Played good old Hansa Teutonica - it’s been a while. Tried to swing early on city vps early in the game, didn’t work as I found myself running out of cubes in both of my supplies.
18Mex with Wyvern. Got rules wrong lmao. But solid 18xx title.
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Enjoyed a nice ‘Games with the Kid’ night tonight, gave him the run of the game shelves and he chose a few really light games that we hadn’t played in a long time.
Started with Impact: Battle of Elements which is essentially Strike. Bit of competitive push your luck dice chucking. My wife joined in for a game of Go Nuts for Donuts which saw him wipe the floor with both of us. And then we had a game of Cockroach Salad which we nearly had to stop before the end because he was laughing so hard I thought he was going to rupture something internally! 
Good to have a laugh, particularly as we were told the whole country (Ireland) is back to almost our highest level of lockdown again for the next 6 weeks, from midnight tomorrow. Well, hopefully we’ll get to have a few more family game nights going at least. So this thread and the ‘What are you reading’ thread should see a few more posts from me!
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Tonight’s bimonthly game night (staying virtual and likely to remain so):
Legendary Inventors - feels kind of like Augustus with the bits thrown in a blender and taken out in a different order. I put a lot of effort into getting a decent run, only to find out that I’d have had a lot more points by putting the same effort into other things; another player hoped to finish with inventor improvements, only to find that the bag randomly didn’t throw up any of the right value in the final phase. All a bit arbitrary, but light and fast-moving, and I wouldn’t mind playing it again.
Thurn und Taxis - a classic of course, but the first time I’ve played it. It has the feeling of being a game that would reward card counting, at which I’m very bad. Had fun but I don’t suppose I will play often enough to get competent, unless I play nothing else for a bit, which is unlikely.
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My wife and I played a game of Unmatched last night, her Medusa vs. my Sinbad.
I started off with a decent hand, having two of the voyage catds, but one of them was the Voyage Home card that returns all of your played voyage cards to your hand, which is something I would have wanted to draw later in the game. I kept my distance with Sinbad and tried leveraging the Porter more, though eventually one of Medusa’s harpies came in to deal some damage. I took it out and later managed to hit Medusa for a point with the Porter.
My wife uses the harpies very defensively, blocking off avenues to Medusa, but with one down that was harder so I started trying to force her into positions where I could attack, and managed to do so with Sinbad, getting a couple more damage in, but taking some hits in return. Got the health totals to something like 10 for me to 9 for her.
Then I had a perfect setup. Medusa attacked the Porter and I defended with Leap Away, which let me move either fighter up to 4 spaces, so I moved Medusa out of her harpy screen and next to Sinbad. I had 5 Voyages in my discard, and still had the Voyage Home in hand. So I played it and, of course, she Feinted. What should have been 7 damage for her to defend against became just a 2, and no cards came back to my hand. I think this cost me the game. I followed with a different attack (which I should have done in the first place to draw out any Feints) which she defended.
She hammered me from there on out, finishing me off with the Quick Glance scheme which does 2 damage. I don’t remember if I hit her for any more damage. As it was, I only had 5 cards left in my deck and she had a lot more, so fatigue would have done me in pretty soon anyway.
And she wanted me to note that she was slightly inebriated at the time. Either I suck at this game, she is incredibly good at this game, Medusa is overpowered, or some combination of all three are involved here. Inhave only won one game of this, our second one which was my King Arthur vs. her Medusa. I have lost the other 8 games we’ve played. It is still really fun though.
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On Monday played the first few days of a Too Many Bones game in physical space for the first time with my other girlfriend (a recent addition - modern life is complicated). She took Tantrum, I took Ghillie. We handled the initial battle with a near shut out. She can actually roll meaningful damage, unlike me. 
It’s a bit more demanding of a game than she is apparently used to, but it went over well and it awaits our return next time she’s over.
Yesterday was online gaming. We were down my friend Liz, so we went back to our in-progress Mage Knight game. I was convinced we were doomed after both Ed and I took huge damage in early fights, but I’m now like level 6, have three tier 3 or 4 Units at my disposal, and a bunch of powerful spells and skills, so recent encounters have scathed me barely at all, and one of those spells healed half my wounds shortly before we called it quits for the evening, so I’m feeling more optimistic. Volkare’s still gonna be a hell of a challenge, though. We’re still only halfway through the rounds, so it’s not going super fast, but the pace definitely picked up notably compared to that first session. It’s really reminding me how much I love this game, slowness, fiddliness, and all.
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Solo games tonight – my first plays through of Elevenses For One and At the Gates of Loyang.
The first is a very little (just 13 cards) solitaire puzzle of trying to manipulate a randomised sequence of eleven special abilities over the course of ~14 turns such that you can extract them in numerical order. I’ve been playing The Lost Expedition in recent times, and the gameplay made me think very slightly of that (but perhaps it’s simply reminiscent of other patience games generally). The art work is lovely, and I just really enjoy having a game which is themed (however lightly) around making a posh morning tea as quickly as possible. I managed to avoid being fired in two games, and in the other two Lady Agatha was so pleased with me she gave me a half-day off!
The cards are sturdy, but don’t seem to have a very smooth surface for good shuffling, so I was happy to discover that the only pack of card sleeves I had of the size in question, although nearly-depleted, contained 14 sleeves : ) That worked a treat.
It’s a very simple game – it’s not going to rock anyone’s world – but it’s tiny and fast and quite a nice puzzle, so I’m happy I picked it up. Most likely I’ll pop the cards it into a much smaller case of some kind, and it can live in my bag.
The box also contained a solo card game about 10-pin bowling, so I guess I’ll give that a whirl sometime. (The bowling game actually took up far more room in the box, as it has a larger deck and also a printed scorepad!)
At the Gates of Loyang took me a good couple of hours for my first game, but hopefully would be more like one hour with some practice. I managed 16 on the prosperity track, which I felt was totally acceptable for my first game (the manual said 17 was good, 18 was very good, and 19 was outstanding). I had a single ‘casual customer’ the entire game, who was fated to never receive a single vegetable : ) I was able to avoid ever taking a loan (those seem really brutal), and mostly I was doing reasonably well with regular customers – until I realised most of my fields were going to dry up with a couple rounds remaining, and I wasn’t in any position to fulfil orders and plant new fields. I got lucky with a couple of market cards in the final round, and was able to trade just enough of the things I didn’t have to reach my “almost but not quite ‘good’” result : )
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The original (2-4 player) game is very adversarial, so it’s delightful to imagine you’re playing as high society ladies sabotaging each other’s tea parties by stealing biscuits and hiding crockery.
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I forget what exactly prompted it, but I started watching a Youtube playthrough of Kingdom Death: Monster a day or two back. I’ve long been curious about the game, but nowhere near curious enough to drop the kind of money they’re asking (or e.g. assemble minis). And I’ve heard really mixed opinions. Some folks love the game. Others, e.g. Paul in his SU&SD review, not so much. Personally, I was kind of expecting to lean in the “not” direction given the heavy randomness and the way you can just arbitrarily be savagely punished by the dice, plus the unnecessary T&A in the artwork and the way a couple of cards seemed to betray a juvenile sensibility (e.g. referring to a monster’s penis as a “ding-dong”) that badly clashed with the weird horror of the setting.
Then, on a whim, I gave it a go myself in a really slick, scripted Tabletop Simulator mod (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2112101994), playing solo over lunch break. I got utterly destroyed by the tutorial encounter, all four survivors mercilessly slaughtered by poor rolls on both actually managing to hurt the Lion and not instantly dying when severely injured. I was not impressed. Almost no decision-making, and almost no way to mitigate the huge amount of luck that conspired to end my run before it even properly began. Some of the atmosphere was good, though, and the AI and hit location systems are pretty cool. And gosh, that mod is slick.
Fast forward to tonight, when two of my usual gaming group is either sick or (it turned out) fell asleep shortly before we were due to start. I’m telling my friend Ed about my experience getting murdered by a weird White Lion. “Fuck it,” I say, “why don’t I load it up and show you what I’m talking about?” And I do, pointing at various bits of the game, talking about the mechanics. We end up playing, why not. This time, we survive with a mere two casualties, albeit at the cost of most of our Founder’s Stone weaponry. We get to populate the settlement, learn Language, build crafting structures, craft crude bone and hide gear, ritually eat our fallen friends. Storms roll in, because I’ve added the Gorm expansion after reading someone say they recommended using that one even to new players. We see about hunting ourselves a Gorm, why not try something a little different? This fight goes much better - sure, we still lose a survivor (fatally headbutted in the arms to his instant demise), but nobody else gets worse than heavily wounded (despite much charging and puking) and our new weapons are quite effective. We learn to make ammonia from its urine, develop new crafting structures and practices, get another whack of materials, and now we have an experienced and effective one-eyed dagger mistress to lead the hunt. We didn’t continue to our second settlement phase really (the above were pretty much all the aftermath of the Gorm showdown)…but we probably will.
The arbitrariness of the random elements (and so, so much is random) is still a big flaw for me. But I will admit, I think I like it anyway?
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You are still in the honeymoon phase. After about 20 games solo on a TTS mod, a different one, but also well scripted, the repetition wore me down. YMMV, of course.
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Played about 30 ‘years’ and enjoyed it, but I don’t think I would revisit. Love the exploration of the setting, slightly too much admin.
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While I don’t like the game overall it was the game that reawakened in me an appreciation for what heavy random can do in a game. The advantage of unfair death being around every corner in KDM is what it does to the atmosphere. It makes the world come alive with how grim, desperate and hopeless the survivors existence is. Even your best fighters can just get destroyed out of nowhere so you can’t get attached to an avatar. And that was the feel he was aiming for, so arguable it’s well done
For me the main problem with the game is how long it takes to resolve considering how few decisions you have. The fights are a long winded way of seeing what happens with your equipment set up. Maybe it’s better online with an automated set up 
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If there were more of a risk of kitted out survivors dying in a showdown it would be more interesting. As it is, once you get used to a given encounter, it’s really just the between-game bookkeeping phase where strong characters die.
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As I think we discussed during my write up, almost all problems can be mitigated as you get stronger. I don’t know if this was intentional, but it’s a real flaw.
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Is that the point of getting stronger??
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Things happen, they mess you up, you mitigate them, on repeat. That’s fine, it’s just the punishments seem to become more forgiving.
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Oh, I’m sure it’ll get to me too - that’s another thing I was dubious about. Yes, the monsters get a shuffled around AI deck every time and levelling them up changes parameters a bit more, but…there’s what, 7 in the core game and every expectation you’ll fight at least some of them several times? But, frankly, 20 times is more than I play a lot of games. And it’s not like I invested $1000 like I would have to on tabletop.
I do find that the atmosphere is strong…but for me that’s much more in the crazy creature design and similar than it is in getting arbitrary results off a random table. I can’t imagine playing this thing as actually designed in meatspace, though. The mod doesn’t automate the fights, so it might not help with your complaint, but it does automate setting up the Hunt and Showdown phases (you pick a monster and level and it does virtually everything other than actually placing random terrain and survivors), it automates grabbing relevant cards when you place new settlement locations, it takes you directly to story events when you click on the relevant bit of your timeline (and some other relevant places), it has a one-click button to clear temporary injuries and reset armor when you’re done with a showdown, it automatically tracks the stat profile of every weapon you have in your gear grid as your stats and the monster’s change (except for terrain effects and Hit Location bonuses/penalties), you can automatically pack away a survivor and swap in a new one when you’re adjusting your hunt party…just lots of faff removed. It seems like it would be a giant pile of stuff to track and sort through every single phase of every single play session on the table.
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My wife and I played a couple of games this afternoon. First up was Azul, which my wife won pretty easily, 69 - 55. I got nailed by 6 tiles on the floor in the last round, and took the first player token every round as well, which dragged my score down.
We followed it up with Splendor, which she also won handily, 17 - 10. She nabbed two nobkes to my zero, partly because the game would not stop putting out diamond mines, so I could not prevent her from getting enough for one of them.
Oh well, fun anyway.
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Finished that real life Too Many Bones run with my new girlfriend. We won against Drellen on day 7. This was by no means easy - if Drellen had survived another turn things would have gotten real dicey as Tantrum was down to just a couple HP and as Ghillie I no longer had my pet wolverine to tank for me. But Tantrum was up to five attack dice by that point and we’d whittled Drellen down to 3 HP (it helped that he wasn’t rolling well for defense) so, as it turns out, he did not. Also no other bog critters in the Baddie Queue to refresh his invulnerability, thankfully. She had fun and is up for trying again sometime, although we’ll be playing one of those Kosmos adventure game titles (Monochrome, Inc) first.
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Finally got to play High Society today – firstly with 3 players, and later with 5. Everyone really enjoyed it (with one player immediately going in search of a copy to buy), and the superlative artwork (and very funny thematic overview text) of the Osprey edition really is the icing on the cake. I rarely enjoy auctions in games, but my gut told me that I was going to like this game, and I’m happy to confirm that my instincts were correct. Lovely stuff.
Also Geometric Art which everyone also enjoyed. The constraint of creating your picture using only the set of shapes determined by a bunch of custom dice is a delightful way to spark creativity. You might have two ovals, two curves, and a triangle in which to create a picture matching the category “a daily routine”, and the other players must correctly guess the name of your picture. This is the only game I’ve bought solely on account of the SUSD podcast, despite them saying they weren’t expecting to do a review. I’m glad I picked it up.
The next new game of the day for me was The Crew. I felt bad that I didn’t comprehend quite how lost one of the players was by the gameplay, and so they really didn’t enjoy it at all. They were new to trick-taking games generally, and I thought I’d explained well enough, but with hindsight there was some information overload, and I think we needed to have played some open-hand rounds with narration in order to clarify the concepts. Those of us who had played trick-taking games before had a better time, and I definitely enjoyed it – it can be a bit of a mind bender. In one of our failed missions I realised that of the remaining 6 tricks, the only one it was possible for me to lose was the one trick I needed to win – and with another player still needing to win one too. D’oh…
Karekare is a neat little hexagonal tile-laying game, where every combination of tile types has a particular effect. With 4 tile types (forest, field, hill, water) there are sixteen (4x4) possible actions resulting from playing a tile – and playing adjacent to multiple tiles means you get to do the appropriate action for each of those connections. I liked it rather than loved it, but I’d happily play it again.
Lastly, Solar Draft is a card game about building the best solar system. The artwork is delightfully silly, and added to the fun. It’s a pretty easy game to learn, but there’s a lot of text on the cards due to the sheer number of different planet/moon/comet types, and the end-game scoring takes a lot of effort on account of all the special scoring conditions depending on what other cards you had played into your solar system – which would be fine at the end of a multi-hour strategic marathon, but seemed a bit out of place in such a quick and simple game. We all enjoyed this as well, though.
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Scenario 13 of Jaws of the Lion still excellent. All of us are level 5 now, so next game the monsters need to go up as well. My Demolitionist now has the opportunity to have a ridiculous mech suit. Bosh!
We fluked this one. My eldest walked into the final room and hossed an attack 6, range 4 at the boss which should have spawned a lot of minions. He pulled a X2 and exploded said boss against the wall which turned it into a rout.
We’ve won every scenario so far and only 1 had us clinging on in the last turn. That felt the best even though I was out of it so we need to up the difficulty.
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