Neta Tanka: Deluxe Edition - I had a feeling that I wouldn’t like it. And, indeed, I didn’t liked it. The worker placing combo is cool though.
Spectaculum - another great Knizia. A friend called it “Circus Gauge” because it’s a (Capital T, Capital G) Train Game that has a travelling circus theme on top.
Skull King
I even track my characters on it, and their sheets. Great stuff.
I got to play my newly arrived Clockwork Expansion for Root this afternoon. After I did my accounting for the last 2 months, we had a lovely visit to the local farmers market and a wonderful lunch, I set up, checked up on the—too many!—rules and decided to try my mettle as the Woodland Alliance on the lake map against the Dynamo Dynasties (my copy is German… so whatever that is called). Totally played on easy to figure out how the bot works.
So it seems mostly well-rounded rules-wise, but I have one question or two.
Root is a rules moloch. I really like Cole Wehrle‘s games and the way he writes his rulesbooks seems so concise but I always end up not finding certain things or clarifications because some stuff is just too much „between the lines“ so unless I know the whole of it I may never able to derive the ruling for my special case. It is very much so with Oath and Pax Pamir as well. But Root is the worst because of all the different factions… the other two I can normally find my way around the rulebook but Root….
Logging a lightning fast round of Mottainai with my partner. We’re both very much in the discovery phase with this game so it caught us both by surprise when I laid down the Cup, prayed for my bonus action and poof! I win (after discarding the cup). I think we got 5 rounds in?
Anyway we’re deep into our second game now, already longer than our last, but got interrupted by a waking baby. My partner is the one rushing the endgame this time, but she may be underestimating my sales table.
With the first rule, with the Eyrie in the normal game you discard cards after crafting (and only get 1 point for it no matter what you craft, as the Eyrie hates technology) so I wonder why it should be different in their robot version. To have 1 point (from crafting) plus decree seems overpowered to me.
For the second problem, I found this…
I played the first collection of puzzles in Twisty Little Passages last night.
It’s basically the dry-erase book version of computer games like “Desktop Dungeons” (the nearest reference point I could recall, but I see the author suggests “DROD RPG”, “Tower of the Sorcerer”, “Myth Bearer”, and “Tactical Nexus” as other computer games which play similarly).
The book is a campaign/story which you progress through, but each page of the book is an independent puzzle – you don’t carry over any equipment or stats; it just tells you what you start with (equipment should be a match for what you finished the last one with; health usually starts higher because you will pretty much never have more than 1 health point left when you complete a puzzle : ) No doubt there was a health potion between the levels.
The story is a fairly bare-bones classic fantasy affair which isn’t hugely important. There’s just one page of introduction text, after which it gets drip-fed to you in the description of each new puzzle. I trust there will be an epilogue.
The puzzles are the point, and are essentially “figure out which order to do things in, so that you will (barely) survive”. You can see everything you need to do (which is always "get from point A to point B, where B is probably defended by a big nasty); you just have to figure out the correct way to do it. Levels are filled with locked doors, keys, healing potions, equipment, and monsters. Nothing is random; there’s “fighting” to eliminate monsters, but this is entirely deterministic – depending on the monster and your own attack and defence stats, a table shows you how many health points it will cost you to defeat each monster. Obtaining equipment will boost your stats, but probably also cost you health to obtain. There will also be different monster types, and different paths through the level, so you will often be choosing which monster(s) to fight to get to a part of the level (or whether you should go there at all).
Should you get the better shield before fighting the troll, or would you lose enough health getting it that you won’t survive the troll even with the shield?
Should you get the shield or the sword if you can only get one of the two? You will fare differently against different monster types depending on which you obtain… which will enable you to survive, and which will lead to inevitable failure?
The health potions frequently have different healing values and are behind locked doors or protected by monsters. Do you need to get it now, or do you come back for it later?
Etc, etc…
I used a dry-erase pen for the first puzzle, but after that decided to just track everything in my head and avoid the writing and erasing hassle, and the early puzzles are certainly small enough that this was totally fine. I believe the difficulty ramps up, so I may need a pen again later. (The book didn’t actually come with a pen, so I grabbed one from another game.)
I like it! The book quality is really good; the artwork is nice with varied scenarios and maps; and in general it does what I was expecting it to do. The computer game variants will certainly have more content and more complex gameplay; but I enjoy this style of puzzle, and it’s neat to have something like this in book form.
You can see/play the first set of puzzles in PDF form at Caravel Games - Twisty Little Passages
Some games yesterday (after my wife’s yum cha event at our place during the day (which was also terrific)):
Ohanami, close 2 player game of this, snagging a bunch of greys secured the win for me.
Hansa Teutonica, wow what an unusual game! We got one small rule wrong, so I’m not about to answer decisively whether I love it, but even as it was - it was really interesting, and I look forward to playing it again soon!
Cascadia, this one was as much fun with 3 as it is at 2 - I like that you’re encouraged to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing and that playing well involves taking navigating when to compete and when to try and forge your own path forward!
Gem, a quick game of this one to close out the evening, I didn’t win, I rarely do in auction games but it’s a lot of fun and interesting decisions in a very small box/timeframe.
The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game , chapter five. Most of the challenges involved getting characters to a certain place, in order to unlock another character. So, Fezzik needed to get to The Cottage to get Inigo on the board. Then, Inigo needed to get to the Pit of Despair in order to get Westley out. Then all of them needed to be at Miracle Maxs. All the while, Buttercup and the evil Prince Humperdinck are moving along an aisle at the church, and if they get to the end and get married, it’s game over. Fezzik needs to keep the Brutes (bad guys) in the barracks, because most plot cards advance Buttercup and the Prince if there is no one in the barracks. Luckily, Fezzik just has to move to the Brutes location to send them back. It was all looking a bit hard, didn’t have the right cards for the Miracle Max challenge. But we managed it, and then needed to get everyone to the castle gate. Someone used two special cards to get them almost up to the gate, and the next player moved them to it. Huzzah! And with Buttercup and the Prince only one step away from getting hitched.
Trickerion: Legends of Illusion , finally took this out of shrink. I had the legends KS box, bought it from a friend ages ago when he got the newer version. We didn’t finish the game, but we played out a couple of rounds. Everyone was happy with that, it was just a learning game. And we’ve got a fourth player who couldn’t make it, and he is pretty keen on playing. We just did the base game, so no dark alley components, and only the level one and two tricks. It was mostly pretty smooth, it’s just a worker placement. Place a worker, get action points, do actions. The only tricky space was the theatre, we watched a video that explained that pretty well. One of the players wasn’t happy that she was getting no bonus for her trick being performed on another players turn. The performing player was on Sunday, so got a bonus to stars and money. She was not performing, and only had a disc backstage, in one of the zero bonus days. Whereas I would get the bonus, because I didn’t have anyone in the theatre (meaning I get the bonus from the performer).
The Key: Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land X 3. Terrible first game, had 52 points in cards and barely knew anything. Second game was a bit better, got the solution, got 29, winner was 18. And in the third, got 30, winner was 26. Same winner in all three games. He reckons the “ÿellow” cards are best early. Well, we call them yellow cards, they have information on crimes from one to three, shown in a yellow box.
The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X 3. Nearly won the first game, tied with another player, but she had less value four cards. Second game had 34, winner was 30. And the third game, well that was just a mess, lots of cards and barely any useful information. Sometimes you just need a break and the whole thing falls into place. Winner had only 24, which is pretty damn good for Oakdale.
Fantasy Realms X 3. Got the Gem of Order in my hand for the first game, and a couple of low cards. Ended up with a 6 card run, good enough for a score of 176, winner got 180. Lost the next two games as well. No really high scores, nothing over 200.
Well that escalated quickly! The pen was back in play in no time, and I’m already stumped on a puzzle – I’m sure I’m going to be annoyed with myself once I figure out what I’m not seeing, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. This thing might keep me busy for rather longer than I had anticipated…
Edit: Ok, that was driving me crazy for a bit… I thought my whole approach to the level must be wrong and so I was calculating every other unlikely approach I could think of; but in the end it was just a variant on the theme I’d initially gravitated towards, and I feel like I would have attempted the correct sequence already, so I’m wondering whether I’d been using the wrong table results for some of the combat. Definitely something to be wary of – one unwitting mistake on the numbers can send you on a wild goose chase.
Played a first solo game of Dino island Rawr and write. I think the amber dice are a bit of a design mistake (insert goldblum quote here) but the game itself is quite good. It feels like a lot of meat for a roll and because it has two stages (a sort of set up and then run an engine phase).
I got two ranks from the bottom on the score list so not too bad. Will focus on other things in the future but it really depends on rolls and how conservative you feel you need to be. I don’t have a feel for the latte quite yet which means there’s some games to play still.
I don’t know how irritating it would be in a real game, as it feels like the chunky points require a lot of luck (from dice) and helpful rivals as they’re hard to achieve.
Thank you. The first one is clear now. I didn‘t read the Eyrie rules again I just read the bot… ah well. In my German edition the movement rules are already the „fixed“ version. I think I still need to read up on that. I am always a little impatient and for all that I love playing new-to-me stuff I am terribly impatient with the rules learning. I just want to play 
But my guess is that I mostly did the right thing in throwing together all possible targets for the movement no matter the origin (the origin still had to qualify of course) and then picking the one with the right priority (weirdly sometimes the bot takes the lowest sometimes the highest. I think highest for movement, lowest for building new nests…
Played Beyond the Sun twice with the econ clique. First was just the basic setup. Then, they want to play with the advanced so we did. The table agreed that advanced is much better. SVWAG is right - if you guys play mid to heavy weight games, don’t bother with the basic.
Teotihuacan with @EnterTheWyvern . I don’t dislike it now. But I think there’s a reason why I stepped away from Euros, in general. It was still fun with great decisions to be made.
Lemminge
Food Chain Magnate - played with the new milestones. I spent the entire game feeling like my engine wasn’t sufficient, then did a dirty pricing discount and manage to end at 2nd place with $10 just behind Wyvern
Did the winner use marketing milestone? I’m wondering if there is any other choice if you play without any other Ketchup modules.
Yes. We all had it though.
Any experience using other modules that make other milestones viable?
How are you enjoying the Princess Bride game? It is on sale here for $15 and I am tempted, but don’t want to get yet another game that will never or rarely reach the table when it is not a must-have. Is there replayability?
Yesterday, my wife and I got in a quickish game of Jaipur. I took the first round, but she obliterated me in the next two rounds to win the overall game.
Then today, we got in a game of Concordia while our older kid took a nap (he was up at 4 AM). I felt behind most of the game, as my wife was able to get a bunch of cloth early on, which she was able to ultimately convert into more houses in the board. She had all the cloth cities and two of the wine cities before I ever managed to even get a wine city of my own.
However, I was able to grab a number of brick, food, and tool cities, and get all of their Minerva cards. She managed to buy the last cards from the track, ending the game and getting the bonus 7 points.
Scores turned out much closer than I expected, 127 - 124, with my wife taking the win. Sadly, she was distracted through most of the game dealing with Amazon customer service trying to get a replacement kids tablet for the one which our older kid broke the screen on Thursday, and was supposed to have already been handled on Friday when she called about it, but it wasn’t. I am not sure if the distraction worked in her favor or not, though.
Lastly, we squeezed in a couple of games of Kingdomino, which I was actually able to break my losing streak. I won both games, even, the second one by a pretty decent margin.
It’s…okay. I’m glad I didn’t buy it, and I’m not sure we’ll go back to it once we finish, Most of the chapters seem fairly straightforward, there don’t seem to be any major decisions to make. The last chapter we played (5) was probably the best so far, it had a couple of things going on.
This is the weirdest version of the Three Little Pigs.
Played some Survive with the kids.
They played ‘gang up on Daddy’ but I still made 2nd place thanks to the youngest’s tactic of load up the boats then get them to the side islands and an early volcano draw. There was a 1/8 chance of the game end happening.
