Euro Mondays: From The Moon and Frenzy Falls, plus Tipperary
Our Euro Mondays continued this week with a pretty solid worker placement game, a quick little chain reaction card game, and a milestone for me in gaming with my wife.
First up, Logan brought his deluxe copy of From the Moon a 2024 strategy game designed by Johannes Goupy and Gilles Lasfargues and published by La Boite de Jeu. This game has a gorgeous cover that caught my eye when I was doing my GENCON 2024 list, but the price tag kinda scared me off at first. Luckily, Logan got a good deal on a copy at our favorite game store in Dallas, Common Ground, and has been dying to try it.
In From The Moon, players are tasked with helping mankind finally leave our moon colony — I guess the one we built in Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon? — to survive an unspecified cataclysmic event. Using three worker placement style rovers, each that can be outfitted with space travelers who themselves can be upgraded to specialists, players gather resources to build out their tableau and complete missions. There are combos all of this board; I’ve played (and dug) a lot of Johannes Goupy games (Faraway, Pixies, Elawa, etc.) but this is a much bigger offering with lots of opportunities to combo wambo your way into the turn you really want.
I knew the mechanics of the game, but the point scoring was a little opaque to me on my first play. I wanted to get a good food engine going, and it scored me a tons of achievement points (enough for second place in that scoring), but I didn’t really accomplish much of anything else. At least on first thoughts, I need to be more diligent about contributing to the missions and maximizing the benefits from rovers so as not to get lapped by Doug and Logan again. I loved my first play, even if some slight production issues with the rovers and meeples took me away a bit from the beautiful gameplay.
While Logan had been setting up the game (which does take a while), Doug and I played a two player game of Frenzy Falls.. This was my first real play, after some “two-handed” plays on a terrace at the Sierra Nevada Brewery in Asheville, North Carolina watching an amazing Guatemalan rock band and sampling the local wares. To say I was a little distracted during those test plays is an understatement! But I knew enough about the gameplay to walk us through this time.
In Frenzy Falls, a co-design by Joseph A. Chen (Fantastic Factories) and Randy Flynn (Cascadia) from The Op Games, players are trying to score as many points in about thirty minutes by secretly placing numbered cards in cascading waterfalls. Once the turns are concluded, and starting with the top waterfall, the cards are revealed, and if there are enough points, a spillover occurs. Whoever has the most influence in the row gets to keep the waterfall (scoring card) and the other players can drop a card down to the next waterfall.
That wouldn’t be much of a game, but the designers have cleverly added two twists — the cards that will push the spillovers don’t have much influence, and some of the cards have special powers that can dramatically change the landscape. Cards can “pull” another card into the card row, or let you switch cards with a better card in your hand. We haven’t played this at the higher player counts yet (it plays up to six players, each with their own deck), and I bet it gets even better the more opportunities there are for shenanigans in the card rows. My only complaint? I wish there were more Weberson Santiago art in the box!
Finally, my wife and I reached a milestone. It is only May, and we hit our 20th play of Tipperary in the Gumbo Pot this year. This has turned into our perfect date night game, and also a fountain of unending silliness in my group discussions with the Chuck’s Gateway and Filler Games Facebook group. We usually play it two or three times a week, sometimes even two or three times back-to-back, and honestly, I never tire of the game.
I’ve heard the complaint that there is almost zero player interaction in Tipperary, and it’s true. But you know what? There should be room for games like this, games that are elegantly designed, that challenge you to maximize the puzzle and compete with your friends to do so. It’s the same reason we play Wordle on our couch sipping a cold glass of Abita root beer and share the results with our friends, or play the MapTag game and compete to see who can score better. I love games with lots of interaction — just finished an epic game of Iwara where Jerod and I were battling back and forth the entire game — but I also love games that are all about striving for perfection. So thank you Günter Burkhardt and Lookout Games for seeing Tipperary to the end.
That’s my sheep story, and I’m sticking to it.
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo
** Complimentary copy of Frenzy Falls was provided by the publisher. **