Okay, now I've had a chance to beat
Sara in a playtest of this game
I've never written a review before so bear with me (I'll keep my dictionary handy, so if you don't understand my english just tell me
)
Värmlandskampen - a review of a
Carcassonne rip-off.
Quality: It comes in a little bag made of sackling, which looks really nice, but the bad thing is that it spreads its dust on the table - if you're allergic to dust you should really swap this out for a cloth bag. The tiles themselves are made of plastic, and this has the advantage of beeing beer-proof. With these I don't have to be afraid to down a chilly one while kicking butt! The game pieces are small huts made of stone, and are actually quite classy. Among the tiles are also six river tiles which act just as in
C. They are supposed to represent Klarälven (the biggest river in Sweden) but six tiles hardly makes it justice. (I live next to it - it's much, much larger then six tiles)! The game consists of 97 game tiles, six river tiles and two bonus tiles. Every player also get a city tile as a representation for different towns in the county. Unfortunetly my home town wasn't among the five - so I couldn't feel the patriotic touch either
Each player is also given eight huts.
The graphic of the game are sincerely found wanting. The colours doesn't match, the roads aren't well aligned
and neither are the river tiles. The actual motif of the seperate tiles looks as if drawn by a six-year old. Crappy - to say the least.
Features: Since it's Sweden we're talking about the farms in
C are exchanged into woods and the cloisters against small lakes. There are some tiles with animals on them, for example one of the lake tiles has a wolf which gives you the dubble amount of points for the lake {16} instead of the normal {8} should you place a hut on it. There are also a tile with a moose which gives you three points when you place it, and doubles your hut's value (makes it count like a big meeple in
C) if you choose to place a hut on it, and three tiles with deer on them - which act as the moose but don't give you instant points.
Gameplay: It's
Carcassonne with a few added twists. For one there are two special tiles; a stop tile which makes you hand over the turn to the next player without further ado, and one duel tile. The duel tile makes you - if you so choose - to challange another player for one of his huts. The crux is that you do this by .. rock-scissor-paper (I think this is the name of the game in english, you should figure it out anyway), first to three points in this sub-game wins the area where the hut is placed. If you have no huts in your pool, and you are the challanger, the opponent's hut gets removed. It's a good tought, but doesn't fit into the game - at all.
Final thoughs: Again; it's
Carcassonne and there is no way denying it.
Sara's comment was that it's an absolute B-game (and that's not a compliment), and I concur. Regarding the game tiles themselves; they are too many. Yes you read right. 97 tiles are too many, or maybe they are just not balanced. The roads can end in crossings as normal, but also if a tree has fallen over them (this is a nice idea actually). But there are too few "clean" roads, and too many crossings - and also too few city tiles. We found ourselves building small four-points cities quite a lot, since the bigger city-tiles were so uncommon. Only four small lakes are included as well, which makes them into a non-regarded feature for the most part.
The lack of a license (at least the mentioning of one) is however what irks me the most. I wonder if
Rio Grande Games (or whomever owns the license) would send me a copy of
C - The City if I told them abut this game
On the other hand, I'd wager a guess and say that they won't sell a whole lot of this game, maybe upwards fifty - hundred or such. Most people who are into this kind of gaming knows about
C already.
Edit: Typos :
