Apropos of nothing, my new favorite Knizia is Stephenson’s Rocket, and I’m glad it’s getting a reprint this year so more people can play it. It’s sort of an Acquire derivative, if you removed the random tile draw and added in an extremely nasty vetoing system. Mechanically, it’s classic Knizia. You can take two actions per turn which can be any mix of three choices: take a stock share of one of seven train companies and expand its rail network, take an item token from a city, or place a station on an empty hex. The thing that makes the game shine is that any time a player takes an expand action, any player can call a veto round, in which shares of the company being expanded can be bid to change where the tile is going to be placed. This is significant because final scores are based on three majorities, of item tokens from cities connected to the rails, station majorities for each surviving company, and share majority for each surviving company.
As far as recent (last year) new games I’ve played, there’s been 1.5 plays of The Colonists, a few plays of Power Grid Card Game, and two plays of Terraforming Mars. Otherwise, I’ve been mostly playing 18xx (89, 30, 46, 22, 4th age, 80, 60). Colonists was an ok resource conversion/logistics game. I’m being a little harsh on it, but we played an Era 2-4 game and it took roughly 6-7 hours over two sessions, and I’m really not sure it earned that length. I think I’d be interested in doing an era 3 and 4 only game, which is where most of the interesting stuff happens, but no more. There are basically three significant concepts that distinguish it from other resource conversion games: the random set up of colonies (game-changing upgradeable special powers), the board creation as part of the game progression, and storage (essentially, you have three zones on your board where resources can be, only one of which you can spend from). There’s something about the storage that irks me and strikes me as almost pure makework though, and it’s a significant annoyance for what’s one of the central mechanics of the game. Player interaction is fairly minimal as well, in that you can’t really block someone from using a location, just force them to be slightly less efficient in using it or delay them, though amusingly enough even that’s gone by era 3. I’m pretty sure I’d rather just play Roads & Boats if I had a choice. The Colonists feels like that, but with heavily toned down logistics and significantly less player interaction.
Power Grid the Card Game was Power Grid, the card game. It’s shorter at least, but I’m still not a huge fan.
Terraforming Mars is way too random for how long it takes to play. All of its good ideas feel cribbed from Through The Ages, but it’s less good at all of them. I didn’t play with the drafting variant which probably does help with the randomness, but I’m not too inspired to give it another try.