I doubt that I would ever have bought this on my own but it had really good word of mouth on Broken Forum and just fantastic worldbuilding. It’s honestly more than a bit anachronistic since we’re currently worried about global warming yet this game is all about the world freezing to death. Yet it’s undeniably a great idea for a premise and all of the game’s mechanics are built around it.

Like most people I bought this prequel entirely because of how much I liked the main game. This one is actually made by a different studio and being a prequel has no Max Caulfield and her time powers in it. Instead here you are put in control of Chloe Price and the story is all about how she gets to know Rachel Amber and become best friends. There’s a new mechanic called Backtalk which is supposed to represent Chloe’s ability to convince others to do things her way by insulting them but in practice, it’s another conversation option.

Playing this in 2019 just highlights to me that game graphics are already good enough that I don’t really care about chasing the state of the art any more. Honestly while obviously not being perfect, they look fine to me even though this game was first released in 2015. This is especially true for this series given that when the sequel, Just Cause 4, was released only last year, many people complained that its production values and graphics seemed to have regressed.

So not only is this another boardgame adaptation, but it’s a card game to boot. As much as I love card games, I’m getting sick of them myself so this will probably be the last one for a while. The good news is that I got a ton of expansions in one package when I got this, which would have been ruinously expensive to buy in physical form. The bad news is that this game was clearly inspired by Dominion but I think I still like the older game more.

This post covers both the Patient Zero mini-campaign for the 2016 game as well the free so-called Summer bonus episodes for a total of seven extra missions. All these reuse the same locations as the base game of course but they do change up the decor a bit and often depict the same area during a different time of the day. The Summer episodes are essentially more of the same in simpler form even, but the Patient Zero missions do change up the game mechanics a bit.

The last game in the bundle of digital versions of board games that I bought so very long ago is good, old, boring Ticket to Ride. This is one of the very first board games we learned to play in Kota Kinabalu. Given that it has dirt simple rules and that I would only be playing against AI, I thought I’d just briefly check it out. The good thing is that this version comes with nearly every map ever made for the game. With the slight rule variations on each of them, it still takes a little bit of time to give each map a test run.

I put the year of release together with film titles here because quite a few films share the same title and some have been remade so many times that it would be confusing to know which version I am referring to without specifying the year. I’m now wondering if I should do the same for video games as franchise owners have been rebooting and renumbering them. This post of course refers to the 2016 reboot of Hitman but then it’s not really a reboot since it takes place after Hitman: Absolution. Whatever, it’s all just for marketing purposes anyway.