At the moment, I don’t mind - I actually quite enjoy seeing people ‘get it’ so happy to do it. One woman who came last night actually said she was going to go away and buy a game and she would teach it to us next time!
9 Likes
And next week, you’ll be:
A) wondering where did she even find the copy of The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43
B) asking yourself if your friends and family will still remember you when it’s done
C) remarking how much easier the gameplay is than you ever imagined – her rules explanation was incredible!
12 Likes
I know someone who has a copy… 
(Probably - I don’t know if this is a real game or not but he has soooooooooo many war games)
3 Likes
Now I am thinking that in those lists of games you should play at least once in your lifetime… they forgot that one.
And go to the extreme, take a week off, go camp somewhere and play it like Rommel did.
EDIT: Minus the tanks and bombs flying round. That might involve a trip to a warzone and we would not recommend that
3 Likes
Okay, so. TTS because I am still scared AF to do in person gaming (every time I think about inviting somebody over for games, they come into my workplace without a mask a few days before the weekend, just to banish any thoughts that they are being as cautious as I would like), but I managed to get a full game of Battletech in!
4500 BV. I took an Archer 2K with an Elite pilot (named “Killingyouguy”), an Orion (“Grunt”), a Hatchetman (“Hacka di Planete”), and a Locust (“Dedman Runnin”). My opponent, Nick, brought a King Crab (“Pinchy”), an Axman (“Lil Chopper”), a Hatchetman (“Big Chopper”, yes, he knows), and a Wolfhound (“Bill”).
He wanted an Elite pilot but couldn’t fit it in… But that’s because he accidentally took a LosTech Axman (double heatsinks, large pulse laser, ferro-fiber armour). Ah well.
Early shots were mostly pointless: my Archer found a hill and stood there all game,.lobbing LRMs at anything that poked it’s nose out of.cover. Turns out the 2K varient generates way more heat than it can deal with if you use the lasers and the LRMs, making it a pretty stupid design (12 heatsinks, and one round of shooting generates 26 heat… ridiculous). Ah well, lessons learnt!
My Locust circles around behind the behemoth King Crab, but then decided to unload on the Wolfhound instead: the laser did some middling damage, but a machine gun burst managed to get 3 Crits on its torso! Two crits to the engine and one on the gyro. In response, Nick’s Hatchetman managed to land a solid blow with its ax to my Locust… and hit the head, cleaving it clean off in a single blow!
(There were lots and lots of missed shots at it as well, of course)
His Wolfhound shutdown from heat… so we were both down our Lights.
My Orion and Hatchetman went after the enemy Axman, raking it with AC10s and medium lasers and a few hacks from my hatchet. In response, the King Crab casually blew off the Hatchetman’s left leg, then left torso. My mech fell, the pilot knocked unconscious.
The final round saw me pouring everything I had into the Axman to little effect, but enough damage to cause it to fall, and fail his pilot roll, knocking it out. His King Crab opened up on my stationary (and massively overheating) Orion, but missed all its shots: the heat caused it to overheat, then it’s AC20 ammo exploded (taking out it’s left torso, the large laser, and knocking out the pilot). His Hatchetman fared little better against my Orion, but it was basically pristine at the end of the fight.
I conceded (it was getting late), but things weren’t as dire as they may have been. I still had two functional heavies, and his King Crab was useless aside from it’s LRM15.
Gosh I love Battletech.
10 Likes
I love Hardback. It is my favorite word game. by a lot. I should really rate it a 10 on BGG to reflect this I guess.
And I really really want to like Paperback Adventures. Tonight was my third game. I only have 1 of the character boxes. And maybe that is for the best. Maybe it was a mistake to listen to SVWAG talk about it while I played it.
But they really just confirmed the niggles I already had about it. I present evidence #1: the components. Well the component that they call the „dealbreaker“. The idea is good. Track the HP, energy, crowns and poison values for yourself and your opponent in these pretty plastic trays. I do seem to remember that during the campaign they struggled to make it all fit. The end result is: it fits so snuggly that if you are not careful it pops right back out. Also if by chance you have two trackers in the same slot (3 fit in there) if you have to get out the first one … you have to get out the other ones, too. And guess what you have to move around at least 1 marker on each board per round. More often it is 2 markers per round. Up and down. If I could take time on how much of the play time is spent fiddling with these things… I stopped putting them into the slots and just dropped them on sideways.
For me the component thing is meh but not the dealbreaker.
I love books. I love the idea to have a wordgame about books. I love all the cards the Mc Guffins and what they do and the items… I love that this game has a card called Chekov‘s Gun. Except the gun is mostly useless. Like most of what is in the picture. It is all mostly useless.
#evidence 2: please see the upper right corner of the previous image. You may see the „shop“ sign. Well, I just played a 90 minute campaign of 6 fights and I bought 1 letter from the shop and I couldn‘t even upgrade it. I played a whole game and didn‘t upgrade a single card (they have really pretty sleeves that allow flipping the cards to the upgraded side). I got all the items and McGuffins as rewards for the fights, I got 2 full crowns over the course of the entire game… (crowns is what you use to buy stuff but what one of my character specific items also uses to do stuff… so not getting any is pretty much eliminating a lot of the game).
So maybe this is just not this character‘s specialty? She is a poisoner after all and not after Crowns. So I use the poison track and my other special item to deal damage to opponents in a sneaky way. And on 1 of 3 games this actually worked because I lucked out and drew an item that allowed me to pay energy to further poison opponents … this time not so much. So my special did a grand total of 3 damage this whole game.
More complaints:
- What really bugs me the most is that I stopped caring about the words. I draw 4 cards each turn. I get to add 1 vowel from the boss and 1 wild. And in 2 of 3 games I actually had items that allowed me to draw an additional card for a total of 7 letters. But then some cards give bonusses for being discarded and the boss vowel has strategic use that supersedes it‘s use as a letter: including it in your word skips over an action that might be worse than the next one. The wildcard gives you energy to spend on items if not used. Quite a few letters give bonusses for short words. So I end up making words like „At“ or „Gun“ or „Sing“ …
- tricky housekeeping issues: you only get the bonusses from the word in the „clash“ phase but have to use all items before that and then need t keep track of what you did and when and…
- the game purports to be a deck builder. But it is more of a deck management game: except for 2 of the boss fights all cards you add to your deck are not added but replace other cards. So you begin the game with 10 cards and you end it with 12. Those 12 may be better than the starting cards sure…
- at least you gain a lot of items and McGuffins in the game more than anything else but those are more or less random draws from the decks and once again in this game I had at least 2 that didn‘t do anything the whole game.
- to win the game you have to rush each boss with maximum damage. I have rarely ever found it useful to splay left for defense. The strategy seems to be to do damage quicker than the opponent and use the boss vowel to skip over actions that would damage you to badly. And since this is not in line what this character box says it should feel my guess is the other boxes would play very similar. Edit: reading through this again there is also another reason to rush: each word you make exhausts the top card from your word so it is out of this particular fight. As each opponent has two sides and you have a maximum of 12 cards to exhaust playing for time and going slow is just not a valid strategy.
Finale: The arc of the game is flat. There is no real trilogy with a suspenseful opening and a climactic boss fight to remember at the end—it feels like 3 books of boring „middle part“. After half the game I get bored… is it unfair to think I would rather have played Ark Nova tonight? After all that game is Top10 now on BGG. But I also think I‘d rather have read a book than played at being in one. Or lost more at Agropolis (More on that in another post). This game frustrates me, the little jokes, the cards, the ideas and the theme speak to me and I have nothing else except Hardback that hits that note… but I don‘t think I want to play it.
10 Likes
Did some Oink games session.
The Pyramid’s Deadline - dice drafting and build a pyramid. It’s fine.
Troika - It’s a push-your-luck and make 3-token sets. One should be a 3 of a kind to act as fuel for your ship. The 3 runs are your ores you’ve harvested from the planet. It’s a decent game, but we got so many push-your-lucks tbh. This one can compete with its small size.
In a Grove - the rules seems good, in theory, but once you play it, the logic is just too straight-forward that there’s not much uncertainty going on. Players earlier on the turn order are obviously hosed.
Kobayakawa - Finally! A great game from this session! The twist with the Kobayakawa card supplementing the lowest card is a wild twist that stops the game from being too predictable. This is a good one from Oink.
Rurik - not an Oink. It’s another troops-on-a-map. Still fun. Not very elegant system. But the flow is nice. Once players know how the entire system works on Round 1, then Round 2 is easy.
6 Likes
Thirsty Meeples in Oxford tonight. (If you’re near Oxford and would be up for an occasional outing to try new games, give me a shout.)
- Akropolis, a tile-laying city-building game; it felt to me like a blend of Between Two Cities (without the “between” bit, but a similar set of constraints on the zones of different colours) with NMBR 9 (tiles on top of others are worth more). Didn’t feel as though it was doing anything terribly original, or anything to do with akropolites, but it was good fun and I’d play again.
- Heat: Pedal to the Metal, and I think I start to see what’s going on. On the one hand, yes, there’s card play quite like the same designers’ Flamme Rouge; on the other, they’ve removed the consumption of cards which ties races to a particular length, and cards can be swapped in and out of the system as the race progresses. It’s hard to justify getting this when I already have both Flamme Rouge and Rallyman GT, but I’d certainly play it some more (at least if I couldn’t persuade people to Rallyman instead).
- Wonder Woods, gathering with partly hidden price information. Pretty basic but I’d put this under the nose of a bright kid and it wasn’t offensive.
- the traditional Timeline, in this case Historical Events. Which includes the extinction of dinosaurs as well as the release of Nelson Mandela, and I had quite an easy time of it.
9 Likes
That’s disappointing. Everything I’ve seen so far makes me relieved that I took a “wait and see” approach to Paperback Adventures. I like Paperback and I love the thematic touches with the book titles and illustrations (they always make me smile), so I was imagining a solo word game with a great theme, but it seems like the designers lost the plot (or at any rate designed a game that doesn’t hold any appeal to me at all).
4 Likes
Had our first game night in what feels like forever!
For Sale with a full complement of six, first play of this! It was a lot of fun! You run out of money in the bidding round a LOT faster than I was expecting, but I still did alright. I had the 29 and the first 15,000 card came out on the second-to-last round, so I had to guess whether my friend with the 30 would play it. He didn’t! So it was close but he beat me by 2,000 in the end.
Ethnos also with a full six. Merfolk, Wingfolk, Orcs, Giants, Skellingtons, and Minotaurs. Fun fights over the territories as usual. I ignored the Merfolk completely and mostly got points from Giants, which I held the token for in the last two rounds (and got the points from the big Giant bands that implies).
Finally two rounds of No Thanks, a big hit! Won both times by the same person who had a whopping -7 in the first game.
8 Likes
I also played two rounds of No Thanks last night, with six players. I lost both games (the first with a catastrophic 74 points to my name). I think that, in both games, every single time I thought I was safe to allow another circuit around the table to get more tokens before taking a horrible card, someone else took the card and its tokens just before me – and then something equally horrible would get turned up and I’d have to take it with virtually no tokens on it at all. It was awful! I love it :)
I also played Handsome the other day, which is an ingenious micro-sized word game in just 18 cards.
And I’ve been playing a bunch of solo Cribbage on the train, which I can do with just my travel-sized board on my knees, the card box to hold the discarded cards after each hand, and everything else I can manipulate in-hand and between fingers – the remaining deck, my hand, and the crib. I can get a couple of games in on my usual train trips, so it’s my go-to option.
Also a few rounds of Calico, which is my current outdoor solo game of choice when the weather is nice (being another breeze-resistant game). I remember being a bit overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of cardboard and tokens when I bought this, and wondering whether I’d made a mistake; but with every cat stored in its own zip-lock bag it’s pretty quick to set up, and I find this a really enjoyable game to play, so I’m glad that I picked it up.
10 Likes
Some games over the last week:
Splendor Duel, it’s great - all the best bits from Splendor with more interesting decisions throughout.
Azul: SP x3, played a best of three with my Mum when she was down visiting. She won. I’m better at this than the original, apparently still not great though 
Takenoko, super close game of this one which was great.
Spring Meadow, my favourite polyomino placement game (if we’re not including A Feast for Odin)
Galaxy Trucker, man it had been awhile for this - it’s still excellent though. Our winner did really well all three flights and despite me doing pretty great at runs 2 and 3, his lead was enough to make him a clear winner. The intruders from the expansion can really screw with you, but I like that with them included you can’t just build a ‘perfect’ ship and cruise through the game - there’s always a threat you can’t totally prepare for. Robosmokies suck though. (Also am I missing a reference there? Cause I continue to have no idea what is going on with that card…)
4 Likes
I have only played Cottage Garden and the fall themed one … have you played those? What does Spring Meadow do to be better? (My favorite has always been Cottage Garden but maybe only because I played this more than the fall one the name of which I cannot even remember and I have not played Spring Meadow)
2 Likes
Indian Summer??
3 Likes
Just got done learning Furnace. Super simple (if you’ve played it, about the same complexity as New York Zoo), but oh boy, that’s brain-burny. Kinda refreshing after Beyond the Sun and Bitoku, LOL.
Oh, and I won against the stuffed monkey 54-40. No idea if that’s a big gap. I had a LOT of problems playing a two-fisted game of this, for some reason.
7 Likes
Scout - Scout is great, innit
Food Chain Magnate base game with 5 players. Boy it was such a wild dynamic. With more players, I found myself blindsided a few times. It only went for 3 hours with 4 newbies (still faster than some Euros) yet the game felt really epic. When using the word “epic” to describe a gaming experience, this is what I am looking for.
5 Likes
I forgot to report my game of ISS Vanguard on Thursday night. We played the second mission (still quite tutorial-ish) and really enkoyed the feeling of living your own Interstellar-like adventure (with less physics involved, but hey, give it time I guess?). The systems are slightly complicated, but the actual gameplay is nice an easy, and I am liking the choice selections that are involved though the adventures.
At some point, the reduced supplies were really feeling stressful, and I think we managed well even though at some point it looked like some of the team would not be able to return. I can see this being a heavy part of future missions (a bit a la exhausted cards systems in Gloomhaven but with dice instead)
We managed to only get a couple of recruits injured, but we did clear all the unique discoveries and even an extra one that might come in handy on future planets. Looking forward to our next sessions, to see what the game will feel like full on.
8 Likes
If you’re not feeling it you’re not feeling it, but a few comments from my own single play (with Damsel also) thus far:
I also got almost no crowns. That did feel like a problem but it’s possible that it’s rewarding riskier play (the effects I had with crown generation generally didn’t do a lot else) or more challenging words (also they were on letters I had some difficulty making top card). I definitely didn’t use them for my item.
I had like 8 of my cards upgraded due to victory rewards and a right out of the gate Boss McGuffin that upgraded cards in my fatigue pile when an encounter flipped (and then put two of those cards back on my deck).
At the very end of the game I had an item that I could flip for a one time hex injection (it’s poison for Damsel but it’s a generic mechanic) but otherwise I was mostly generating hexes from letter cards, especially a Plot effect that added one. It may not seem that effective but I found it tremendously useful for peeling that last chunk of HP off, especially on stage 2. Especially as it’s loss of life, not damage. (I did eventually get an X that let me double the hexes on the enemy, but didn’t get to use it much.)
I only had one effect that rewarded me for short words and I swapped that out almost immediately. But that’s also specifically a Damsel thing - the others don’t have any cards like that and Plothook actually has a mechanic that only fires when you have 6, 7 or even 8 letter words (he accomplishes this through his Crew mechanic which allows him to play letters from his fatigue pile). And I early on got a Z that I could Plot into a larger hand the next turn, so that actively encouraged longer words at least some of the time (when I had a Critical Hit and didn’t have a bunch of Plot cards).
There are definitely enemies you need to block, e.g. The Titan. I agree that offense is generally more useful but most of my fights lasted at least 6-7 turns and not infrequently more, and I never once used the enemy vowel for its effect and made it pretty handily to the final boss (though I didn’t win that one. It just happened to have a hex effect that I couldn’t deal with. The vowel wouldn’t have been useful.)
It’s definitely a random game, and it’s less a word game than a tabletop version of those roguelite card games where words are a major constraint to wrestle with on how exactly you deploy your cards, so I wouldn’t recommend it for people who are primarily into it for a word game. But I had a much better time than you apparently did, and with some of your complaints I wonder if you might not have had a better time with one of the other characters.
3 Likes
I agree that some of the issues may just be that I have the „wrong-for-me“ character box. This core-box model is really meh. I thought: if the game play is good I‘ll be able to buy the other boxes later. I should be able to judge the game by 1 box.
(I chose Damsel b/c in Slay the Spire the poison guy is my favorite to play with)
I admit I am a little worried that I am just unable to grok the game and how it should be played and that I am missing out. But then I have played this 3 times and every game I was a little less excited to play.
I find it very difficult to put into words how I feel after a game of Paperback Adventures. Mostly, I feel frustrated because it feels like I should win fights with dexterity and elegant moves but instead I wield my deck like a cudgel that just crushes everything in its path with blunt force with the help of a random hodge-pudge of items and McGuffins. I play games to make cool moves and combos. And this game seems to signal „you can make cool combos“ and I am frustrated because I cannot seem to create any.
This game has so much potential. The core idea with the splaying of the words to gain effects is so nice. I love it. But how this is integrated into the larger game just doesn‘t sing for me. I wish to see this mechanic in a completely different game with the same theme…
I barely ever house rule anything. This game tempts me to make up my own game from the components.
2 Likes
Modern Art
SCOUT
Rapido - which is a reprint of an older Knizia called Excape. Good dice chucking game. This might be my fave dice chucker, but I need to play more Gang of Dice
Razzia! - as a card game form, this is just better than Ra. I need to see how good the reprint is by 25th Century Games. Fingers crossed.
The Estates - tense as ever. I have to say, this is better than a lot of Knizia auction games. 
7 Likes