Saturday, April 14, 2012




The Contenders





Round 1 - Theme




Winner of Round 1: Lords of Waterdeep



Andy Andersen said...

Excellent report. I'm looking forward to more

stormseeker75 said...

Thanks, Andy. I think it's going to be a fun ride.

Unknown said...

Man now I can't wait for the rest as I have both games and have yet to play either one lol.

stormseeker75 said...

I should have the next post up by Friday or Saturday hopefully. I work in taxes so it's a bit busy right now!

Chris Norwood said...

This is a great concept for a "review", but man did you get this one wrong!

I think you're bringing a heck of a lot more theme to Lords of Waterdeep than it provides. When it all comes down to it, you can basically play the game purely to get the right colored cubes to satisfy the picture on your quest cards. I'll admit that the theme is done well, but it's really pretty thin unless you have a pretty significant history with D&D/Forgotten Realms/Waterdeep already.

TMP, however, has a lot stronger theme. Even the fact that the ONLY way you can score points is to build, test, or load bombs is really cool, let alone all the steps and resources that model actual A-Bomb making. Plus, the art and graphic design of the board and workers and all is a lot better than you give it credit for (and is certainly better than the blah art on the board of LoW).

Obviously, this is mostly all a matter of taste, but your taste is just wrong! ;-)

Jacob said...

I was surprised to come across your article because this is the debate I was having with myself: Lords or Manhattan or nothing? I won't buy both and I might buy neither, but right now, if I do, Manhattan is winning. Looking forward to part 2!

Matt said...

I have to agree with Chris.

While I enjoy LoW, the theme is pasted on. Sure, they include flavor text in the rules and some cards. However, that theme doesn't influence the mechanics in any way. This could be Lords of Soups and it would play the exact same way.

TMP, on the other hand, built everything around the theme of building bombs in a cold war setting. From bombing runs to espionage, Plutonium and Uranium, it would be hard to convert to another theme without losing some of that marriage of theme and mechanics.

To me, it's not even close. TMP actually has theme that plays into its mechanics, and LoW is just a random theme on top of a game that wasn't influenced by the world in which it's set.

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