YORKTON - Hobbies, like most things, bring out the best and maybe the worst in terms of judgment.
At least with many hobbies the bad judgment usually means few, or at times a lot, less money in the wallet.
When you are a fisherman a new hook design will attract you to buy far more quickly than it will attract a fish.
Disc golfers are drawn to new discs – especially putters – in hopes of finding the one that always nestles nicely in the chains. In the end it likely gets tossed into the bag of ‘forgotten discs’ waiting for Santa to take them to a new home someday.
Readers have piles of books – many unread but waiting for that mystical time when you have unlimited hours to read.
And, as board gamers, well it’s hard to head into a game store and not emerge with something – even if there is a shelf in the game room stacked high with games yet to play.
And a garage sale or discount store with games – well we are bees to sugar then.
But, that is often a fine thing too.
In the last few months a ‘dollar store’ locally has occasionally carried board games that are a cut above the usual fare they offer, and at the sweet, low prices of $5.
It does not take a particularly outstanding game to be a good value at $5.
Three, or four players sit down and play a game – any game for an hour – and the recreation cost per hour/per player when it’s a $5 game is less than a fast food coffee.
So when we picked up Down Force – the first $5 game to hit the chain store locally, we knew almost nothing about it other than from the box it was a race car game.
The race genre is not one which The Meeple Guild has gravitated too at all, so Down Force promised something different – although since we had obviously shied away from such games, expectations were modest at best.
Maybe that is in part why Down Force was such a pleasant surprise. We had invested virtually nothing, and had no expectations regarding the game. It honestly couldn’t have disappointed had it been Monopoly-boring.
But Down Force quickly proved itself to be fun.
You bid to acquire cars in the race, then play a hand of cards to move cars around the track, an effort that can box other cars in at bottlenecks, or roll a car to the front.
The game it rather simple, but the on track tensions of manoeuvring the cars during the race is really a blast.
The components are fine, a good heavy board, functional little plastic cars, and good quality cards, so all that is a plus too.
For $5 Down Force has been a surprise in terms of level of fun, and it teaches easy, so it’s a great ‘group gathering’ game too.
Likely the most fun per dollar we will have all year at the game table.
