That, at least, was in the rules. 
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We just finished up our back half of our first game of Wasteland Express Delivery Service, started on Saturday. That probably makes it sound like a slog, and the game seems to have a bit of a reputation for running long, but actually it ran really quick! Not counting a fairly big (but easy) teach, I figure we spent about 2 hours of actual game time, which seems just right for a game of this scope.
Anyway, I donāt have much time for commentary, but suffice it to say that: my partner and I had a great time, it all boiled down to a really tight race (I won by two turns, one if my partner thought to purchase an escort the round prior), turns were dynamic, went quickly and tracked well enough to survive repeat interruptions. Above all else it was really fun.
Far more Xia-lite than I expected (and I did expect that), it ended up ticking off way more fun-factor boxes than I expected it to, and I think even a few of its design elements are properly ingenious (Raiders in particular). I think weāre both looking forward to another round.
6 Likes
Game #2 of Root, this time with three players. Last time we were two players running through the tutorial scenario (which requires all four factions, so weād had two each).
My Woodland Alliance was in second place for most of the game, but was permitted to run rampant by the other players, and ultimately became too powerful to stop. The Eyrie had an absolutely abysmal time of it, never getting out of the starting blocks, and suffering endless Turmoil and virtually no points at all. The Marquise de Cat maintained a decent lead for most of the game, until the mice did me the really tremendous favour of destroying not only the warriors and regular buildings at the catās Keep (which I did expect), but also the Keep itself (which came as a complete surprise to me). That Favour of Mice card is a freaking WMD (if the other players donāt stop you from being able to use it, which clearly they ought to).
5 Likes
After a month completed the first proper hunt of the new Kingdom Death Monster campaign.
How the hunt phase went.
Step 1. Lose all survival.
Step 2. Move directly to the next space.
Step 3. A living wall of flesh ādisassemblesā one of the party to increase its own size unless you spend a survival. (See Step 1)
So I had to undertake the fight with only three survivors and things wentā¦ ok?
Stuffed up who was supposed to go first, and again I need to fully understand collisions, but uncovered a tactic that seemed effective for once.
Again, only found a single bone, so this is going to be the big limiting factor. Planning on continuing to fight only lions for now.
3 Likes
So after my teaching session on Tuesday, we had ourselves a game of Pax Pamir 2nd in TTS
This is my first synchronous actual multiplayer 
Four players.
What I should have expected is that I kept having to explain details and that people were overlooking so many possibilities that I had to spent the first half hour to hour helping along with ideas for moves. This makes my usual sneakily quiet strategies harder.
First dominance check went to Blue because Blue got that Herat card that can create new spies and so Blue had the most pieces in play when no faction was dominant.
Second dominance check, Afghanistan was dominant and so that was shared between White (me) and Orange who both had the same influence with Black coming in third.
Right after that first Black than White changed their loyalty to the British Empire and White became the ruler of Punjab. There was a bit of a scary moment when Black bought the event that lets a player remove all tribes and armies in a region and the others urged Black to raze Punjab. But they went for Kabul instead decimating Orangeās court. As Orange was quite leveraged they lost a lot of cards on their turn.
We had to take a break playing. If I could have got a dominance check in the market by my next turn, I could have ended the gameāI am rich I could have easily bought it and a present to gain the most influence and would have been in the lead with enough points 9 points over 4. But Orange declined to take anything from the market after I announced the possibility in an attempt to finish the game. Weāll continue the game Sunday afternoon. One of the good things about TTS is the ability to save.
5 Likes
Today I played a game of Terra Mystica. First game with my MT swap copy if this. Havenāt played in years so was without strategy largely but much fun was had. The wooden pieces are ludicrously jolly, even playing the darklings and using black pieces was jolly. My brian melted, I finished last by 1 point but I did some fun stuff and spent a lot of VPs on moving mana.
I think Iām happy to keep Clans of Caledonia as well as itās so different and much faster.
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Not helping 
Iāve been eyeing this one to replace Isle of Skye as my Scotland game but stayed away because of the supposed similarities to TM.
I am glad you had fun with TM, I should get mine out I havenāt even played with the newest expansion yet. And that is at least 2 years old now.
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Iāve never played Terra Mystica, but I played Clans of Caledonia once and was really disappointed; I went into it expecting to really enjoy the game, but I found the fun parts of the game were very āonce-and-doneā whereas the path to winning involved doing uninteresting things repeatedly ā like, focusing most of your time on doing protracted resource production/conversion that you had already done multiple times. Also, the final scoring was nearly a-thematic; seemingly a balancing mechanism to offsetā¦ something?
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You what? Do you even have a copy of TM? I mean it has āboatsā andā¦ bridgesā¦
But then what you describe in not enjoying about Caledonia could very well hold true for TM as well. So maybe not your kind of game.
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I got a copy of Gaia Project for my birthday (over 6 months ago) but havenāt gotten the energy in the evenings to crack open the rule book and teach myself the solo mode.
I really need to get on that.
2 Likes
Played some evergreens: For Sale, Q.E., and Liars Dice.
Someone introduced me to Strike which is a fun game of throwing a dice and try to get some pairs, 3 of a kind, etc. It was fun as my first. I have doubts with the longevity. But happy to be proven wrong. Still, Iād rather play that than some 2 hour heads down resource coversion malarkey.
Whats best is that you dont need to buy the game. A bowl and some dice is enough.
Nothing heavy but I will leave that on Sunday with 1861: Russian Empire
3 Likes
Terra never felt to be a resource conversion game, since resources come to you as income, and then expend them for buildings.
I got tired of Caledonia when the game is more tactical than strategic, unlike Terra. Contracts is unescapable. And itās hard to deduce which market will be hot, to exploit an opportunity, unlike say Container.
2 Likes
Three at our weekly gaming gathering this week, we played:
Quarriors, as much as I know I really hold onto this one because of good memories of playing it with my wife early in our relationship, itās still decent. Thereās a lot of randomness, and some of the special powers are a bit overwrought, but itās still good fun building a bag and rolling lots of custom dice. Itās probably been superseded by Quacks for me but itās an interesting throw-back. I went for all the wizards in our first game (and nabbed 4 of them) but lost that round when I couldnāt seem to get them summoned and in our second nabbed only 1 wizard but won that one, quality over quantity applies to wizards apparentlyā¦
Incan Gold, classic push your luck game - we played a couple of rounds of it. In the first one, one of us (not me) got a solid early lead, leaving the rest of the game a bit of a desperate (and failed) attempt for the rest of us to catch up. The second was much closer, and in the end I won it by a few points thanks to bailing early on a couple of the runs and nabbing some artifacts.
Metro X, got in a solo play of this new acquisition today after a learning game the other day (where I misunderstood how transfers worked). Iām looking forward to playing it with others - very clean design with a bunch of tricky decisions - a nice little addition to swelling my roll and write collection.
3 Likes
Two games of Oceans the last couple of days, first with my 8yo daughter, today with my OH. Some really wicked Deep cards these two games, really wow.
Won both, which wonāt help getting it back to the table any soon. Still love how the game has every species connecting and interacting in the board ecosystem.
7 Likes
Do you mean shuffling money around or the end of turn production āchainsā?
Resource conversion always felt an inconsequential part of the game to me. I think it has a hint of logistics, but is mainly about tempo and board positioning with using the market to make choices between turns and goods to fulfil the contracts. I think the contracts work well until the last go when they become a touch arbitrary. That also links to the tempo where getting a choice from 3 increases the odds of getting good ones.
I also disagree about the end game scoring being athematic. Itās a very crude abstraction of notions of supply and demand. I find it enjoyably tense trying to work out if you can fulfil less optimal contracts to bump resources up to get them more popular than your main one.
I think @lalunaverde is accurate to point out how tactical it is, however I donāt think that means itās not also strategic. Itās nowhere near as heavy as TM and itās not got that think of the whole game at once in every decision crunch. Thatās maybe what I like so much about it though, for a medium euro itās got enough about it to be a fun 90-120 minutes with some market stuff and some sense of building out on a board. Is it perfect? No but it does enough well that Iām always keen to play it.
I also wonder if itād be a particularly bad one to play async online. Itās mechanics arenāt rigorous but the player interaction is real from tempo and spatial considerations. The sterile land of async online is terrible for whatās going on in the game.
Usual caveat of subjectivity in games applies of course. I was just trying to see if I could articulate some of what I enjoy in the game.
4 Likes
Oceans arrived within the last week and my girlfriend is still getting to grips with it so weāve not introduced the deep deck yet. Iām still really impressed with how everything interacts playing the game at a pretty basic level but Iām itching to get some of the deep cards in.
3 Likes
Jaws of the Lion , another kill everything that moves mission. I was exhausted a turn from the end, but the team pulled it out.
Project Elite , first play. Yet another kill all the aliens game, but the gimmick is that there is a real time action phase, where you all simultaneously roll your dice to move around and kill the invading aliens. There are a few different game modes, we chose Extermination, which meant completing objectives on the board by matching their symbol. There are eight rounds, and each round has the same structure: draw an event card, draw a swarm spawn card per player (which add aliens to the board), boss spawn. Basic aliens are runners, shooter, and biters, and the name gives you an idea of what they do. They all have a single health, so any hit will kill them. Bosses are nastier, and have more health. Then you have a two minute action phase, where you try and roll dice as fast as you can. You can reroll any of all of your dice, but red dice are alien movement, and you must resolve them first. Weapons require dice to ready them, and have various effects. The weapons have a range, the number of hit dice they roll, and what value is required for a successful hit. You need move action dice to move (duh), and search dice to search for items. After the action phase (which is over sooner than you thinkā¦) is the aliens turn to fight back, and move forward. We destroyed a couple of bosses, but managed to complete none of the objectives required. It was a full time job just keeping the aliens back. Good fun tho. Quite nice minis as well, the bosses look particularly nasty.
Are You Dumber than a Box of Rocks , first play. Picked this up cheap. Itās a trivia game, where every answer is either zero, one, or two. You give your answer, and then two rocks are shaken up inside the box. Each rock is marked with a 1, so they give the answer of zero, one, or two. Embarrassingly, we lost the first game. Some of the questions are a bit odd, and Iām not sure who would know the answer. Like how many weeks a flower will survive after being given Viagra. Weird. We did beat the rocks in the second game, so thatāsā¦good I suppose?
99 , first play. This is a trick taking game based around a standard deck of cards. I heard about it on reddit, so wanted to give it a go. It has all the trick taking aspects you expect, but the clever bit is that you have to use three cards from your hand (of twelve) to predict exactly how many tricks you will win. The values of the bid cards donāt matter ā just their suit. A diamond is zero, a spade is one, a heart is two, and a club is three. So the minimum bid is zero (three diamonds), and the maximum is nine (three clubs). Itās an easy enough game to pick up and play, if youāve ever played a trick taking game. It was fun, but Iām not any major hurry to play again.
Nova Luna , always fun. At least when I win. Which I did.
Are You Dumber than a Box of Rocks again. Not taken too seriously this time, but still a bit of fun.
Project Elite , another bash. Much more successful this time. I still sucked, but the other players were smashing it, going thru the standard aliens and the bosses like a hot knife thru butter. Probably would have won, but some idiot (ie me) didnāt remember that to successfully complete the mission, you have to make it back to the start area. Oopsie.
Nidavellir , mostly fun. Except I tried to use the app for scoring, only to find some cards couldnāt be selected. Turns out there are some cards taken out if youāre not playing with 5p. I donāt think Iāve ever taken cards out. And weāve always done scoring manually. We decided just to go ahead, no easy way to fix it. I lost by quite a lot, which was no surprise. I think I had one hero card. Still fun tho.
Biblios , we needed a quick one to finish up, and Iāll never turn down a game of Biblios. Pretty simple to play, and good fun. I canāt remember what people have taken, so I just bumble along.
6 Likes
Had a really nice exploration of the Xia TTS module with some forumizens (forum denizens?) last night. Played a 5 point trial game and I think we need to do a repeat for more points now that I understand that a D6 engine is just too slow to catch a smuggler 
(this is not what happened but the sentence sounds good and paraphrases what I learned.)
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I also learned ādonāt take a mission when the origin point hasnāt been drawn yet, because you have only one not-yet-started-mission slotā.
4 Likes