Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[InkyBloc]

Played a few games with my wife last night. Started with another match of Mind MGMT - second full game and this time I won as the rogue agents. The new mechanic from the first shift box really helped (I won’t go into details) - I was onto her for a large part of the game and basically got her into a corner where she only had two moves and I was set to capture on both spaces once she did. So now she’s got her first shift package and it should be veeerrrrrrrry interesting.

Then since we were already in the room with it we played a quickish game of Nippon Rails, where (surprise surprise) neither of us went to Hokkaido, but I had a few runs to the north of Honshu which took a long time and didn’t get good synergy coming back, so she won by a mile.

[COMaestro]

Yesterday my wife and I got in three games of Royal Visit. She won the first two, and I won the third. I like the back and forth of the game and how quickly it plays, though it can be frustrating to make a move and then have your opponent immediately play cards to undo what you just did.

After that, we had a quick game of Ethnos, using the Merfolk, Wingfolk, Halflings, Trolls, and Wizards. She beat me out on that one, due to a last minute Troll placement to get the tiebreaker going in her favor, which let her win two more regions for 14 points, which would have been mine and would have made all the difference. Good play on her part

[GeeBizzle]

Snap! Just had our first 5 games of royal visit it’s got a wee bit of thinky filler going on and is a good quick length.

I lost 4 of the 5 games. Can see me playing this one again.

[COMaestro]

Just until you win again, right?

That’s what my wife accused me of when I was done playing after the third game yesterday: that I quit after I won.

[RogerBW]

Local Board Game Group tonight: Ominoes, a pleasant filler that for me runs just the right length, and Stone Age, which was also the perfect length because we were cut short by the pub closing.

[VictorViper]

I spent, oh man, the whole dang afternoon playing my first full-blown session of Shadows of Brimstone. I took a hefty breather between the mission and the town wrap-up/bookkeeping (which I took slowly since it was mostly by the seat of my pants), but still the day whizzed by. It’s going to take several sessions before it all comes together smoothly, but nothing has ever come grinding to a halt, and it flies when things get going well.

I’m going to be writing a battle report series in the RPG section for this one. My god.

[EDIT] The Ballad of Jeb and Henny (Shadows of Brimstone)

[raged_norm]

Squeezed in a couple games.

Obsession, good game, nice theming. Nothing too spectacular so goes to the “happy to play no need to own” pile. Didn’t build up enough rep to comeclose to winning.

Brian Boru, described by a fellow player as all the misery of El Grande distilled into one hour. I agree, which of course makes it excellent.

[EnterTheWyvern]

Played The Colonists for the first time in a few years yesterday. Gosh I was rusty, to the point of making a serious rules error with one of the embassies. I still really enjoy it though. It’s a very medium, low interaction euro with some interesting grit. Mainly the storage demands and balancing that with the efficiency puzzle around actions and the movement concerns that messes with your sequencing. The scale and consequent length of the game is arguably the big twist and another thing I like. Building up across that time length is satisfying on a strategic level to me. I have a bit of a preference that seems to suit this game length and feel. The same can’t be said for poor @lalunaverde who sat through 6+ hours of something that is not his preference. He gamely didn’t complain and just got through it. Modern euro squared is not ideal for someone who’s less into modern euros.

Also of note was how quickly this one played compared to my previous group. 10 and 11 hour games was the previous norm. Makes me realise just how slow and AP the previous lot were. I shall avoid the rant.

[KIR2]

Had a day of Arkham Horror LCG (Edge of the Earth campaign) to show my TCG friends a more board gamey take on cards. First time playing 4p and what everyone said was true. Far too long and often makes someone redundant in the chaos of everything. Fortunately that redundant player was me, so at least everyone else was having a good time. Three of us had terrible evasion stats, not realising how important evasion was to the new campaign… that was interesting.

The campaign itself is fine, a decent intro to the series. First scenario was great, although the searching the board aspect means it will only ever be great on your first play. The second and third acts of the scenario then lean too heavily into all clues or all enemies, leaving specialised investigators to twiddle their thumbs (a scenario with no enemies at all isn’t great for Guardians!). Second scenario is the obligatory train scenario (but it’s a mountain, not a train. Don’t call it a train.). Bit of a trudge going in a straight line tbh.

Everyone enjoyed the games and we played for 10 hours, so big success. Will finish the campaign with them another time and then try some board games

Is 10 hours too long to play Arkham? Yes. But everyone else wanted to keep playing and I was a good host. Think 6-7 hours is maybe my sweet point.

[Marx]

Partner and I tried a quick (starter) game of Cubitos. It was fun! She crushed me!

Like, she was 5 zones ahead when she won. It wasn’t even close! She liked it, and I look forward to trying it again soon… gosh I love simple little race games!

[Chewy77]

Gee, I am way behind here. On New Year’s Eve we managed to play some Codenames. Yay! After over a year in the shelf of shame, I can tick the box. And it actually went quite well, we played it 4 times.

For everybody’s amusement, my turn on the clue giving seat did not go very well. The killing word was Drill, and I went brave with Instruments: 2, hoping for my OH and her friend to go for Violin and Tuba. But no, they went for Drill instead of Tuba, as they read Tube instead. So dead I ended.

[mistercrayon]

I had my first game of mind mgmt where it seemed like I actually understood the game and could unravel my partners mystery moves. Felt good but I think we’re getting to a tipping point where the amount of weird rules might be too much.

[InkyBloc]

I’m curious what weird rules you’re referring to! I don’t think there was anything in the full game (so far, not including future Shift packages) that was particularly weird except for the very specific (and therefore hard-to-remember) order of setup.

[mistercrayon]

It’s the shift packages. They aren’t that bad individually but my partner has a hard time holding lots of special powers in mind. So we’re currently at 3 shift packages for me and she’s just got her second. I think we’re at the point that holding all of them in mind and using them well for both of us will be a bit much.

The rules suggest using three max I think so I think that will be the limit but even remembering them all and listing them for future use (best combos and so on) might add too much too much.

The standard game with a package on each side is fine enough I think.

[Simfers]

Just got done with a nice game of Terraforming Mars, which I won 120-107, before getting marysed like never before at Patchwork, 40 to -24. I was laughing SO hard!

[Whistle_Pig]

I finally got fed up with having a partly finished game of Pandemic Legacy taking up space on my shelf (we were playing it with a couple who moved away in 2019). I played 7 games over two days, and now I need to figure out what to do with it!

[Benkyo]

Burn it, I guess? But only after you salvage the cubes and other bits for PnP (I used mine for 4-player Light Speed)

[Bondy034]

Well the surprise gaming evening my wife cooked up on my birthday was great, and meant I could break out some of the party games that commonly languish on the shelf in my collection:

Super Big Boggle, okay, not a party game, but we played it before everyone had arrived. I did pretty well and was a great warm up to the evening.

Just One, staple for big gatherings for me. So easy to get into and yet plenty of laughs and groans and fun to be had. Our second game made it to like 9 I think, which for us is pretty good.

Fake Artist, finally got to play this one and yeah, it was pretty good. Spyfall but with (bad) drawings, basically. And a little less pressure - you don’t have to field questions you don’t know the answer to. A solid effort and I don’t have many drawing games so a good addition to the collection.

Werewords, we did pretty badly at getting to the word in time in our plays of this. Balancing the guessing game with the social deduction elements elevate this one above games that only do one of those.

And then some games this evening:

Coup, been a while since I’ve touched this one. Easy enough to slide back into.

Fleet, I didn’t fare well with this one. Just outplayed. The winner doesn’t always get on with auctions, so he was pretty pleased with his win of this one.

Hansa Teutonica, it’s been fascinating to observe how differently this game shakes out from game to game. This one was marked by few bonus markers being claimed, someone finally connecting east to west and a good chunk of upgrading. I ended up with the win by just one point. The second place player had unlocked the full 5 actions by the end, which led to me fishing for an early end to avoid that snowballing 5 actions can bring. Such an interesting and engaging game!

Fantasy Realms, a quick game of this to close out our evening. I did pretty bad, in hindsight because other players were also chasing the armies I was banking on :(. Still fun.

[yashima]

We played my newly arrived Ramen Ramen–the Secret Santa gift that got held up in customs processing oO. My partner won with 28 over 10 points because I gambled on him not holding any Nori cards which of course he did.

In the afternoon I played a first 2 handed learning game of Cryo.

I made a couple of mistakes in the first couple of turns but those were easily corrected. Still, left hand won over right hand by quite a lot.

Cryo is a worker–uh drone placement game with some resource conversion and a small area majority game in the mix. The ruleset is pretty tight simple and I am reasonably sure I can teach it now and will not forget any major rules or have to look up tons of things–probably not even for set up. Not quite, the number of worker spots that randomly get destroyed during setup changes with player count but if that is all I have to look up, I think I am good.

I found the arc interesting because as the game is played over 5-6 rounds with a bit of a weirdly variable end condition–the sun sets and ends the game when someone takes back their workers and “processes” the sunset tile which comes into play during the last round. As far as I read the rules, this means anyone can end the game prematurely during that final round. So any player who thinks they are ahead can just call it. Of course they might be reading the board wrong or forgot to account for the hidden mission cards.

Anyway, for most games most of the points in the game are won by having your cryo pods stashed safely in the caves but it takes until the last couple of rounds for any number of them to get down there. So for a first game that felt like I was playing it wrong until suddenly the caves started filling up.

Some of the interesting bits:

• fixed number of 3 workers/drones
• 5 unique resources (crystals → energy → transport, tech → card powers, leaves → retrieve pods, nanobots → exploration)
• multi-use cards
• customizable actions on player boards that get activated when retrieving drones

I think there is an interesting engine puzzle here. Left-hand made one that worked, right hand struggled.

Setup is reasonably quick, it looks pretty and it is not a terrible table hog. Sure the board isn’t tiny but there is nothing much outside of it and the compact player boards. So that’s a plus.

I believe there is a solo-mode somewhere on BGG. But I really want to convince my partner to try it.

[VictorViper]

My partner and I have played it twice now, and I’ve really been enjoying it. She was apprehensive after our first play (where I accidentally crushed her), but after a close second game she seems more eager to get back to it. I love that the game seems purpose-built for player interaction, and does it with a lean ruleset. You need to win with cunning, not trickiness. Both of us can acknowledge we’ve been playing the game much friendlier than is necessarily optimal, too.

I’ve taken a look at the rules for the solo mode and deemed it too much trouble to bother with. This is a game where I want human opposition and I’m more than ok with that.

Oh, and it plays great at 2.