this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
15 points (94.1% liked)
boardgames
2009 readers
1 users here now
Everything boardgames
Please stick to English for posts and comments
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Last week saw the arrival of a kickstarter game I backed a couple of years ago, Mercurial!
As a result, I've seen 3 plays of this in the last week; one solo, one 2-player, and one 4-player.
Very much enjoying this title so far! The designer has opted to use iconography on the cards instead of any words. Whilst this slows the initial couple of plays down, you soon learn the language it was designed with and you can begin to intuit cards quite quickly.
Something I forsee possibly being an issue for some people is the lack of player interaction. It falls into the same space as Wingspan in that the only interaction one can really have is drafting a card that another player wanted.
The art is beautiful, vibrant, evocative, and most of the time you feel like you are manipulating the elements as you flip and convert your dice to your needs!
I took a quick look at Mercurial, sounds neat! I hope it makes it into retail too. Did it work well with 2? Sounds like with the low player interaction it should. How long did the plays take?
I believe it got picked up for retail, so do keep an eye out!
Because of the very low player interaction, it worked really well still! I scored 71 whereas my partner scored 69 - so it felt competitive also.
We had to cut out 4-player game a little short as we'd started late and it was running on a bit, however I was teaching the rules to the other 3.
Our 2 player game was probably close to 2 hours, but again there was a reasonable amount of rules clarifications from trying to parse the icons fully!