Wait, is your partner my husband? I wouldn’t like that very much. 
My husband is the worst about getting annoyed at a game and being in a bad mood for at least half of it over all the things he can’t do and ending up with like 35+ more points than anyone else.
Train games! As in, games played on the train home.
We started with Railroad Ink: Deep Blue edition, naturally. I won, 41 - 31.
Then I had three games of Regicide solo, all losses, though I at least reached the Kings on the latter two games.
We later played three games of Hanamikoji. The first game, I had the favor of four geisha, but my wife had 11 charm points, so she won. The next game, I won after the first round, getting 11 points. We played a tie breaker round which I won as well with 11 points again, though it took two rounds this time.
Finally, we played Batman Love Letter. There is a lot more luck involved at two player, but it is still fun. My wife was up 6 - 1, but remarkably I was able to come back and win.
And that was the extent of our gaming on the train. Vacation is now truly over.
I hope you do. The con has such a fantastic vibe, and everyone is so helpful and nice, and it is just great seeing so many people playing so many games!
A secret double life involving a daily transatlantic commute… does he seem very, very tired? 
Just a tiny update on Tindaya. I read a few of the threads on the BGG forum and found a few more hints and ideas how to play this. There was also an acknowledgement that the fires are more difficult with fewer players and that I had overlooked that there is an additional “wild” offering (Idol cards) one can use and that number of offerings does scale with players. So some of my misgivings are cleared up.
A veritable rollercoaster of emotions…
Ack! I’ve played Viticulture a few times, and (despite the theme) simply haven’t enjoyed it. Which would be completely fine, if Nusfjord wasn’t one of the boxes in my “shelf of opportunity”…
Disaster averted! Hurrah!
Nooooo.
Eager to hear what you think, when you finally get to it! A part of me suspects that Nusfjord is a game that grows on you while Viticulture is a game that grows stale if you play it too often. Just a hunch.
In other news:
Several rounds of Fantasy Realms. Two player rules work really well. Just a quiet, pleasant time. I hit it out of the park with a 7-card Gem of Order bonus.
First round of Root. Didn’t care for it at all. Woodland Alliance ran away with it. The Eyrie was so obsessed with not going into turmoil that they made a decree that had them just shuffling birds around clearings they already controlled. I was the Cats and started out very strong until I ran out of building sites and the Alliance, seeing me as the only opposition, began ripping up my clearings. I couldn’t do anything about them - clear the dissent, give them more supporters. Fight off their army, get slammed by their guerilla tactics. They just got stronger the more I tried to rein them in.
All in all, each faction felt really shallow, like there weren’t many things I could actually do. So many rules with four factions (we had three) but each player then only gets a fraction of them to work with. I kept comparing it to El Grande in my head, where I feel like I’ve got Batman’s utility belt full of tools to advance myself, secure my standing, or undermine an opponent. Here I was just… ok, recruit, move, attack. Again.
That said, this is a first impression and not yet an opinion. I’d really like to try the Alliance out so I can get a better sense of how I should have been stopping them. I definitely don’t feel as if I’ve really experienced the game yet.
Also Jaipur. Yes, it’s light, but I am continually amazed at the perfection of its design. Everything is just exactly in the right place, and it endlessly feeds back on itself with weights and counterweights on every action and tactic.
I think I’ve heard every faction in Root declared to be unstoppable at least once 
It’s definitely a game with a lot of overhead to begin with, which can be off-putting, especially if you’re left to stop another faction running away with it single handed.
I think Quinns said of the original box that he found each faction had a specific other faction whose job was to stop it getting the runaway win, and if that other faction’s player wasn’t on the ball…
The Cats are actually best placed to deal with the Alliance, but it’s by policing rather than aggression. iirc, 3+ units in a clearing increases the cost to add unrest by an extra card, and that can cripple Alliance expansion. Likewise, sitting a big police force on an Alliance base prevents their tiny force from moving anywhere, without giving them any cards. It’s easy for the cats to get a lot of recruitment, but inefficient to be moving around and attacking any more than absolutely required. (Contrast with the birds, who can move and battle a ton, but are crippled by having to hand over cards to the alliance)
That said, the cats are just plain hard to win with. You’ll usually run out of steam, need to marshal free moves from crafting very carefully, and probably go for a dominance win. The alliance starts off very slow, but snowballs to their win condition.
Which shows that sometimes, Turmoils are very necessary for the Eyrie to win. It is very counterintuitive, but very often it is a turn that is not wasted, you just gain 1 VP or none at all instead of 3-5 per turn as you would.
This is my main perk against the Cats. You start strong, but if the Alliance is playing, your steady pace and the nature of the Alliance makes your chances of winning very slim against somebody who knows how to use them.
I appreciate this. It makes sense - I’d been percolating on a few of the ingredients but that ties it all together.
Got to play the Clone Wars Pandemic, and it was pretty great. Aside from the original, it’s the only pandemic I’ve played, and it was cool to see the system tweaks made to fit the theme. My daughter was very excited to see the Clone Wars characters that she’s gotten to know from the show, and the mechanic of discarding one of them for each damage taken hit her hard. We defeated Ventress, though, so Commander Cody’s sacrifice was not in vain.
Played last night a few rounds of Love Letter with my daughter. Even though I won the first “set” easy, she wiped the floor with me on the following two. Amazing how many times she guessed my card right using a Guard or managing to make me drop the Princess through a Prince card. Hat’s off.
I just saw an ad for this on BGG the other day and I am very interested. But I still need to get Fall of Rome to the table.
This’ll teach me to post a photo without any accompanying text indicating the game title. It took me ages to locate my Land vs Sea post in the Last game you bought? thread. You can see some of the game tiles there.
I played a two-hander this evening to learn it. (I didn’t think to take a photo of the end state before I packed it up, so here is someone else’s.)
I like it (as I’d expected), however I fear for my chances of getting to play this with my partner. The game is superficially a bit like the city-building part of Carcassonne, but each (hex) tile contains both land and sea areas, and one player is trying to enclose areas of Sea while the other is trying to enclose areas of Land. So you’re wanting to play tiles that help to close off areas for you, while ideally expanding the extent of your opponent’s areas to make it harder for them to close them. Closed areas score 1 point per tile involved for the associated player, plus possible bonus points for whichever player actually closed it. (In the above BGG link, Sea has had rather a bad time of it – most of that is one huge incomplete area which has scored them no points. As a rule you want to make lots of small areas, but my first impressions are that this is much easier said than done…)
I think my biggest problem will be that whereas in Carcassonne you can be mean, I think in this game it’s absolutely inevitable. Because every tile you play affects both types of areas, messing with their borders to make things harder/impossible is a certainty; You can also finish an area for them (if you think they’ll do it themselves otherwise) and steal the bonus points (marked on some tiles) which they would have gotten for finishing it; Some tiles cause you to steal one of your opponents two tiles from them, meaning they only have one option on their next turn (but drawing back to the normal hand of 2 afterwards).
As often happens with Carcassonne as well, I found the last few turns took me into A.P. mode as I tried to figure out whether/where I could get any points with my final tiles.
I played the basic rules, but there are three sets of optional advanced rules built into the system which could easily be very A.P. triggering. Some tiles have mountain/forests on some land edges or corral reefs on some sea edges, and there are points to be had for matching those things together (with escalating points if you can connect more of those tiles in a sequence). Then there are tiles with ships or caravans which introduces some area-majority scoring at the end of the game: if a group of connected tiles have a total of 5 ships and 4 caravans, then the Sea player wins the majority and gets 5+4 points (tbh I think this would be extremely tough to keep tabs on – the ship/caravan areas can arbitrarily overlap multiple land/sea areas, and that just seems like it’s going to be hard to track visually). Lastly each player optionally starts the game with a token they can place on unfinished areas, and if the area is later finished there are bonus points and they get their token back (but they only get it back if that area is finished – much like having a single meeple to place in any city-in-progress in Carcassonne). I can envisage it getting pretty tricky to figure out the best use of your tiles once you start adding in these additions. (Also, I really like the detailed artwork on the tiles, but I hadn’t realised how many of those details were gameplay-related until going through these extra rules.)
Finally, while you can see which 2 tiles each player has, all tiles are double-sided with different things on each side, and only the player with a given tile knows what the hidden side has. So you could figure out half of their options on their next turn, but not the other half. Maybe they’re about to finish an area that they can’t finish with their visible tiles, etc. This also affects your choice of tile when drawing back to 2 – you don’t know what’s on the other side of the tiles you’re choosing between.
All in all it felt like a pretty neat design. I just hope I actually get to play it with another human! : )
If you’re in the market for a very interactive tile layer which is easy to learn and kinda cut-throat to play, I’d say this one is worth looking at.
Just played a bunch of games at SHUX, so I’ll just post the short notes I took on all of them
Wormholes - Hella fun, will buy
Spirit Island - Maybe?
Tsuro - Enjoyable enough
Rebuilding Seattle - I liked a lot, will buy
Heisenburger - Fun, but not really my jam
Allthingi - Interesting, but probably not a buy
Container - It was fun, I’d play again but not buy
Irish Gague - Also fun, maybe a buy but check out Iberian Gague and Ride the Rails first?
Sidereal Confluence - Still fun. Still no idea what I’m doing.
Kingdomino - Fun little game
Tales From the Loop - I dunno. I wouldn’t own it but probably wouldn’t say no to a game.
Twilight Inscription - I liked it
Codenames Duet - Mostly captures the fun of the original
Onitama - If I wanted a 2p game, I’d get it
More Cat in the Box!
Stephenson’s Rocket - yep. This is the Japanese edition, and my priors were confirmed. Visibility on who has what commodity and who has what shares is not as good as the Grail Games edition. Grail just did an excellent job on the UX of this game. The only reason why you want to look at other people’s personal board is the number of passengers they hold.
Anyway, best Knizia game ever.
Yes! Even more Cat in the Box!
Decrypto - I have swung the other way in the party gaming pendulum. I am now seeking these thinky filler games. Decrypto is just aces!
Irish Gauge - I’m trying to put Cube Rails on the table. Irish Gauge is, so far, Amabel Holland’s best title. Need to explore Dual Gauge and Trans Siberian Railroad more. Will be waiting for Dinosaur Gauge.too
Imperium: Classics/Legends - We played with 4 players and it’s soooo booooring. This is ONLY a 1 player or maybe 2 player game. The take-thats are just the shallow BS from Euro designers. “ooohhhh you get an unrest! Oh no!”. Like, how is this “interaction” fun? I wasn’t interested on what everyone else is doing!
I have this theory that take-thats are now on designer check-list because games have to have interaction nowadays (disagree). And this is the most milquetoast crap they can think of. As the Celts, I didn’t feel like there’s anything different with playing against the Arthurians, Romans, or Mauryans. There’s no ecosystem. This could have been like a light deck-building interpretation of Root or something, or maybe I’m just expecting too much.
Tonight my wife and I played Taverns of Tiefenthal to unwind after the kids fell asleep. I think we were pretty even for most of the game, but on the last two rounds I got very little money, while my wife got a ton on the last round, managing to upgrade four of her sections while I could only upgrade one. She won, 126 - 98.