This weekend I met up with two other board gamers and we played three different games: Lancaster, Marco Polo, and Stock Pile. None of us had played Lancaster or Marco Polo before, but I read the rules and watched a few videos ahead of time, so we were able to play them relatively error free. I say “relatively” because I do think I messed a couple of rules up. Overall though, we had a great time and made it through the games fine.
The first game we played was Marco Polo. It has some really interesting dice placing mechanics and I liked the way you can displace other peoples dice. I’ve heard it said that you will always feel that some other players character has better abilities than you do and that was definitely the case. The player that had the guy who could teleport won by a large margin, but he’s a good player and it might have just been him optimizing his moves; he probably would have won with anyone.
We played Lancaster next and surprisingly, it felt a lot like Marco Polo. I think this was because of the ability to displace other players knights from spaces, similarly to the dice displacement in Marco Polo. We had a lot of fun with Lancaster as well – it was a much closer game than the previous one; I was behind the first player by only a few points.
The last game we played was Stock Pile, which is a favorite of all three of ours. We had the expansion, so played with it and every advanced rule for the game. At first, I thought the character I had was under-powered (the guy who lets you swap out cards in the piles), but by the end I was thinking he may have been over-powered. This was the only game I won during this game day.
All in all, it was a very fun day.