Cosmere, and Andrew reviews some games!

So I have this crazy idea, right? Years ago when I was at BYU I made a card-game called Cosmere. It was about the, uh, Cosmere. The fictional universe where a lot of Brandon Sanderson's novels take place. There were four decks you could choose from: Allomancers, Elantrians, Awakeners, and Surgebinders. And you would put out characters onto different location cards of places in the Cosmere and use magic and equipment to try to get shards. First player to get 16 shards wins. 

Anyway, Brandon Sanderson's agent was all like "Brandon already has an idea for a game so this is a no-go" and I was like, okay, that's fine. 

But now I'm like, I should make it anyway. Only instead of trying to publish it, which would be impossible because of IP issues, I'd just make it a print-and-play. And just put it up online and say, "Hey do you love the Cosmere and always wanted a game based on it? Well, here you go. Print it and play it for free and enjoy." 

And then from there hopefully it will get a lot of attention and people will think it's awesome and fun and it will become popular and then Brandon Sanderson will hear of it and look into it and also think that it's awesome and fun and want to do something more with it.

Wow, that plan sounds a whole lot crazier written out than it did in my head. 

In other news, school started and this upcoming week will be the third week of school. Two weeks down, I don't know how many more to go.

Not yesterday, but the Saturday before that, there was a big board-games playing event at a board-games store. I'm part of the Facebook group Adventures in Board Gaming which is how I found out about it and I went. 

Here are the games I played: Dive, Letter Jam, Savage, CuBirds, Point Salad, Cryptid, Clank!, and Calico. 

Now for reviews on all of them:

Dive is a game with a bunch of transparent sheets with pictures of turtles, sharks, etc. on them. They are stacked on top of one another and you have to figure out what layer the pictures you see are on. More or less. Wasn't the type of game I'm into. I rate it a five out of ten. (5/10)

Letter Jam

Letter Jam is a game which in my opinion logically shouldn't work yet somehow does. And I loved it. The main idea is the cards all have a letter on them. You can see everyone else's card, but not yours. It's co-op, so you are trying to give them clues so they know what their letter is and they are doing the same to you. How it works is you spell words with those letters, laying down number chips. So if I see an L, a T, an E, and an R, I can put the 1 chip in front of the L, the 2 chip in front of the E, the 3 and 4 chips in front of the T, the 5 chip in front of the E, and the 6 chip in front of the R. So the player with the T is like, huh, the word is LE**ER, is it lesser? letter? And the other players are doing so as well, narrowing down what their letter is. (9/10)

Savage is a game still in the prototype stage by a player there who designs games (not me, though, his name's Jay). Savage is kind of like a mix between The Resistance and Dead of Winter. You are all survivors after an apocalypse, but some of you are traitors. Each round you go around and can contribute food to a stash (the stash is shuffled so the cards you put in are anonymous so if you're a traitor you can sabotage it) then an event occurs, in which the leader picks a team to contribute an item (done the same way so the traitor can sabotage). Everyone has three health, once a player goes down to zero the game ends. Survivors win if only a traitor dies, and the traitors win if at least one survivor dies. In my opinion this prototype was well put together. The ratio of medicine to disease cards was just right, and I had a really good time playing this. I'm not normally a party gamer, but I enjoy games like Coup and the Resistance, and this fits that niche. I could definitely see it being professionally published. (8/10)

CuBirds is a small little set collecting game. There are birds in four rows and you pick up birds by sandwiching them between birds of the same type. Once you have enough birds of one type and you can make a flock. The first player to a certain number of flocks wins the game. Others enjoyed this a lot more than I did. It didn't really resonate with me. (6/10)

Point Salad

Point Salad is a fast card game where every card has one of six types of veggies on the front, and on the back of every card is a completely unique scoring condition. On the table are six cards veggie side up and three scoring condition side up. Turns are fast: either grab two veggie cards or one scoring card. If you grab veggies, the card with the scoring on them get flipped to their veggie side to take their place. I enjoyed this one a lot. The game is fast, fun, with lots of options, cool scoring conditions, and clever plays. I highly recommend this one. (9/10)

Cryptid is a game that I saw on the Dice Tower and looked intriguing. Unfortunately, it is for a specific type of audience and the time and place weren't right for me to get it out that Saturday. For starters, I had never played, so I had to try to read through the rules and explain at the same time, plus it is a logic deduction hard thinking game, which would have been better at a different time or place. I could tell from the first few turns I had bitten off more than I could chew. No one really knew what they were doing, were just guessing randomly, and just when I thought I had made a terrible mistake, a miracle happened and a player guessed the exact spot the cryptid was hiding, ending the game and mercifully allowing us to move on to one more suited for our group. Ranking is ? out of 10, because I don't feel I can give an accurate rating on one playthrough, especially if it was that one.

Clank!

Clank! is a game I've always wanted to play and give it a whirl. Two of the people playing had played it before, but I had the rulebook too to clarify, which I had to so a few times. Man, that rulebook isn't really well written. I had to scour it and still had questions. anyway, it is a deck builder and I love deck builders! In this one we also had a board and one piece which we moved throughout this dungeon to grab treasure and then escape back above ground. All the while adding Clank! cubes to the dragon bag, which were drawn out every so often, and if your cube was drawn out you take a damage. 10 damage and you're done, so either buy cards that cancel Clank! or heal you or just buy cards that allow you to move faster or give you attack points to defeat monsters to get gold to get treasures. It was enjoyable. Not nearly as mind-blowing as I thought it was going to be after hearing lots of stuff about it, but it was still good. (8/10)

Calico

Calico is a game which boils down to this: there are hexagon tiles that have a pattern and a color. There are six colors and six patterns. Each turn you place a tile onto your board. You get points based on colors connected and patterns connected. Plus, each player has three bonus tiles in play that they start with that gives you bonus points depending on which tiles you play next to them. I don't know what it was about this game, but I was sold. The cat theming and button theme is just pasted on, but the game is still awesome. (9/10)