Review: Robinson Crusoe
Mar. 13th, 2017 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inanedirkYesterday we attempted to play Robinson Crusoe.
Wow, this is a complex game. We were two hours into reading the manual (none of us were familiar with the game) before we started actually playing. I generally tend to dislike games that take this long to learn. You can hardly concentrate after having the manual read at you for two hours, lots of things don't make any sense at first, and only towards the end it all starts to come together. Having a dozen different kind of tokens, cards, etc doesn't help. Sure they're named consistently in the manual, but you can never remember which ones are which when you don't yet know what they're good for. Us calling all tokens "Schnupsi" or "Schnubbel" of course doesn't help.
So, with that said, for all its complexity it feels the game is very well thought through and designed. There's a lot of little helpers on the board to remind you of things like the order of phases you play through, etc. So there's that.
Thematically the game is of the survival genre. You spend actions to hunt, gather, build, research, discover etc. Various scenarios have different objectives to achieve. Plenty of adventure cards offer extra rewards in exchange for bad things potentially happening later. Every turn there's a sort of crisis card which someone has to deal with, or everyone will suffer consequences. Each player has a different character, with different special abilities. The game plays cooperatively, though I don't know whether there a scenarios that have a traitor in them.
We didn't finish our game - my friends were going on about having to "go to bed" and having "work tomorrow" so we couldn't play into the AMs.
We'll probably retry though next chance we get.
Wow, this is a complex game. We were two hours into reading the manual (none of us were familiar with the game) before we started actually playing. I generally tend to dislike games that take this long to learn. You can hardly concentrate after having the manual read at you for two hours, lots of things don't make any sense at first, and only towards the end it all starts to come together. Having a dozen different kind of tokens, cards, etc doesn't help. Sure they're named consistently in the manual, but you can never remember which ones are which when you don't yet know what they're good for. Us calling all tokens "Schnupsi" or "Schnubbel" of course doesn't help.
So, with that said, for all its complexity it feels the game is very well thought through and designed. There's a lot of little helpers on the board to remind you of things like the order of phases you play through, etc. So there's that.
Thematically the game is of the survival genre. You spend actions to hunt, gather, build, research, discover etc. Various scenarios have different objectives to achieve. Plenty of adventure cards offer extra rewards in exchange for bad things potentially happening later. Every turn there's a sort of crisis card which someone has to deal with, or everyone will suffer consequences. Each player has a different character, with different special abilities. The game plays cooperatively, though I don't know whether there a scenarios that have a traitor in them.
We didn't finish our game - my friends were going on about having to "go to bed" and having "work tomorrow" so we couldn't play into the AMs.
We'll probably retry though next chance we get.
