Wanna give yourself a dose of regret? Pop into your local CEX and have a gander at the retro gaming section. Super Nintendos (original, thank you, not the dinky little re-release thing) and their original cartridges can go for sick money. Why did I let my mother give mine away to that kid up the street? I hadn’t grown out of it, I hadn’t! So you check out the old PC games – and they’re cheap! But what you gonna run those CDs on? Your fancy driveless WiFi only laptop with all the latest components? Nope. You’ll have to build an old school machine with ancient graphic cards and memory from an earlier age of humankind. Good luck, finding those parts in working condition won’t be easy, and you’re not the only one out scavenging…
Computer Junkyard from Dream Egg Games is a tile placement game for 2-5 players, in which the players find themselves in the Computer Junkyard, the perfect place to find all the components you will need! Scavenge for parts with just the cash in your pockets. Sabotage, steal, and trade with your opponents. Be the first to build a computer good enough to run your game! Much like real life, assembling your computer is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. The tiles have different configurations that create a challenging – and satisfying – puzzle element. It’s going to take all of your cunning, spatial reasoning, and problem-solving skills to assemble everything before your opponents do.
In the first phase of the game you’ll get to visit the junkyard Players will add hardware to the Junkyard that increases the inventory, and the prices adjust depending upon how many are there when you visit. Cash is tight! Play strategically and you just might turn a profit. But beware, other players will get to sabotage your computer with a bug, and you’ll need to try and remove it. You can keep playing, but you can’t win with a buggy computer.
During phase two, everyone builds their computers simultaneously within a short time limit. If you’ve left anything disconnected when time runs out, it’s moved off of your chassis where it’s easier to steal! If you finish your computer with time to spare, install your software tile by connecting it as your very last action. Remember, if you want your software to work, you need the right components (I almost never had a decent graphics card or enough memory in the clankers I used to call PCs – you should have seen the state I played Doom 3 in (it was still great)).
Phase 3 sees players inspect each other’s computers to make sure they were built correctly (no sneaky dealings here (yeah, I’m looking at you). Consult the block diagram to verify the colour-coded connections. In a clever bit of game design, you can use the colours of the rainbow as your reference: Purple memory connects to the blue motherboard, which goes into the green PC, into which the other orange, yellow and pink parts will fit. Misplaced hardware is moved off the chassis to be reconnected in a future round.
If you feel like monitoring Computer Junkyard more closely (don’t deny it, you loved that pun), head on over to the crowdfunding page here, but get there quick: it ends soon.
About the author:
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.
