LeiriaCon gaming - Part 2

We were very diligent at LeiriaCon, playing a bunch of new-to-us games. 😁 I want to talk a bit about some of the lighter games, so here is another bouquet of impressions. 👇

🏘️ Cities

We haven't played this last year, so now was the perfect opportunity. It's exactly what you'd expect from a Klaus Jürgen Wrede gateway game. 👉 You draft scoring cards, city tiles plus features and buildings for these tiles each round, trying to build it all in a well-scoring manner. It's a new combination of ideas, but the overall experience feels familiar to many similar games. It's enjoyable for sure. 🙂

🔨 Sneferu: Builders of the Pyramids

This might be the biggest disappointment of every game we played. 😞 You have an Egyptian pyramid building theme with Mico art and double layered boards, but very dull gameplay. You just spend food 🥖 and time 🕰️ to get domino pieces which you build your pyramid with. There is a time management / time track mechanism - whoever is behind gets to act.  This is way too little to stay fun after the first ten minutes, and the board is basically a waste of space for just the time track.

🛶 Lewis & Clark: Expedition 

This is a clever game (which I was interested in partly due to the Vincent Dutrait art). 🙃 Basically you need cards to power other cards, so you keep having to choose which actions to do and which to get rid of (until you claim them back with a rest action). There is also a bit of deckbuilding, limited resource storage and an interactive way of generating resources. Meeple workers are also in a shared economy, as people can potentially claim them all from the board. Now comes the negative part: 😶 it's all about getting resources so you can pay for the movement of your scout, because it is all a race to get to the goal 🏁, and this gets pretty monotonous and samey by the mid-game. So I do think this game overstays its welcome unfortunately, but it's very cool at the same time.