dmv.community is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A small regional Mastodon instance for those in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia areas. Local news, commentary, and conversation.

Server stats:

166
active users

WILD GARDENS seems deceptively simple. The players are foraging hipsters, who wander over a simple network of paths. Every turn, you pick a distance to move and an action.

You can forage: each space you land on is adjacent to three "source" spaces, where you can collect food items: mushrooms, nuts, fruit, bark and stems, flowers, and a few more resources I'm forgetting.

Or you can cook: discard resources to make a recipe such as Wild Sorrel Sauce or Purslane Salad. Each recipe earns you points. Recipes can in turn be discarded to satisfy guests, who will grant an ongoing ability or a one-time benefit.

(2/n)

Or you can study: add icons to your board to make these three actions stronger. For example, instead of just foraging twice, I got to forage twice, collect a point if next to a mushroom, collect 2 mushrooms if next to a mushroom, and gain a flower.

The game seems like it'll be simple and quick, but each turn becomes a messy knapsack problem: "if I have 3 mushrooms, 2 nuts, and 1 leaf, can I make any of the recipes? If not, what do I need to make one of them? How far do I need to move to get those ingredients?" I enjoyed knitting my brow over it. (3/n)

WONDROUS CREATURES is a very similar collect-resources-to-buy-cards game, but is slightly simpler.

You place workers on a hex grid, collect the resources from neighbouring hexes, and spend them to acquire creatures. Creatures might give you points immediately, or grant end-game points for collecting creatures of a particular type or sets of them.

The production is the star here: each card has different, original art; the meeples are long sinuous creatures, and you have a captain who can sit atop one of them. (4/n)

DEEP SHELF, on the other hand, is a really complicated pickup-and-deliver game. The players are corporations mining the ocean floor; you have a free-ranging submarine, and crawlers that are limited to a network of tubes that you build. These can explore new tiles and collect raw ore (osmium, palladium, and gold). This ore can be purified in an underwater smelter, if you can build it, or you can bring ore up to the surface. Purified metal can be sold for money or can buy improvements to your technologies, letting your submarine move faster or avoiding the extra cost for building further from shore.

(5/6)

Andrew Kuchling

There's one weird element in this number-filled economic game; one tile is occupied by the mythical Depth Dragon, a large miniature that the players occasionally get to move. Facilities on one side of the dragon require more upkeep costs; a player on the other side gets an extra dollar each round. (What is happening here, thematically? Is one player selling dragon poop?) Barb and I thought it was probably a rules hack to force more player interaction, and took it out partway through our second game because we didn't care.

Neither of us has figured out the strategy for this game yet: we both felt pretty resource-starved in our two games, and it took us far too many rounds to get metal, bring it back to the surface, purify it, and then use it. We need to play this game more and try different approaches.

(6/6)