Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[EnterTheWyvern]

Got 1 and a half games of Spirit Island in today both against Scotland.

First up level 2 Scotland being scared off by Starlight Seeks It’s Form and Downpour Drenches the World. The combination was killer. Getting off some serious repetition of high damage powers and plenty of control meant it was reasonably straight forward.

Second game we upped Scotland to level 3 and used Finders of Paths Unseen and Lure of the Forbidden Wilderness. We had to stop the game at the start of the 3 cards but it was much more hairy. Didn’t feel on top of things at all. Finder is interesting but I’ll have to play it again to really get some knowledge on it’s subtleties and strategies. It wasn’t necessarily a write off but I wasn’t hopeful.

Remains a great game and lockdown meant I haven’t played Jagged Earth anywhere near enough yet.

[InkyBloc]

My wife picked up some EXIT games we haven’t played, as that is our escape room box of choice, although we’ve been mostly slightly disappointed by some of the recent boxes. Tonight we played The Cemetary of the Knight and let me tell you, it was a LOT of fun. A good amount of getting clues from the box and materials and no puzzles that we thought were unfair (except for one that depended on reading something out with what we would call the wrong pronunciation). I would definitely recommend this as a high water mark of escape room boxes.

[yashima]

I need to play some more Jagged Earth, too.

Yesterday, my partner and I played our first case pf Chronicles of Crime. We didn’t find the murder weapon.

I also taught my partner Splendor on BGA and then we played it in parallel with our current Rallyman GT race. That was weird but fun. I won both games but barely.

Also, finally told my former Tash Kalar Mitspieler about BGA and we started up a game. Neither of us remembered the rules anymore so we had to get out our respective boxes to read the rules. It seems to be a good one to play async.

Race and Roll do seem like they don’t do well in async.

But we’re getting closer anf closer to an actual game night.

[RogerBW]

@EnterTheWyvern

Scotland being scared off by […] Downpour Drenches the World

Have you been to Scotland?

This is a game I’d really like to try some time.

[DJCT]

If it helps, it’s not raining in my bit of Scotland today. Yet …

[bort]

Nemesis , full co-op. Things went fairly smoothly, I think we got lucky on bag draws. Had a couple of adult aliens, but they were dealt with pretty quickly. It did take us a while to find the Nest (needed to destroy it for my objective). We killed one egg, buggered off with another one, and then set fire to the room, so that killed the rest. And by then we could hibernate, so a fairly comfortable win. It’s probably a bit too easy in full cooperative mode, and there are only seven co-op objectives, so not huge variety.

Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels , first play, KS edition (not mine). Based on the video game, which I know nothing about (but have heard of it vaguely). The board game has you moving around tiles with spikes and enemies, and it “scrolls”, so the first tile column drops off (bad luck if you’re still on it), and a new one gets added. We started with a column full of spikes, which required as to roll “jump” faces on our dice. We all failed, so we died straight away. Strange start for a game I thought. Death isn’t a huge deal, you drop half your coins and restart. The rule book was a good size, but it seemed hard to find specific information. And there’s only a few questions on bgg, it’s pretty new I guess. Can’t say I really enjoyed it. Nice minis I guess. There’s a boss at the end, which didn’t last long.

Marshmallow Test , first play. This is a trick taking game from Reiner Knizia. The game is named after a psychology experiment from the 70’s, where a marshmallow is placed in front of a child. They can either eat it now, or if they wait they get two marshmallows. It seems a strange idea to base a game on, but it’s actually pretty good. It’s mostly a standard trick taking game, but with one gimmick. You’re trying to go “out” by winning four tricks (for a 3p game). But when you go out, your points are the number of tricks won by the other players. So, if you win the first four tricks, congratulations – you get nothing. If you are the last player to go out, again, you get nothing.

So, having a great hand of cards may not be to your advantage. Being last to go out does have one perk – you get to name the trump suit for the next round. One thing is done a bit differently to most trick taking games. You generally have to follow suit if you can, but, if an earlier player has played a trump (because they couldn’t follow suit), then you are also allowed to play a trump, even if you could have followed suit.

Really enjoyed this, simple trick taking, but you need to time your run. I won our game, but it was close. You need to get to twenty points (tracked by cool squishy marshmallow tokens). In the second last round, I had nineteen points, and was kept scoreless by being last to go out. But picking the trump was a big advantage, so I got the win.

RATS: High Tea at Sea , first play. I’m sure people are aware of this one. Nothing to buy, just download the player sheets and you’re away (but you can give a donation). This was a lot of fun to play. I felt like being the host most of the time helped me, and if the six didn’t get rolled, no one could take it away from me. Still, i only won by four points.

With this and Regicide, you could have a very cheap gaming night

[raged_norm]

@bort

Marshmallow Test

Having played Voodoo Prince it’s predecessor, the changes sound like a improvement.

There’s no split trick on a 7 and playing to 20 rather than a fixed number of rounds.

[lalunaverde]

Ooohhh! I didnt know about Mashmallow Test being a reimplementation of Voodoo Prince

[RogerBW]

Tried a solo play of Terminator: Dark Fate, and all I can say at the moment is “hmm”.

That’s not a good hmm and it’s not a bad hmm. Not yet.

So the basic paradigm is standard deckbuildy in a cooperative mode: your deck includes cards that give you cash and cards that give you fighting power. You use the cash to buy cards from the market row into your discard, and the fight to destroy hostile cards, which will otherwise damage you when they get activated, or to damage the big boss (the “Rev-9”). So far so Star Realms. (But some of cards in the deck are more hostile cards…)

But the big boss is what makes things a bit innovative here. After you set up the initial market, you shuffle it in with the top five cards of the market deck. Then when you refresh the market (at the end of each player’s turn):

• you draw the market up to four cards
• you draw one card
• you draw as many cards as you like

If any of those draws is the Rev-9 card, it cancels the rest of the draws and it goes on the hunt. At which point you have a choice:

• (if it’s damaged and you want to) Flee from it, remove all its damage, and shuffle it into the top (amount of damage) cards; or
• Let it hunt, either activating hostile cards already in the market or drawing new market cards and activating any hostile ones.

Most hostile cards put Wounds into your discard; if you have three in your hand, you die and everyone loses.

The rules don’t make it explicit (and there are several places where they could), but I’m reasonably confident that while the Rev-9 is in the deck you can’t damage it. So once you have the cards you need to destroy it you need to let it out to hunt, then hit it with damage to “stagger” it, then activate whatever your finishing move combo is.

And this game is all about the combos, which with a 150-odd-card market deck is a bit painful. I got a skill card that let me draw a pistol from my discard pile whenever I used one; I never saw a pistol. I got a grenade launcher, but never saw a grenade.

Stack that with an unfortunately put together manual (it even misnames one of the starting cards) and learning this game is more work than it needs to be, but in spite of that I rather enjoyed it. I suspect it’ll be rather harder in multiplayer where you have to time things in terms of whose turn it is rather than just what’s in your hand.

[Whistle_Pig]

On the subject of games to play outside:

[VictorViper]

We played outside this afternoon as well, had a quick little game of Wayfinders on the balcony. Unfortunately, my partner misinterpreted one of her end scoring conditions, so the game ended in a bit of a disappointment, but it was still a nice way to spend an hour in the sun while the baby slept.

[InkyBloc]

We had a very good friend (who we now live close to) over for games and chatting, which was marvelous. He immediately zoned in on KLASK, naturally, as he was the bronze medalist for our 2020 KLASK tournament (I was silver, my wife was the champion, so we had the whole podium in the house).

After a few rounds of that we brought out The Voyages of Marco Polo, since he had been one of the ones we played it digitally with. He ran away with it this time, while I felt completely stymied in most of my plans due to lack of camels.

Not so stymied in Meeple Circus, where I kept my cool in the final round and placed a 4-point red acrobat on what was not at all a stable tower but managed to keep the balance. It was enough to clutch the win, with only one point separating all three of us.

Then finally he had brought over Hanabi which we did pretty well on, even with the extra rainbow cards for difficulty (and with a little cheating because a card we needed was at the bottom of the deck and we felt we deserved a few more turns).

[Assussanni]

Today my wife and I finished our Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 campaign. My spoiler-free summary is that it feels very much like a refinement of Season 1. If you don’t like Pandemic I can’t see this changing your mind, if you do like Pandemic then I’d highly recommend it. I can’t tell whether or not it is a better game than Season 1, which was my first legacy game and therefore had the element of surprise on its side.

We are also what looks like one game away from completing our Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion campaign, which has been thoroughly enjoyable and done its job of making me seriously consider buying either Gloomhaven or Frosthaven.

Once that’s wrapped up I think Marvel Champions (Galaxy’s Most Wanted) and/or Arkham Horror: The Card Game (The Innsmouth Conspiracy) are next on the agenda.

[Chewy77]

We had a quick game of Splendor between my partner and me last night before heading off to bed. I was quite switched on, and did well on my strategy of trying to have multiple options as often as possible, so I swept up, 16-4. I was lucky with how the middle lane cards came up, with plenty of cards I could buy for free or at a very low cost, and before she knew it, I was owning every single noble, so ran away with a quick victory.
After my despair with this game lately, that felt good.

[COMaestro]

Last night I played Beyond the Sun on TTS with friends. Interesting game. It looks really complex at first, but you quickly realize the iconography is very consistent and there are only 11 symbols or so total, and most of those are immediately able to be referenced just by viewing the board.

Took us about 3.5 hours in total for the Teach and the game, but one of the players does take a long time to analyze everything before performing his actions in every game that I have seen, which does not help. Well, the game length, that is. He wins a lot, so it obviously does help him.

I lost, with 39 points, while two players tied at 51 and the AP player won with 59. It is fun watching your options increase as you research more technologies, while trying to eke out every bit of automation and resources each turn. Curious if I will have a better performance next time we play.

[Chewy77]

Somehow, it does not help if AP-prone players win by a landslide, does it?

Makes you wonder sometimes if games should have a time per turn limit

[yashima]

I did better after my first game in some areas while I completely failed to ever again achieve the Warlord goal (the one where you need armadas of power 4 in three places…).

[Whistle_Pig]

We also had a game of Age of Steam yesterday using the Western USA map. I lost very badly, which I’m blaming on my brain being frazzled from teaching Oath

[yashima]

How many people did you have to teach?

[Whistle_Pig]

Just two, but that was enough!