More Sprawlopolis (highest score: zero); and Food Chain Island (best result: 2 cards) today.
I then tried out Skulls of Sedlec: Monstrance. Once again it’s a neat little spatial puzzle, and the solo expansion keeps things variable with each game including two randomly-selected elements – one being a particular shape to build (alongside one of the regular pyramids), and the other being an additional scoring rule (such as the “peasants’ revolt” where peasants placed higher than royals score triple, but others score nothing; and the “royal assassins” where any royal adjacent to more than one criminal has its card flipped face-down without scoring).
The rules give score rankings for 60, 65, 70, and 75+ points, so I figured that must be the typical range. I felt that my very first game went really well – I got close to maximum points from the peasants’ revolt, and I think I had every single criminal next to a priest, and all my priests on different levels, so I anticipated a pretty decent score! When I totted everything up, I had 61 points : / I think my next game then scored about 50. First impressions – not so easy! Fun though. I think it fits nicely alongside the other two wallet games I’ve played so far.
The scoring isn’t as fiddly as Sprawlopolis, but it still requires adding up a bunch of different things. However it’s quite trivial to see at a glance what each thing is worth; so it’s just a matter of working through each instance of each type in sequence, and keeping a running count as you go (vs Sprawlopolis where it can take rather more effort to figure out the value of each thing, which I find makes it harder to track the running total). At the other end of the spectrum, I really like that Food Chain Island scores are simply “how many cards are left?” (although that approach doesn’t leave much room for getting a new best score – it’s a more traditional Patience style of win-or-lose). On reflection, I think Skulls provides a good balance here, if you enjoy having a Personal Best to try to better.