Diamant is much better than the other light PYL games. If you don’t like PYL you’re well out of luck though.
The best moments is where a couple of people have built up a hoard and lose it all on the card flip. The shared moment is great.
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Personally I prefer Celestia. I enjoy the tension building up as everyone leaves the boat one at a time and then watching the cards get played probably from different positions. Counter intuitively splitting peoples decision to that players turn makes it a more shared process for me.
I only played Diamant 3 times but was unfussed on it where as I’d still play Celestia now.
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As a gentle recommendation: I find a lot of the time (not always, but frequently) “Dominant Strategy Syndrome” is repaired by attempting that strategy against a new group of players.
I work at a game store, and the number of times people have told me “the” strategy to win a game of Splendor, or Machi Koro, or Catan… but it’s never the same strategy. “Oh, always put your first settlement on a port” straight through to “Always pick red gems first”… the problem is self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent. Somebody tells you, I dunno, “Always build pools”, and so you try and then you win and you’re like “Yup! Pools are undefeatable” and since you always play with the same group of players everyone agrees. But if you try that strategy against a different group of people, you might get your teeth kicked in.
Anyway. Some games really are “solve-able” (Few Acres of Snow, I’m looking at you…), but often times it just seems to be confirmation bias.
That stated, if you don’t like Welcome To, there are plenty of other great roll-n’-writes! No reason to dig in on one you’re not enjoying! Try Cartographers, Longshot, or Fleet if you want something as crunchy, or maybe That’s Pretty Clever, Lost Cities RnW, or Encore if you’d like something a little lighter/faster!
(And welcome to the forums! As Roger said, all bites here are optional!)
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That is an interesting one with Welcome To…
The randomness implicit with the way the cards are flipped and how the link with one of the 3 numbers really make it tricky. It is definitely a good strategy on the game to leave the numbers closer to the extremes for last, but it is well balanced with the fact that numbers in the middle range have more cards, and will come up more often, and you only have 3 of each to be used (one per street) or less if you skip one tactically here and there.
Throw in the different projects and house groups that you can pick and choose, that makes it tricky to say, go for swimming pools, or go for raising value… I think it is a game where whoever wins was the one who adapted better to the way the cards flipped and left him/herself more options open at the end while gathering points here and there along the way.
But that is only my humble opinion. I have seen traditional euros with way more obvious “dominant strategies”. And those still can have bad days.
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Thanks for the welcome everyone 
I do enjoy PYO when there’s more going on, (I’m a big Quacks fan) I’m normally the one pushing it too far particularly in Diamant. As you said the best moments are the extremes where people push it and fail, or manage to push it way further that they should have been able to.
I have always wondered whether I’d enjoy Celestia more but never got round to trying it, thanks for the recommend.
Thanks for the tip on countering dominant strats. I did really enjoy Welcome to so I’ll definitely go and have a few games on BGA with some random people to see how they shake out. For context I played ~40 games over the panini with the same 6 people and probably the last 10 games I was trying to subvert this particular strategy. I won’t go into detail as I don’t want to adversely affect others enjoyment.
I’ve not played a wealth of roll-n’-writes, but was addicted to the Ganz Schon Clever app a few years ago, although didn’t enjoy Doppelt So Clever anywhere near as much. For me Railroad Ink and Fleet are top. Have just played a first game of Three Sisters which seems like Fleet on roids!
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I’m fairly certain there can’t be a single dominant strategy in Welcome To. Without fully mathing it out, I’m pretty sure at most there could be two situationally dependent strategies.
Option 1, the three goal cards that come up that particular game all together require fewer houses in order to complete. The winning strategy in this setup is going to be the thing that rushes that end game. Probably scoring all three cards as quickly as possible with I don’t know what on the side as I haven’t mathed it out and it might just depend on what cards come up.
Option 2, the three goal cards require a higher number of houses in order to complete them all. Rushing the end game is not possible here. Go for a longer game strategy. I suspect here you can score more by mostly ignoring the goal cards, except as they fit in with the other high scoring option. I have an idea what this is, but again, not certain.
Key is evaluate the starting situation correctly. Can you rush the end game (complete all 3 goal cards in probably 20-22 houses?) or do you need a longer game strategy (will it take maybe more like 26-28 houses?)? I think those are the numbers anyway. In between, read the table (other players) and make a choice. For me, my main gaming partner, my husband, loves to try to rush end games anytime he can to catch other players unaware so that will always be on my mind if in the midrange.
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The thing with Welcome to is I think it really does depend on who you play with. I think if you play with people for whom neatness is paramount you can have a really chilled experience with it and make judgements based on that. If you play with risky players then you have to adapt to that too.
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Yes massively different if you play to win or just play to get the highest score you can.
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It’s wild that they’re two different things!
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I think Three Sisters might be my favourite solo game (that or Railroad Ink on the giant board). So crunchy and puzzly!
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I agree with the two strategic options you described, but towards the end of my plays we were using the advanced city plans which, at least in those plays seemed to make rushing less viable. Option 2 is the way my friend was playing and was generally putting into the same things each game and ignoring the city plans unless like you say they happen to line up with what you were doing anyway.
I think its fair to say we were playing to win, although I think it was pretty rare across all our plays for someone to try and rush the game.
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Definitely got that crunch. I had assumed it would be on a similiar complexity level to Fleet, but it’s genuinely like playing two games of Fleet at the same time with more bonuses 
. The rain in the last round probably accounted for a third of the boxes I ticked across the whole game!
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I thought for a long time people talked about Welcome to the Dungeon and I thought I can maybe add something 
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You should try Hadrian’s Wall. If you overcome the feeling of “this is doing my taxes”, or “this it an exam back in University” the first time you see that huge spreadsheet-like playsheet, there are so many options on where to go with your resources, you will really enjoy yourself. When I played, winning was not that important. Building up and defending from the Picts was.
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Coincidentally I relistened to the SUSD pod yesterday where they talk about Hadrian’s Wall and it definitley piques my interest. Not always going to want to be doing my taxes or Uni exams but when I am in the mood I can see that it would tick my box. What’s your view on player count?
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I played it with 4 and it was fine, it is very independent from player count. Very multiplayer solo, if you like. I cannot see it taking much longer even if you played it with a higher count, unless there was somebody exceedingly prone to AP. But the wife of the owner of the game is terrible at it, and we hardly had to wait for her for every round (that you all play at once once you set up the new wave of invaders), so that says good things about it.
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Catan - I can appreciate the importance of Catan to growth of the hobby; but please do not ask me to play it. Nothing about it appeals to me.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill - Mindless boring exploration phase followed by annoying broken haunt phase. Cool idea, awful execution.
Cards against Humanity - The worst version of apples to apples. No room for actual creativity, the person with the most offensive card wins.
Magic the Gathering - The TCG model is complete garbage, and MTG is a mediocre compared to literally every other comparable card game I’ve ever played.
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Welcome, Nim!
I’ve never played Betrayal and I have a sort of nostalgia-like feeling as a result: I’ve seen people having fun with it and I’ve often thought I’d like to try it. But actually I suspect that sort of “wandering round a place having encounters” itch is scratched for me by A Touch of Evil.
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Quacks for me. Love the idea of a push your luck bag builder, but I’ve found that it breaks completely when you’ve no luck to push. Draw a bunch of white tokens as your first tokens loses the game. It’d be relatively easy to make a rule where extreme bad luck was mitigated as well, but I don’t think house ruling would go down well with the group. Much prefer push your luck games where everyone has the same luck, like Diamente
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Welcome Nim, I think cards against humanity quite often gets that criticism. I would completely agree.
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