I think you’ve previously expressed some thoughts around the first move being critical in a game. For me Azul is a game where you only really see how important that first move is after a few games. One time I was teaching it and normally with a teaching game you can bumble through to the end but with Azul I felt like you can’t really do that as your mistakes can easily be felt and reflected upon all game.
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Interesting! I didn’t notice that this time, but I did work on building up a grid from the start rather than just taking what would get quick singles.
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Had a nice manageable four for our first game night in the new place. Much easier to play games at the table than in our old place so it worked out great!
We started with Factory Fun, which delivered on the titular promise. A lot of bemoaning from all sides. My wife got a lot machines with extra supply vats, so although she was consistently riding the line of bankruptcy, her input-output points were so high that she easily won.
This is my factory. There’s a lot of wasted output at the top left, which were the last two machines I got. Unfortunately no way to fit either of them into the rat’s nest at the bottom to take over some of the work that my orange vat had been doing since the beginning.
Then we cleansed our palate with Sushi Go Party, using the menu from the original game. What a good time!
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I have some solo gaming to report from this week:
- Dune Imperium with the Rise of Ix expansion: after doing my Top10 list I remembered that I had not played this in a while which is the reason it was so hard to decide between this and Arnak. Tonight, I lost badly against the „twin bot“ (it plays two opponents): 4 points for me with the bots at 11 and 5. Ouch. Makes me want to play again.
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Planet Unknown: 3 more plays with different planets and corporations. Tracks and polyominoes ftw
- Canvas: 3 plays this afternoon that didn‘t convince me to invest any more money in expansions. It‘s rather pretty, so I am keeping it at the moment for an art-themed game-night that has not materialized since I bought this to pair it with Art Decko and Modern Art… hmf.
- Voll verplant: 9 games, making this one of my better flip & writes. Played the Japan maps mostly. I just enjoy these route building things. This one works for me even with repeated plays. Which is rare for one of this genre. They are either too complicated or too simple. This one seems to hit that small path in the middle where currently only Railroad Ink resides.
- Cascadia: 4 more games, it took me a total of 10 games to crack the puzzle for the solo competition. I took a break now. As an aside: Verdant has not convinced me.
- Guild of Merchant Explorers: 2 more games. I think this one is nice but also a little too easy and as I may have stated elsewhere or not: it‘s good but not square box for 40€s good.
As of right now I need about 9-10 more games—depending on which games I choose to complete this—for my „easy“ 10x10 solo challenge.
(Dune in space…)
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I got a chance to play my copy of Carnival Zombie today, and I’m pretty confident this will be sticking around for a while. It’s not particularly complicated, but it’s a forced party of 6 so things were slow going (solo) as there are a lot of moving parts, and there’s a decent amount of asymmetry in the characters.
I got my butt handed to me before I could even trigger the (consolation) finale, but wow, what an arc! Huge fun and tension throughout, and a pretty serious tactical challenge. The different finales present really great opportunities to fail forward, which isn’t something you usually get in a one-off game. Very neat, very unique in my collection. Happy with the add.
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AuZtralia, solo, x 3.
It’s good! I think I’ve seen enough to want to pick up TaZmania at some point, which targets solo and 2-player games, but I reckon I should try some 2-handers as well, as the game surely loses something when there are only two tokens (you + the AI) on the time track.
Set-up seemed pretty arduous the first time, but actually isn’t bad once you know how it works, and I found I could zip through all the tile and resource placements pretty quickly in my subsequent games. The extent to which things get randomised, both across the map, and in the card decks, ensures that no two games will play out the same way. This inevitably means that the difficulty will vary from game to game; but if you like this kind of variability then this game has it in spades. It also has multiple different ways to adjust the difficulty, plus a double-sided map with rules variations for each side, so I think there’s a ton of longevity here if you enjoy the game.
The actual gameplay feels smooth and streamlined in a good way – turns go by quickly, and it feels to me like getting a very solid amount of game for the time put in (games are taking ~90mins I think, which is potentially on the slow side on my part, but probably the right ballpark).
With railways costing more time to build than anything else, the initial “safe” expansion-oriented phase of the game goes by shockingly quickly, before the Old Ones start to awaken and move. There simply isn’t nearly enough time to do all the things you’d like to do.
I managed to win my third game (playing on easiest difficulty). It was actually a large margin (albeit with some awfully favourable cards), so I’ll attempt the normal difficulty next time.
I’d come close to winning my second game – for the solo objective card I’d drawn, I needed to prevent any old ones ever getting within 3 hexes of my port for a points bonus which would have made all the difference, and I almost managed this, but in the final turns a new old one awoke too close to the port and just made a bee line for it, as I had no farms which would have distracted it (a tactical blunder).
My first game was a more hilarious loss. I didn’t know what the pyramids did yet, so it was a little distressing when the very worst thing in the game suddenly spawned three spaces from my port, and immediately moved to attack it. I managed to do 11/15 damage before conceding defeat, which I thought wasn’t bad in the circumstances :)
Edit: If a sub-3-minute introduction to the game sounds appealing, check out this video.
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A few games yesterday:
Twilight Inscription: AKA Twilight Imperium: the roll and write. This is a ridiculous concept, but it’s actually a decent implementation.
There’s quite a bit going on! It’s less “heads down” than other roll & writes because of the periodic war event cards. The combat is very 7 Wonders, in that you build up your military strength and then compare with both of your neighbours.
Dragoon: a fairly light game in which you are dragons hoarding gold by terrorising towns and fighting other dragons. Nothing mindblowing but I’d play again
Tyrants of the Underdark: Deckbuilding + area control + D&D. I’m very ambivalent about the theme but it was fine and fairly quick to play.
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Agents of SMERSH: Epic Edition, our second play. Went pretty smoothly, it’s pretty much move, encounter each turn. I think you need to play a game like this pretty fast, not much to analyse. I think we finished in about two hours, we defeated the henchman (on easy) and Dr Lobo. It’s tricky to predict what skills are required for which response on an encounter, so we just choose something fun and go with it.
Turing Machine, for details, see my previous description. Everyone picked it up pretty easily, as I thought they would. And it played out much as I thought it would, not much interaction between players, but a decent challenge. Bit of setup required, and resorting of cards after use, but not too bad. For a quicker game I’d still go Break the Code. But TM is definitely worth the setup.
Lords of Scotland, great game, not sure why we don’t play it more. Definitely some player interaction here, as you can nick other peoples cards. And even low cards can be useful. You can’t use a cards ability if there is any card out with a lower value, so an early low card can mean no-one gets to play their cards.
Filipino Fruit Market, aka Tindahan (that’s the title on my box). I can’t resist a good trick taking game, and this one was a lot of fun. Normal trick taking rules, there’s a trump suit, must follow suit if you can. But, the start player in a trick can change the trump fruit, and instead of playing a card, you can add a token to the cart of the same fruit as the lead suit. Having the most tokens is worth five points, but it means not playing a card, and you get negative points for any cards left in your hand at the end of the round.
Noctiluca
Pumafiosi
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We managed to finally get another game of Spirit Island in yesterday. This was our third game, so some of the training wheels started coming off, with powers being picked from four random cards and a Blight card in play. No adversary yet, that will wait for next game or the game after.
With my wife playing A Spread of Rampant Green and me playing Thunderspeaker we made slow but steady progress and felt a lot more in control than our previous game.
My wife made good use of Green’s ability to lose presence from Sacred Sites to block ravages then regrow while I had fun manoeuvring the mushrooms Dahan huts around the island leaving a trail of devastation in their wake.
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More games today:
Civilization: a new dawn: my husband got this at UKGE and I was worried it might just be a bit of a cash grab based on the video game. It seems alright on a first play - I’d like to give it another go now that I have an idea what I’m doing!
Azul: queen’s garden: the scoring track goes up to 300… But none of us got above 70 
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Over to Slightly Less Local Game Group today, where I ended up playing:
- Hidden Leaders – I’m missing the subtleties of this (if any). Two undead-faction players did a solid job of driving up both markers and eliminating cards that would move them down again. I think more plays would help it make more sense.
- Realm of Sand – why did this not become a hit? Poor distribution from EmperorS4? I’ll grant the components are a bit cheaply produced, and I’ll probably sleeve the cards at some point, but even so. Great gameplay, always good fun. We added a fifth player since he turned up at the last moment, and it didn’t break anything. (One player wanted to buy a copy, so I pointed her at boardgameprices; it’s still out there, for about £26 right now.)
- Furnace (in “free ordering” mode) – I think I’m in love. The auction mechanic would make the game on its own; stack it with the engine puzzle and the unique player powers, and this is definitely one that I’ll be buying.
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My smell test on Furnace is that the free mode is the patched in mode that felt better than the more elegant (time wise and space wise) fixed mode. It’s a good game though and has survived a cull or two.
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I’ve never heard of it, if that tells you anything…
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I liked Matt’s review of Furnace, but just never pulled the trigger on it.
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I tend not to count this as games, but I had a really good score on Lords of Waterdeep at 4 players max difficulty
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Yeah, EmperorS4 isn’t especially plugged into the publicity/promotion network. And I don’t know which games they were primary publisher for - Burano and Walking in Burano at least seem to have got some attention.
Selling games at Essen for higher than UK retail (thus significantly more expensive than retail anywhere else) isn’t a good sign, though.
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Emperor S4 got a hot buzz around hanamikoji and one other game which got a sequel (secret of the temple) but I think they released a lot which was decent but lacked the punch of discovery and being new so I think after that they sort of leaned a lot on those small games which will get diminishing buzz in my observation (unless you’re oink)
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They did a deal with Deep Water games for US distribution and so the small box games all got put in bigger boxes. I believe that’s a mistake for small box games.
Round House also got a bit of buzz but then they over produced and it went heavily in to discount bin territory. I wonder if that experience put them off doing the bigger games?
Also I love Burano, still probably my favourite game. However it is sooo misunderstood. The comments in BGG about it are so inaccurate. It’s not optimised for first play experience and doesn’t behave like a normal euro. In my opinion that’s good but it does seem at odds with the market.
Maybe all this adds up to just being a publisher that won’t break through in to the big leagues now?
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We’ve got quite a few of their games:
- Burano
- Realm of Sand
- Trial of the temples
- Discovery: The Era of Voyage
- Herbalism
- Jigūan: The Eastern Mechanist
They all seem fairly solid!
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Played a lot of games at a get together this weekend
Some thoughts…
Mexica
Enjoyed this a lot, part of the mask trilogy. Wasn’t quite as nasty as I was expecting but I suspect that is because we were new players. Would be keen to try again, although having played each once I prefer Tikal.
Lancaster
Glad I played it, but not for me. I felt like I didn’t achieve much.
Ra
Really clever, glad I own it. I think more players will make it tenser. Have mostly played at 3.
Ginkopolis
I think this is a really strong game that will get better as I understand it better. Similar weight and length to Troyes (same designer) but a much shorter teach.
Carrom
So hard, but enjoying more as my skill level improves.
Tichu
Really happy we got this to the table. Could have played all weekend.
Cosmic Frog
Mental. Glad I experienced it but I think I prefer Cosmic Encounter, particularly the slightly more deterministic combat. Chucking 5 dice would be better than 2.
Night of the Ninja
I’m not loving social deduction currently and I think I was a bit tired when we played this, but I didn’t get much out of this. Thought the biggest moment was when I screwed up and was responsible for a teammate getting murdered.
Just One
Had some good fun with this. When it’s good it’s really good, but there can be a lot of down time.
So Clover
I enjoy this as well, but I think we all got a tricky board and writing the clues took ages.
Doodle Dash
Real highlight for me. I think we laughed more at this than anything else.
Longshot the Dice Game
Much better than my first play. Still don’t feel the excitement about the actual race that reviewers describe.
Winner’s Circle
I was expecting more from a Knizia. The horse movement felt really unbalanced to me.
Parade
Clever little game with bits I can see from other games.
Oriflamme
I still like this, simple to play but decisions feel crunchy.
The King is Dead
Really enjoyed. Very tense although apparently ours was a weird game. Would like to explore more. I like team games at the moment.
I’m The Boss
Chaotic madness. I got this as a present. Not for everyone because there’s a lot of screwing with each other but we had a hoot.
Skull King
Good trick taker with very similar elements to a lot of games. Probably prefer Wizard because it’s simpler.
Las Vegas
Nice simple area majority dice chucker. Would happily play again.
Paint the Roses
I just adore this, it makes my brain sing
Some pictures…
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