I have a few designers that are my favorites. Friedmann Friesse has always been innovative and interesting (Power Grid, Funny Friends, Fast Flowing Forest Fellers). Vlaada Chvatil is easily my favorite designer of late (Dungeon Lords, Space Alert, Galaxy Trucker). The great thing about gaming is that there are always new people to experience games from. A Designer I’ve heard a lot about, but never played any games by is Richard Breese.
With our recent cutbacks on games purchasing, I’ve been trying to get out some games that haven’t been played yet. I received one Richard Breese game (Key Harvest) from Rio Grande about a year ago (thanks to Jay Tummelson) and I also received a copy of Reef Encounter as “payment” from Z-man games for doing some demos at our local game stores.
It doesn’t happen often, but we played both of these in one night and I got a drastically different feeling from these two games by the same designer. Here are my impressions about both games.
Reef Encounter:
The first thing you notice about this game is how pretty it is. I’m a sucker for great art and bits and this is great. Very colorful and very pretty as the game gets going. The one complaint that was voiced was from my wife and mother-in-law. They noticed that the consistency in the colors of the tiles, cubes, and other items weren’t quite matching. I’d agree. There were two different shades of pink, the purples were really different, and the polyps that they called “grey” looked black in the pictures. It was easy to get over really quick, but it was something we noticed.
This game plays great. It’s a good blend between a game that has a lot of options and depth, but is also very accesible and easy to learn. We cruised over to Boardgameswithscott.com to watch his tutorial video and we were off. It’s definitely a game that takes a few times playing to get a good idea of strategy, but you can dive right in and have fun even if you don’t know what you’re doing. The great thing is that there is a bunch of downtime in between your turns, but you don’t notice it. There are so many things changing and fluxing in between, you have to pay attention, and know what’s going on. I felt a really interesting flow of colors, bits, and player scores through the whole game. The only other game I have that gives me this feel is a game by Frank Nestel called Primordial Soup. REally great game and we really enjoyed our first play. It earned a spot in our cupboard.
Key harvest:
This was another story. I’ve suspended my disbelief before that a game about farming could be a great game after playing and enjoying Agricola and Bohnanza. I guess it’s not as much about farming as it is about economics of agriculture. I was throughly bored and drained by playing this game. By the time we were about halfway through I couldn’t wait until it was over. This is not because I wasn’t winning. I was actually in the lead the whole time and ended up winning the game, but I didn’t care. The art was horrendous and confusing, and there wasn’t very much flexibility based on the way the board was set up. Kind of like Acquire, every tile could only be placed on certain areas of the board. These tiles had different types of crops that could be harvested from them. you would think that this would make a sense of competition and fighting to get the parts that you wanted but it didn’t. Each person kind of decided that they would just occupy one side of the board and play their own game. There is a store function that allows you to put things up for sale to the other players. This never gets used too effectively, becasue everyone just takes the ones they want themselves, and then sets the price s high that no one else will buy thema nd they can claim them for themselves.
Overall, one great game, one total stinker. Richard Breese, the jury’s still out. There area lot of others I want to try but in the meantime I’m going to keep my gaming in the Reef, and out of the Field.
