Crystal Palace

To close out our first gathering, we put Crystal Palace on the table. Its central idea felt interesting to me right from the start, with that rare sense of doing something a little different without needing to shout about it.

The core mechanism is choosing your dice and, above all, paying for them. It felt quite refreshing — personally, I cannot remember encountering it elsewhere in this form — and it gives decisions a pleasing, immediate weight.

Interaction comes through those choices and placements, as you try to make the most of your dice and extract value from the available actions. But that was also where the rough edges started showing: some cards can become excessively strong in the right circumstances, while the scoring also left us with questions — especially the very few points from BM/buzz placement, which felt rather odd.

My feeling by the end was that the game probably needed a little more development. It is not that I would not give it another chance; I would definitely play it again. With such a good initial idea, though, I expected to leave much more excited.