129: Doomlings | Concept | Fleet

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 try to mutate faster than mother nature can tank us in DoomlingsNext up:  Can iconography replace language?, We find out in ConceptAnd lastly: We’re merciless entrepreneurs hell bent on exploiting a new found fishing bay in Fleet Doomlings Designed by: Eric McCoy, Justus Meyer, Andrew Meyer, Chris SvehlPublished by: Mccoy & Meyer (2021)Players: 2 – 6Ages: 10 & upPlaying time: 20 – 45 min Coming to Kickstarter on March 2nd Doomlings is a hand management card game where players are gods to the Doomling species, which are little cute spheres with faces on them. There are 4 types of cards:  Gene Pool, Traits, and Ages, and Catastrophe Gene Pool tells you how many Doomlings you have at any given point in the game. This number will change throughout the game. Traits allow players to infuse these basic creatures with abilities and bonuses. Traits can make the Doomings more resilient, more adaptable, and in some cases, more mischievous. The Ages cards act as the timing mechanism for the game.  At the end of each round, a new Ages card is drawn. Among the Ages cards are catastrophe cards. The third time a catastrophe card is drawn, that triggers the end of the game. The Doomling with the strongest set of traits gets to look the Apocalypse in the eye and declare…“I scored the most points!” – before meeting its ultimate end. Concept Designed by: Gaëtan Beaujannot, Alain RivolletPublished by: Repos Production (2013)Players: 4 – 12Ages: 10 & upPlaying time: 40 min In Concept, your goal is to guess words through the association of icons. A team of two players choose a word or phrase that the other players need to guess. We played on BGA, and we played as individuals instead of teams. A green-colored question mark token is used to denote the concept, and exclamation point tokens of other colors are used to denote sub-concepts. Then there are cubes. Cubes are color coded to either the question mark, or one of the exclamation points.  The cubes reinforce the concepts or sub-concepts. For example, to get others to guess “milk”, the team might place the question mark icon (which signifies the main concept) on the liquid icon, then cubes of this color on the icons for “food/drink” and “white”. The first player to discover the word or phrase receives 2 victory points, the team receives points as well, and the player who ends up with the most points wins. Fleet Designed by: Ben Pinchback, Matt RiddlePublished by: Eagle-Gryphon Games (2012)Players: 2 – 4Ages: 10 & upPlaying time: 30 – 45 min Fleet is a card game in which players are Canadian fisher people of the Arctic Ocean. There are 2 types of cards:  license cards, and multipurpose cards which act as boats, crew, or money. License cards are selected by auction. And you pay for them with your cards acting as money. Players will then launch vessels, but they can only launch a vessel if they have an appropriate license card. The boat needs a captain if that boat is going to go fishing. A boat can hold 4 fish,