Stonemier games in a nutshell, TBH
Played Razzia which is the card game version of Ra. I miss the disaster tiles/cards which arent in Razzia. But the small size and Ra as a small card game is a big plus.
Played Santiago too. Bribery and negotiation game. That game gave me big laughs that I hadnt had since lockdown. It was very good. And found it deeper and more interesting than I expected it to be.
I wonder if this game would get samey? I have a nagging feeling it will. But we’ll see
5 Likes
My friend Liz’s internet woes were not fixed (seriously, don’t do CenturyLink if you have a choice) so we still haven’t been able to get back to Spirit Island. Instead we did a three player Too Many Bones, this time against…uh…the werewolf Tyrant, who is remarkably annoying - he hides behind a battlequeue full of minions, and then a) 50% of the time goes invulnerable to attack dice on his turn and b) runs away and refreshes his HP if you wound him badly but can’t finish him off. and c) you can’t target him unless you’re adjacent. With Duster, Ghillie, and Nugget, we managed to essentially obliterate the first battle and then…didn’t really have another until we had enough progress to face the Tyrant, and we had bonus HP from an event so we figured seemed like sooner would be better.
Reader, we were wrong. Doing it on day 6 meant we had a battlequeue of roughly 7 enemies ahead of the Tyrant. And sure, they were only 5 point baddies and then 1 pointers, hand-scouted to be the least prepossessing foes, with only one more obnoxious option forced by the Tyrant encounter. But they took time, and they took resources, and they hurt us. And by the time the Tyrant was out, we were in overtime, and just couldn’t stay up long enough (and he wouldn’t be vulnerable enough) to finish the job. One more day, and it would have been 5 pt, 20 pt, 1 pt, Tyrant. the 20 would have been nasty, but focus fire that and then our melee fighters could have worked on the boss while I sniped other baddies. Oh well. We were too tired to try again, but we saved so it’s on the cards some other time.
3 Likes
Oddly collectible too. I think I prefer the theme but not the cost to own
2 Likes
Yeah. I found Razzia to have a better theme. The rules explanation was funny because of this. Ra’s ancient Egyptian theme is just a big meh.
I’m a bit behind posting this, but my wife and I played our first game of Formosa Tea this weekend. I’ve been looking for a game about tea that had theme rather than just setting, and, while there is a good bit of abstraction, I think Formosa Tea does it.
On a turn, one can harvest tea, begin to process tea, finish processing tea, and trade to the domestic and global markets. I especially enjoy the relationship of harvesting tea to processing and the grading system for the teas one produces. Harvesting pushes the tea processing along for everyone who is processing tea (time passing, I think), which in a game of more than two players could get very think-y. Tea is graded into three grades based on its moisture and flavor, which are the result of decisions made at harvest and during processing, but better teas generally require either more time or better technology (which also often requires more time, but which can be used over and over). And those are just my highlights.
I will definitely be playing again.
6 Likes
so have I, so have I… yay. I’ve been wondering about this one 
thanks for the review.
Played 1882: Assiniboia with some random regular strangers in 18xx.games. And that was my most enjoyable game of 1882.
This is, so far, my favourite “short” 18xx title. And when I said “short” I mean, 2-3 hours. The map is interesting with the additional cost on crossing rivers. And the map has place names that are cute: Pile o’ Bones, Flin Flon, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat.
This title is more into the stock market fiddling over track engineering on the map and the train rush here is serious. Need to look more into the engineering side of this genre
Rumour has it that the priority deal marker (aka first player marker) is a beaver!
1 Like
Played several rounds of Incan Gold on BGA, aka Diamant. Hard laughs all around. Love this game.
Also played Rallyman GT on the site. Im easily a convert. Good game!
I have to say, the corner rules are clever and pretty straightforward. This is pretty slick
5 Likes
ObJoinUs… well, you get the idea.
Incan Gold/Diamant feels as though someone took a push-your-luck game, stripped away everything that wasn’t about PYL, and replaced it with even more PYL.
5 Likes
I find Diamant is one of the great bar games, up there with No Thanks and Skull. People look at it like it’s a kid’s game but slowly they get more and more invested til everyone’s shouting at the table. Plus alcohol is great for loosening up risk aversion.
Hate the stay/go cards though. We always play by the ‘meeple in hand’ approach. Much faster and more tactile.
5 Likes
We do thumbs up to stay, thumbs down to leave.
2 Likes
Same here. They did better cards for the later version.
A second game of Friday. This went faster as I knew the rules, but is still tricky even on Easy.
Amazing balance of the adventure deck having a set pace (two cards a turn) but your Robinson deck going as fast as you’re willing to spend (and take age cards). Also balancing leaving the hard cards to later when you’ve built up your deck engine, vs getting them now so that you have high scoring cards to power the engine in the first place.
Really good, instantly tense with a ticking clock. I got pirates for 40 and 35 points and no special skills, and even then the 40 point nearly ran out my entire deck. Must remember that the 2x pirates basically take as long as the rest of the game up to that point.
Definitely going back to it, excellent solitaire game.
5 Likes
Bios:Genesis ended up in my Pile of Frustration enough times that I just dropped it off at a Board Game Swap Meet an hour ago. I had such high hopes for it as a solo game, but could not justify the mental strain of just figuring out how to correctly set up and play.
1 Like
My wife, two of my kids, and I all started teaching/learning online this week, and the prep for it has stretched a couple weeks back from this. It hasn’t left any brain power at the end of the day to game, or even paint. What I have rediscovered, however, is Fly Casual an independently developed simulator for X Wing: Miniatures that has a fairly challenging AI. Matches run about 30 minutes, including building a list, and I’ve been using it to unwind after grading, or extended Teams meetings. It’s still staring at a screen, but it’s staring at a screen full of tiny spaceships.
4 Likes
I had a quick game of Ticket to Ride: Europe with my 8 yo daughter before we took the little one to gymnastics (which is a lot of fun, by the way). She did not have much luck with her tickets, and I dominated central and northern Europe before she could get a foothold there, so there was a bit of a massive difference of points when I closed up the game.
She was a bit salty about it, but I think there was a lesson there, she should have ignored the route she needed between Paris and Edinburgh (she had to use a station in London) and should have focused more on all her tickets in Eastern and Southern Europe.
1 Like
Re: Diamant / Incan Gold …
The cards themselves look fine to me (I have the top pair, not the bottom pair), but I find the reveal process using cards is a little bit tedious, so switching to something faster sounds like a good idea to me. Thumbs up/down sounds like you could cheat if you wanted to – but so long as you trust everyone play properly, it would surely keep the game ticking along.
1 Like
It’s been a while, what with work and social commitments, but I finally got Architects of the West Kingdom to the table this morning - and what a joy it was.
Just choose a simple solo game for my first go with it, and I won playing as Ada against the bot Constantine by 32 points to 18. I was trying to stay virtuous throughout but had to dip into the black market once or twice and grab a big haul from the Tax Stand My focus was on building the Cathedral while also constructing the Aqueduct and both the Carpenter’s and Mason’s Huts, acquiring the Stonecutter and Acolyte apprentices along the way was a great help too. Loads of fun with this one solo so looking forward to trying it on the harder difficulty and testing other strategies.
With luck late this afternoon or evening, I’ll get Nusfjord to the table solo for its debut here.
5 Likes
I finally received my long-awaited KS copy of Obsession plus expansions. I just unboxed, learned and played a first game against myself (there is a solo mode but it is usually not wise to start out with that before knowing the basic rules).
Explanation and more pics inside
So this is the base game, two expansions & a bunch of promo tiles and cards from the three Kickstarters this game went through. One of the things that I appreciate very much is the attention to detail regarding the packaging. All of the game including the promo materials fit in the box in a neat an organized way. It was one of the major challenges the designer faced in the campaign because he very much wanted to achieve this. With a final weight of 3.7kg in a normal sized game box, you can imagine the complexity of the task.
There are six little boxes per playable “family” so you can pull out starting materials quickly (one could even pre-setup a game with those. And two bigger boxes for the tiles and cards and meeples. The first expansion box (Wessex) fits inside the box as well and is used to hold the family boards. It’s just lovely and all of the materials are really high quality, the card stock is great, the cardboard for the tiles is nice and thick…
There is just one criticism I have of the materials: in sum there are two rulebooks, one glossary and a number of loose leaflets. This is not the only game facing that particular challenge but I wish there was something I could do about the Zettelwirtschaft.
The rulebook is well organized though and after an initial “OMG how will I ever learn this” hiccup, it proved to be quite good.
This is the table after about half of a standard game (there is an extended version and about half a dozen variants). The game plays 1-4 players (up to 6 with expansions) and with all the variants (one of which aims to reduce swingines and randomness) I am reasonably sure that it works at all those player counts.
The theme is match-making among Victorian era gentry in Derbyshire, England in the tradition of Jane Austen and other authors from the period. I feel that theme is very nicely integrated into the Euro game underneath. My plan was to play this with an afternoon tea with my girls group… obviously this will have to wait. My partner on the other hand is scowling audibly when I mention I’d like to play with him.
So here’s the starting setup:
The goal of the game is to win the VP salad to become the most prestigious family around and possibly marry on of the eligible Fairchild bachelor/ettes. VP are (mostly) obtained from improving the estate (buy tiles for money) and having a lot of guests over (the gentry cards) and having a great reputation.
At the start, each family gets an estate with one tile in each category (essentials, service, estate, prestige and sporting) and 5 servants (who all have slightly different abilities and your butler can hire more later). Each family has their four members in their gentry deck at the start and starts with their reputation in tatters.
Each round every family is putting on an activity (the tiles) to which they invite guests (the gentry cards, including the family) which have to be served by the servants (meeple workers). As a result of an activity the family receives favors both from the activity and the participants. Favors come in three varieties (most of the time): money, more gentry cards and prestige.
Once a tile was used for an activity it is flipped over to the “improved” side which often means more VP or the ability to host larger gatherings. And finally before ending their turn, the player can use their money buy a tile from the market.
The standard game lasts 16 rounds, 4 of which are courtship rounds (some kind intermediate scoring). So it’s more like 12 rounds with some rounds having special conditions like giving players bonus money, allowing to ignore prestige requirements or buying more than one tile. This keeps things interesting, serves (partly) as catch-up mechanism and helps with the game’s arc.
The action each player takes each round is just putting on that one activity, using workers as required and then counting out what favors were obtained and finally buying a single tile from the market. It’s quite simple but a lot of things want to be considered. Many actions and guests require a certain prestige and the complexity of the decision space is only rising with each round. What helps is that the rulebooks suggests that one wants to use each tile once at the most because using it again doesn’t give additional VP. So unless one has a great combo this shrinks the decision space back to reasonable.
There are several mechanisms that are used in giving the game an arc where the start is rather slow and it feels like one will never reach the heights of prestige necessary to invite the Dowager Countess Fairchild (who needs 7) and a few rounds later you’re having dinner parties with 8 guests and are wondering how you hit the prestige ceiling.
One thing the game lacks is player interaction. Besides competing for the Fairchilds and buying tiles from the market there are only two other mechanisms that mess with other players (stealing prestige or workers) and I didn’t use either in my test game. But this is an issue with many such games and I don’t mind at all.
After only a single game vs myself it is too early to give a final verdict. So far I am impressed with the flow of the game and I think it has potential to see the table because I feel I can teach the game easily and playing it is not incredibly complicated but it seems to have enough depth to keep players engaged. It drips with the theme… and yet the theme doesn’t get in the way of this having solid mechanics.
7 Likes