My May Gaming

Some months, learning games end up being a way to decompress and relax. May was one of those months.

I learned:

Kaos in the Catacombs

Rally J

Roll Crawl

The Last Lighthouse

Beards and Booty

Both Kaos in the Catacombs and Rally J  honestly like prototypes or experiments to me. That said, trying games out and giving feedback is part of the great circle of life. Or game development. And I try to learn a new Roll and Write every month and Kaos fit the bill for May.

Roll Crawl is a very simple combat/dungeon crawl game, using tiny dice pools to beat up monsters. It does offer some decent choices during game play. Not amazing but it clicks as a quick little play. Where it falls short is that it really needs more content for any long term play.

The Last Lighthouse is the most recent of Scott Almes’ Simply Solo games, a description that will be obsolete fast, I’m sure. I had a bad initial impression because I messed up a rule which made the game unwinnable. Once I got that straight, the game has steadily grown on me

The one issue I still have is that I think the theme and the mechanics don’t mesh wells. Traps being treated as autonomous fighters doesn’t make sense. The creepy art is good though.

Beards and Booty pleasantly surprised me. Its goofy charm and decent-sized menu of actions make it more than the sum of its parts. It’s a dice chucking, beat ‘em up game that comes together as a fun, silly beer and pretzels game. If you have a big table and a big game closet, you don’t need Beards and Booty but it does the trick for limited space.

Good gaming month. I hope June is also good.