You know, I picked up Tiny Epic Dinosaurs on a whim (the meeples helped for sure) and because it seemed like it would be on ok puzzle for a decent price, but I feel like it actually punches a good bit above its weight. The spatial aspect of trying to manage the pens and not overbreed, utilizing the special dinosaurs, and the interesting tweaks you can make by buying research cards adds a really nice layer to the worker placement/resource management aspect. It tickles a lot of my brain buttons and my group has also really taken to it, surprised by it as well. My only complaint is the same with Tiny Epic Galaxies, and that is just the component aspect (the board/cards slide all over the damn place). I wonāt buy a mat for it, but I really would like if the central board were, well, a board.
Lovely Wife and I started a 10x10 for the year, with Sagrada:Passion and Rallyman GT starting us off with two plays each. In our house, I decide what we buy, but she decides what we play, so I was a bit surprised that she chose Rallyman. She was very not into it, until she realized that with a combination of focus, braking, and coasting that she could absolutely dust me around the final turn, and now sheās all for it.
I highly recommend grabbing Rallyman GT5 if you donāt already have it. I think the boost/green die from GT5 gives the absolute best decisions.
Jaws of the Lion , walk in the park. One of the rooms had moving traps, which was quite cool.
Aliens : Another Glorious Day in the Corps , first play. I was so excited to get this on the table ā would have played it first, but JOTL was already setup when I arrived. It was supposed to be released in Australia, but there was some licensing issue. But Guf have it in stock, just the basic game, Iām not sure how. I ordered it directly from Gale Force Nine. I have spent hours this last week putting together the models. The humans werenāt too bad, but the alien drones were a little fiddly, my first couple were a bit rough, then I figured it out. I bought both of the expansions as well (Ultimate Badasses and Get Away From Her You Bitch). The UB expansion gives you extra characters and experience cards. I added the new characters to the main box for variety. The GAFHYB expansion gives you the alien Queen and the power loader, havenāt put those together yet.
So, basically this is a dungeon crawler in the Aliens universe. All your favourite characters are here: Ripley, Newt, Hicks, Hudson ā even Carter Burke. If you have the expansions, you have all the important characters from the movie, except for Ferro and Spunkmeyer (who didnāt do much besides crash the dropship). You have a team of six characters, so for a 3p game you choose a hero character each, and then fill the team out by turning over the character sheet to show the grunt side (worse stats and no special abilities). I chose Ripley, because I chose last and thought someone should be our fearless heroine. Each character gets to choose a main weapon, backup weapon, and two equipment cards. All the iconic weapons are here, like the M41A Pulse Rifle, and the M56 Smart Gun.
We played the first mission, finding Newt and calming her down so she could join the squad (although obviously she canāt use any weapons). We got lucky and found her early (there were four face down tokens, one of them is Newt, the others are aliens). But calming her was a chore, from a D10 die you had to roll four or lower, which I failed to do on numerous attempts. And Newt tries to run as far as she can from the Marines, but not Ripley (very thematic). Each character gets two actions on their turn, actions are move, attack, barricade, aim, interact (with something like a computer, depends on the mission), do a card action, and rest. A characters stats are speed, defense, melee, tech (for barricades), and aim. Each time you fire, your aim goes down. Some guns have a full auto mode, where you can keep firing until you miss (inevitable with your aim decreasing each shot).
Thereās a couple of decks to deal with where you exhaust cards as you use abilities. If your two main decks run out, youāve failed the mission.
After the marines have their actions, itās the aliens turn. Any existing xenomorphs move closer to your characters, and out of sight aliens are represented by blip tokens. Once you have line of sight to a blip, you flip it to find out how many actual aliens are present. More than one alien is a swarm, and you place tokens under the models. As each alien is (hopefully) destroyed, you remove tokens. New blips will spawn at various places, but they can also tunnel under you and swarm you.
The mission turned out a lot harder than it appeared at first. We found Newt so quickly I thought we would be in and out in a couple of turns. Didnāt quite work out that way, although we made it harder unintentionally by having a newly spawned alien attack straightaway. We eventually made it out, bu leaving a couple of marines behind.
This game was as much fun as I had hoped. Iām a huge Alien/Aliens fan, so just loved it. On BGG someone complained because they thought using actual pictures and quotes from the movie were too cheesy. I donāt understand this, surely you want it to be cheesy and fun. I love the quotes on the cards!
Any downsides? Slightly fiddly rules, and having to remember how the card decks are used. Its not a short game either, although this was our first play, there was lots of checking with the official FAQ.
Canāt wait to play again! You can play a full campaign, progressing through the missions, including rescue missions if a character is captured by the aliens. You can also do bug hunts, where you just have to destroy the aliens.
As Vasquez says ā lets rock!
Canvas , first play. This is a pretty light game where you create paintings. You pick up art cards, which show various symbols. You complete a painting (and score it) by adding art cards to a background in a clear plastic sleeve. Each card can cover up symbols, so you need to choose carefully to get the symbols you want. Each game has objective cards, we played with the suggested starting objectives. For example, an objective might say you need to have all four possible symbols in the same painting. Each time your painting completes an objective, you get a token. Collect tokens for points. I thought this game might be too simple, and while it is light, you can spend a bit of time choosing your cards. Beautiful looking game too, and very nicely presented (I got the deluxe KS version, of course).
Got to play a couple of games yesterday, having taken the day off from work. First up was a 2-player game of Concordia with my wife, using the Italia map. I won this one pretty handily, despite my very unusual opening move of Senator to take the Smith and a Mercator card. Which was funny in hindsight, as I ended up with no tool cities at the end. However, I did get out all but one of my houses, while my wife still had five or so to place, and I think I had more cards from the shop, and the Concordia card. Final score was 134 - 110.
After that, I tried out the beginning solo scenario of The Legend of Drizzt. The mechanics are easy enough, but I overlooked one thing which served to make the game much harder. After my first monster encounter, I neglected to draw Treasure cards after defeating monsters, which meant I quickly went down to 0 HP and was almost defeated after using the Healing Surge before I realized my mistake. I retroactively applied the rewards, which ended up healing a lot of my damage and flipping over some of my used power cards, which let me breeze through the rest of the scenario.
I like the system so far, though with the order of Hero, Exploration, and then Villain phases, any monsters that come out get to attack you before you can do anything about it, which kind of sucks. But, since so many of the Treasure cards seem to heal the heroes, it may not be too bad. Need to play more.
Definitely enjoyed it though.
One of my favorite systems. (Though Iāve been spending more time painting it than playing it lately.) If you end up enjoying Legend of Drizzt, Iād recommend picking up one of the later versions, like Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which has smoothed out the gameplay a bit. You can pull your favorite heroes and monsters from Drizzt into it as well.
Iām excited for you to play against one of the Big Bads, which are brutal playing solo, but fun to figure out.
Iām going to need some luck this weekend, as Feudum is out and itās getting played, one way or another. My partnerās interest is piqued, thanks entirely to its beautiful imagery, but Iāve been careful to temper expectations.
The teach itself is going to be daunting, though I suspect itāll cap under 30 minutes. Weāre going to play the basic game, so that eliminates half the available actions, many of which are more circumstantial and fall quickly into information overload territory. Iām hopeful an overview is sufficient for us to get to playing quickly so we can start pushing buttons.
Played the first game of our second copy of The Kingās Dilemma. Itās still excellent fun, even if I wasnāt really feeling it today.
Just played our first game of Hansa Teutonica. My wife and I played a colour each and shared a third player. She won. I really enjoyed it, lots of decisions but a pretty quick play time. Itās a shame the routes which give bonuses off your action board donāt change on setup, but I can see this one being a favourite with the guys we play with as itāll be easyish to set up and play via Zoom.
Got to play the demo game of Defiance (the Infinity-the-game dungeon-delver by Corvus Belli) on TTS.
Ups: Mechanics seem to be pretty streamlined, and I like the way they use the Aristeia dice, but a little better (specifically, Crit Blocks and Crit Successes are straight up better in the new rules, and I hope that itās a lateral translation to Aristeia soon).
Downsides: in the TTS implementation at least there are a few very poorly explained elements (specifically, the āShieldā tokens are apparently the consoles? And console rules themselves donāt make much sense. I should point out, however, that I havenāt read the physical rule book (which I have downstairs), and maybe they ironed out the issues (I think this TTS is based exclusively on the demo material that was circulated prior to the campaign finishing).
Addtional downside; there is only the demo mission on TTS! Frustrating. I was hoping to play it online with a few friends, but looks like that aināt happening any time soon. Boo.
Just finished up a game of Patchwork with my wife. We had one bad patch ofā¦patches, where there were three 10 button cost patches in a row, so we had to keep jumping over each other for a few turns.
I thought I had it in the bag, getting the 7x7 bonus and having more squares covered, but my wife came back admirably, only losing 8 points at the end for uncovered squares to my 14. And she had had more buttons on her board than me for the whole game, so it was no surprise to me at that point that she won, 17 - 7.
Got to play a 3-player game of Obsession. Final scores wound up 115, 104, 88. This game has some seriously brutal moments when someone refreshes the market or buys a tile you need for your objective just because they wanted it. It was just as tense as Iād hoped it would be, though. Every turn is agonizing as you are constantly wanting to be able to get just one step closer to the plan thatās going to pan out in two turnsā¦ no, wait, itāll be even better if I do this in three turns because Iāll have this servant back and then I can take advantage of this gentry to get that bonus thatāll let meā¦ you get the idea. Itās very satisfying to see a three-turn strategy play out or to have someone buy a tile at just the right time which then lets you buy something a turn earlier. The only complaint that I have so far on this first real play is that the objective cards left the two of us who lost a bit frustrated. I only had two of the tiles required for any of my objective cards show up the entire game, and the last place player was in a similar situation. However, the first place player ended up with objective cards that basically gave him bonus points for things he already had (servants, money, guests) and it very much won him the game. On the whole, it was a great experience (even though my fears of AP with my group were grounded in truth). Every decision feels meaningful. Many different paths to score. Nice variability. Interesting choices to make. And building your estate is very satisfying.
Iāve played Village Green most mornings this week as I drink my coffee just as a nice little self-care treat before starting my day. I honestly donāt think Iām going to be playing this with others. I really like it as a peaceful little puzzle to get my brain going. You feel really clever when things go right, and if it doesnāt go right, you can just blame the cards and move on. Low-stakes, quick, quite pretty, tight little puzzle.
This afternoon we got 3-player Everdell with Spirecrest. 54, 53, 36. Not a lot of high-value cards or critters needed for the special events. We definitely made up for it with our maps and maximizing the payout from our discovery cards. Each of us ended up with a ridiculous amount of resources. I only won because I was able to send a meeple on a 2-point journey at the end. Still very much love the game. Putting together those big combos is incredibly gratifying, and I never tire of the wonderful presentation.
Itās one of the criticisms Iāve heard about it. It gives ācorrectā openings with enough play apparently.
The last couple of weekends weāve made a start on two challenges: my āplay all your unplayed gamesā and our gaming buddyās 10x10.
From my challenge:
- Coup Reformation - not great at three but needs must.
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Yokohama - probably one of my favourites. I shall continue to refer to it as āIstanbul turned up to 11ā, and nobody can stop me
From the 10x10:
- Ride the Rails - the simpler end of train games. I like the combination of stocks, route building, and passenger transport mechanisms.
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Ninja Camp - a puzzly game where you get points and trap your opponents by removing parts of the board. Added bonus points for my character being a ninja flamingo
- Ulm - a Euroey Euro of building a medieval German city. The action selection mechanism is like a mini game of Labyrinth (the kidsā game), which is quite fun.
- Coimbra - itās okay, but the colour palette offends my eyes.
- Inis the game almost ended on the second turn, but then went on for another hourā¦
We also got in a game of Everdell, which was charming, as always.
Some excellent games there. I really fancy Ride the Rails
need to to have a closer lookā¦
Overall sounds like a set of fun games. So Ulm is not bad? Huh. Because Iāve seen it sold for so cheap I immediately assumed it had to be horrible. Ulm is a beautiful city not too far from here with a big ass church.
I quite like Ulm, I think the designers could have gone with a more novel setting than ābuilding a city in medieval Germanyā, but itās a nice game.
I feel like everything up to the first stalemate is merely game set up!
Available to play on Yucata if you want to give it a chance free of obligation or buyerās remorse!
Last night my wife and I played a game of Unmatched. She stuck with her usual Medusa, while I tried out Little Red for the first time. After just a couple of turns, both of us felt like the other had the game in the bag. She hit Red pretty hard, but the Huntsman managed to hit Medusa back, and Red used a card that did 2 damage to every opposing fighter in her zone, killing one harpy and damaging Medusa as well. Soon, both were at 8 HP.
The tide turned in her favor when she was able to bring back her harpy and move all her fighters 3 spaces, even through opposing fighters. She was able to pin in Red and hit her for a few more points of damage. Both of us were really low on cards in hand, so I just had to maneuver and hope to draw some good cards. Red was down to 1 HP when the Huntsman was able to hit Medusa for 6, but that was not enough to take her out, and a harpy took out Red on the following turn.
Playing Red was interesting. Trying to manage the cards you play to put the symbol you want on the discard pile to make your next played card more effective is tricky. She has some really powerful cards, but usually only if you have the right symbol showing in the discard pile. Luckily she has some wilds, which helps a lot, including her basket which starts in the discard pile at the beginning of the game. She was fun in any case, and I look forward to playing her some more.
