games review: three from Aristoplay
Aug. 7th, 2022 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI'm visiting my parents and playing old board games from our shelves in hopes of identifying games we all agree we never want to play again, so that we can get rid of them.
Aristoplay made educational board games in the 1980s, and we had like six of them.
By Jove is a roll and move on a Monopoly board layout where you can acquire heroes from classical mythology and use them to fight various perils; there are also a couple of side-tracks for special quests. It suggested setting a time limit and playing to that time limit and calculating points, which was arbitrary but a useful way to know how much of the By Jove experience we were going to have, and to get to stop having more of it.
Star Hop has you rolling to move on an open grid, certain points of which let you travel to various astronomical destinations. I immediately house-ruled this one by a) removing the penalty for needing to look up which destinations corresponded with which facts - I am not penalizing my 10yo for knowing less astronomy than my dad - b) reducing the number of points needed to win, and c) giving a roll bonus to certain "get out of somewhere" rolls based on points cards held by the leader, which made the game playable, but still kind of tedious. Also the board and art are tragically ugly for an astronomy game (although obviously astronomy wasn't as pretty yet in the 1980s as today).
Made for Trade. A pleasantly charming board with a winding path for roll and move, but fiddly object-acquisition and swapping rules. The 10yo thought this was the worst of the three, but did like the warm-up game, which was basically Spoons, and would like to play more Spoons.
Overall review: there is a reason my family played the same Ravensburger games over and over again instead of any of these. :/
As yet unplayed: Dinosaurs and Things, which my sister knows she wants to keep and so is not a candidate for disposal, Music Maestro, which I believe needs a cassette player for the "identifying instruments by audio" mode but may also have a "categorizing instruments by section" mode, and Pyramids and Mummies.
Aristoplay made educational board games in the 1980s, and we had like six of them.
By Jove is a roll and move on a Monopoly board layout where you can acquire heroes from classical mythology and use them to fight various perils; there are also a couple of side-tracks for special quests. It suggested setting a time limit and playing to that time limit and calculating points, which was arbitrary but a useful way to know how much of the By Jove experience we were going to have, and to get to stop having more of it.
Star Hop has you rolling to move on an open grid, certain points of which let you travel to various astronomical destinations. I immediately house-ruled this one by a) removing the penalty for needing to look up which destinations corresponded with which facts - I am not penalizing my 10yo for knowing less astronomy than my dad - b) reducing the number of points needed to win, and c) giving a roll bonus to certain "get out of somewhere" rolls based on points cards held by the leader, which made the game playable, but still kind of tedious. Also the board and art are tragically ugly for an astronomy game (although obviously astronomy wasn't as pretty yet in the 1980s as today).
Made for Trade. A pleasantly charming board with a winding path for roll and move, but fiddly object-acquisition and swapping rules. The 10yo thought this was the worst of the three, but did like the warm-up game, which was basically Spoons, and would like to play more Spoons.
Overall review: there is a reason my family played the same Ravensburger games over and over again instead of any of these. :/
As yet unplayed: Dinosaurs and Things, which my sister knows she wants to keep and so is not a candidate for disposal, Music Maestro, which I believe needs a cassette player for the "identifying instruments by audio" mode but may also have a "categorizing instruments by section" mode, and Pyramids and Mummies.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-06 06:23 am (UTC)