Thursday session: Tower of Babel, Razzia!

We had a slow Thursday session, just four players - the university Autumn break is probably slowing things down a bit. Last week was quiet as well, I hear. Maybe next week'll be better?

Tower of Babel... Well, it's a good game. My play sucked, I thought I was doing well but I wasn't, but I do think it's a good game. It's just, well, subtle seems to be the favourite one-word review for this one. While I will play the game when someone suggests it, I'm not that keen to suggest it myself. Thus, even though I sort of like it, it's heading for the sell pile.

Fairy Tale is good, four-player Fairy Tale with partnerships is better and four-player partnership Fairy Tale with the Richard Garfield variant is even better than that. This simple variant (partners exchange cards on table whenever one of them plays a black card) improves the game quite a bit, offering partners possibilities to help each other. Me and Olli used this well: both of us were able to give each other very useful cards.

Razzia! is a smaller version of Ra: the most important thing missing is the disaster tiles that destroy other tiles. Otherwise it's just less tiles. The new gangster theme is fun and makes perhaps a bit more sense than the rather abstract Egyptian theme.

I realized I'm not a huge fan of the system, but it's a decent game, in the end. I probably slightly prefer Razzia!, though I would play either. Our game was total slaughter: after the second scoring, Olli was in the lead with scores of 19-7-2-0 or something equally disastrous. Guess who won?