Barnes on Games #7 - Forbidden Sky, Railroad Rivals, Cryptid

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Love the disclaimer. Love the Patreon pitch.

I played three games of Cryptid in a row. One player in those three games got a single turn -- together.

On your turn you can ask a question or you can search. The game wants you to ask questions. Asking questions is the "right" thing to do. But you can also search. And that's what we did, and in each game the Cryptid was found in a handful of turns.

"But Dave," say people on BGG. "The goal is for YOU to find the cryptid, not for the cryptid to be found! So on your turn it's wiser to ask a question, since you give away less information!"

Perhaps that's true. But that calculation also depends on everyone else asking questions instead of searching. So it's not enough for you to play "correctly" to make this game work, you have to ensure everyone else is doing so too. In one of our games I did ask a question, but since everyone else searched, all I ended up doing was killing my own chances.

Did we play wrong? Apparently. There are two actions and half of them are wrong most of the time, I guess. But it's moot because the game, even if played "right", is boring as hell. It's boring to look at, it's boring to play, and giving it a "cryptid" them doesn't change that.

Played two games of Cryptid at BGG.Con, and had a similar issue as Dave. The "right" thing to do is to ask questions instead of searching, but that was both boring and slow. And the few players that did that were disadvantaged when everyone else was just searching. In fact in our second game, someone asked a question about a particular space, and got a positive response. I had the next turn and went ahead and searched the same spot and won the game. And everyone else said they were going to do the same thing if I hadn't. It's a neat idea, but didn't work at all for us. It was fun talking afterwards finding out how often we were so sure of someone's rule, only to find out we had it completely wrong (but yet still worked).

And I agree 100% with Barnes on Forbidden Sky, wow is the difficulty ramped up in a non-satisfying way. I've only played a couple of games with 2, but the order the tiles comes up is HUGE in determining your success. I do like the spacial element of planning for the tile placement, and I really had to work with my son to plan ahead more, something he wasn't doing. I haven't given up on this game yet, but I wonder if some house-rules are in order, maybe increasing the the tile hand-size or something...