I must say, now you mention Citadels, I can see the role cards mechanics as similar. Implemented with different results, but that definitely is a resemblance.
As a light hearted game, I thought it ticked the box. Definitely the lightest Mars based game I ever played, and I think that is a good thing.
I’ve gone sour with Citadel classic. I need to try the two expansions to see if I can change the assassin and the warlord.
7 or 8 years ago a friend gave me Citadel during a clear out. Still not played it!
I have played a lot of Citadels but not in many a year. Got bored but considering how much I played that’s not a criticism.
Changing the Assassin out for the witch became standard as I had one player who would always choose the assassin. Never won but they just liked killing people. I thought it was a shame when the big version was released that I was done with the game as the 3rd set of characters would have been very interesting to me at one point. C’est la vie.
Considering I was the first one to the gallows, I’m way past caring at this point 
Just finished my first solo play of Sleeping Gods. Really enjoyed it and only touched a smidgeon of the content.
Picture is me about midway through the game. Some takeaways
So worth it as a solo experience?
In my view yes, indeed probably best as a solo.
The great thing is, others can drop in and out during a campaign - you collectively control the same roster of characters - so you can actually have the best of both worlds if anyone shows an interest …
Just received Mercado de Lisboa and played it with my 9yo. Lisboa is my favorite big game, so I was excited to try something that focused on one aspect and might be accessible to him. (Getting a nicely-printed queen variant didn’t hurt either.)
About mid game, I scored some stands (equivalent to stores in Lisboa) that he’d let me cluster restaurants around (no equivalent in Lisboa that I can think of). It was a jump from me scoring two or three coins a turn (the same as him) to scoring 12 coins two turns in a row. That demoralized him quite a bit, and it was a struggle to get him to finish. I think he could have come back from it, except that he’d gone big into flower shops in the early game, and no 3-customer flower-buying customers (equivalent to public buildings in Lisboa) ever came out.
I’m not sure what I think of the game. I’d happily play it again. I’m not sorry I bought it. It makes me want to play Lisboa again soon. But on a first play, I felt like we both flailed until there were four or so shops out, and it felt like my 9yo’s game was severely hampered by the distribution of customer and shop tiles that were available to him. In contrast, Lisboa has bonuses printed on the board that suggest where you might want to built to pick them up. (MdL sort of has this, in the form of the restaurant tiles that you pick up to place, open side up, on a future turn, to enhance the scoring of your shops, but less than half its spaces have these at the beginning of the game, and you don’t know what kinds of shops you’ll be building mid- to late-game at that point.) And most of the randomness in that part of Lisboa is determined beforehand. (Lisboa has store locations whose price is variable but known at the beginning of the game/controllable by the players, has fixed scoring values per store location, and has only four different categories which need to be matched in order to score. MdL has variable pricing based on what’s been built so far, variable scoring values depending on both customer tiles and positioning, and five different categories which need to be matched.)
TL;DR: I like Mercado de Lisboa. On its own, I’m interested to play it again and get better at it. But it is going to get compared to Lisboa, and it’s not as good. I’ll play it with my 9yo because it’s shorter and easier to grok. But I don’t think I’ll be teaching it to my spouse. We’ll just play the better game.
Fisher Price’s My First Lisboa
We played no thanks on BGA tonight. On the app it’s got a box with no merci which i think is a fun double meaning name (it doesn’t feel like accurate french or English to me!)
I like it. It feels like one of those games that you’re supposed to play a hundred times to see who the really good players are because so much might rely on what might be missing I think. But it’s super simple and is can be tense when deciding whether to stick our twist.
We had years of playing No Thanks as the first game of each games night. It’s got a nice flow going round the group, flexible player size, you don’t have to focus on any rules, welcoming to newcomers, and it picks up a strange meta. It’s wholesome and comforting!
I’ve got the big box but have only played once with a different setup. It was slower than usual thanks to the roles being a bit more complicated and everyone not knowing them by heart.
But it was better than the big version of Coup (G54 or something?) where having to re-read a role just ruins the game.
Interesting to know! I was avoiding it because campaign games don’t interest me, but solo would be worth a shot.
Frankly it’s like a tricked up fighting fantasy book (though inevitably with more complexity/content) - if that sounds good and not put off by the price …
Yeh, I think it’s gone into the “if it appears in a sale” column.
My wife and I had our first game with our new copy of The Voyages of Marco Polo (which we had previously tried on Yucata). It was still quite fun and felt like quite a different game from the first! She took the pooper (aka the guy who drops a trading post in every city he passes through), so she focused very strongly on travel, and I took Kublai Khan (starting in Beijing instead of Venice) and focused more on contracts, which were more easily done by the extra goods I got from being first to the more eastern cities. How did that work out for us? She managed to pour everything she had into her last travel action and place all of her trading posts, and won the game by a single point!
I’m excited to play again; it’s been so long since we’ve bought and played a new big(ish) game like this, and with the dice rolls and the different cities and characters the games have much different feels to them.
Had another game of Nemesis yesterday, with two new players. We went with semi-co-op this time around. And again, it was a loooooong game, 6+ hours. Not quite sure where the time goes – player turns are fairly fast with two actions.
We played semi co-op for this game, to add a bit more spice. First encounter, and it’s the Queen, of course. Early drama as one of the engines is checked, and we don’t believe the player when he says its okay. We started using air quotes whenever we checked the engines. We all ended up checking the same engine, so we knew the first player was a bit shifty. And he later set the self destruct as well. I thought the player I trusted had checked one of the other engines (meaning we had two functioning engines). But, as it turned out, he didn’t. Our shifty mate locked an escape pod while another player was trying to get in there, so I was trying not to move too far away from the generator room (which locks/unlocks pods). There’s no direct way you can fight a traitor player, but you can try and trap them in rooms with aliens, or fire, whatever is available. Time was running out as we tried to get to the pods. You have to roll for noise when you enter a pod, if you get an intruder you’re pulled out of the pod. I had an alien, but managed to kill it. Then, stupidly, I elected to wait for another player instead of just launching. For some reason, I thought ejecting while the ship was on course to earth would count. I blame the long game, wasn’t thinking straight. I took a chance that the engines would be ok, and as it turned out…they weren’t. If I’d launched straight away I would have fulfilled my other objective, which was to be the only survivor. Not sure what I was thinking.
Had another go at the Meddling of Meowlathotep scenario for Arkham Horror the card game tonight. It did not go well. Bark Harrigan went insane about 6 or 7 turns in, and managed to draw both of his weaknesses in that time frame. One of them gave him a Horror any time he got damaged, which accounted for 3 Horror before I got rid of it. Then an encounter card made him test Mind and do 1 Horror for every point he failed by, which was enough to end it. Only had one card in the Victory display, and one Meowsk revealed.
Since it was such a short game, I dug out my new (used) copy of Firefly: the Game and tried out the solo story card. Man, that game is a table hog! I can only imagine how bad it will be once I add Blue Sun. I chose the “End the game with $15k” as the victory condition.
Things started off okay, but after my first couple of jobs, I realized I had forgotten to pay my crew their shares. I retroactively paid $1k, and since I had a crew member that could remove 1 disgruntled token per turn, I called it good. Illegal jobs refused to go my way because of the Misbehave cards. Took two tries for my first illegal job, and then the second one was completely failed after two tries when the card options were a ridiculous tech roll to proceed, or an automatic botch option, but only if I had a particular gear type, which I didn’t. So, Warrant for me, and right near the end of the game, too.
Very last move of the game, I pulled the Alliance contact card which warped the Cruiser to my location and boarded me. Luckily I had no Contraband, Fugitives or wanted crew, just my warrant which I had to pay off. Ended the game with $11,100, would have been $12k if I didn’t need to pay for the warrant, and if the illegal job had succeeded and I stiffed my crew, I think I would have just squeaked into a win.
I think the game really needs other players to really shine, as just playing against a clock is not all that fun. Plus you have no incentive to move the ships anywhere near your ship or your destinations, which seems a major part of the interaction between players (in the base game).
Also, the rules do leave a little to be desired. When you complete a job, you keep it to reflect you are solid with that contact, but you lose that if you get a warrant while working for them. So what happens to that card? Nowhere in the rules does it say, or what to do with a completed job card if you are already solid with the contact. There were a few other things that were not very clear either, but I am failing to remember them right now.
Still fun, though.
One of the playthroughs I saw was a solo game as well, and I think the guy houseruled that when he had to move a ship like the Cruiser or a Reaver, he would roll a dice to decide if to move towards his ship (1-3), or anywhere else. But yes, the time limit can look a bit tricky.
Yeah, that sort of thing is why I wrote my own rulebook for Firefly. (But also because of having a bunch of separate expansion rulebooks dealing with related subjects, which makes it less useful to you playing the base game.) I believe in both cases the completed job card is out of the game. (The one you got a warrant working goes back to the contact’s discard pile.)
