Played another app scenario of Imperial Assault. I think we’re getting towards the end of this campaign as this was a ramp up in difficulty. We won, no thanks to me who died well before the end. Two others were on their wounded side by the end as well.
The dice really seemed to go against us today.
Also got utterly destroyed at Innovation by my wife. I just couldn’t get anything going at all.
In the normal game, you lose if all the heroes are wounded. Isn’t that true of the app campaign as well?
Edit: Yep, very top of the right hand column on pg. 11 of the app rulebook:
The players lose a mission if each hero is wounded.
When a hero becomes wounded (and again if it
withdraws), players need to inform the app by
selecting that hero’s portrait and selecting the icon
to the left of the portrait.
Got two more games of Tiny Epic Dinosaurs on Saturday with my daughter. She really loves it.
I agree, this game has a lot more than it seems, resource managing and dealing with space are a lot more complex than it looks like. Managed to win a game that I had nearly lost by snatching the T-Rex on the last round (my daughter even managed to get a private contract fulfilled on that one), and on the other game where I was quite behind on contracts a good couple of final rounds really gave me the edge. I cannot wait to play this with 3 or 4 players.
Three heroes wounded doesn’t necessarily mean every hero wounded, though. There can be up to four.
Ah, true. I have been playing with three, so my mind just latched onto that number!
Thanks. Didn’t know that rule, we’ve picked up straight from the app as the teaching aid. We must have been 1 hit from losing then.
Bit of reading to do before the next game!
I’ve played at 3 a couple of times, and it is TIIIIIIIGHT! Scores were not very high, and each round is very dynamic. It’s pretty clear when everyone is going for the same contract, and that realization results in a very cutthroat race. Though, you can take advantage of that and rush your opponents into fighting for specific spaces/resources and really set yourself up for some big swings a round or two after that battle happens. I hope you can get some more people around it!
Can I just say that over the past several months I have become quite invested in your quest to beat Medusa. This has been a great saga! 
Inca Empire (not the David Turczi one. This one.). It sets during the rise of the Incas where they expand, build cities, fortress, temples, and terraced fields until some [redacted] called Pizzaro came and ruin the show.
It’s different to other games in which you all start in Cuzco and expand from there. You get points for expanding Inca and build buildings, but other people can still score your buildings if they build roads connecting to them. So it’s a positive interaction as the other player doesn’t lose points when someone else “leeches” on their hard work. So it become interesting where blocking someone other off on this map of Western region of South America isn’t beneficial to you at all. So you want someone else to work with you so you can connect to their buildings and gain points.
And also there’s the Sun phase where you play event cards to the players. The event cards board is designed in a way that an event card will always affects two players. You have a good card you can use to yourself? Then you have to share that bonus with another one. You have a bad card? You can screw 2 people with it.
So, yeah. It checks the boxes: player interaction, emerging gameplay, relatively simple rules, route building. I’m curious on how replayable this is, but I have some confidence due every game emerging differently every game. Need to play more of this.
Dolmen - a reimplementation of Die Dolmengötter. An abstract game where you have people roaming the map with point to point locations pooping stones along the way on each spot they move from. These stones are used to determine area-majority on a Dolmen site where you build a dolmen. Achieve a majority will allow a stone to be placed at the top of the pile. Achieving an equaliser allows a stone to go underneath the pile. But adding stones to consolidate your existing majority will not allow you to place a stone.
Sounds boring and abstract, but I really enjoyed it. The production is better than Die Dolmengötter. The player count is reduced from 5 to 4, but BGG rated the 5 player as “not recommended” so I’m fine with that.
Clans of Caledonia - been playing some games of it in boardgamearena to the point where I’m done with it. I really like the market, but eh. The contracts are the main scorer of the game, but they refresh every round. This drip-feed manner is lame when I realised that I can’t really predict what goods will be in demand for people, so you can’t really synergise your strategy with other people.
I’d rather play Terra Mystica for the spatial aspect of the game or Navegador for a more dynamic market.
And all I’ve played is a few games of Sprawlopolis (note on Button Shy: I really need to get the Food Chain Island one from the review–Agropolis and Tussie Mussie are ordered via the KS and I already own Circle the Wagons) and finally a solo of Parks with the Nightfall expansion which I had to teach myself before taking it to someone else 
I also decided that I could just put some of the parks from the original in the expansion box and exchange the objective cards with the new ones and voilà expansion mostly fits in with the base game.
The Nightfall expansion gives a few more options as there are camping spaces that you can go to from certain spots on the path that give interesting bonuses. The new objectives are more varied and interesting and replace the old ones and the new parks have instant bonusses to encourage “chaining” actions. None of this makes the game much more complex just a little more well-rounded. If you really like the game: get it. Everyone else: it won’t probably change your opinion of the game.
Played scenario 1 of Dice Throne Adventures again, with a different setup card and my upgrades from the previous attempt, plus an extra 3 salves (which is how the campaign works - win, you move on with any upgrades and the salves you have, lose, you repeat the scenario but you keep any upgrades you got and get 3 more salves over your previous starting amount, at a ten point overall score penalty to the campaign). This time, things went way better. I ultimately cleared the whole Portal Crawl using one salve, ending up with more than I started with to carry into scenario 2, and both the Paladin and the Ninja had more health at the end than they started with.
Which isn’t to say things went perfectly. The Paladin for most of the scenario couldn’t seem to draw ability upgrades. Everyone got a bunch of First Strike enemies which would often guarantee attrition. And loot rolls were often poor. That said, the paladin managed to block the vast majority of incoming damage while healing occasionally, and the Ninja managed to alpha strike or Smoke Bomb damage cancel and then kill with Delayed Poison on more than one occasion. And the Paladin did end up with an Epic and a Legendary loot by the end (plus a couple commons. The Ninja, just commons and rares.) And sometimes I got lucky and the enemies failed their attacks, which didn’t happen almost at all the first session.
Still very entertaining. Looking forward to fighting my first boss, the Fallen Barbarian. That’s closer to a standard Dice Throne duel, but the good guys have a shared health pool and the boss has more health than you do. It also gets to start with possibly quite a few upgrades, randomly dealt and paid for out of a starting pool of upgrade CP. And will automatically either play or sell a card each turn, which will do various (usually bad) stuff, but get the hero a bonus as well, and provide the boss’s roll objective. It also has priority numbers assigned to each ability to guide which to select when it rolls something that could apply to multiple abilities. Looks pretty slick, and also scary. I’m not real excited about it being able to do between 8-15 damage many swings, especially since it goes every hero turn…
Played the first scenario of Chronicles of Crime 1400 with my girlfriend. It was great fun, and eventually took up a LOT of floorspace as we ran around town chasing leads. Very satisfying.
Went way over time, but answered every question to end up with 100 points. Having one person check the scenes while the other scribbles notes works really well.
Informal get-together of the UK contingent of 1 Player Guild today. (Usually we go to a pub, but. BGA and yucata.)
6 Nimmt! with 9, definitely the point at which the wheels are coming off but it’s still great fun.
Libertaia, which I suspect I’ll enjoy more if I play it more.
Lemminge, definitely one I’ll print-and-play if I can’t find a second-hand copy soon.
Incan Gold, who shuffled this deck anyway?
No Thanks!, where I suspect I should just work out what feels like the right thing to do and then do the opposite.
and Twin Tin Bots, the talk of my first Essen but almost completely vanished since. Like Lemminge, now very expensive when one can find it at all.
More a saga to try out all the characters, as other than King Arthur (who I used in my first 3 games), Sinbad (who I have used twice now), and Robin Hood (also twice, in a game my wife asked me to play someone she had seen before and which I won), each game has been with a different fighter. I am enjoying the smorgasbord of options available and want to try them all, and it is fun seeing how differently they all play.
I think I’ve been projecting my own struggle to beat my partner at any card game other than Jaipur onto your process. I also had the base Unmatched for about 6 months and no one would play it with me, so I ended up trading it. I enjoy your game rundown and character breakdowns, though they do make me sad.
BUT… she really likes Buffy, and I’ve been dropping little bits of “Oh, you could really be ruthless as Willow in this game…” So fingers crossed. I haven’t probed, but I think she might really find the characters in cobble and fog interesting too.
The two sets I decided to get, and put on a shelf as I’ve got no one to play with.
Why would you need to get together to play games? /joke
It is indeed the standard joke, but we tried it a few years ago and really enjoyed it, so we’ve kept doing it. (On one occasion with a video link to play Codenames with an American group, back when that was still unusual.)
Been playing Geistes Blitz 2.0 with my 6 year old daughter and she’s really get good at it. I used to give her 5 secs headstart in looking at the card (i.e. I’d count to 5 before i moved) but now I maybe do 1 or 2 secs and often (especially with the cards that actually show the item) I don’t even need to do that! I got thrashed yesterday!
More importantly, why did your session not include nothing but multiplayer solitaire Eurogames?
There has been some comment from our other members that when they’re stuck in multiplayer online games with long downtime they may well get a solitaire game out to play out of camera view.