This past Tuesday night, I was able to play three games, including our new Game of the Month! Age of Gods and two other games that are new to me.  They both made enough of an impression on me that I wanted to say a little about each one... so here I go.

The first one was Im Reich der Wüstensöhne, which is one of the relatively new Entdecker variants.  In this one, the players are controlling caravans exploring the desert.  Instead of islands, they are discovering oases that contain goods and resources such as salt, gems, myrrh, incense, water, and more camels.    The water is used to perform special actions, camels allow the caravan to carry more goods, and the goods are counted to determine your score.  The coolest part of the game is that there is a little market-manipulation element as well, because each of the goods has a base value of 4, which can be modified by applying rumor tokens (also available in some oases) to the value track. 

Overall, the tile-placement part of the game feels a little more Carcassone-like rather than the exploration feeling that I get from Entdecker, which is not a good thing.  But on the other hand, it has quite a bit of depth involved in placing your dudes on the board and making decisions about how to use your water and which goods to collect.  And, like I said, it includes a little market manipulation aspect, which is one of my favorite game mechanics these days.  While I wasn't crazy about the game, it seems like it would be a solid medium-weight selection for people that like tile-placement, and I'd be willing to give it another play or two.

The other game was Andromeda, an older Alan Moon game from his pre-TtR days.  Overall, it was a heavily random space-themed game that uses a cosmic ashtray to let players claim bases around different planets.  For the most part, it was fun enough but, like I said, very random.  The part that took me off guard, however, was the forced trading mechanic.  

Pretty much all your plays involve playing sets of cards showing the same planet, and this mechanic is a very novel way of having very structured trading.  The start player each turn can play 1-3 (or 4 with a technology advancement) cards face up in front of them, one at a time.  After each card is played, the other players in turn then play a card face up that is different from any of the cards that the start player played.  Once everybody has played their cards, the start player can trade their face-up cards with anyone else's.  Players trade these face-up sets of cards until everyone takes a set of them or there is no one left to trade with.

Maybe I'm just ignorant about this mechanic, but I was really surprised that I've never seen anything much like it before.  With as many other Alan Moon games as I've played, I would have thought that he'd have used it again.  There is so much strategy and second-guessing involved in choosing which cards to play, both as the start player and as everyone else, and it was the most interesting part of the game to me.

While I initially thought that I liked Im Reich der Wüstensöhne more, Andromeda has been the game that I've thought more about all week, and I think that I've flipped-flopped in which I would prefer to play now.  Maybe that copy of Andromeda sitting in my FLGS is calling my name...