I’ve switched out my morning Sprawlopolis with Fairy Trails (that little Rosenberg that came out sometime last summer). After losing two times in a row one afternoon, I just had to figure out a strategy to win this reliably. I have now won twice in a row 
It’s quite addictive once you get started. It is sold as 1-2 player but it really is a solo game. We played with two once and my partner said “never again” after I trounced him.
You have to factor in the time dilation effect that Covid had. If you do this, 2018 was actually 7 years ago. You are justified!
Forgot to mention a couple of games played earlier this week. First was 7 Wonders Duel, with my wife. Things seemed pretty close the first two ages. I did not have a lot of resources, but got a lot of coins from two of my wonders, though she managed to build all of her before I could get my fourth built. I did manage to get the Economy science token, so she had to pay me for any resources she purchased, but it only triggered a couple of times.
Then, in the 3rd age, things started getting nasty. She went heavy into military, pushing into my side until there were just two spaces until I would lose. However, in doing so, she let me get another science token, and I picked Law, which was my fifth symbol. Due to the layout of cards, she had to be the one take the card which revealed the military card she needed to win and the card with the sixth science symbol I needed to win. Very close game.
Then the other day we played two games of Ticket to Ride: London. She won the first game, ending the game one turn before I would have, which cost me a completed ticket. I won the second in the same fashion.
Playing some Res Arcana on BGA. Not a bad game, but I’m not totally sold on it yet. The core thing of having to get just enough of the right elements just in time seems a bit more finicky than such a short game warrants.
Some old-school Space Hulk with my eldest. I played the “humans”, without any command points. She enjoyed mobbing up the aliens and tearing my guys to pieces.
Aliens:Another Glorious Day in the Corps , we’ve covered the basic missions now, and the next ones in order involve the Queen and the Power Loader, neither of which I’ve put together yet (ok, I’ve been a bit slack here). So we instead did the APC Chase, which is supposed to be recreating the scene from the movie when Ripley drives the APC into the alien hive and (more of less) saves everyone. Mostly everyone. I’d heard it was a bit easy, and so it was. We passed all our rolls for driving, so the APC was moving forward the maximum each time. There were a few aliens around, which were blasted away by the gunners in the APC. We were out before any nasty motion tracker card came up. Very disappointing, but now we know.
Burgle Bros 2:The Casino Capers , first play. Kickstarter edition (not mine). I’ve only played the first game a few times, but generally had fun with it. This seems a bit more streamlined, only two floors instead of three, and the guards dont get faster as they did with the first game. Still quite tricky, we had only just reached the second floor (where the safe is) when we died. Seemed like bad luck, a few locations made a commotion, which attracts the guard, and you add cubes each time you encounter one. Six cubes, and its game over.
Diamant , an old favourite. Certainly more fun with more players, but still a blast at 3p. Love this game.
Heist:One Team, One Mission , hadnt played this for a while. Should it even be called a board game? Theres no board, just a set of tools and an electronic box. Its good fun tho, but we were sadly out of practise.
The Search for Planet X , wasn’t the first to find Planet X (actually third, in a 3p player game), but had enough theories to get the win by a couple of points. I’m always up for a game of this – might be time to try the expert side.
Nova Luna , another great game
Oriflamme , enjoying this filler game. Couldn’t be simpler or faster to play. You have seven cards (you start with ten, but randomly discard three), you play one card each round, and you never play the last card. So, six rounds. But its pretty tense, as people put down cards and let them collect tokens. Is it a soldier under there, or maybe its the Ambush card (which gives points if someone else reveals it). Good fun, so quick to play. Perfect little filler.
Canvas , still fun, although points were hard to come by. My only criticism is that often there are often art cards that just don’t help in any objective. Still, its a unique experience.
Looking in my book of traditional card games, I realised it described a couple of solo forms of Cribbage – a game I love but never get to play – so that occupied me for an hour or so tonight.
The first variant is like the normal game without the ‘play’ phase, and where you’re always the dealer. You deal six cards to yourself, two to the box, discard two from your hand to the box, draw a starter card, and then simply score both hands. You repeat until you’ve used the entire deck (six rounds), and ‘win’ if you reach 120 – which means averaging 20 points (across both hands) per round! (This target is so tough that I’ll be genuinely surprised if I ever manage it. I did manage a score of 32 in a single round in my last game, but that felt like pulling a rabbit from a hat, and my end game total was still ‘only’ 94.)
Then there’s a ‘patience’ game which was very different and pretty neat. You just draw and place cards one at a time until you have filled a 4x4 grid, with cards going into any empty space. Then you draw a starter card and score the eight hands represented by all the rows and columns, and you ‘win’ if you reach 61 points. So you’re trying to construct the best eight hands you can, with each card contributing to two independent hands, and without knowing in advance which cards are coming next, and with a continually shrinking set of available spaces to play into as the game proceeds.
(This variant feels a bit like Village Green, if you’ve played that.)
Neither is a patch on playing with another person, but they’re both enjoyable, and I was extremely happy to be putting my crib board to some kind of use, and will definitely be trying again to reach those target scores in the coming days : ) (My very best score in either game was about 3/4 of the target for ‘winning’, so I’m going to need rather a lot of luck.)
Edit: I found some other variants online, some of which include ‘play’ phases:
Played Survive Escape from Atlantis with the children.
Both got the idea and made it a co-op game. Not sure if I’m proud or sad
To give it the full title Survive Escape from Atlantis: Operation Pick on Dad
Fortunately slightly too young to realise that strategy
Got my copy of The Matchbook Collection and got in a couple games of Eiyo and Space Lunch.
Space Lunch is solid, and I see it being a favorite “Daddy Game” for my 9YO.
Eiyo is great, and may, in time, replace Samurai Spirit in the collection. (Although I remain wonderfully perplexed by Samurai Spirit’s bizarre shift mid-game from Kurosawa to Anime)
The production of the whole collection is great. The game mats, which I wasn’t particularly excited about are beautiful.
The only hitch so far are the rulebooks, which suffer from their small size and some translation issues.
Tried the solo variant for Rome and Roll. It’s alright, but the automata really doesn’t capture player interaction very well. There’s too few opportunities to bounce off the automata’s actions for points, and with the automata just putting blocks onto the map it feels quite stale in building. Don’t think it cuts the mustard!
Another play of Ticket to Ride: London since we had a few minutes and we really needed to engage our brains a little to stop dozing on the couch. I finished my initial tickets early, grabbed two more and finished them, then took one more, but my wife ended the game right afterward. I only had one more turn when I needed two to do the ticket. Thus, my wife won 46-30, though even with the 10 point swing the ticket would have given me, I still would have lost. Her tickets were really good.
I’m glad I read this! I had been side-eyeing the new Kickstarter to pick up a copy for solo play, but couldn’t find too many opinions on the automa.
Got a few games in yesterday:
Rising Sun: I don’t know if it’s just our group, but this doesn’t really feel like the negotiation game that it’s billed as. It’s still fun though (but not as fun as Blood Rage).
Coimbra: I’m definitely warming to this one. I like the dice drafting and the fact that you need to consider both number and colour. I went all in on monasteries this time, but didn’t manage to pick up the scoring card that gave you points for doing so 
I never felt it was a negotiation game either. The “team play” with your ally is alright.
Some games this week split between our RPG/games group (I’m beginning to think that rebranding as a more general games evening may suit the current state of our group - It’s been awhile since we’ve been RPGing) and some chilled backyard games with some friends:
Point Salad, we had a couple of games of this at the start of the evening and it went over super well. It’s just a great solid little set collection game.
Incan Gold, or Diamant as it seems to be known now. This is some silly push your luck, I did terribly which seems common, but it was enjoyed by all.
Welcome to the Dungeon/Welcome Back to the Dungeon, between getting into an argument about whether it’s necessary to play with the gender swapped dungeon cards in the sequel with expansion (it’s completely not, was my view but some people found the lack of symbols a bit confusing, so I’ll give some ground there). I may try a bit harder to keep the games separate in future to avoid the awkwardness. Though I’ll probably still keep the health tracker from Welcome Back for both games. One of our players decried the thematic disconnect between not wanting to go into the dungeon, rather than it being the fun thing that play rewards. I could see his point, though as the light little distraction the game is, it doesn’t bother me as much. It’ll join my short list of games not to play with specific people though - but I’d figured it wasn’t going to be the same fun and slightly silly game with everyone anyway.
Played outdoors after dinner with some friends:
Uno, they pulled this one out. I humored them. There’s not much to the game , and I definitely do miss some of the wackier rules from games with international students back in my undergraduate days. But it’s a fine distraction. I just expect a little more out of my games thesedays.
Anomia, this went over gangbusters, and we played through both decks. Was thrilled to finally get it played in the right kind of setting and it was terrific after a few drinks and played while chilling in their backyard. Great game. Though baseball team is a tough one for Aussies! Everything I know about baseball I learned from Back to the Future 2, and I suspect that might be more than most Aussies. Football team would work better in our context (though I understand the term ‘football’ can indeed represent a bunch of different sports, but that to my mind just makes it a better option for an international game!)
Love Letter, this one was tense and fun and just a solid little game all round. One of the strings in my bag finally gave out. Might be an excuse to upgrade to the new version with the more diverse and (to me) better art! I wonder if the printing quality of the cards has improved - Love Letter is still the only game of mine I insisted on sleeving - the cards are definitely susceptible to getting marked. Though my wife did point out we have some sentimental attachment to the version we currently have (one of the games we played a lot when dating) so I think she’d prefer to stick with the one we have.
Lie, we had a quick round of this later in the evening. One of our players was struggling a bit at that stage in the evening, but we enjoyed it. I do definitely prefer Perudo though - the choosing the orientation of your hand is interesting but throws all the statistical crunch out the window in favour of extra mind games. It does also lack the visceral thrill of shaking up and slamming down those dice though!
The automata builds rubbles in set mountains. I guess when you’ve learned the cards you can be a bit more strategic in building placement, but being able to predict where buildings will go feels a limp experience to me. Makes it a completely differently game to interacting with other players.
Added to that, several building cards depend upon interaction between players, so simply don’t work with the automata building zero buildings. You can’t get the adjacency bonuses through one player alone - especially the building that needs to be adjacent to three buildings of a specific type for the bonus.
Still excited for the expansion though, think it will push the (multiplayer) game from a standard resource management euro that’s a roll and write for some reason into something more interesting.
Played a game of Istanbul with my wife last night.
We stayed very close in gem acquisition throughout the entire game. I got the first by getting both tiles from a mosque, then she got one for the other one. I got one for fully ypgrading my wheelbarrow, then she got it. Then we each got the gem for the other mosque. Then she got ahead by getting a gem from them Sultan’s Palace, but I tied right after using the Gemstone Dealer.
At this point, both of us were low on resources, though I did have enough money to buy another gem. My wife started refilling at the warehouses, while I worked to get a couple of blue goods. My wife went to the Gemstone Dealer herself and got her fifth gem.
On her next turn, she moved to the Small Market and got a bunch of money. I used my family member to get my fifth gem from the Sultan’s Palace. With her newfound wealth, she went back to the Gemstone Dealer and got her sixth gem. Since she went first, though, I had one more turn. However, I did not have enough money to pay her at the Dealer’s space, and get my sixth gem. And even if I did, she had more money left at that point, which would break the tie in her favor.
We tried the layout using the red numbers which was a bit weird. All the warehouses and the wainwright are at the top, while the Sultan, Dealer, and mosques are at the bottom. Made for some interesting paths. Very close game.
I now had two solos and one two player coop of Flourish
For all that it comes in medium sized box (West Kingdom Trilogy+), it’s a card-game for which they really should make a “pocket” version.
The game is played over 4 rounds in which 3 cards are played turn by turn. At the end of each round there is a scoring. The fourth round is a little special as all 3 cards are played at once. After that there is a final scoring.
This is a drafting game. Players have a hand of six cards. They select 1 to play and pass 1 each to their neighbor. For the next round they pick up the two passed from their neighbors and one from the draw pile to get back to six cards. And so on.
Cards score in various ways. There are plant symbols in 5 suits (roses, mushrooms, bugs, leafs and those blue flowers) and there are “features” like beehives, paths, walls, trees and lawns. The upper left corner has scoring (on some cards) for after a round usually counting symbols and awarding points based on what is in your garden or one or two of your neighbors. The lower right has end game scoring. After three games the iconography has settled in my brain and I don’t have to look up stuff anymore.
There is a number of modules and variants to make the game more complicated, a puzzly fun solo mode and a coop mode and up to 7 players at once.
I’ve enjoyed all 3 games. My partner did need a lot of time to optimize his card play so maybe it causes a bit of AP.
For me it sits in the same pile as Sprawlopolis and Fairy Trails right now. But in the long run the nice gardening theme (I have at least one friend who really really loves his garden) and the huge player count and ease of teaching this will hopefully bring it to the table on larger or smaller game nights.
PS: for some reason I always end up with tons of mushrooms and beehives. Let me tell you: walls are rare!
