Let's Talk: Quarantine

So, I got this in a trade and it's turning out to be way nastier and trashier than I had ever hoped it could be.

As it turns out, this is sort of a re-imagining of Vegas Showdown, with a new "customer" mechanic and a "under construction" (in the vernacular of VS) mechanic. It's got the bidding, but even more nasty than VS, and the fact that you can dive bomb customers and "under construction" blocks on opponents' hospitals which screws them over is awesome.

One of the cooler cheap games I've ever played.

Anyone else?

I played it once and remembered liking it okay, but something about the gameplay bugged me. It's been too long to remember what.

The bidding. It has to have been the wonky bidding which the rules do a shit job of explaining, but that are pretty awesome in practice.

From 2013:

played on 4/30, 4 players

In a fair world, I shouldn't even be talking about this game. We played wrong in like 12 different ways, so we weren't experiencing it as intended. I'm not one of these clowns who believes you can't form an opinion on a game until you've played it at least a dozen times, but in all fairness, we didn't play this game, we played some effed-up version of it.

Sadly, ours is a fallen, flawed world.

There are some nifty things here. The wait line, and the fact that you can send folks to others' hospitals, is a nice idea. The fact that the way you design your hospital might score you more points, but also makes you vulnerable is another interesting idea...in theory. In practice it engenders a "take that" element that results in most of your actions being wasted on removing contamination instead of doing what the game is supposedly about. The game is called "Quarantine", however, so it means to put its most un-fun and annoying idea front and center. There's interaction and conflict, and then there's petty slap-fights, and this is the latter.

Would I play again? I'd give it another try, but what I saw didn't wow me.

Do I need to own this? Nope.

Tentative Rating: 6