a bunch of hexagonal shapes all over and you are supposed to fill them in with different workers to gather different materials. We would prefer to play his other classic games and skip over this one.
- Imhotep – We never thought we would say this about a game ever, but this game is just too balanced. It makes it very hard to declare a winner at the end of the game. While this may be desirable for some, we like to have games where we rack up a tonne of points and the opponent has very few. Nice tight games are good every now and then but constantly makes it seem unreal.
- Via Nebula – This game just lacks the basic finesse that we have come to expect in modern board games. The graphics are minimal, and the board seemed a little thin for our taste. While these games are meant to play on a tabletop, quite often people may sit on the floor and play them. One false move and your board could be ripped in half. It did have a decent amount of tension in the playing of the game, but not enough to save this game from our “Meh” list.
Closing
We at Reviews Coast Spas, are glad to see so many developers take a chance on games but wish that some of them would go through some more beta testing. Print a couple hundred games and pass them out at board game conventions with the promise of providing you with an honest review. This is the only way to see if your game is ready to be played and has the appropriate elements in it.