Skip to main content

Our Latest Article..

Divinus Board Game Review - Lucky Duck Games

Demigods eh? You think every thing is going well and life is nice and quiet, then all of a sudden you're reminded that you've actually got to go and prove yourself and show how powerful you are in order to ascend to some kind of Pantheon type thing. Well, in Divinus you need to. Now, I don't want you to cringe when I mention this game, but Divinus from Lucky Duck Games seems to have crawled from the same evolutionary pool as Charterstone. Now that might be enough to have some of you wince slightly but hang fire. I'm very aware that not everyone had the best time from that game and time has seen it as more an experiment in gameplay than a direction to forge ahead with. What if I said that Divinus also seems to have inherited its mother's love of Carcassonne. Does that make you feel any better? I hope so. I really do.  Divinus is another entry in the application based games that Lucky Duck Games are quietly and regularly producing from their studios. They seem to have

Demeter Board Game Review - Sorry We Are French - Hachette Games


Stop being clever. Taking that into account, sometimes all I want is a game that is solid and bloody well good at what it does. Others throw at you what looks like an inaccessible pile of nonsense that baffles, while you try to translate what is on the table from the rulebook that is so much many confusion. I'm tired of innovation for innovation's sake. It happens you see. When we get a shiny new exciting genre, or an old genre that gains a bit of popularity and its taken and copied and then others take what they think are the fundamentals of what makes something fun. They twist it a bit too far and they mess it up and you're left with a tuna and banana pizza with a chocolate orange stuffed crust. If any one of you reading this thinks that sounds like a good idea, then I'm afraid I have to come after you. It's the rules you see.


'There's no need to apologise' is the first thing I mutter when I look over the rulebook for Demeter from Sorry We Are French, which makes me chuckle and also wonder what part they are apologising for. It's clever because I now know I'm going to remember this company even if I don't like the game. So I file it in my mind under quirky and at the same time try to remember if I know what the French for quirky is. (It's excentrique btw. You don't need to disappear and google it. Stay here.) 

Demeter is a game about discovering dinosaurs on a distant planet that has a connection to a previous game of theirs, Ganymede, which I have never played but am potentially interested in giving it a look if it is anything like Demeter. It's a flip and write where you draw a common hand of cards which everyone will work from and these in turn will allow you to fill out certain parts of your own planetary sheet. Cards come in five different colours, which decide a bonus and also your main action. You have the choice of completing colouring part of a dinosaur, or increasing the number of scientists you have, or observation platforms. You might build a building to increase the number of rewards you gather which becomes more important as the rounds progress. 

In Demeter your trying to win the most Mission Points and while the route to winning can vary, ultimately its about multiplying what you get on you base turn. Each of the dinosaur areas have their own track and way of scoring points for you, but you'll need to open up parts of the scoring track by making sure you have already completed earlier parts of the track. Now, there now restriction on the card choice, and multiple players can pick the same card for that round, but what becomes interesting is where they mark on their sheet for that particular resource. 

With the choice of possibilities on offer when you pick a resource for where you play it, it's actually perfectly feasible for two players to select the same cards during a game and end up with different looking scoring sheets. It helps to play off the fact that like a lot of roll and writes, there can be a lack of direct player interaction, but it changes Demeter into some kind of efficiency puzzle where the fastest player will often win through. You begin to wonder whether it's worth being the first to discover dinosaurs to score the bonus quicker, or whether to concentrate on producing buildings to give you an extra resource every time. You might decide you want to maximise research or simply make sure you're picking a variation of coloured cards because in the endgame, all of these decisions will matter when it comes to tallying up the end score. 

Even for of its potential brain bending, it's fast and it picks up the pace as the rounds progress as the players rush to complete their committed strategy. There's no hiding either, your board is there for everyone else to see, and that can lead to sudden changes in direction just to try to make sure you're grabbing those all important extra points to scrap a victory. The theme is neither here nor there. I really like the artwork, I actually think its a crying shame we don't see more of it on the card art as the geometry based illustrations are pretty cool in my book. Shaded in lined based dinosaurs is always going to appeal to my inner child, and so yeah. I like that. 

I enjoyed Demeter as it headed towards the final crescendo and players were picking one card but marking down resources across their entire pad. It's fairly easy to learn, and takes literally no time in terms of set up. There's not a real player count to worry about, you can play it solo as a score beater and it can easily support a full table of as many players as you have sheets to write on. It's going to be one of those games that you'll bring to the table as a warm up before you head into a crunchy main event. Sorry We Are French have very little to apologise for. Formidable. 

Designed  - Matthieu Verdier

Illustrated - Oliver Mootoo, David Sitbon

Hachette Games can be found on https://www.hachetteboardgames.co.uk/ 

If you like reading these words and wish to support us then please consider joining our Patreon https://www.patreon.com/werenotwizards

   This review is based on the final retail version of the game provided to us by games distributor Hachette Games. We were not paid for this review. We give a general overview of the gameplay and so not all of the mechanical aspects of the game may be mentioned.


Comments

Related Podcasts

Popular posts from this blog

Parks Board Game Review | Keymaster Games | Base Game Review

Taking slow methodical steps, taking your time, closing your eyes and breathing in slowly, taking in the smell of nature and the scenery and managing the sensory overload crashing over you with a pine freshness. Do that. Stop and breathe. Take it all in. Be at peace. You might be inclined to use the word 'majesty', and you wouldn't be blamed for feeling a slight sense of being overwhelmed, as once again you're reminded of how stupidly small you are in relation to everything around you. That no amount of preparation would help you if the uncontrolled environment decided to focus it's gaze entirely on you, to put you back in the food chain. You might think to yourself you could survive, but the reality is that you'd die of thirst before you died of boredom, and so we sanitise our touches with the grander examples of nature, by sticking to the path, and coming within touching distance enough to go ooh and ahh, like we are watching fireworks. Always behind a

Wee Toons Board Game Review - Alderac Entertainment Group - (Tiny Towns Review)

Fir aw the times yi hope yi end up gieing the chance tae look at summin braw and special and summit that the high heid yins are aw spraffing aboot, thurs aways the chaunce yi sit there thinkin, am a gieing it laldy here coz I am gettin tae ploy it? Sometimes yir better waitin until aw cont hiz calmed doon, and yi dinnae feel like some wydo is sitting aun yir shouldoor, checkin yir watch fir ya, and tutting like a radge.  Tiny Toon fae Alderac wiz such a game. In the past yi couldnae move fir sumwan chattin aboot it, stickin it oan lists and Twitching all oer tha innernet. Like, it wiz so gid tha it even wun tha top prize at Origins. Tha probbly ment tha heid bummer, Mr McPherson wiz toap man fir five minits in his hoose, so he goat the remote fir the telly, and was given the extra crunchy bit off the fish supper oan friday.  Tiny Toons is aboot wid an bricks an glass and stoan, and yir aw like the heid man makin the calls, tellin fowk wit tae build wi an they aw need tae follow yir lea

Empire Plateau Board Game Kickstarter Preview

This is the pre-production version, so the art, rules and mechanics may be subject to change over the next couple of months. Therefore please treat this as a first thoughts piece, based on version of the game that we were provided with. We have not been paid for the preview. We also do not provide a full play by play explanation of the game, so not all mechanics may be mentioned in the preview. So what have I done? I really don't know. I have a rule about reviews that I keep to myself which is very simple. Any designer that contacts me and says 'Well, it's like chess but..' I normally respond with a quiet thank you and then a polite decline. I want people to sell me the game because of what it is, not because they claim to have improved a game that is so in it's own category some people wouldn't even necessarily put it down as a board game. No, making the horsey jump an extra space isn't going to cut it, and no I like the prawns the way they are I thank you