Recent game purchases

[dougo]

It's been a while since I posted about games here. In the last week or two I've bought a bunch, played a bunch, and even invented a couple. I'll just stick with recent purchases in this post:

• Flowerpower, one of those rare Kosmos 2-player games that Rio Grande didn't pick up and is now out of print. It's a nice little dominoes-ish tile-laying game about planting flowers next to each other in your garden. A copy finally popped up on BoardGameGeek Marketplace that wasn't from out of the country (with exorbitant shipping costs), so I snatched it. Unfortunately it's a first edition, which had a tile misprint: there's three copies of one tile when there should only be two, and another tile is missing. It wouldn't be such a big deal, but the missing tile is a double, which is somewhat more important than the others. I tried sending mail to some address I found on the Kosmos web site, but haven't heard back yet; maybe it's all closed down for August vacation. But I think chances are slim that I'll be able to track down the missing tile so I may have to make my own.
• Ingenious, another dominoes-ish tile-laying game, but with hexagons instead of squares. Most of Reiner Knizia's designs are rather abstract, but I believe this is his first to not actually have any theme at all. Not that that matters much, it's still a fun game and well put-together.
• The Princess & Dragon expansion for Carcassonne. I will pick up pretty much anything Carcassonne-related, and so far I haven't been disappointed by any of them. This one adds some nastiness to the game—the dragon can eat others' followers, and princesses can seduce others' knights—but it seems pretty well thought out and balanced. As usual, though, there are some ambiguous rules that I need to track down some clarifications for. The Carcassonne Rules Compendium is a nice project but it could do with better citations to make it clear where the various clarifications came from (the Kosmos FAQ, Rio Grande, or the author's guess).
• Fjords, an elegant little 2-player game that combines tile-laying (like Carcassonne with hexes) with area enclosure (like Go, or more specifically Through the Desert).
• Camelot, a realtime wargame from Tom Jolly. I may have crossed over from "Tom Jolly fan" to "Tom Jolly collector" on this one, because I don't like realtime games and I'm not big on wargames either. Haven't played it yet, and I'm not sure if I ever will, but something about it made me curious enough to buy it.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I still haven't played The Count expansion. I'd like to get the Cathars expansion, but I'm not that interested in the whole Almanac and I'm not sure it's worth 8 euro. I wonder if Jay Tummelson will ever publish it?