This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/boardgames by /u/Murraculous1 on 2023-10-03 19:57:05.
Note: This marathon post also exists in podcast form, if you prefer to listen.
The Reinerssance party continues with my largest 1st Impressions post ever featuring 18 Knizia games. Enjoy!
My Island
13 Plays (2 Players)
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Your island WILL be unique. So the box prophecy says, and so it must be fulfilled.
My Island is the hotly anticipated sequel to Reiner Knizia’s My City — an approachable, spatial puzzle legacy game about filling your board with tiles by following bingo style card flips. My City offered the most satisfying use of polyominoes I’ve ever encountered, and I was excited to see what the hexagonal pivot to My Island would bring.
More than any other element, the core change from square-based polyominoes to hexagonal-based shapes is far and away what sets these two games apart. Rather than having the My City freedom to place a tile adjacent to any other tile, My Island forces you to always link one hex to another matching hex type as you spread your tiles across the island. This added restriction is compensated by the fact that you only have 4 different shapes to deal with (at least in the early episodes), which is noticeably far less than the 8 starting shapes of My City.
While it is still a tile laying spatial puzzle at its core, the tiles of My Island make it feel like a very different beast. The puzzle is much less about fitting different shapes together perfectly and efficiently — rather, it is more about building clusters or lines or barriers of symbols of a matching type. Each tile has two, three, for four different symbols on it — house, field, path, and wall. The aim is to link paths together that create a route or cluster houses together to form a village or connect fields together to form a farm. As your tiles sprawl across the island, your options for how to finish these groups dwindle.
Fundamentally, the amount of long-term planning required seems generally less than what My City demanded. The fact that the shapes of My Island are so similar means that you can usually adapt on the fly and find multiple different tiles to meet your goals. So the puzzle is perhaps a bit more loose and forgiving in that sense. But you still certainly need to plan and map out your tile arrangements as the open spaces shrink. It’s common for players to position their yet unused tiles in intentional areas around the outside of the board as they simply wait for the matching card to be flipped so they can insert the tile precisely in its planned location.
But as per usual, Reiner finds plenty of ways to push you outside your routines through the use of evolving legacy rules. Sometimes he changes the way you score points, other times he layers on yet another objective with a tempting reward when achieved or a devastating consequence when neglected. What once was your highest priority strategy can quickly become a fading memory.
This ebb and flow of objectives, this evolution of board and tile features, this unveiling of new adventures within a sound and satisfying puzzle is precisely what makes this line of games so great. As far as I can tell, My Island is no better or worse than its progenitors. Unless you have a personal vendetta against polyominoes or hexes, I suppose. At any rate, it simply continues the tried and true recipe of engaging episodes and competitive chapters, all while offering its own twist on the formula.
True, My Island doesn’t quite feel as thrillingly novel or refreshingly unique as My City did when we dove into it 3 years ago. But it’s still mighty impressive for us to now be 50 plays into this line of games and still hungry to explore the next episodes and chapters. Shoot, we even just opened the thick Chapter 5 envelope and encountered a feature that I was not expecting at all. Even after all these plays, it seems that this My ____ series still has more tricks up its sleeve.
Prognosis: Excellent
Galaxy Cat Extension
2 Plays (3 Players)
Due to Reddit post text limitations, my impressions for Galaxy Cat Extension have been rerouted to this post.
Pick a Pen Trilogy
9 Plays (3 plays per game, 2 Players)
Due to Reddit post text limitations, my impressions for the Pick a Pen trilogy have been rerouted to this post.
Yangtze
1 Play (4 players)
Due to Reddit post text limitations, my impressions for Yangtze have been rerouted to this post.
Sunrise Lane (And Rondo)
Rondo — 1 Play (3 Players)
Sunrise Lane — 3 Plays (2,3, & 4 Players)
Back in March, at Dice Tower West, I got the chance to try out Reiner Knizia’s Rondo. Not long after that, I wrote up my first impressions of the game. But it just so happened that I put off publishing my impressions long enough for publisher Horrible Guild to announce a new version of the design titled Sunrise Lane. So I figured, why not put off my Rondo impressions even longer until I can try both versions? Well, after several more months, we’re finally here and ready to dive in.
First, my thoughts on Rondo:
If anybody is the King of light, easily teachable, clever, addictive, family-weight board games, it’s Reiner Knizia. I’m talking about games like Ingenious, Quest for El Dorado, Lost Cities: The Board Game, Treasures of Nakbe, Blue Lagoon, Whale Riders, Indigo, and so many more. Along those same lines, Rondo is an easy addition to this list.
With its massive yet simple board and its big draw bag of clackity colored tiles which are slotted into your player rack, Rondo gives a nod of appreciation to casual family games like Sequence and Rummikub. Turns are dead simple: draw two tiles or play as many tiles as you want and then draw one back. These tiles can be five unique colors: red, yellow, blue, green, and purple. And you can place your tiles in a line starting from the center of the board or adjacent to any tiles that are already out. Players will be snaking their tiles outward along a wheel of numbers which range from 1 to 5 and match the five colors of tiles. While you’re allowed to place any tile facedown on a given space, you can only place a tile face up and score the displayed number of points beneath if the colors between tile and space match. Most satisfying of all, you are allowed to plop down multiple tiles onto an open matching-colored space and score its points multiple times in the same turn. That feels particularly good when the space is a 3, 4, or 5.
Rondo has a buttery smooth ebb and flow of building your hand over multiple turns, then spreading tiles over the “rondo” and raking in the big points, then starting over again by accumulating more tiles from the bag. Finding and claiming the most opportunistic locations based on your bag draw may not be as strategic as Knizia’s greatest hits, but there is something quite addictive and satisfying about it all. The decision of whether to keep drawing or commit your hand early is zesty enough to feel meaningful and impactful, yet none of it gets bogged down by over-analysis or overexertion.
Rondo is a game that warmly invites you to sit down with family or friends and enjoy a casual competition while you catch up with each other. For most non-gamers, that’s all they really want anyway. For myself, it’s certainly one that I wouldn’t be disappointed to play again. It’s hard to dislike a game that is this pure, smart, and quick.
And now, on to Sunrise Lane:
I was impressed enough by my one play of Rondo that part of me was tempted to track down an old copy in the used market. But there were also just enough factors that kept me from pulling the trigger (aside from the fact that it is a bit tricky to get ahold of): The box is huge (and I’m getting increasingly tired of big boxes), the presentation is completely abstract (making it even harder to get to the table), and...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/16yypw7/1st_impressions_of_my_island_sunrise_lane_and/