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Friday, 28 April 2023

New Haven


New Haven is a City Building and Tile Placement game from R&R Games for 2-4 players. The gameplay is fairly simple but keeps you engaged even on opponents turns and is lots of fun. By the end of the game I am always left with a strong sense of accomplishment and a desire to play again. One of my favourite parts of New Haven is how you feel like you can always improve your game / score. Despite the simple rule set I have found New Haven surprisingly hard to teach to new players but once everyone has the game down it uses a great mix of both tactics and strategy. My group has really been enjoying New Haven and I cant wait to get into the review so please continue reading for how to play and my thoughts.



Objective:

Your objective in New Haven is to develop a settlement worth as many points as possible. Completing individual buildings are not worth any points, in order to score you will have to fill either entire columns or rows of your Land Plot with various buildings. There is a way to score double points on these rows or columns, but for the purpose of understanding the rules I will explain this at the very end when I cover final scoring.

How to Play:

On every turn a player will perform the following actions:

1. Place one of your tiles on the board
2. Collect the appropriate resources corresponding with the tile and where you placed it
3. Spend those resources on building tiles
4. Give other players a chance to use your left over resources
5. Place Building Tiles on Land Plot while other players are using your leftovers
6. After every player has had a chance at the leftover resources, replenish the available buildings and your resource tile



Tuesday, 4 April 2023

Beasty Bar


Beasty Bar is a Hand Management card game focusing on take that mechanics from Zoch Verlag (the company that brought us Ghost Blitz). Your objective is to get as many of your animals as you can through the lineup and inside a bar called Heaven's Gate. You will have to make sure that your animals do not get tossed from line and are actually allowed in, to do this you will manipulate the bar lineup. The only similar game I have played is Guillotine but even that is a stretch. In this review I will quickly cover how to play, how well it scales from 2-4 players and what kind of gamers I think would enjoy Beasty Bar.













Goal / Objective:

The goal in Beasty Bar is to have the most animals inside the bar Heaven's Gate when all players have no cards remaining in their hands.




How to Play:

Getting inside Heaven's Gate is not an easy task. First there have to be 5 animals in the lineup. Once the lineup is full the two animals in front (closest to Heaven's Gate) will be allowed inside the bar and the animal at the end of the line will be tossed into the get lost pile.