Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

It was a stellar games night for me when these are the three that I get to play:

Irish Gauge
El Grande
King of Siam

8 Likes

I sold Letters from Whitechapel because of the protracted setup and play time. Whitehall Mystery is mostly the same game with a fraction of the setup and less than half the playtime. It’s brill.

8 Likes

Usual Saturday games yesterday. We’re still chugging through the 10×10 with Oh my goods and Coimbra. This has definitely solidified my feelings of “meh” towards Oh My Goods, but I’ve warmed up to Coimbra. Our friend seems to be getting a bit tired of this challenge, which is a shame. I’m actually quite enjoying playing games where I know the rules and can develop a better understanding of the strategy! I had thought of suggesting a collective 10x10 or 20x5 next year… We’ll have to see what the others think.

We also played Oath, which was a very tense game. We were using the Oath of Protection (hold the most secrets and banners), so we all went treasure hunting straight away. I drew the Vision of Faith (win by holding the banner of the darkest secret) early on, which was easy to conceal under the guise of competing to be the oath keeper. I revealed my vision a bit too early, which led to a bit of back and forth with people targeting my banners, until the other exile revealed the Vision of Conquest (hold the most sites) and the Chancellor and I took a break to gang up on him.

In the second half of the game, I had managed to collect a relic that let me take secrets instead of favour when playing cards to a site, so I was in a good position to take the Banner of the Darkest Secret. This also made searching the deck cheaper so I did a lot of searching and eventually came across this card:

Rubs hands in evil glee

At this point the Chancellor and the other Exile decided that it was time to put aside their differences, join forces, and take down the weird cult that was gathering followers in the Hinterland.

Then followed two rounds of the Empire booting me out of the site with the Tome Guardians and wresting the Banner of the Darkest Secret from my culty mitts, only for me to sneak back into the site and make off with the banner.

At the beginning of my last turn, which was the final turn of the game, the Chancellor was the Oathkeeper again, and the other Exile was in possession of my precious banner. I managed to collect another relic to draw with the Chancellor, but couldn’t see how to overtake them. With no other sensible options left, I searched the world deck and drew:

Allowing me to grab back the banner that I needed to fulfill my vision, and win a War Exhaustion victory.

:partying_face:

Needless to say, I am enjoying this ridiculous game.

P.S. have I mentioned how much I love Kyle Ferrin’s art?

9 Likes

2nd solo game of Cascadia.

I got 92! (Up from 83 last time). Used the “B” scoring cards which were indeed just a little bit trickier than the starter "A"s. Really concentrating on the terrain scoring side helped me boost it though.

I like this solo, because you’re able to take your time with the decisions. Two-player could be sloooow while you wait for your opponent, will be interesting to find out. Solo at least, the pace is lovely - steady and calming progress, with enough draw luck to keep it tense. You get both “okay, none of those came up, I need to change my plans” and “I only have X turns left for a Salmon to be drawn, pleeeeaaase”, but other than that you know you’ll always gain regularly and there will be something that will work.

I think this definitely counts as a “relaxing” game, especially because of the theme, the fact that it’s not totally ruthless and no-one has clearly won until scoring, and the dependable pacing. The wooden animal tokens are really satisfying to handle, too. (None of this stopped me from screaming “Noooo I don’t need any more Foxes!!” at least once).

7 Likes

Looks lovely on the table. I can see myself playing this in physical form. It definitely has this puzzly aspect that should make for fun repeated plays of this. Also hex fields > all.

3 Likes

Oath always sounds fun.

I think the arch-nemesis of the Darkest Secret holder is the Roving Terror though. Horrible card. Horrible, I say! Tome Guardians… huh? Goes to search the world-deck some more… oh wait, it is expensive now. Hmf. Looks around, who took my Dark Secrets… @COMaestro … I am coming for you :P—you can hear a screeching sound followed by almost inaudible grumbling that sounds like some witchy curses being prepared

I have seen some awful card that can target someone’s advisers I think… nothing is safe in this game. And the art is indeed great.

PS: totally not sorry for escaping our Oath thread :wink:

5 Likes

I’m sort of kicking myself for not getting Cascadia on the table this weekend, for some reason I chose Arkham: Final Hour instead…

3 Likes

My darling wife is off camping for the week, so yesterday we had ourselves a good ol’ game night:

Jaipur (I won this one, close game though)

New York Zoo (another close game, but I lost this one, such a cute fun game)

Race for the Galaxy (2 games, I narrowly lost both, despite my wife claiming she doesn’t understand the game really :joy:)

Pandemic (with four characters, we not only won, we cleared out the board, though it was a near thing)

8 Likes

I finished my game of Zombicide Invader this morning, and took a decisive victory. The escape portion of my mission was pretty uneventful, as the bulk of the enemies were inside the main structure and hobbling slowly along, and my gun emplacement was making short work of anything that decided to spawn outside.

With that said, this was the introductory mission, so I expected a bit of a cakewalk, and as a demonstration of game flow, I think it did a pretty bang-up job. Things would have been grim if I had delayed much longer before pushing the escape, and the board was absolutely riddled with enemies on the final turn, including an especially active Abomination spoiling most of the interior.

On that note, this mission was configured such that you could not lose by one of the main conditions (two spawn points linked by mold), but again did a great job of making me understand the seriousness of the mechanism. Between the escalating numbers and spreading mold, there’s a really nice, organic Doomsday clock built in to force your pace.

Lots to like here, I’m looking forward to a stiffer challenge with the next runs.

3 Likes

Just want to quickly mention that my partner and I tackled all the 3 and most of the 4 star cases in MicroMacro yesterday.

It continues to be a joy. We have… 6 or 7 more cases (including the 2 promo cases they released), and then we’re done and ready to pass it along to the next family. Super satisfying, a joy to explore. A little depressing for a few of the cases and some… questionable… content for a couple so far, but still, a great, satisfying game.

I’m still not sure it’s Spiel das Jahres material, though. I mean, what do they care what I think, but… it’s a weird pick. I think Zombie Teenz Evolution deserved the win, but meh, whatever. At least it’s better than Pictures.

7 Likes

We played the first 8 cases of MicroMacro today in less than an hour. We found ourselves discovering the answers to most of the questions before they came up because we were just following the threads of the story and getting ahead of ourselves. That’s a pretty good sign. It’s not genius, but it is a lovely time. Though as many have said, it’s rather a shame that there’s a lot of sensitive material in there because the format would be great for younger children.

Over the weekend we played also played 3 EXIT games. The Abandoned Cabin was pretty good. The Enchanted Forest was mostly irritating - by far the worst one we’ve done. Dead Man on the Orient Express was great from start to finish - by far the best one we’ve done.

We played a game of Century Eastern Wonders, which continues to be quietly satisfying. I can see why Quinns liked it. Bit fiddlier to set up than Spice Road but unlike its predecessor it feels like there are plenty of meaningful decisions to make in the second half.

We also played Codenames Duet for the first time in a while and picked up where we left off by losing twice more. Good stuff.

6 Likes

Played a “quick” game of Nidavellir with my wife today. I was not feeling too good about things as she was getting more higher value coins and had a lead on heroes, plus 10(!) blacksmith ranks by end of game. However, due to a good score with miners (77), we ended up with our closest margin yet. She won, 322 - 319.

Might give the Thingvellir expansion a try next time.

4 Likes

Husband and I are on vacation for the next week. On the flight out, we followed our usual tradition of playing one of the 60-minute Unlock puzzle games on the plane. We have so many piled up at home and haven’t played one in so long because of the pandemic! I’ve been wanting to play one and he has kept insisting we could only play them on airplanes, in airports, or otherwise traveling. Hmph!

Anyway, for our first jump back in to Unlock in over a year and a half, we did the middle level adventure from the Timeless set, Arsène Lupin and the Great White Diamond. It was a pretty good one. The theme was engaging enough and held the puzzles together while the puzzles were fun and generally the right level of difficult for a middle rated box. There were a few puzzles it took us a bit to work out, one we had to get the apps to tell us a that once it did we could see what we should have done, and only one - a visual one - that we had to have the app tell us and once it did we still can’t really see what we were supposed to do but it was a quick and direct little visual puzzle that we didn’t spend long on so no real frustration involved.

5 Likes

Got together with some friends at the weekend to play experience U-BOOT.

In the 4 hours we spent playing the first training mission we:

  1. Failed to find our first target despite being in the precise location,

  2. Eventually gave up and went to find our second target,

  3. This time we found it but overshot it,

  4. We turned around and overshot it again,

  5. We fired a torpedo and missed,

  6. We fired another torpedo and sunk it.

Rather than try and find our next target, we instead sat out the last 8 hours of in game time and just tried to keep the crew alive and the boat from sinking.

Submarining is hard.

11 Likes

Games Night last night, we did squeeze two long ish games. Played Evil Dead 2 first between 4. Fun hidden traitor game, full of memorabilia from the movie, which I had forgotten half of it by now (I think I haven’t seen the movie since the early 2000s). We did manage to win even if Ash turned deadite on us when we were trying to close the portal. It did resemble a lighter version of Cthulhu:Death May Die, but with the corruption cards thrown in to get hidden traitor dynamics.

That finished a lot earlier than I expected, so we ventured for a game of Concordia. When we were setting up a fifth player joined, and that lengthened the game till quarter to eleven, so pardon the yawning. I was first player, which I don’t particularly like, and through the whole game I found my engine lacking, I kept being blocked out from the wine cities. By the time we were reaching the end of the deck of cards, the new player was clearly getting away gathering Jupiter cards no end. I was rallying behind, but with so many players locations fill up very quick.

I was holding on with my Mauretania/Gallia prefecting, which was supplying me cloth and brick, so I went for the Weaver card, but I did not manage to build the last city in far East Syria. Still, valuable cloth to trade and buy cards with, which got me a second position in the end with 77 points. The leader got away with over 100, and all the other players were at 50s and 60s, so not too bad overall.

2 Likes

Yeah. Going first on Concordia isn’t that pretty to many. You put out an Architect and then everyone will go Diplomat. The good alternatives I’ve found so far would be:
Tribune - put out a person or a ship, which you can travel with 3 moves on your Architect.
Senator - if you have some cheap cards to grab that will work with your plan.
Mercator - works if you want 2 or 3 cities on Turn 2

Which then forces the Architect on the 2nd player.

It’s not the end of the world though, especially if you can build 2.

3 Likes

Funny enough, only one person Diplomated my first Architect. And then a bit later, when I bought a funky 5 money Mercator, nobody Diplomated him much either…

Sounds Groovy

3 Likes

Spent the last week on a small holiday and played games for the first time in ages. Got some quick games of No Thanks, Lost Cities and LAMA in as a warm up. Then had a nice game of London, which was the first time playing it at home with wife and kiddo. They both liked it enough to play it again which is a result.

8 Likes

Local games group online foundered slightly on one player’s technical problems, but we did get in BGA Concept (I still prefer “Street Concept” rules but the visual setup is pleasing) and The Crew.

3 Likes