I have been meaning to play as I love Dixit. But haven’t had the chance.
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I just think of A Streetcar Named Desire every time I see that name.
*Actually that’s not true, I think of Cameron in Modern Family looking for a dog called Stella and referencing A Streetcar Named Desire
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My group played it (also on BGA) a few days ago. My partner loathed it, which is saying something.
I was… unimpressed? But I don’t know how much of that is that I’m just kinda “over” Dixit. Dixit is a lovely activity but a lousy game (the scoring mechanics are overly complicated and impossible to strategize with), but I still pull it out sometimes for friends that are just looking for something to do that doesn’t involve winning or losing. Mostly I play Mysterium Park instead, since it uses the same beautiful cards but has rules/mechanics that are legit great.
I was hoping Stella would be a good halfway point, but I think it’s that weird thing where it takes the worst elements of both? Like, the “eliminated” (“falling”?) mechanic is very punishing, and the way you score is somehow even more convoluted than the original Dixit!
Wasn’t for me.
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I got another round of Hellboy in last night, and boy, did I pick the wrong time to dig around in the spooky stuff; I took HB, Abe and Liz for the ride, and all three of them were very much in need of a rest when I unexpectedly triggered the final confrontation. I needed to drag an injured field agent back to the map entrance while clearing the enemies and avoiding the indestructible ghost of Rasputin. No big deal, right? Well let’s see who can spot the problem:
…Liz got a little frazzled along the way, which was great until it really, really wasn’t. The upper route back wasn’t looking viable since the rooms remained unexplored, and the inferno raging on the bottom half was, as you might guess, quite treacherous for my poor fish-man trapped in the big room with the field agent.
This game really thrives on desperation, so it was super fun trying to get out of this one alive, but the fires were simply too much to contain while still clearing a path for the escort. I made it about halfway back before the frogmen caught up and took out HB (Liz was knocked out earlier and just wasn’t waking up), and then Rasputin took a long shot down the corridor at Abe, who wouldn’t have survived the attack even if he wasn’t reduced to just the fate die for defence.
Note to self for next time: don’t burn down the escape route.
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Had a solo game of Tales of Arabian Nights on Friday night, after trying it out earlier in the evening with my daughter. She enjoyed it, but it was taking a bit too long for her liking, and we gave it up. Later that night I continued my character, and ended up getting filthy rich after finding a giant diamond in the heart of India. Made up for quite a bad run of luck I was having while my daughter was playing it, poor Ali Baba got imprisoned, accursed and ensorcelled before finding the Diamond Kingdom. So after one pilgrimage to Alexandria and Mecca, I was good to call it a day.
Then on Saturday and Sunday I played 3 sets of Love Letter each day with my daughter. Won both 2-1, with really lucky guesses tipping it often on my side.
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So @Lordof1 and I have been playing Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 on Tabletop Simulator. (He’d played before with a physical copy, but he avoided giving me any hints about what might happen. I have a variety of reasons for disliking the legacy game approach and TTS solves them for me.) Our first game was on 3 January 2021; last one was tonight. I will avoid spoilers.
My overall reaction was… well, it was OK. I did get rid of my copy of Pandemic some years ago after I’d discovered Flash Point Fire Rescue, which obviously works in broadly the same coop framework but which I simply enjoy much more. So I didn’t go in loving the game, but nor did I hate it; I did like what the Legacy game did to it, in giving us a setup for game X that was clearly influenced by what we’d done in game X-1, and in giving a bit of mechanical variety while still building out from the base game rather than bringing in something entirely new.
But my main objection, particularly towards the end, is to the extent to which it relies on randomness for tension. Of the four games we lost, two or three we were already pretty sure we’d lost once the initial infections had come out. After that point there’s quite a bit you can do to mitigate the infection cards, both in terms of stuff that works in baseline Pandemic (look at the places that are already in the discard because they won’t come up again as soon as the ones that are already infected but aren’t in the discard; remain aware of when you’re in a potential epidemic turn) and with things that Legacy adds. That’s great. But there is nothing you can do to affect your own hands of cards and card draws: if those reds don’t come up, you ain’t curing red, and no matter how well you play you can’t keep ahead of it without a cure. Draw the right cards, you win; draw the wrong ones, you lose.
(That may vary a bit at higher player counts; we didn’t end up doing a lot of Sharing Knowledge until the last game, and of course with just two of us we spent more time moving than a larger group might have.)
(This is something I’ve noticed with other random-setup coop games – for example in The Crew the same mission can be trivially easy or nearly impossible depending on which specific target cards are associated with which goals. So when we’ve “beaten mission 10 after 3 tries” or whatever, it doesn’t feel as if we’ve improved enough to beat it as much as that we got an easy iteration this time. I get that a lot less with Flash Point because the setups are more consistent.)
As for the writing, well, I guessed when the initial CoDA thing happened basically what the course of the plot would be, and I was right, to the extent that I was always trying to avoid setting up military bases. I could have done with something a bit less clichéd and predictable.
I’ve just gone back and watched Quinns’ review, and I can’t say he’s wrong (except in terms of “everyone’s copy will be different” – technically true, but basically the same things are going to happen in each campaign, just in different places), but it really didn’t grab me the way it clearly did him. This isn’t familiarity with Legacy games; this is the only Legacy game I’ve played. Maybe put it down to my clinkered black heart, or lower-case-p pandemic fatigue.
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I agree. When I had the physical copy I really, really enjoyed it. This time round I enjoyed the game less (although the company more). I particularly felt the element of luck at the end of the game too. I won’t be in a hurry to play Pandemic again in any form honestly, although the fact that we played it through this far and I’m still not utterly burnt out on it speaks to the strength of the core mechanics, I think.
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Yes, while I rate TTS over BGA/Yucata for “feeling like a board game” it’s still not the real thing.
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That normal pandemic thing feels like it stings more when there are permanent effects which i guess makes sense but doesn’t help the game.
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I think Pandemic Legacy is much better than standard Pandemic because the goals are less singularly focused and there are long term consequences to weigh against short term victory. But I do look forward to a legacy design that builds on a game I already would like without that. Cause boy howdy, are things like Risk, Pandemic and Betrayal not on that list.
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AuZtralia , fighting Old Ones in outback Australia. We’ve won this fairly easily in the past, but this was a bit more of a struggle. I very nearly lost my port (which would have ended the game). I had an Old One positioned next to my port and a farm, but luckily it moved onto the farm, giving me the opportunity to kill it. Good fun.
Loot of Lima , and once again, we had no winner. We’re finding it a bit tricky, and it’s hard to seee where you made a mistake, unlike other deduction games where you can basically go thru all your info again. I’m a bit lost in this game. There are some alternative player sheets on bgg, might try them and see if it makes it easier. Apart from not winning we’re enjoying the game.
Heist: One Team, One Mission X 2, just a couple of quick games at 4p. With the added difficulty of a small dog who howls throughout the game.
The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X2. Thought I had the first game won, finished it seconds ahead of another player. But then the last player to complete beat both of us on score. Second game was very bad, just couldn’t put anything together.
Noch Mal!
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Alex nudges Stefan after school. He knows he can rope him into anything. “Hey, some kids were talking about their folks acting really weird about these creepy plants in their gardens this weekend.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Well, we all saw the army machine patrolling around the video store.”
“Uh huh”
“And that big harvester’s been going non-stop near the dig site all week.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“You’re an idiot. Something weird is going on again, let’s go snoop around!”
“Ok, but I gotta mow the lawn or dad’s gonna be like, so pissed.”
So began Alex and Stefan’s last week on earth. Two dumb dumbs with one heart of gold.
It’s amazing what this game can establish with a single sentence on a card and a little bit of provocative “enemy” placement at setup. The power of a strong setting.
I lost hard tonight. Between our brave, tough and stupid attributes, we ended up losing a whole bunch of actions to injuries and conditions that sapped some early momentum. The game really lets you fail forward some though, so even if I was constantly on the back foot, it kept waving a carrot in front of me to push on rather than pack in.
Until it didn’t. Eventually a loss condition revealed itself and we had a very healthy head start at it. A couple of days later we were going into the weekend with its associated action point bonanza; Stefan had finally healed up; Alex wasn’t grounded any more; We had just commandeered that army robot, which would allow us to destroy the Watchdogs that were hounding us (yuk!) and flip a plot card at the same time. Alas, we rode too close to the sun and before we got our chance to wreak havoc, gained enough enigma points to trigger the loss condition and send us home to whatever our parents—and the rest of the town—had become.
I just love this game to pieces.
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I’d suggest that Arabian Nights is a game you can end whenever you want. IMO it’s not a game that you play to “win”, and all of the fun comes from creating a story; so opting to end the game at a suitable point of someone’s narrative is probably going to be more satisfying than a player accumulating “points”.
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And the game is…? : )
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Tales from the Loop by the picture, if I had to guess.
We have a copy at the store and I have been oscillating on getting it… if it’s still there in a few weeks, I may have to. That aesthetic alone… plus, not super expensive.
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We played pyramids after a long time
It’s still good.
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Oh, whoops! Yes, it’s Tales from the Loop (the boardgame). @Marx it’s important you know the manual is a hot mess. Makes learning the game way harder than it needed to be. It’s also worth noting that it’s definitely a bit Pandemic-like at its core. It’s not perfect by any means but it comes together well, and provides a really nice narrative arc.
Speaking of that arc, it’s nice they’re self-contained. They were confident in the strength of the setting and so there is no linked campaign to worry about. I feel no compulsion to replay that last scenario before trying another one, and that feels great.
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Last Sunday was a game of Azul with a lot of bookkeeping anomalies. The fact that the scoring all happens simultaneously (individually) and that the score track jumps lines like a typewriter means everyone has to really understand the rules and avoid mistakes. We got to the end and I think the whole table was like … “what?” (I caught the newby moving tiles from the broken tiles area onto her tile lines between rounds, and sliding tiles over to the completed area from unfinished rows earlier in the game. Not her fault, my sister-in-law tried to teach the game while I was out of the room and this is the common result.) My wife also gained about 40 points during final scoring. It’s all good, I wouldn’t have won anyway.
Azul seems to land in the Lords of Waterdeep space where I remember it as being just ok, then I play it and it’s more fun than I remember, but then I still remember it as being just ok. Then I play it again…
Did a quick round of Timeline which just arrived in the mail. Going to gift it to my niece and nephew but had a VERY enjoyable 10 minutes with it!
Finally, Cascadia. Seemed the right pick after a long week. I topped the field at 98 but the Mrs came in with 93. She pulled down a staggering 22 points on Foxes but failed to manage her terrain. Cascadia’s a real gem for striking that “breezy” and “engaging” balance; I wouldn’t want anything else from this type of game.
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For me this was a great end of the evening boardgame café game - they have a bunch of different sets so when one of them seemed too familiar we’d move on to another. (I did feel faintly soiled by winning the Star Wars Original Trilogy version, mind.)
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Oh my goodness - I still have my Star Wars trivial pursuit but it’s in the attic because no one would play. We’d have to houserule it or I would run the table on my first and only turn.
I’m still burning about the time I didn’t know who in the OT mentioned the planet “Sullust.” Never again.
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