Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

We played some Stay Cool yesterday.

Aside from a few shortsighted/problematic cards, weā€™ve really enjoyed it. Also the person who owned it discarded a card because it was ā€œWho is the strongest out of these three?ā€ and the accepted answer was Chuck Norris. I respect his decision.

Played 5 player Pax Pamir with @Whistle_Pig on TTS.

Iā€™ve landed at 2nd place by making the Afghans dominant. It also helped the player who won, by making them 1st lol. But post-game shows that it was the right choice for me as the winning player will make the Afghans dominant anyway, making them win and leaving me at 4th place.

So, I am innocent of king-making, Your Honour.

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:laughing:

Iā€™m not totally convinced that ā€œking-makingā€ is a problem, especially in games about political intrigue. Perhaps Iā€™m just very philosophical about it because I lose games so often that I donā€™t generally get ā€œrobbedā€ of a victory!

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Donā€™t have a problem with it too, otherwise, area controls wonā€™t be my fave genre!

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Played some Lord of the Rings: Journeys In Middle Earth. Here are my initial thoughts:

Itā€™s very, very, very hard. Itā€™s all about optimising your turns, and the only way to do that is by already knowing every character and role and item, which you wonā€™t when you start the game.

If you take Pathfinder and Hunter (the two more generally effective classes) itā€™s basically impossible to win the 2nd mission. Iā€™m good at optimising, Iā€™ll sacrifice some things to travel further in a turn and deal with the urgent threats, but I was still getting slammed. Interesting that they then released an Easy mode in the app, which reduces the threat speed a bit and gives you free inspiration tokens, but even with the time pressure reduced certain parts are still difficult.

The theme is great, the items are very few and only change slowly, but it feels as though this will develop more as future expansions come out.

Iā€™ll definitely keep playing, but if Iā€™m struggling with it then a casual gamer who likes LotR is going to ragequit pretty quicklyā€¦

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Hey :slight_smile: I saw you guys were playing. Well, one of you anyway.

We were having a TTS party of our own at the same time with some ā€œlocalā€ friends. We had a few new modules to try out from that glorious BGG Top 500 list that was posted by @IssiNoho77 the other day.

The new module we tried for The Crew is scripted and just perfect. We played a few rounds just to test the module which was a vast improvement over the one we previously used. Anyway, The Crew is always fun especially when you play with 4 people who have had a bit of practice and you donā€™t need to start with scenario 1.

Then we tried Cryptid. The game was fun as usual and the module nicely scriptedā€“however the player colors were a bit difficult to keep apart. We played one round with the person not using the integrated checklists winning. I already knew that the game plays better when you focus on the board instead of trying to sudoku your way out of it.

Finally, after having played El Dorado on a real table we brought the starter scenario to the virtual table. I made a really stupid mistake because I was sure of a win and ended up losing to someone who had been 3 turns behind me because I only had 2 cards in my deck that could cross water. Our friends immediately said this would be a perfect game to play with their kids and I wouldnā€™t be surprised if they bought it ASAP.

Anyway the stack of rulebooks next to my computer is growing because everytime we play a game I tend to want to have the paper rulebook with me and itā€™s just that much faster to check.

I am so glad our friends are taking to the digital playing as much as they do.

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TTS is sufficiently demanding that I can only run it on the big desktop machine, not the laptop; and that has three monitors, so one of themā€™s usually for support material.

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If anyone else is in the situation where their desktop is man enough for the job, but the laptop/chromebook or whatever isnā€™t, Parsec is the answer.

https://parsecgaming.com/

You install the server program on your games machine, then the client on a laptop (you donā€™t have to install the client, thereā€™s a web version, itā€™s just not quite as good). Then you can stream anything from your main PC to any other device. It works on your network at home, or over the internet.

So if Iā€™m feeling like slouching, I fire up TTS or whatever else through parsec on my laptop in the living room. Iā€™ve also got PDF copies of the rules of all the TTS mods I have (thereā€™s a fewā€¦) in a folder in Google Drive, and then just alt-tab between them.

If youā€™re not into alt-tabbing thereā€™s a couple of other rulebook options. You can upload a PDF to Steamā€™s cloud and add it to the game as a custom component, or the quick and dirty way is to spawn a tablet onto the game table, then view the PDF on that. Itā€™s not perfect, I grant you, but it works.

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Looking forward to hearing how it goes. We really enjoyed our games so far, and weā€™ve barely scratched the surface; still using the ā€œbasicā€ mode for the heroes and starter decks

Thanks to all of this itā€™s been a couple of months so weā€™ll have to give it a few refresher games before really digging in. Not sure Iā€™ll get into the real deck building, but they have pre-built decks for each hero, so you can draft and ā€œshuffleā€ build your deck.

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I played El Grande online and lost.

Async turns, which was a bit weird but fine.

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I own all the sets but I didnā€™t realize there were new turn order cards in any of them. Must be New Age, like you say - havenā€™t opened that one yet because we were still working on Legacy when COVID hit.

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Just checked the rulebook, and yes it is. But of course you can improvise this with the standard TO deck - just have two tokens for ā€œI, one of players 1-2, have taken my turn this roundā€ and ditto 3-4.

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Five tribes!!! How can I love this game so much when I find it so totally frustrating

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Welcome @Wichitastraw! What a great first post!

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Is that any better than using Steam Link? I would have thought the interface options on Steam would be better.

In my opinion, a lot better. First it streams your entire desktop and isnā€™t dependent on Steam and its awkward adding an external game function.

Thereā€™s a portable client which doesnā€™t need installing, which is handy if you have, say, a work laptop (not that anyone would do thatā€¦), and when without it you can stream to any modern browser.

Latency is really, really low, even online, and the host has good options for streaming quality, and whether it scales video down to stream to lower resolution screens, or whether it changes the host resolution to that of the client when it streams, which is good if youā€™re playing something with a small UI from a 1080p (or higher) host to something like a laptop with a 1366 x 768 screen.

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Just finished another play if 1889. Was really tense, only 600yen separated first from third with the winning score at 7900. I made a mistake about half way through which tumbled me in to last and compounded it with another mistake shortly after to keep myself there.

Still remains a fascinating system, the delicious interactivity and narrative arc are really spicy. I hope I can play some of these this year in person rather than online.

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We bloody love Five Tribes in this house. We really need to get the other expansion. We got one but Iā€™m not convinced it makes the game any better. I donā€™t remember which expansion it is. :upside_down_face:

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A big thanks to @Ross for the suggestion, so I and Mrs Name1ess played Escape of the Dead this evening. I stole some cubes from Terraforming Mars and pressed a bunch of Carcassonne Meeples into service as the walking dead. I know that itā€™s supposed to be a solo game but it worked well with us dividing the tasks, and dice, between us so that one of us was at the barricade while the other tried to fixing the car. In what was the final round we had the car at 80% complete, six zombies outside and a barricade with only 3 HP left. Going for the Hail Mary play we took 2 dice each and concentrated just on the car. A 6 from each of us gave us the win by the skin of our teeth and in my head it played out like the final scene from a movie. The engine spluttering into life and we were swerving out onto the road just ahead of the horde. We were done in about 15 minutes and it was really quite excellent! :grin:

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During a very long Zoom meeting that only related to me now and then, I read the rules and tried out a solo game of Roll Player on Tabletopia. Ended up with 28 points, so not bad for a first try. I also learned that Yabletopia needs a better way of looking through a deck for the card you want. Or, if there is a way of doing so, advertising it better.

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