Yes, dammit, this has nothing to do with the Turing Machine! (But I suspect I shall like the game anyway.)
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Gamefound of Damask from @MarkSP just arrived.
(Not kickstarter though! Dont think gamefound has the same ring). KIckstarter must be the Hoover of crowdfunding …
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The other day a friend from out of town was here and a group visit to FLGS was in order (just like the good old times 25 years ago when we were young and bought Magic cards instead of boardgames)… and so I bought: Star Wars: Clone Wars (Pandemic) and told my friends that yes Codenames Duet is good and sold them Kingdomino Origins (newly out in a too large square box in German–I’ll rebuy the Blue Orange one that is much smaller thank you very much… my nephew has my old copy now) and almost sold them Splendor. Our out of town friend wanted to buy the German edition Hardback but that was not in stock (unsurprisingly).
I also let them know they can have my copy of Sleeping Gods on an indefinite loan instead of buying their own but I may have killed that interest by mentioning “choose your own adventure” and attrition. Last but not least, I am obviously up to teaching and playing Ark Nova (he almost bought it anyway straight away because Zoos)
I have tested a 2 handed solo of Clone Wars but that wasn’t enough to get a feel for the game except realizing that the rulebook is a bit sparse on the finale of the game and that playing on easy is easy (until the finale throws a few edge cases at you ruleswise.)
PS: wrong thread but we have already seen the new episodes of Bad Batch 
naturally…
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My Damask got here today as well.
Original estimate was end of February, so that’s another way in which this project wasn’t Kickstarter.
Thanks @MarkSP !
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Got it as well. Very pretty. I think this will work well with the club
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The second Christmas update!
We hosted my family Christmas this past Saturday; our best showing since before the Pandemic – we had 8 guests over (out of a theoretical maximum of 12). I got to see my mom for the first time since 2019 – she got to meet our nearly 1-year-old youngest child and see our 3.5 year old for the first time since she visited us at the hospital when she was born. It had been a long time; and sadly I didn’t get to spend a lot of time catching up with her.
My older two daughters each received a game as a gift; the older one got “match puzzle game” which I’m not sure if it’s actually a game or not (it is also not databased on BGG, from what I can tell); my partner got it out to play with her yesterday while I was out running errands, and she said she (an educated adult), couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work.
The middle daughter received “Eye Found It – Hidden Picture Card Game”, which is on BGG, but is very close to not being a real game either – my oldest enjoyed it but the middle one doesn’t have the attention span yet for “find the thing hidden in the picture” activities.
My partner received Blank Slate, which appears to be a word game hybrid of Apples-to-Apples and Dixit. Each player has a dry-erase slate and marker; a “Word Cue” card is revealed and everyone writes a word to complete the cue, hoping to match an answer with someone else; extra points for matching with exactly 1 other person, but no points for not matching with anyone. Looks interesting enough for a light party game that supports up to 8.
My grandmother usually gets me a game from my wishlist, so I wasn’t too surprised to get one myself; what I wasn’t really expecting was Eriantys, mostly because it was put on my wishlist very late – I was out running errands a few weeks ago (like, mid-December?) and I was catching up on So Very Wrong About Games and in the episode I was listening to (#224), they discussed playing Eriantys, a reimplementation of Carolus Magnus a.k.a Carlos Grande a.k.a. Chucky Big Big a.k.a. Chucky Mags a.k.a. Caruly Maguly a.k.a. The Big Chuckster. I had heard them talk about Carolus Magnus before and thought it would be interesting to check out, but grumpy european dudes are an increasingly difficult thematic setting to pitch; instead of grumpy european dudes, there’s brightly-colored frogs and unicorns on floating islands. I’m very excite, especially by the stated “30 minute” play time.
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Glad it’s arrived! Hope you both enjoy playing.
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Because it was on sale, I purchased Marvel Champions: Rise of the Red Skull expansion, which completes my collection of the boxed expansions. Mostly I just wanted Hawkeye 
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Splotter went crazy with the bits again.
I worked out the perfect storage, bought a pile of trays, then realised all the bits just barely fit back in with perfect packing and there isn’t room for a single tray, let alone a pile of them.
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Worse than Antiquity or Roads & Boats?
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Antiquity I never played physically, but there’s a lot of putting things on and taking them off the central board - a lot of movement. Roads & Boats too, producing, transporting, consuming…
With Horseless Carriage, nearly all the cardboard you place is permanent. Cars do get added to and removed from the marketing board, as do market windows, but I think that looks like it’s nowhere near the amount of fiddle of those two games. Just have to see how it plays today.
On the other hand, I actually had room for trays in the RBO&ATS box, making packing and unpacking much less hassle. On the other other hand, I can actually fit Horseless Carriage in a normal backpack.
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I bought a couple of things
k3 - this simple stacking two player duel game where you try to corner your opponent to being unable to place a block.
Halli Galli - mostly because it has a squashy banana.
My hope is that Orleans - Joan of Arc - Roll and Write comes soon too.
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Some post-Christmas (and post-big birthday) orders on the way:
For me (i.e., mostly soloing)
- Flash Point: Fire Rescue
- Final Girl with the Happy Trails Horror scenario
For my casual gaming group
- The Fuzzies
- The Mind
- PitchCar
Plus, for my RPG reading
- Call of Cthulhu 40th Anniversary Starter Set
- Solo Game Master’s Guide
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Bought the latest Cthulhu Wars expansions:
- Azathoth faction
- Bubastis faction
- new Tcho Tcho power tiles
- Ultimate Errata pack
Eclipse Second Dawn - got it from boardgameguru for 85 quid. Which is the cheapest I’ve seen on retail!
So far, Eclipse and 1883: Northern Italy are my first purchases of this year. I’m doing alright, I htink
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Just received my unpunched copy of Summer Storm - The Battle of Gettysburg (1998). The map for this is really pretty, so I might have it framed for display as well. 
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Something like this photo which is posted on the game’s BGG entry. But I would probably go for a frame with a far less obtrusive border.
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Seems like frequently between buying and receiving there’s a cooling off period. Something you bought just because it was on sale. Something you’re no longer sure about. Seldom have I been so jazzed about every item in a shipment as this one:
Bohnanza: I’ve been collecting since '95. Bohnanza has come up A LOT. Never played or bought, though. SU&SD’s recent spate of content on it (thanks Tom) nudged me to finally do it. Read the rules, I think this is going to be a good one.
Radlands: Another one that just keeps coming up in discussions of 2p games with a lot of runway, or winners of depth:size rankings. Now that I’m buying less, I sprung for the deluxe and it’s nice to have that tactility in the cards and tokens. It does look really, really good. However, the theme is likely to keep my wife from playing. Just the evocative roughness - things like a “blood donor” event, picturing a run down medic tent, with an effect that allows you to “kill” one of your cards to heal another. It’s Mad Max and the world is not friendly. I don’t prefer it either, but I have more psychic distance and prioritize mechanics. We’ll see when I can find an opponent.
Ginkgopolis: Another one I’ve heard about for a long time. Thanks to @captbnut I finally got to take it for a spin in the BGA alpha and it’s just a great game. There’s a lot going on, in all the good ways.
Spirecrest: OK, this one is maybe the least exciting. There was a sale and I figured I’d want it eventually. So the story goes.
War of the Ring: Got this without any reviews or research. I just knew I’d want it. Now that it’s in my hands I’ve read up on it and it seems like such a winner. Turns out it shines as a 2v2 game but it does have a 1v1 setup. It’s small, deep gameplay, and most importantly evocative. Really feels like you are going through the story, yet plays in such a way that it’s different each time. And it’s by the Quartermaster General guy! SO eager to play this one!
The big complaint though, here is the content in the box:
It’s a 5x4x2 cube (inches) once you put a handful of tokens on top. This would fit in a Radlands or Silver sized box. The manual, in fact, suggests it was designed for a Condottiere sized box. But here we have your typical Dominion 12x12.
I have to assume that publishers like Ares know more about marketing a game than I do and that moderately big boxes will sell more in the long run? But here we are, paying for materials and shipped air, and then spending more time and money on custom storage solutions. Maybe a small BCG trading card box with some trees of Gondor and eyes of Sauron taped on will do it?
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Well, you have to leave room in the box for the inevitable expansions!
Heat certainly did.
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The thing publishers always say is “shelf presence”, both to get shelved with the big games rather than in a pile with the little ones, and to be visible from a distance on the shelf. On MGTT I asked a couple of publishers whether that was really still important in these days of internet sales, and they both said yes, absolutely.
SJGames’ Castellan tries to get the best of both worlds: on the shelf it looks like this
but you throw away the clamshell and cardboard wrapper, and it all fits in the lower box.
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Bohnanza is great. I’ve actually just played it async on BGA, which I wouldn’t recommend but it actually worked.
I also have War of the Ring on order. Looking forward to get a chance to play it.
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