It’s weird, someone kind of offered me £80 for El Grande, I was tempted as I could paste up a German copy for £45 for the big box
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Philippsburg is like half an hour drive… I don’t look that far out. (Okok not true my copy pf Samurai came from Berlin)
I need Spiel to happen this year. Half the fun is scouring the used game sellers shelves for whatever I am hunting that year.
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TBF I found the cheapest one available to illustrate my point
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The point being that beige Euro games sell here as if everyone bought SdJ for Christmas and then 10 to 15 years later gets rid of it again. Slap a meeple … sorry Pöppel… badge on it and print…
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Thurn and taxis is a game who’s bga implementation makes physical copies justify their high price.
I wish they took a few liberties with presentation in that game.
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Funny enough, played it today at a local convention, 4 times. Great game!
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I think Teotihuacan has enough expansions now…
This is with all the solo components in the Shadows of Xitle box. There are 9 modules now, so dissecting this will be a challenge.
Here are the modules, for a laugh:
Pre-Classic Period
- Priests & Priestesses - Player boards, assymetrical player abilities
- Height of Development - Temple board, provides a new temple track
- Seasons of Progress - Seasons board, provides variable season effects
- Architecture - Architecture board, replaces pyramid decoration area
- Development - Development board, replaces pyramid construction area
Expansion Period
- Obsidian - New wild type resource (required for modules 7-9)
- Mansion - Mansion board, replaces the Palace area
- Altars & Shamans - Adds shaman meeples who travel in the spaces between areas, buffing actions in adjacent areas
- Expanding the Empire - Conquest board and warrior meeples, adds a new conquest track.
So 2 ways of adding variability, 2 new tracks, 3 action areas that replace areas on the original board, 1 new action for supplementary strategy (and 1 wild resource that isn’t really a module in its own right).
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A second copy of Ivor the Engine arrived today and I’m like WHAT?
I definitely screwed up somewhere.
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Why have I failed to learn this one? I made several attempts but every time I got close to making the switch from two handed play to the bot, my brain quit.
What is it about the game that makes it so good that you (and others) keep buying the expansions? I would really like to click with this one… it is one of my „oh it is never going to be this cheap again“ buys from before Christmas…
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I assume you mean Cryptid because playing Alchemists 4 times in a row sounds a little stressful 
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For me, it’s the bog standard euro done right. Nothing’s amazing about it, but for move your meeple, do the action, it’s crunchy and satisfying. I think Matt has said similar things on the podcast before, but I don’t always want a crazy innovative game that subverts the genre with its unique mechanisms. Sometimes I just want a game that does the standard things well for a nicely satisfying time, even if there’s no real WOW factor. The game does a lot for what is essentially ‘repeatedly go around a one-way rondel’.
I don’t think I could learn it solo, having an understanding friend struggle through the first game with me helped a lot. Definitely one of those games I’d recommend learning with a 2p game, then play a 3p game with 1 new player, then a 4p game with another. Having too many new players would bog this game down considerably since it’s a lot to take in visually and to think through repercussions.
I’m not sure if the third expansion is strictly necessary. Certainly I haven’t played it enough to validate the purchase. The first expansion adds some needed variability along with some things that add a lot of fuss. The second (small) expansion provides more variability in the randomised tiles that a lot of people were begging for - the ‘essential’ expansion if there is any, since it doesn’t change the game but adds variability. I expect there will be a few cool things in the new expansion, I generally enjoy the things that replace the board for variability rather than add extra to it for more complexity, but not sure when I’ll get round to playing with all of it.
I mainly bought the new expansion because after the recent Tascini controversy, Board & Dice said they had stopped their collaborations with Tascini and would only fulfill existing contracts. Since this was designed before that statement, there’s a chance that this could be a single print run and no more. Ethically questionable buying a Tascini game at all, but everyone needs to make their own choice.
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How many possible variants do you get out of it? 2⁹, or 2⁵ + 2⁴ - 1, or…?
It’s almost got as many modules as a Queen game!
Fresco has, what, 13?
Escape Curse of the Temple has 16
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Well it depends what you count as a variant. In the base game you switch around the order of the action areas*, so that’s already a tonne of possible set ups straight out of the box… and the 3 action areas that swap out with the base game areas can also go in each of those different orders…
.* The natural board state is only recommended for learning the game, as it places the areas in the logical order for optimal construction.
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I was thinking of Onirim, of which the second edition comes with 7 independently-usable mini-expansions, so in theory you have 128 variants. (And I think there are people on BGG who’ve deliberately played through all of them.)
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There’s a whole spectrum of what would be counted. The module combinations would be the highest level of variability, but arguably the randomised technology (special ability power ups) set ups change the game just as much. There are 23 technologies (think that includes a few promos), 6 used in a single game. 
Plus the seasons module has a whole bunch of variability: 9 seasons, 3 in a single game.
I think it beats My Father’s Works’ 13 trillion possible games or whatever they claim 
Looking on BGG, there are already people looking at broken combinations if the various randomised pieces are aligned!
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Shall we do some maths?
The simple stuff:
23 technologies, 6 spaces. Order doesn’t matter - 100,947 permutations
9 Seasons, 3 spaces. Order does matter - 336 permutations
Base game board - 8 areas, 8 spaces. Order does matter - 40,320 permutations
Use of modules together - 9 variants (8 modules + base), 1-9 ‘spaces’ (so it’ll be 9! Combinations?). Order doesn’t matter - …this is where my mind dies.
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