Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[lalunaverde]

Court of Medici - this is a very abstract card game but this is very clever design.

Facecards - animals, people, inanimate objects. You have a hand of cards. You select 2 cards. One you play in front of you. The other in the middle. The middle cards are pooled and shuffle. Each player has 2 chance to try guessing a pair that another player has made. It’s a funny party game

Age of Steam - we played 3 players with France map and it was tense, difficult, and exciting as usual

Medici - played the new edition and wow they fixed the scoring track. The colour scheme isn’t perfect, but this is way better than the Grail Games edition

Wavelength - another great party game that allows great discussion

Flamme Rouge

Just One

Codenames - yeah. This feels dated on how there’s so much down time. There’s so many party games that I’d rather play.

Waterfall Park - Chinatown reimplementation. The pseudo-hex grid is a great improvement. This allowed better chaining of lots.

Wandering Towers - A Kramer and Kiesling title. Defo in the family games section and can’t fault the game for that. But it was rather meh playing it.

Schadenfreude - great game. What else can I say?

Voodoo Prince - one of the clubmembers who returned from Korea bought this (along with loads of card games). This edition is annoying as it lacks the icons to indicate that 0’s beat 12’s, and that winning with 5’s and 7’s will award the winning player 2 tricks instead of 1. The German edition is better.

Dracula vs Van Helsing - amazing 2 player game. I don’t really consider this as a trick taking game. I would say that this is more comparable to Schotten Totten/Battle Line than a standard trick taker.

This game is easily in my top new games of this year.

Jekyll vs Hyde - I might put this as my top 2 player trick taking game. Need more plays

[Acacia]

Finally notched Sequoia. Hmm.

To rank the small box AllPlay titles so far, I think it’s:

1. Mountain Goats (though this is probably group dependent)
2. Sail (good but also frustrating)
3. Chomp (quite good, but has to compete with Cascadia, Habitats, and Trialblazers, which is a tough situation)
4. Sequoia

You roll five dice, choose two pairs, and the sum of those pairs let you put out two tokens for area majority. The problem I had is you have somewhere between 2 and (someone do the math) permutations of dice combinations in your hand, then you have to look up to the board to cross reference the winning/losing situation on the board spaces, and also track which board spaces are worth more or fewer points at the end of the game. It’s mentally fiddly in a way I found tiresome, when that was the whole game.

Now the tiebreaker rounds suddenly got spicey, that might be the real game right there?

Also, my opponents didn’t really grok the importance of different trees being worth different amounts of points until scoring, so future games could be a bit more tense with competition focused on a smaller group of spots.

It had it’s moments. Maybe destined for the kids games pile. It’s simple/short enough and small enough that it can stay around for further evaluation.

[Captbnut]

Kate and I just played Forks on BGA with @MarkSP.

Have now pledged for a copy. Really nice pub weight game and the art is great, even on BGA.

[Acacia]

How did you pledge? I’ve been trying to get in but missed the campaign.

[MarkSP]

Thank you! Late pledges are on Gamefound (Forks 2nd Edition by Radical 8 Games - Gamefound) super late pledges will just be buying it off me when it arrives, so please don’t feel you have to rush or anything.

[DJCT]

@MarkSP - did you end up doing anything with Lounge of the Ghost Ship? I have fond memories - it is where I got my descriptor after all …

Lounge of the Ghost Ship Game (Play by Post)

You all awaken in a lounge on a ship. A bunch of strangers without recognition in your eyes. A clock chimes and you somehow know, you only have 13 hours to escape… @Captbnut @RossM @Scribbs @Suz @DJCT Welcome to the Ship. It is Round 1- Planning Phase. Currently the Ship is locked down, so you can only explore Locations 1-4. When everyone has chosen somewhere to go we’ll start the Exploration Phase. Any player who hasn’t chosen somewhere by 9pm Wed (GMT) will remain here in the Lounge. No…

[MarkSP]

Thanks, I made a physical copy, but never got around to playtesting it. It would be so hard to playtest a game where the play takes place in different rooms I’ve left it for now.

[MarkSP]

After last week had another Lacerda blowout today! 2 plays of Escape Plan and one of Robot Factory. Still really enjoying Escape Plan, everyone who has played it had a blast. The second game someone asked to join who was there for their first time. Previous games they played were Splendour and Azul. We explained it would be a longer, much more complex game, and they still wanted to go ahead with it. Their first question was how we knew how many movement points we had when we hadn’t rolled dice. That all said, they got it and were able to escape, which can be more than can be said for two of the other players. The end really is about walking away when the Heat is too much. Great disasterous ‘One final score’ energy.

Bot Factory was fine, nothing too original, but the quickness of play and simpleness gave it a certain charm. Also squeezed in Wonder Bowling, Metro, a bunch of Bez’s games and Nations the Dice Game. Big day.

[BertFill]

@MarkSP

The second game someone asked to join who was there for their first time. Previous games they played were Splendour and Azul. We explained it would be a longer, much more complex game, and they still wanted to go ahead with it. Their first question was how we knew how many movement points we had when we hadn’t rolled dice. That all said, they got it and were able to escape

This is why I’m not keen on the whole idea of ‘gateway games.’ There’s hardly a popular game out there that is beyond the wit of an intelligent adult, whether or not they’ve played Ticket to Ride or Azul or Carcassonne before.

I have no idea what is the most complex game I own, but whatever it is I’m confident that pretty much anybody could cope with it, even if they’d never seen a board game before.

[RogerBW]

The impression I’ve got from recently introducing a relative novice to modern boardgames is that the difficulty is not so much “these rules are complex” as “I have to get used to picking up new rules quickly”.

[lalunaverde]

A Feast for Odin + the Norwegians - Le Havre, Fields of Arle, and then this. I requested it because it’s been a while and I wonder how I would see this now.

It’s good. The minimalistic engine building is there and it’s pretty good execution. But I found Fields of Arle’s strategic decisions more interesting. I feel that it’s the type of game that rewards memorising openings (if that’s your sort of thing). There is a good amount of forward thinking in regards to the housing and islands you can acquire on what pieces you need in to fill them up.

Sol: Last Days of a Star - 5 players full game without events, and if you look at the photo below, I only built 3 stations and 1 gate, and won the game. In our play it was neck on neck between me and White player. And I won because the last Solar Flare card flipped on my go, rather than his. I didn’t like that one. Also, first time playing without the events, and I didn’t like it.

6 Nimmt - 8 players is pretty wacky

Medici - took this reprint for another spin

Imperial - the OG, boi. Top 10 game!!!

Mercante - part of the Love Letter universe. It’s an auction game with commodity selling. It’s pretty fast and fun but the design is rather restrictive that I’m a bit dismayed.

[Benkyo]

I played one (1) four-player game of Mage Knight. Took a little longer than I would have liked, the new player basically tapped out towards the end, and even my brain was fried. The other two had a great time though, and it was nice to revisit the game.

[malkav11]

I have generally similar feelings but I will note that I know plenty of people who, whether or not they are functionally capable of learning a complex and intricate game (or even a standard weight hobbygame) are not particularly interested in actually doing so. But that still doesn’t really make games “gateway” games…because that term would imply they’re being inducted into the world of more complex boardgames later and in fact they just stop there.

[COMaestro]

As far as “gateway games” goes, I think of them as shorter games that are easily picked up that may make someone who is only familiar with things like Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry, Clue, etc. think, “Wait, board games can be like this?” And the only reason for the short and simple aspects is because people like that will probably not be all that interested in playing a board game if those other games are their only reference points. Being able to use “short” and “simple” as selling points might get such a person to at least give it a try.

[BertFill]

I’m refining my stance.
I think I’m fine with the idea of gateway games as a ‘look at this, this is what board games can be like’ for someone who otherwise might not ever try one. My problem, I think, is just with the idea that it’s all but impossible for someone to play more complicated games unless they’ve played some less complicated ones first. And that’s very much the impression I get from some people (not on here) who talk about ‘gateway games.’

[Lordof1]

Had a go of Legendary: Marvel last night. I like it, the rhythm is fun although it suffers again from the ‘who am I supposed to be in this game?’ problem that I had with Legendary Encounters. I played it solo but 2-handed, and I think it might work better purely solo, as far as ludonarrative dissonance goes at least. I like it, but… ultimately I think I prefer Marvel: Champions.

[yashima]

I got to play 2 games of Cascadia with the my cousin‘s 5 yo. The first one we played the intermediate variant and she forgot she had to place the animals next to each other for them to score. We fudged the numbers a little to get our scores as close together as feasible

Then she demanded another game but with the „adult variant“, so I picked out the AAAAA animals and she actually did better in this game. I reminded her a few times that she wanted to place animals in certain ways and she did really well. Maybe with a few clues here and there. But the game says 10+ on the side. She had also previously played with her uncle a couple times. I am guessing she‘ll get a copy soon enough.

Before they left yesterday, I also taught her a simplified version of Naturopolis (there wasn‘t time for a bigger game). She got a little confused that she couldn‘t turn the cards in both directions. But she built a pretty cool landscape nonetheless.

She seemed to prefer boardgames to almost everything. They had brought a bunch of children’s games and she was playing some roll and write with her mother a bunch of times. Her father was complaining he didn‘t have a group right now for complex boardgames.I guess he won‘t have to wait long I previously mentioned how he already plays „3 + 1“ handed Root with her.

[Phil]

@BertFill

My problem, I think, is just with the idea that it’s all but impossible for someone to play more complicated games unless they’ve played some less complicated ones first. And that’s very much the impression I get from some people (not on here) who talk about ‘gateway games.’

I don’t think I’ve ever observed anyone interpreting “gateway game” that way. Or maybe I have and I misinterpreted their interpretation :). The obvious analogue is “gateway drug”, and I don’t think anyone would try to argue that people are incapable of trying hard drugs without first trying a gateway drug. It’s just that they’re more likely to consider it. Getting people to consider trying games that they wouldn’t otherwise have considered is the aim.

[BertFill]

I’m sure I’ve seen people saying things like ‘this is not a game for beginners,’ and offering progression routes through games of varying complexity, with a clear implication that, for example, you really need to be familiar with an uncomplicated coop like Forbidden Desert before you’ll be ready for Spirit Island.

[mistercrayon]

We played some art society over the weekend. I like this thing. The game description says auction but it doesn’t feel that auctiony for most of (a two player) game.

The main reason for this is probably because it’s a jockey for position auction rather than a try to win a certain thing auction. And in most cases (perhaps this will become tighter with knowledge and experience) earlier on everything you can win in an auction will be fine enough. I guess if you’re really clever it’s doing that for sale two part thing but here even though the game remains the ostensibly same throughout there’s a secret pivot in the game where the flavour of the auction changes and the first half is creating the right circumstance to attack well in the second half.

With the auction you bid with numbers 1-20 and you can only use each bid once and you probably won’t use all the numbers so that’s why setting up good numbers at the end becomes critical. You want to be able to do what you want when the lots available move from being “anything will do” to “only one of these three tiles works for me and there’s a good chance it’ll be gone” but when that happens is not explicit and perhaps sometimes switches back.

The auction part feeds a tile placement game where you have to fit rectangles of different shapes and sizes into a board as perfectly as you are balancing hugely detrimental penalties for certain kinds of adjacency but bonuses (in the form of nooks and cranny fillers) for other kinds of adjacency.

In the trying to fit things properly aspect the game does this cool thing where over time you need specific shapes to fill your space (maybe a 2x3 rectangle and definitely not a 4x5 rectangle or something like this). The way the auctions work is when you are first player you get to choose the shape of the objects for auction but the things that affect adjacency (bonus and negatives) are invisible when you choose the shapes. So you can control things and mitigate things sometimes but it’s never a full control.

Lastly the game has this kind of stock market thing where the things that don’t get bought get more valuable (a common mechanic).

There’s a really nice smoothness to how things fit together in everything from the game to the packaging. I suppose it’ll be interesting to see if it holds interest for a long time.