18Lilliput

I first saw 18Lilliput with only two players, and it immediately gave me that wonderful contradiction: it is brain-burning, yet it stays light. It is an honest bit of design, in a way that does not require you to be a train gamer to appreciate it. And when a game manages to give both the initiated and the uninitiated a good time, I say it is doing something right.

At the table, players begin from colour-coded companies — and in my first game, the green starting company seemed possibly a little favoured in a two-player setting. I will not label it a problem based on a single play, but it is exactly the kind of detail I want to check again when we sit down with it next.

The game heads into a final round and, at least in my later experience, the result was not predetermined at all. There was more commotion, competition right to the end, and enough arithmetic for me to get spectacularly wrecked because I cannot add — a recurring theme of the evening, sadly. The fact that a well-known lover of blue won merely confirmed tabletop gaming's fundamental rule: blue is always ahead.

The verdict is the simple, correct, obvious one: get it while it is available. It is so good that I can see it gaining the replay frequency of Wind of Change on a Rock FM playlist. If television plays it, the singer will sing it again too. It is HIGHLY desirable for your collection to include it. Even the hack journalist read the rules here; world-changing events.

Updated session

The second experience was better than any earlier ones I remembered. Rather than confirming that the game unfolds predictably, it brought more chaos and an open result until the end. My initial reservation about green in a two-player game remains only a reservation, not a conclusion, while the overall impression became even more positive.