Latest addition to my boardgame collection arrived yesterday. No, it's not the first new one after my previous post about new games arriving. Not every game is worth writing about (except maybe on a boardgame themed blog 🤔). This one however had some special quality I thought was worth writing about.
The game in question is Cloudspire by Chip theory games. I had heard about their reputation of delivering high quality games (both component wise and gameplay) but I wasn't expecting what I received.
First hint was the weight / size ratio of the box. From the post notice I knew I would be receiving a box weighting a bit over 6 kilograms. So obviously I was expecting s big box! My first impression seeing the box was that there has been a mistake. It wasn't much bigger than an average game box. But lifting it up prove me wrong - the weight was all there... what, they made the components out of lead or something?
The game itself is a kind of tower defence game drawing a lot of inspiration from classic electronic counterparts of the genre. There is a randomly generated map where the troops of players (and the villain in coop/solo mode) travel forward in waves. Players can also build towers (spires in this game) to shoot down those invading troops.
Both troops and towers are being represented by a stack of chips. An interesting mechanisms where you can add different kind of chips to enhance those things. The upgrades include chips with additional attack, range, movement, health or defence. Taking damage in turn will remove those upgrade chips from the bottom of the stack. Nice and functional mechanism with direct visuals to see the power of those entities.
Such a mechanism obviously wouldn't work with some cheap flimsy cardboard cutouts or cheap plastic pieces. So what was weighting the box was a huge stacks of poker chips! Even without picking one up you could tell they were quality chips indeed.
But it didn't stop there. Instead of cardboard map tiles like basically all other games come with here the tiles were cut from a sturdy neoprene mat. The cards weren't cardboard either, but were these nice plastic ones. They even came with a plastic tugboxes! It's hard to see even cardboard ones in many games. All components also came in a sturdy containers nicely backed inside the box, no need to invest in 3rd party or custom organizer to keep everything in order. The only components that didn't impress me with their quality was the dice. They were rather ordinary dice, nothing special there. Which is surprising as the company's most famous game Too many bones is basically revolving around dice. I would have expected with their experience and promise of quality the dice to be something special too.
Sure, it wasn't exactly a cheap game. I've seen more expensive ones with the same amount of content but with a lot lower quality components. I just hope the gameplay proves to be up to the same standard as well. Would be nice to get all those quality components to the table often enough.