Andrew Flashback Friday

Flashback Friday – TMNT Pizza Power Game

It’s the late 1980s. He-man, Transformers and G.I. Joe have been supplanted as the most popular cartoon and action figures of the time and little kids everywhere – myself included – were running around shouting ‘Cowabunga Dude!’. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the hottest property around and they were plastered onto absolutely everything.

Shirts, mugs, fridge magnets, books, you name it and you could get it with the turtles branded all over it. Board games didn’t miss out either as shown by this fantastic example

In this game, you play as one of the four turtles and move around the board trying to be the first to defeat three bad guys. When you encounter one you use the battle flipper and dice to see who wins. The flipper is missing in this copy so we haven’t actually been able to test it out yet. I keep meaning to make a replacement so we can but haven’t got to it yet. Since I can’t tell you how it plays I’ll just leave you with some pictures to enjoy instead.

If the front of the box didn’t sell you, maybe the back will!
It’s not easy being…a strange shade of brown
Mmm Pizza
All your favourite bad guys from the cartoon are here – Krang, Shredder and…punk? Looks like Rocksteady to me!
The good guys are there too, and at least they have the right names!

If I ever get a chance to try it out I’ll come back and update the post. The artwork was just too good not to share though. I want to play it purely for the nostalgia value, which is a common theme with these flashback friday posts.

Until next time!

Andrew Family Games, Game Reviews, Two Player Games

Potion Explosion, 2nd Edition

We’re big Harry Potter fans in this house, so when a game comes along that lets you brew magical potions we had to give it a go.

In Potion explosion, players are trying to gather ingredients to complete magical potions. Each potion had a different level of difficulty based on which ingredients it needs, and the harder it is to complete the more points it’s worth. Whichever player has the most points at the end wins.

Getting ingredients doesn’t involve opening dusty bottles full of weird smells. Instead you you have a dispenser full of glass marbles that randomly fall into five rows. Each marble represents an ingredient and on your turn you get to remove one. If that makes two or more others of the same colour touch, you get to take those as well, and so on. They make a satisfying ‘clink’ when they smack together and it’s a lot of fun when you manage to set off a chain of collisions and collect a pile of ingredients in one go.

Let’s say that you need blue and black marbles to complete your potion. If you took the black one from the middle row the three blue would touch and you’d get those too, and you can see there’s a black just at the top of the dispenser as well that would roll down and touch the three black marbles at the bottom as well, giving you five black and three marbles from that go. Kaboom! Ingredients galore!

You may not need that many, but you might be able to store them for later or if the other players are working on potions that need them you have just denied them the easy move.

You can work on two potions at a time in your little laboratory, and you can store some extra ingredients for later in case you need them. There’s a total of eight different types of potion, and even within the same type they need different ingredients so you need to keep an eye on what is coming up on the stack and plan your collecting around that as well as on what’s in front of you now..

Once you’ve completed a potion you can ‘drink’ it. The game is a whole lot more fun if this involves you picking it up, taking a swig and making the appropriate sound effects, but basically it just means you activate it’s special effect.

Each of the eight types have a different effect. One lets you take a marble of each colour from the bottom of the dispenser, one lets you use any colour of ingredient in your flask in a potion, another lets you steal all items from another players flask. You can chain these together as well to help you complete more potions. Once that’s done you turn them around to show that they have been used, but the points from them still count at the end of the game.

We’d had our eye on this game for a while, but there were reports of the cardboard dispenser in the first edition breaking so we held off until we heard that they were releasing a new version. The only change in the second edition is that the dispenser has been replaced by a plastic one.

The game pieces are made of thick cardboard and there are no printing errors that I’ve noticed. The artwork is fun and consistent and fits the theme perfectly and the addition of proper old school glass marbles really adds something to the game that plastic marbles wouldn’t have. There’s even a bag of spare marbles included in case you lose some. The box is solid and the rule book is clear and helpful.

We did find an issue and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the overall manufacturing or just our copy, but the new dispenser has a drawer at the back that is meant to let you store the marbles when not in use. There seems to be some additional plastic on ours that means that you can’t open it. I’ll try and fix it at some point but it’s a bit disappointing that it was shipped out like this.

Another issue is that the box insert isn’t great. The potions are an odd shape and even though the rule book shows you how to store them we find that they tend to fall out and end up loose in the box even when stored horizontally. We ended up putting them into ziplock bags which does solve the issue but I’d have liked to have seen some more effort go into the design here.

Setup is a pain too. You’re only meant to play with six of the eight potions at a time so some sort of clever dividers to keep them separate would have greatly helped. Even if you’re careful to separate them out when packing up, they all get mixed up by the time you want to play again because of the insert problem.  Because the dispenser takes up a lot of space they seem to have crowded everything else together without too much thought.

Once you get past the few issues mentioned above, you’ll find that there’s a really fun game here. While it does look like a kids game, and I’m sure that older kids could play with no problem, it has enough depth that we really enjoy it ourselves. In some respects you will get out what you put in – get into the spirit of things and add your own sound effects to the action and it’s far more entertaining than without them.

We’ve played multiple times with two players and it works really well. Most of the time you’re working on your own potions and not interacting with the other player that much so there’s no hint that anything is missing from the lack of more players. More players should be fun though, as it gives you more flasks to steal from and a higher turnover in the dispenser. The game is not so heavy that it discourages conversation and it only takes about half an hour to play with two.

I’d rate it 3.5/5, with points lost due to the design and manufacturing issues.

Andrew Card Games, Family Games, Tile Laying

Shuffle Cards – Connect 4

As a child I had the original Connect 4. I distinctly recall the blue plastic frame with the feet that were impossible to get in and the bright yellow and red playing pieces.

I remember playing countless games with family and friends and really enjoying it. Somewhere along the way though the frame broke and the rest of it went to the great game cupboard in the sky. I never bothered to replace it as an adult, knowing that it wouldn’t have the same appeal now.

Even though I’d outgrown the original, I was intrigued when I saw that they had released a card based version of the game, and at $8 on sale I grabbed it. It doesn’t resemble the original game that much once you start playing it but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game.

It comes in this little plastic case, shown below. There’s a whole range of these card games based on their famous big brothers and they all come in similar cases. I have a few and I’d expected the plastic clip to have broken by now but it’s held up pretty well. The sticker peels up at the edges though and at some point I’l either have to glue it down again or tear it off.

Inside the case is a set of mission cards and a set of tiles. The cards are quite flimsy and the tiles are the same thickness as the cards, not a nice solid cardboard like in Carcassonne or Cacao. There’s also a tiny rulebook. I would have liked a bit more quality but even at full price these are only around $20AU so you can’t expect too much.

To play, each player gets two mission cards and then takes turn laying out the tiles trying to make the pattern that matches their mission. if you complete a mission you take another and continue until someone has finished four of them.

The tiles either have a four coloured dots, a multi-coloured dot indicating that it’s a wild, a blank, or one of three action symbols – the plus allows you to play that tile over an existing one, the minus lets you remove a tile and the rotate symbol lets you spin an existing tile to help you complete your missions.

The mission cards are straightforward. You either get four of the same colour in a row like in the original game, going in any direction, or a square or L shape of four. If you completed a mission that the other player also has they get to claim it as well so you need to watch what they are trying to do and avoid finishing yours if it will give them the win.

Every game we’ve played has been really fast, under 10 minutes to complete four mission cards. There’s just enough strategy with taking the spots the other player needs or removing their tiles to make it competitive, and it’s actually a lot of fun.

You could teach it in a few minutes and the small packaging means it’s a good travel game. The rules say that if you want to make it more competitive you can play with the mission cards face up, so you can see what the other player is going for and block them, and that could be fun too.

The few things I don’t like are the low quality components, it would have been far nicer with thicker tiles, and I think there’s too may tiles with blanks and actions compared to the ones with just four coloured dots. Other than these minor complaints I’m happy with it for the price. I’ve only tried it with two players but we’ve probably played 10+ times given it’s over so quickly. It’s a decent filler game at a low price.