Petrichor

When I backed it, I knew I was getting into slightly hipster territory and suspected it would end up low in my collection—or high on my trade list once I suffered the appropriate aneurysm. I did not expect it to be this bad, though. There is something interesting here, and there are a few innovative ideas too, but the game feels like a ship taking on water everywhere because of its own design.

At its core, Petrichor relies on mechanisms that aim to offer something different and that, in isolation, have some real substance. The problem is that they do not come together into a smooth experience in play: the flow of the game keeps stumbling over troublesome mechanisms, and it feels as though the gameplay did not receive the attention it needed.

The interaction does not stay at a pleasantly competitive level. The take-that element comes across as blunt and punitive, raising the pressure rather than making decisions more interesting. In our game, we got so wound up that there was an actual argument afterward, simply to let the pressure cooker vent. It had been years since I had seen a game push us that far.

To me, this is a classic case of a designer seeming more concerned with drawing people to Kickstarter than with whether the game actually works at the table. And the fact that the response to criticism of these problems was “use a house rule” makes the whole thing twice as disappointing. I do not want to buy a game and then be asked to repair its foundations myself.