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Welcome to Which Game First where we boldly explore the hilariously huge world of board games. Did we unearth any hidden treasures you’ve been missing out on? Let’s find out!
First up this week: We put our ink slinger on the beat to grab the scoop in Penny Press!
Next up: We put our highwaymen on the street to grab the loot in Carcassonne!
And lastly: We put our droids on their feet to grab the jewels in Twin Tin Bots!
Penny Press
Designed by: Robert Dijkman Dulkes, Matt Golec
Published by: Asmadi Games (2015)
Players: 2 – 5
Ages: 13 & up
Playing time: 45 – 60 min
In the game Penny Press, players will take on the role of newspaper magnates such as Pulitzer and Hearst as they strive to become the dominant paper in New York City around the turn of the 20th century.
Publishing newspapers is the name of the game. To publish newspapers, players assign some or all of their five reporters to the popular stories of the day. Stories are collected from one of five “beats”: War, Crime & Calamity, New York City, Politics, and the Human Condition When ready, players ‘roll the presses’. They will claim stories where their reporters worked the hardest. If you collect stories from the hottest beats, you’ll score high. Also try to collect stories with the most stars, because they are worth circulation points at the during the final scoring.
The end of the game is triggered when one player publishes his fourth (in a two- or three-player game) or third (in a four- or five-player game) newspaper. The player who moved farthest along the circulation track is the winner of Penny Press – and that’s “All The News That’s Fit to Print!”
Carcassonne
Designed by: Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Published by: Hans im Glück, Z-Man Games (2000)
Players: 2 – 5
Ages: 7 & up
Playing time: 30 – 45 min
Carcassonne is a tile-placement game, set in a beautiful southern French landscape.
Players draw and place a tile, one tile at a time.
The tile might feature a city, a road, a cloister, grassland or some combination thereof, and it must be placed adjacent to tiles that have already been played, in such a way that cities are connected to cities, roads to roads, etcetera.
Having placed a tile, the player can then decide to place one of their meeples on a part of that tile: on the city as a knight, on the road as a robber, on a cloister as a monk, or on the grass as a farmer.
Points are achieved by controlling contiguous tiles of land, roads, and structures upon which your meeples hold domain. I say this from the bottom of my heart …. Regardez toutes ces tuiles!
Twin Tin Bots
Designed by: Philippe Keyaerts
Published by: Flatlined Games (2013)
Players: 2 – 6
Ages: 10 & up
Playing time: 50 min
Twin Tin Bots is a robot-programming game. Set in a world where crystals sprout from the ground, corporations are invested in crystal mining. You are the robot programmer for your corporation. Screw it up, and they’ll send you to the Spice Mines of Kessel.
In the game, each player programs two robots to harvest crystals from the game board and bring them back to their corporate base. The catch is that robots repeat their programming, but changes to the program from turn to turn are limited. Robots can also interact with other robots so even the best laid plans can end up slightly different than expected.
The player who harvests the most valuable crystals wins, and retains their job as programmer of the most efficient Twin Tin Bots in all of Crystaldom!