Gaming Diary #2

Tiny Epic Dinosaurs, Flip 7, and Duels!

I spent Friday night popping out all the bits for X-Men Dice Throne and the Marvel Dice Throne Adventures game - hoping to try a solo mode this weekend. Why is popping out bits of cardboard and then organizing them into a little tray SO relaxing? I guess it is just finding a bit of order in the chaos.

The Ladies’ Table group at my FLGS met up this week so that was where my gaming happened. The group is only together for about 2.5 hours before the store closes so we usually get one or two games, depending on the learning curve - because of course we rarely playing something we’ve already played. Board gamer problems.

Though, to be fair, Maria brought her copy of “Tiny Epic Dinosaurs” which she had played with her family and I had played that solo ages ago. It’s a pretty easy to pick up the rules again - worker placement and resource management - so we got through a quick teach with the other two players and finished the game in about 90 minutes - less time than watching Jurassic Park!

You’re not really running Jurassic Park in this game; it’s like you’re the island where they stock dinosaurs to sell to JP. You place workers to try to create enough pens for the dinos your workers catch. You want to leave enough room in case they have babies because if they end up in the wrong pens, they might run away or become food for the meat-o-sauruses.

There are also some dinos you can create using research (cards) - they are domesticated and don’t run away if they are not in a pen and they can give you some great bonus powers. But space is a premium so you need to balance filling your island and fulfilling contracts to make space because, again, at the end of the round, you need to have enough food on hand to feed the dinosaurs or they run away!

Scott Almes, one of my favorite solo designers, designed Tiny Epic Dinosaurs, which is why it is the one “tiny epic” game I own since everyone said it had a solid solo mode. Now that I’ve played recently, I might break this out again and go up against the solo adversary - “the poachers”!

“Tiny Epic Dinosaurs” feels like a good second game in an epic dino themed gaming night…kick things off with Draftosaurus, then TED, and the grand finale could be Dinosaur Island or Dinosaur World…or the Rawr & Write version.

Since we only have about 30 minutes left after that before the store closed and a few more people had joined the able, I grabbed “Flip 7” off the shelf. It’s such an easy game to throw on the table and teach and go.

It’s a push your luck game - the deck has cards from 1-12 and each card appears in the deck as many times as the number. So there is only a single 1 card, but there are 12 cards. On your turn, you can “hit” or “pass”. If you get doubles, you bust. If you can manage to flip 7 number cards with no doubles, you get a bonus 15 points, otherwise you can stop anytime and just take the points in front of you. First to 200 wins. There are a few random cards to make things a bit more spicy - make someone flip 3 cards, freeze someone, or a second chance card. It’s just ridiculous but it let us keep playing and chatting.

On BGA, it appears to be DUEL season! Both Azul Duel and King of Tokyo Duel dropped, along with the solid two-player games of Zenith and Architects of Amytis. Some quick thoughts on these:

Azul Duel - Not only are you drafting the bits, you’re also drafting your board! I’m not sure my brain is able to take in all the things on a computer screen that it could on the table in front of me. It’s definitely got a new layer of things to think about. It is going to take me awhile to get good at this one.

King of Tokyo Duel - a tug of war between being the most famous or reviled monster…or you can just hit the other monster until he leaves. I’ve only played a few games but the monster powers and cards really make a difference. I like KoT with more people because 2-player never felt right, but THIS adaptation makes it work and so far, I am really liking it!

Zenith - same designers as Captain Flip, which we all know I love. There’s not tutorial yet so I missed out on a few things my first play-through because I am terrible at reading rules. With multiple ways to win, Zenith has more than I thought it would at first glance.

Architects of Amytis - Like Zenith, you might glance at this and think it’s just a simple draft to make a pattern game BUT there’s a few different things happening. Along with the patterns, each tile you select gives you instant points and the board you draft from gives you a bonus if you manage to get 3 of your pawns in a row! AND you can pile up the tiles, creating patterns that can also score you end game bonuses if you are able to claim the King’s favor.

I’m always looking for new Board Game Arena friends! Let me know if you want to try out any of these games.