Sharp Shooters
I picked up this dice rolling game today at St. Vincent DePaul for 25 cents. Not bad for a $21 game. It ranked at a 6.5 on “Thegeek”, but I got it because I couldn't pass up 32 dice, a great rolling box and an assortment of three colors of poker chips ranging in values of 10, 50, and 100. I borrowed the description at the bottom from "The Geek."
I played myself for one game for the sake of needing to practice and overcome my phobia of rolling dice. I could not find the definition for that fear.
I started out winning by strategically placing my dice, but by the 3rd card, I had myself against the ropes and pleading for mercy. I ended up losing... and winning for some reason. Since this is my first review and I only played it once against a difficult opponent, I'd rate it at around a 7 for the sake that it is an easy to learn game that does not take a lot of time to teach to kids and that my family would enjoy something not as intense as I like and that I'd play it again if the family suggested it.
I'd rate it like a beer and pretzels type of game where you stuff your face, pass a jug and not have to worry about getting anything ruined by the food byproducts on your hands, but I'd also rank it around a 6 because I personally like games with a little more depth and not as much die rolling.
Description [Edit] [History]
Games Magazines 1996 Game of the Year. Each player armed with a fistful of dice start their turn by rolling 5 dice and placing as many of them, at least one, on a card. The card has 6 rows of from 1 to six dice pictured. These are in various combinations and dice must be placed in order in each row. As long as you place at least one die and you have not used all of your 5 you can then choose to roll again. If you choose to stop or you roll dice with no legal placings available your turn is over.
Scoring is achieved by placing the last die in a row and scoring can be a negative. When the last row of a card is scored it is removed and a new card replaces it. Play until a predetermined number of cards are scored.
Due to some recent activity regarding this game, I will make this my first official game review for PolyU.
Rocketville- A retrospective, or How I learned to quit worrying and tolerate the robots.
One sentence review for those in a hurry- Rocketville would be an ok game if played with just 3 players, but it becomes hopelessly random with more.
Hi I'm Harb... ( hi Harb) and I would play Rocketville again. (gasp! mumble, mumble) I know, I know, at first I was ashamed to admit it, but hear me out...
I won't get into the details of how this game works exactly, as I can't really remember them all, so I will focus on the very basics.
Rocketville is a blind bidding game(series of 36 bids), with a very thin futuristic political campaign theme. Blind bidding is the very crux of it's problem. With blind bidding, you can only have a very few players in on the bid, or it does become completly random. With only a couple interested parties in each campaign stop, but everyone bidding, there can be some wild swings, that you can not predict. If there were fewer bidders you can at least have a little strategic planning.
The other issue with the blind bidding that only adds to the randomness is that the cards you get to use for said bidding is randomly drawn. I think with some sort of variant whereby the cards you have are either drawn from a pool everyone can see, or eveyone is given hand of somewhat equal strength, that the strategic choices would open up a little.
The other problem that this game has is that it was put out by Avalon Hill and designed by Richard Garfield of Robo-Rally fame. It is not anywhere near in the league of a RoboRally or Nexus Ops, so you need to put it in that frame of reference.
Well anyway that is the way I see it. I would try it again, but with only three players. I would also like to tinker with it to see if it can be improved. But of course there are better games calling be from the Cabinet of Wonder and since I don't actually own this one, I doubt that will happen.
Harbinger-