The only way I don’t run out of cards on turn THREE is by never using discard powers until nearly the end, and always carrying stamina potions.
I’m about to get braver with using discards, but honestly I find the game’s movement demands pretty tight and I usually end up discarding at least one to cancel damage (only played the 5 intro missions so far, though).
I usually try not to lose any cards until the end, I probably hang onto them for too long. I think its the first time I’ve been exhausted, in JOTL at least.
In this game I thought “well, if I hit this guy with a big card, we will progress faster to the next bit”.
Although the teach for Lords is longer, I think the game is also a lot better than Petz.
It’s fairly simple to work out the number of turns you’ll have based on hand size and working out permutations based on when you use discard cards and how many in any loop of playing and refilling. It’s quite eye opening in how many turns you lose from using a discard card but also in how many turns you actually have in each scenario. I didn’t make a number of turns based on hand size and discards equation but maybe I should 
It’s more that I have to estimate how many turns of the game are left, and how quickly I can cross the remaining area. “There’s only two enemies left, and then I just need to get to that door. So I can definitely afford to discard this card for a powerful ability now”. No. No, you cannot. On the early levels at least (I’m only just up to adding my first lvl2 card) you absolutely cannot.
…Or maybe I need to get better at this game 
First cardboard play of Troyes (thanks @michaelg) after a couple of exploratory plays on BGA. Let’s say we’re still learning how things work! It’s really tight, I never seemed to have enough money or actions to do what I wanted. I can see there is a good game here, but learning that mechanics at a not ideal player count doesn’t make it shine brightly atm. We both really want to play this more.
Which leads to…Troyes BGA Asynchronous Game Recruitment
Played a quick learning round of Wrestlenomicon with my GF in TTS. Pretty fun little game. One player plays Cthulhu (me in this case), the other the King in Yellow, trying to defeat the other Great Old One in a no-holds-barred wrestling match, complete with gloriously punny card names and gloriously gnarly eldritch tentacly art. It features an interesting system where you can take one of three actions on your turn: play an attack card, play a permanent card, or pass and draw 2 (/3 if you also discard a card). Attack cards go onto a track of 6 cards with a seventh Ground Zero card at the end. Your attack will specify a position it’s played to on that track, and a Momentum value that it lends to another card you already have on the track to move it closer to Ground Zero (sometimes, they’ll move everything). When an attack reaches Ground Zero, it fires, doing its attack ability and possibly also a Slam ability if the opponent’s most recent attack is of the right type. You can only attack once per turn, and you can only have one card in each position on the track, so timing and positioning is definitely a factor, especially considering Slam effects.
Permanent cards do something when brought into play, and then offer some passive benefit as they remain in play (you can have two at most). For example, as Cthulhu I got a card called “Let’s Take This Outside” (into space), which got me card draw to start and then damaged my opponent whenever they passed to draw cards. (Sadly, it never fired as she got a card off that destroyed one of my permanents before she passed.) You can also have Combo cards that don’t count as an action for that turn but can only be played under specific circumstances. And the final wrinkle, is that some card effects get you Cultists worshipping you, which you can sacrifice when applying momentum to add momentum, one for one.
Things were very close, with both of us down to one HP before the end. But I was able to maneuver an attack into going off before she could get one (that did damage, at least) into range, so I won. Barely. Should have significant replayability as well, not least because you at most see a little over half the total deck for a character during any particular game - 25 of your cards at random form your Guts (HP) pool.
PS: You won’t (yet?) find this mod on the Workshop…because I made it myself. Yep, I’ve taken my first steps into TTS modding. Some teething pains along the way, but it was good fun for the most part and I am quite satisfied with the results. Hoping to get some Dice Throne Adventures and Hexplore It modding going soon, although both are significantly more substantial tasks than this little purely-cards game. Hexplore It in particular poses the question of how to implement those dry erase player sheets.
I always, always get a rule wrong in that game. I play it about once a year so always check through the rules first, but at the end I always have a niggling feeling that I didn’t play something right, and sure enough…
Played Terraforming Mars for what feels like the first time in a year. We both played corps we don’t know very well which made it fun.
It’s a really enjoyable activity because we’re both so comfortable with the game. It can drag at the end with 2 players when you’re trying to max out the final parameter and maximise points, which gets a bit frustrating at times.
My wife is better than me at TM, which means with 2 players it’s just about who pulls the best cards (can’t be bothered with drafting).
Just realised that this sounds miserable. TM is my most played game of all time, I love the way every play is different, even when you know the cards. It’s a great game
In fairness to you, the organisation of the rule book is pretty awful – I can see that they tried to structure things in some kind of logical fashion, but for practical purposes it’s a bit of a mess. The BGG files section contains numerous rules summaries attempting to address that, and I think it’s worth having a look though those, and printing out something to add to the box.
I always have to do a refresher, and it’s good if that’s not the rule book.
I hear this a lot, but I never found the rule book hard to follow or poorly organized. The only reason I missed this rule is because I did not review all the rules before starting, and when going back to look for the activation rule, I found it very quickly.
OT: We played 1.5 games of Hanamikoji today. I won the first game in the first round, 11 - 7.
Because it was so quick, we decided to play another one. However, then our kids started going apes**t crazy. Once things calmed down to the point we could play again, we could not remember how the game had played out to that point, so we just stopped. We were aggravated after dealing with the kids anyway, and is just another example of why we barely ever play games during the day.
Game day this past Saturday:
Nut, won this one with 2 squirrels to my opponent’s 4 - it’s gone a long way to assuage my concerns that getting the squirrels is the most important thing you can do in the game. They’re good and I’m not sure you could be competitive without any, but they are not the holy grail.
Babylonia, this one was tense and two of us were neck and neck in the late game. Could’ve gone either way - he was banking on scoring for lots of cities, I was depending on my crazy big network. In the end I won - and without a ziggurat power to boot!
No Thanks, couple of three player games of this - it still works with three, it feels quite different, but still good fun.
The Quest for El Dorado, this one keeps moving up in my estimation - the combo of race game and deck building works so well, and striking the balance between buffing up your deck and actually progressing across the boards is so interesting. Our winner was the player who was in the lead for most of the game, though the rest of us were only a turn behind him. In the end we were undone by not having water movement at the moment we really needed it.
Ticket to Ride Switzerland, this is still one of my favourite maps for TTR, so tight and vicious! Our winner kept and fulfilled all their initial tickets, while the rest of us got a bit distracted by trying to make all of our country-country connections score for the maximum. Also, I had the worst luck with tunnels I’ve ever seen 
Evolution: Climate, we were hit by a couple of wildfires early on that made food a bit scarce for awhile, but the climate ended up pretty stable after that. I played pretty aggressively, and was the first to go carnivore, and stayed that way for the rest of the game. I’d engineered two species that could prey on each other if need be, though they ended up nomming on my opponents species instead (pack hunting plus max pop and significant body size meant their defenses were largely inadequate). I managed to drop the food supply significantly at the same time and cruised to a comfortable win.
Had a long session of games yesterday, it was National holiday on Monday, so the Monday Nights game became a Monday Afternoon Onwards, just because we could. I only arrived at 16.30, so had three games of Coup (of which I won one with a Contessa, yay) before pizza arrived at 17.30, and then two main games.
Played Brass: Lancashire with four, including teaching it, which was less challenging than I expected. Hopefully I did not get many rules wrong, the only problem was that I forgot there are two extra cards from the old version that I didn’t remove and we had extra cards in hand at the end of the canal era. We removed them and considered them like the 4 that are under the Locomotive cardboard, and moved on. I must admit that being looking after three people had my brains turned to mush by the end of the railway era, I forgot that I could not take any more loans (after reminding everybody) and really struggled on the last few rounds, so I finished third as the coal market collapsed and building anything became really, really dear. A half decent third (somewhat around 110 points), with the guy that went for two shipyards getting away on the high 130s. Everybody enjoyed the game, and they could see how after 4 or 5 rounds it made sense, so that was a relief. Hopefully I won’t have to nursemaid so much next time and focus more on my game.
Then played Tiny Epic Dinosaurs with three (after teaching it), losing hardly achieving 60 points, while two private contracts from my opponents on round 6 put them on a neck to neck 77 to 78. I enjoyed that final count (of course there was a recount) to top up the day. After 6 hours of games (minus a pizza break), it was time to go home and sleep.
Had a virtual game night with a friend. First up we played Grand Austria Hotel (newly on Yucata) because I had heard it was fun. And it is! Lots of fun in fact, when you get combo turns like “oh if I hire this guy then I can deliver these items and complete this guest and that will allow me to take more cubes and complete this guest and-“ etc etc.
Then we finished with a best of three of Mottainai, our usual. He won the second by ending the game quickly and hoping I didn’t have enough back order points to break the tie that he would win (I didn’t). He tried it again in the third game but I had a single back order, which put me two points ahead.
Yeah, unlike @COMaestro I do find it to be a pretty bad layout. I’ll definitely have a look at the BGG files section. If it was a game I played more often I’d probably have done that already, so good shout. 
A couple of nights ago, my partner, in an attempt to experiment with environmental influences on some health issues, decided to go the evening without television, computer or phones (let’s be honest, all three of those things are firmly in the category: “computers”). She has a number of hobbies that allow for this: reading, knitting and, of course, listening to her partner talk about boardgames.
She has been wanting to play some games lately, but she’s (due to health issues) usually too tired to brain at night once our kids are asleep. So, while she has been asking about Wingspan lately, she felt it was too much thinking for the occasion. Instead, we played 2 rounds of Oz Fluxx (I won both rounds, thus further solidifying the fact that between the two of us, the person who likes a game the least will typically win). And then we got Morels out for a cutthroat(?) hike through the moldy woods. I won handily. This time, instead of being overwhelmed the entire game, I was merely overwhelmed with the breakneck speeds in which we were dashing through the woods for the last half of the game – in the early part of the game I managed to build up some resources of frypans and walking sticks (I’m sure you can imagine me sprinting through the woods as fast as possible carrying 4 frying pans and 9 walking sticks). I won by nearly double, but she still enjoyed the game.
Last night, she was mentally exhausted again, but wanted to sit in a comfier chair, so she spent the evening knitting and reading a book. I, on the other hand, spent the evening playing some games solo (since I was not being guilted into sitting next to her on the couch in what we like to call “quality time when you have kids” where you just try to be close to each other but also not wake the other if they happen to fall asleep watching TV.)
I started with Alubari and had to brush up on some rules – not because I had read them and forgotten, but rather that it was almost Snowdonia but with some tea leaves and pots of tea, and I had to figure out how the tea worked. All-in-all, I’m glad I grabbed a copy of Alubari. I think it’s interesting enough to stand on its own next to Snowdonia and it may have a slightly better solo experience (though I haven’t yet tried to play against the Snowdonia’s Deluxe Master Set’s Botdell).
Feeling energetic still at 10:30, I opted to get something else going. Fearing my energy was short-lived, I finally got Aerion to the table. What a beautiful, joyous game. After just 2 turns I thought to myself, “Why the heck have I let this sit for X months on my shelf unplayed?”. I really enjoyed it; I had been apprehensive about it being too much like Onirim, of which I have the app and I do not care for. Aerion is extremely good and I absolutely adore the art direction.
Aerion got me smiling and feeling energetic, so I decided to break out Pandemic: The Cure – which oddly is not just a mashup of Matt Leacock’s classic design where you play as, instead of the CDC, a gothic post-punk band. Instead, and much like real CDC employees, your skills are represented by tiny (perfectly-sized, in my opinion) dice. I set the difficulty to “way too simple” because it had been a while since I had played and my first time running dual-characters (my only previous experience was with 3 in which we failed miserably). A quick perusal of the rules later and I was out, saving the world from cuboid, be-pipped diseases. Due to the incredibly-easy difficulty and a lot of incredibly lucky rolls, I knocked out all 4 diseases before the 2nd outbreak using the Containment Specialist and the Scientist.
In one particularly unlucky roll, I had 4 disease samples in the same space as the Scientist and managed to roll four 1s, remarkably failing – which I believe this represented 2020 within the game.
Append “and children” to “due to health issues” and you’ve just described my wife most nights!
Yes, children, as well, are part of this particular cocktail of this particular soul crushing ennui
Just wrapped up my first game of Spirit Island. I actually managed to win due to a really lucky card draw. I played with Shadows Flicker Like Flame, interested by the high Fear generation effects, and also its ability to target any land with cards if there is a Dahan there by paying 1 energy.
It definitely takes a bit to wrap your head around the flow of the game, between the fast and slow powers and how the Invaders act in between those. As such, I would plan my turn, pick my cards, then realize I can’t do exactly what I wanted because the board state changed before my slow powers took effect.
So Blight started covering the island pretty quickly, and even hit my starting Sacred Site, making my innate power worthless for a bit as it needs to be targeted from a Sacred Site. I managed to get a couple of minor powers that could cure Blight, which was good as I was down to one remaining in the supply.
Things were looking pretty dire, but I was generating a lot of Fear, and actually managed to hit level 3. In what I expected to be the last turn, as I only had 2 Blight left, but Coastal lands were about to Ravage with enough force to place them, I flipped the Fear card I had, and it gave 9 Defend to Coastal lands! No Blight was placed, and my Dahan even wiped out everything in two of the lands.
The remaining Coastal land had the only City, a couple of Towns and 3 Explorers, but I had just put my Presence there and was able to use the Power card that let me downgrade a City to a Town, winning the game!
It is definitely a tough game, at least to start with. Probably didn’t help that I picked a Spirit with low destructive capability. It did have a lot of moving Dahan and even generating Dahan though, which helped immensely. Really enjoyed it.
However, turns out that my copy is missing pieces. There are supposed to be 13 Presence tokens in each of the 4 colors. Instead, I have 8 Yellow, 6 Blue, 6 Red, and 4 Purple. I have contacted the manufacturer, so I guess I will have to wait and see if they will send me replacements. At least they are easy to proxy, if needed.
I am so looking forward to finally playing my copy after finally deciding to get it before Christmas (I have played the game before but only once).
That one is so high up on my wishlist of “games to grab when I see a copy no matter what else I just bought”
Sounds you had some great gaming 