New to Me – April 2023

As mentioned in my April Gaming post, April was not a banner month for games.

Too much time off and missing a regular game day really sank that.

It also affected my “new to me” games because I only got two of them played!

While I will admit that I enjoyed both games, there were really no knockout games that just floored me.

One might do that if I get the right players, but that certainly wasn’t this time.

The Cult of the New to Me was happy, though. Even though one of the games was from 2021, the other one was from 2015.

2015!

They were placated, though there’s always that undercurrent of rebellion if I play too many Cult of the New games.

Being a cult leader is hard work.

Anyway, without further ado (all of my ado rusted away before I could use it anyway), let’s get this show on the road!

Corrosion (2021 – Capstone Games) – 1 play

Designer: Stefan Bauer

Artist: Dennis Lohausen

Players: 1-4

When Corrosion first came out, it sounded kind of intriguing but I never pulled the trigger on it.

In January’s math trade, however, it became available and I decided “what the hell?”

Not only did I get it, but it was new in shrink!

I was such a happy camper, punching out all of the components.

I finally got to play it in April, though, so here we stand.

Corrosion is an engine-building game where you are literally building engines.

Chrome engines that stick around or other engine types that will eventually rush away.

Hence the name. (Editor: “I bring you Dave, Master of the Obvious”)

The player board is interesting because it has a similar mechanism to Barrage, with the wheel that turns and you are paying attention to certain parts of it.

There are four sectors on the board. When you gain regular gears (a mechanism of payment), build one-time use machines or turning machines (machines that activate every time you turn your wheel), they will go into sector 3. Sector 4 (or X) is where things go away if they’re still there.

Thus, you have three turns of the wheel before anything bad happens to them.

Every time you turn your wheel, a new sector becomes sector X and everything in that sector will rust away at the end of the turn.

One-time use machines will trigger and then go away. Your turning machines will have activated 3 times but they will now go away. And if you haven’t used the gears in the sector, those will go away.

But chrome!

Chrome is where it’s at!

One of the options is building chrome machines.

There are three types, and they will give you victory points at the end of the game.

When you take them, you will put them on your board (or you can keep one off to the side) until you have the gears to build them.

Once built, they will trigger whenever the conditions on the machine say.

The machine above, whenever you turn your wheel, you can spend a regular gear and spend one steam to get a chrome gear (while regular gears go into Sector 3 when you get them and can rust away, chrome gears are just in your supply and you can spend them whenever you need to without worrying about them rusting).

So what does this all mean?

Essentially, on your turn you can take one of two actions.

You can either play one of your engineer cards for the action on it, or you can turn your wheel.

Engineers get placed in the sector corresponding to their number. When sector X reaches them, they go back into your hand.

You then take the action on the card, which may be to take a machine from the display, or maybe hire a “Qualified Engineer” to add to your hand, or maybe gain some gears or steam.

These engineers have more powerful abilities, or maybe are just higher numbers.

Once you’ve taken your engineer’s action, other players can follow it with an engineer of the same suit (colour) and a higher number. They don’t get their engineer’s action, though. They get the one you took.

The way you turn your wheel and build machines that will give you stuff before they corrode away (or the chrome machines that always activate as long as you haven’t built a machine of the same type to put on top of it) is what really makes this game interesting.

You have to plan far in advance for what machines you need or might want to use (and of course what’s available to take).

You can also spend steam to move your one-time use machines closer to sector X. While that means they will go away faster, it also means they will activate faster.

There are also endgame goals which will get you a bunch of points if you satisfy their conditions as well.

You get points for all of your chrome machines built as well as the endgame scoring tiles you take during the game and the victory point tokens you earn during the game.

All in all, this is a quite intricate game that may not be for everybody. My one play of it was marred by somebody who ended up really not enjoying it, which was too bad. It did make it less enjoyable for the rest of us, but that can happen unfortunately.

I’d like another play where everybody is getting into it before I make a final decision on it.

But my first impressions were fairly positive.

Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King (2015 – Lookout Games) – 1 play

Designers: Andreas Pelikan, Alexander Pfister

Artist: Klemens Franz

Players: 2-5

Wow, an old game!

Yes, 2015 is old…it’s 8 years ago! That’s old for games.

But I’ve played the app version of Isle of Skye a few times and it’s always been a bit intriguing.

When a friend bought it and brought it game day, I had to try it. Especially because it’s not really that long!

Our game was over in about 45 minutes.

Which makes it perfect for a work lunch…if I ever decide to buy it.

Isle of Skye (my fingers are tired, so I’m not typing the rest of the name) is a tile-laying game where you are building up an area of Scotland to get the most points (nobody ever does it because they just want to provide good housing).

It has an interesting bidding mechanic as well as scoring which really takes a bit of head space to wrap your head around.

Each turn, you will have three tiles.

Behind your screen (so before that picture was taken), you will choose which one of those tiles will go away and then you will set a price for the other two with the gold you have.

In turn order, players will decide whether or not to buy one of the tiles on offer for the price the player put on it.

Once everybody has bought a tile, the unpurchased tiles must be bought by the player who priced them, for the amount they priced them for.

So don’t overprice! You will probably have to pay that money.

Players will then put the tiles they bought into their tableau.

You are trying to connect and close off various areas (mountains, meadows, lakes, etc) that will score you points during the scoring rounds.

How do points score?

Each round, two or three of the scoring tiles will score in a preset pattern.

Thus, you know what you’re going for each turn, and in future turns as well.

(Yes, somebody forgot to take a picture of the scoreboard with actual scoring tiles on them, so is using an old picture from the app).

You might be scoring for a set of four tiles in a square. Or maybe for each set of whiskey barrels on your tiles. Or maybe number of enclosed mountains.

After five rounds, whoever has the most points wins! Some of the tiles you can play have endgame scoring which is figured at this point.

I actually really liked this game!

The auction mechanic may be a bit difficult to parse for those people who don’t like auctions, but otherwise it’s a very straightforward game that’s a joy to play and is a perfect way to begin or end a game day.

I didn’t say I was very good at it, though I didn’t do too badly overall.

It’s a fun game and I would definitely play it again (or maybe bring the app out again, which I haven’t played in forever).

So that’s it!

A short and sweet “new to me games” post.

May’s already starting off well, with me playing a new game (and one that’s older too!) already just four days in.

Here’s hoping that trend continues.

What new to you games did you play in April?

Let me know in the comments.