The Blob That Ate The City is a roll and write game is a game where you roll dice to determine a Tetris-style shape that you draw onto a grid and try to cover up map features.
Honestly, I have lost track of the number of Roll and Writes that have that as a core mechanic. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good mechanic but it’s hard to stand out in an ever increasing field.
But Blob et al manages to do it. After you use a shape, you then add more squares to that shape. The Tetris shapes you are using are constantly growing and changing through the game.
Here’s how it works. You actually have two grids: the cityscape that the blob will be eating and a grid broken down into six blocks with a starting shape in the middle of each block. Each turn, you roll two dice. One dice will be the shape you draw in on the cityscape, trying to cover up stuff for points. The other dice will show you the two-to-three block shape that you add to that shape at the end of the round.
And remember how the shapes are all on the same grid? You can extend a shape until it merges with another one. At that point, either number uses that same big shape.
It’s not all fun and games (well, actually it is) You can rotate or reflect the shapes. Which does make it easier when you have weird, cumbersome shapes to fill in. And while expanding the shapes is fun, actually fitting them into the cityscape becomes increasingly tricky.
Blob et al takes some very basic ideas everyone has already seen a dozen times and makes something actually different with some interesting choices going on. And it definitely captures the idea of a blob monster growing and eating a city lol
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