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    MEGA MAN MOBILE

    MEGA MAN MOBILE

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    Play a piece of gaming history with the original Mega Man, the action-packed classic platformer! In...

Hunt In The Night (Blood and Bonds #3)
Hunt In The Night (Blood and Bonds #3)
S.J. Coles | 2024 | LGBTQ+, Paranormal, Romance
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Saved the best for last!
Independent reviewer for GRR, I was gifted my copy of this book.

This is book 3 in the Blood and Bonds series and you really MUST read book 1, Touch in The Night and book 2, Bleed in The Night. It is a continuation of the ongoing story arc, and much is NOT recapped.

Book three has to be my favourite!

This book follows Mason, the police detective tasked with finding out who is killing haemophiles and humans, and more importantly, WHY. He is joined by Cai, a former police dective who wa turned against his will. There is some clashing at first, but Mason finds himself attracted to Cai and he is straight, right?

So, book three. It wraps up everything that has been happening, with a big fat bow. BUT! I did NOT see that coming at me, not at all! I had it all worked out, who was doing all this and why. Then, I'm thrown for a loop as to who turned Cai those ten years ago, and it appears the bad guy was playing the long game.

THEN! There was another thing thrown at me that I did not see coming as well! I mean for the most part, this book kinda threw me, but in the best way!

Again, the book is told only from Mason's point of view but I knew it would be, so I was prepared.

I'm being deliberately vague, I know but I don't want to give you spoilers.

We get, eventually, a wonderful wedding of Jesse and Emory (from book 1) and there is a return of Tyler and Lucien (book 2) for said wedding. So it was nice to catch up with them.

But the best bit?? The epilogues! Told from Emory, Lucien and Cai's points of view. While I would have LOVED to hear from them in their respective books, getting this little glimpse into the minds of the haemophiles was the best thing! We get the fear of these guys, at falling for a human, and the joy they feel at finally admitting they needed someone in their lives. I loved it because it was so unexpected! This is not a spoiler thing, either, cos other reviews have mentioned it already, and I NEEDED to say how much I loved getting into THEIR heads, just for this little bit.

I cannot fault this one, I really can't so...

5 full and shiny stars!

*same worded review will appear elsewhere
  
Firefly: Shiny Dice
Firefly: Shiny Dice
2015 | Dice Game, Science Fiction
One of the best parts of the board gaming experience is finding a fun group of people with whom to play! Sometimes, though, coordinating a game night is easier said than done. We all must occasionally forego the group experience and face the world as the Lonely Only. But fear not! The world of solo-play is a vast and exciting realm! What follows is a chronicle of my journey into the solo-playing world – notes on gameplay, mechanics, rules, difficulty, and overall experience with solo variations of commonly multiplayer games! I hope this will provide some insight as you continue to grow your collection, or explore your already owned games!

I really like Firefly. So when Travis told me he had Firefly: Shiny Dice, and was looking to get rid of it, I jumped on the chance to get my hands on something Firefly! I’d never played the game and had never even heard of it either. Having played it now, though, I can see why Travis wanted to off-load it on someone else.

In Firefly: Shiny Dice, over the course of three rounds, players are rolling dice to assemble a crew, complete missions, and defeat bad guys. All of the main characters of the show are represented by different die faces, each with a special power. Use those powers to help defeat bad guys and earn VPs on your turn each round! The player at the end of the game with the most points is the winner. Firefly: Shiny Dice is played the same way, regardless of player count – in solo play, you are still trying to amass the most points possible over three rounds.

At it’s core, Firefly: Shiny Dice is a dice-rolling game. And that’s where the simplicity ends. This game is bogged down an ambiguously confusing rulebook, complicated turn steps, and just way too much text overall. When I first got this game, I was psyched to play. I sat down, opened up the rulebook, read through it at least 3 times, and then put the game away. I was so confused by what I had read, I couldn’t even bring myself to try it at first. There is a lot of ambiguity in the rulebook that caused a lot of confusion and frustration for me. For example, the brown dice are Outlaw characters and the white dice are Passenger characters, but the rulebook and player aids use “Crew Dice” most of the time – so are they all Crew Dice, or just the Outlaws since, in the show, those are the characters who actually are the crew on Serenity? Are Passengers considered Crew? The same ambiguity goes for Mission Cards – if you draw one that you cannot complete, is it just discarded? Then what’s the point of the Mission Card? How about if you draw one and don’t want to complete it? Are you required to complete it if you can? Or can you choose to ignore it to negate the Mission Keyword? I felt like after I read the rulebook, I actually had more questions than before I started.

Regarding turn order, there is just way too much going on for me. There are 4 steps each turn, and some steps have several ‘phases.’ First you roll your dice, and then depending on what you rolled maybe you can re-roll some, and then you have to check to see if you got any bonuses/penalties after your re-roll, but then you stop and draw a Mission Card and possibly resolve it (?), and now you go and deal 1 damage to a foe but only if the current Mission says ‘Shiny,’ and then the foe dice resolve their effects, and now you can use your dice and character powers to fight the foes, and then depending on how many dice you have left/the Mission Keyword from your card this turn, you can decide to push your luck and take another turn immediately or just end your turn now. Whew. There are just way too many unnecessary steps, in my opinion. All you should need to do is to roll/re-roll your dice, resolve foe effects, and fight the foes. The Missions and die bonuses/penalties feel extraneous to me, and result in clunky gameplay.

In theory, this should be a cool game. In reality, it’s just frustrating. To me it feels like every single small idea made it into the end-game, but they were not executed well enough to justify including them. This game is way too wordy and ambiguous to make sense, and even though I keep the rulebook on hand every time I play, I feel like it doesn’t really help me at all. I think a more pared down/edited version of this game could be a hit.

As a fan of Firefly, I want to like this game. I really do. But I don’t. I think it is too complicated and far too confusing for what it is supposed to be, which is a relatively light dice-rolling game. Firefly: Shiny Dice is not on my short-list of games to play, nor is it on my long-list (is that a thing?). It’s kind of just in my collection at this point, though I don’t know if it’ll stay here for long.

https://purplephoenixgames.wordpress.com/2019/01/28/solo-chronicles-firefly-shiny-dice/