WM is fun. Happy to keep my copy in my kallax. I would be more incline to give control of an investigator to one person to have some direct responsibility while playing as a team. Because I agree that it’s not a game of pure optimisation
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I would have done that had we had three (non-murdery) human players rather than two. 
I’ve never played Scotland Yard and I suspect I probably ought to try it some time just to see what’s different. I do tend to like “pure” mechanics, and WM is definitely more of a “pure” hidden movement game than FoD, just as The Resistance is a more “pure” social deduction game that Battlestar Galactica.
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Went to a board game cafe for the first time in a long while! Didn’t get to try anything hugely exciting, but I did get to play a few lighter games with my partner.
Abandon All Artichokes: Massively underwhelmed by this one. The core idea is solid, but there are only 8 or so abilities in the deck, and none of them have particularly interesting interactions, at least with 2 players. It’s passable, but not even in my top 3 food-themed filler games, which is a bad sign.
Battle Line: I really enjoyed this one, but like a few Knizia card games, this feels like a game that was designed with a deck of cards, then had more suits added so it could be sold. I know that’s a reductive viewpoint, and the internet says you can’t use four suits without breaking the hand probabilities…but I don’t need my games to be mathematically perfect! I’ll probably just work out a four-suit variant to play in the future, because I did think it was pretty great, and my partner seemed to enjoy it as well.
Lost Cities: Speaking of “standard” card games with extra suits added, it’s another Knizia! This one I know works with a deck of cards, because I’ve played it and loved it that way for years. That said, the art is excellent, and the game itself is unassailable as a light push-your-luck filler.
Sky Tango: This is a boring game, but I did get to block my partner three turns in a row, at which point she promptly asked to play another game, so… some fun was had!
Onitama: Very approachable and engaging, but too chess-like for our tastes. The copy was also missing the Sensei pieces (or whatever you call the king analogue), so we were duking it out with a red wooden car and a blue Chthulhu-tentacle miniature.
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Agreed, but my kids love it so it’s stays. It’s an interesting concept but doesn’t have staying power.
Played Beyond the Sun 2 player. Great fun. Jockeying for position on the boards. Want to play the advanced boards next time
And London (2nd Ed) better than first edition.
And that’s my hot take.
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Started our campaign of The Crew with friends who live nearby. It was a great success! After a few initial hurdles (one friend had exaggerated how much her boyfriend knew about trick taking games) we clearly improved throughout the night - where we struggled with a 3-task mission at the beginning, our last mission of 10 with 4 tasks we completed in just 2 tries.
Thankfully our communication was better than over text, when I said “Monday night confirmed for the crew!” So when we got there my friend asked “So how many more are we expecting?” I was confused why she thought I would invite other people to her house, and she said, “Oh I thought you said there was a whole crew coming!”
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Because it was my cakeday today I not only got cake, I also got to choose a game to play and so I got my first non solo of Imperium Classics. I played as the Scythians and my partner as the Persians. I had a good feeling for most of the game, I managed to keep my deck small and go through my developments reasonably fast while keeping Unrest at bay…. While my partner was struggling to understand how the rules worked. Then came the final scoring and well it went 82 for him to my 65. Oops.
So, I am not sure how many of you have played the game or seen playthroughs of it. Let me give a short overview.
At its heart the game is a deckbuilder, where everyone chooses one tribe and tries to guide them from Barbarism to a Nation. So a deck building civilization game. The game has several possible endings but the most common is probably when one player has completed all their nation specific developments.
Lol short…
Everyone starts as a small tribe with a specific starting deck. Each starting deck has a few nation specific cards but most of them also have Conquer, Advance and Prosperity cards. So there are some similarities. The game is played in rounds. Each turn the player can choose between a standard “Activate” turn that gives him 3 actions or alternatively choose to Innovate—to obtain a card without cost—or Revolt—to get rid of a number of Unrest cards. Both of these latter ones are a bit of Verlegenheitsaktion… but sometimes you cannot avoid them. In a standard turn you get 3 action tokens that would usually be used to play cards.
Some of these cards allow you to obtain cards from the market. The market offers Regions to conquer, Tributaries to rule and civilised and uncivilised developments for your deck. Some cards will be played (semi-)permanently into your tableau, others will go into your discard after playing and some will directly go into your history.
Once per round when you have to reshuffle your deck, you get to add another of your nation specific cards until you reach the turning point card f.e. Julius Caesar for the Romans. Then you turn from a tribe of Barbarians into an Empire. This means you can no longer play certain cards but instead you can play others and from then on you get to develop powerful cards for each reshuffle and edge ever closer to victory.
So for many decks the game goes like this: cycle through your deck over and over to gain all of your nation cards. To do this every nation has their own strategy and special actions and VP conditions.
What fascinates me, is how the game allows you several options to keep your deck small and give you powerful combos. Some cards are added to your history where they are (usually) out of the game but still count for VP. When you play region cards, you can choose to garrison a card with them, which remains out of your deck for as long as the region remains in play. And there are quite a few cards that allow for card drawing/discarding thus helping with the cycling. And Unrest cards can be removed from the deck via an action and returned to the Unrest stack.
And then there is the Glory card. Every nation I have played has this. To gain the precious and powerful fame cards you play Glory. But you need to return three played regions to your discard and allong with all the cards garrisoned in these regions so suddenly your deck has grown by up to 7 cards in one single action. Oops. Brilliant and dangerous but so rewarding.
So much for the good stuff. Sadly, not all is good but the issues are minor: as previously mentioned the insert is meh and the setup of the main deck requires a lot of card shuffling.
The tokens for the three resources could be better. There are 1x/5x/10x tokens for each but they are too similar in size and especially the 5 and 10 tokens are easily mixed up.
The handling of actions and exhausting of cards is awfully fiddly with tokens because apparently people cannot keep track of their actions without tokens (which is probably a correct assumption given how many freeplay and exhaust actions accumulate in a given deck and tableau)
Understanding when and how often you get new cards from your nation deck was a bit of a challenge which brings me to the rulebook. This has a very good glossary, and a nice list of of the Nations and card and setup explanations but it lacks a few examples of play and in general reads a bit disjointed leaving you without a clear impression of what the game plays like or what certain mechanisms are supposed to do.
Finally the solo mode. The solo mode is good but again the rules are too sparse and lack a few examples to give it a soul. There are tables for all the Nations as solo opponents and you basically give the bot a number of actions and then reveal cards check on them in the table what they do… sounds easy? There are just a few too many ambiguities that the table doesn’t resolve at a glance and then you spend a lot of time looking at the table and figuring out what is happening. As just one example I played against the Romans and the game ended when the Romans had gobbled up all the Unrest cards in the game leading to a special end condition called Collapse which they could only loose because in Collapse those with the fewest Unrest cards win. I am reasonably sure I made a mistake somewhere in there playing the bot… but I still cannot see what it was. (See my post below, there are errata that fix this, apparently a section about how the bot handles unrest was missing from the rulebook)
Overall though this has tons of replayabilitiy because I want to explore all those 16 nations (8 per box) and all the different cards from the common decks. The deck building is quite unique and lovely in the options for deconstruction it offers. As previously mentioned one of my favorite parts of deckbuilding is making a small combo-tastic deck and even when it doesn’t work out that way it is so much fun to try.
It does run a bit long and my partner who ended the game on some wild on-going mega-combo said he had smoke coming out of his ears (I didn’t see it but he insists his brain ran hot).
If you like the tropes of Civ games and deck building and don’t shy a way from a two hour card game that needs four cards in the rulebook to explain card anatomy… I recommend this game.
Oh and turns out this wasn’t short. Sorry about that. Or not.
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Happy cake day! I hope it was good (the cake, that is; but also the day!)
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New York Pizza - very fun filler game! The “I split; you choose” mechanism is very interesting, as it is coupled with area majority. Paying attention on how you slice the pizza in context with what kind of pizza slices that everyone has made New York Pizza filled with interesting decisions. Although the game can be computable to find the optimal decision, that would require some repeated plays to get there though. I really enjoyed this.
Startups - still superb
Imperial 2030 - remains a sublime game. I ditch the dumb basic set up and went for the advanced set up where we take turns buying shares from each country one at a time. I started with Europe and India under my control. Somewhere at the midpoint of the game, I saw China and Brazil ramping up for a big expansion. I only have enough capital to buy and control either so I went for Brazil. Immediately went for that big aggressive expansion and a fast tax and investor payout cycle to milk Brazil. The former Brazil controller went to take control of Russia and she did the same cycle there - alas, I didn’t had enough to invest in Russia as I went all in on Brazil.
Brazil ended with the coveted 5x modifer. Russia close at 4x. and the other powers are at a lower multiplier. So I scored loads and won with a big lead as I made a big gamble at investing big on Brazil at mid game. Fantastic game. The best Mac Gerdts game ever.
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Family away game night 2!
Hols de Geier/Beat the Buzzard - excellent double think game. Never feels bad because games are 5 minutes long
Fantasy Realms - Interesting drafter. Not sure it has staying power though
Durian - the kind if push your luck I like.
Antike Won this one. Straight from the old school euro book. Rondel, a little bit of mean interaction. Lovely.
Finished with me being benevolent rules master on Pan Am
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Happy cake day! 
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I had to pause about midway (daddy shift starting), but I got my feet wet with Atlantis Rising this morning, going with a 3-handed learning game to start.
I’m not sure if this got downplayed among reviewers of the second edition, or if maybe I just didn’t pay attention enough, but I had gone into this one thinking the turn structure and WP element seemed like a cool conceit for cooperation. I did not expect how much of a dice-fest it is—more specifically, how much of a gamble-fest it is. The resource gathering is about as mundane as it gets, but the absolute mayhem the turn structure creates when paired with the diceyness of the dice is just fantastic.
Wrath of the gods indeed. This is in good company alongside Rallyman and Space Base (beloved and permanent fixtures on the shelf); each offers something dramatically different, but they all lean hard into the thrill of the gamble. You don’t mitigate your odds as much as revel in them. Much fun to be had here, and will be a good one to show just about anyone!
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I think when learning new games (with my stress soaked mom brain), I do better when I can compare elements to other games I’ve played to give me a starting strategy. Even if it doesn’t fit exactly. It gives me a start.
With Nidavellir, the aspect of getting a bonus card after chaining one of each, is a lot how I look at completing quests in “Lord’s of Waterdeep.”
With Waterdeep I try to get quests that will give me what I need to complete the next quest.
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I want to add a couple of notes to my Imperium Classics post:
- those of you who listen to SVWAG know this: not all tribes in the game actually become empires
Vikings always remain barbarians and Arthurians go questing while Atlanteans just sink below the see as an empire never being barbarians… - there are errata with one major fix to the solo mode which looks to make a huge difference: Unrest cards are not handled under the „Other“ line but returned to the unrest stack when they turn up.
- I am looking into making a playermat with action counters and resource counters to fix the fiddly parts of the game
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With the errata change above I thought I might try the bot again. So on to another round of Imperium Classics/Legends. This time I chose the Atlanteans from the Legends box for me and the Macedonians from Classics for the bot. The Atlanteans start as an Empire that has to strive to stay above water… I didn‘t quite grok the strategy until it was a little late in the game and I could not stop the bot from wiping the sea floor with my sinking lands. 114 to my 89. I felt I did well but not well enough. I think I have to play on easy mode a few times.
Also I noticed that if you want to play a @pillbox in this game you need both boxes. Because the left card is in Legends and the right one in Classics:
I am also disappointed that they tried to avoid the obvious reference by naming the left card „Road Building“ …
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I haven’t seen the artwork before. I like it!
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The artwork is all by The Mico. Some people dislike it I feel here it is a bit toned down in comparison to West Kingdom.
These are some cards from the Celts decks….
I like them quite a bit. It‘s a pretty game on your table and quite evocative. I should have taken a picture of my final Atlantean layout…. It looked classy. Like I imagine Atlantis looking just before it sinks beneath the sea.
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Played two rounds of Paperback with my wife while the kids were out. Might be a Quiddler-killer, but we need more plays to be sure.
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I thought it looked a bit like The Mico. Usually I’m not that keen on his style either, but I really enjoy the colors in this game. This might move the game from “looks interesting, but so do many other games” to “buy it, maybe?!”.
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Played Orleans last night with my wife. Nice to see the game still works with just two players. She creamed me, managing to get 5 Citizen tiles to my 2, and reached the end of the development track, which I just did not quite manage to do. Tied at 5 Guildhalls each, she easily took the lead. While I was slightly ahead on money, it was not enough to offset that, and she had managed to find a couple of silks while moving, in addition to wine and cheese, while I only had a couple of wines and a bunch of cheese.
Final scores were 133 - 108. Really liking this game.
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Orleans is a top top game. I got caught up in newness fever and bought altplano. Altiplano is good but not as good as Orleans in my view. I can’t really explain why other than perhaps piling up the pieces at the start is worse and the randomness is less maybe. I don’t know some spark is missing.
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