Got a few rounds of Ice Cool in with the whole family. It was ridiculous, and not the thematic struggle that I usually like in my gaming, but it was definitely the most fun we’ve had all together in at least a week.
8 Likes
Played my first solo game of Nusfjord for a while, and had my first time trying the Codfish deck. The final score was 43 points, my highest yet. Really thought I was struggling until the fourth round when the Bank came out, but I had loads of gold from issuing shares and serving fish, and then picked up the Forest House in the final round and used a Reforest action to fill up the final two spaces on my player board. Chuffed!
Game Play-by-play
Round 1
- Deforest
- Take an Elder (Constructor) to Build a Ship (Sloop)
- Issue a Share
Round 2
- Build a Building (Customs Area)
- Copy an Action: Deforest
- Build a Building (Head Office)
Round 3
- Transfer Reserve
- Serve Fish (1 Plate)
- Use an Elder (Constructor) to Build a Building (Office) to Issue 2 Shares
Round 4
- Build a Ship (Schooner)
- Buy Shares
- Deforest
Round 5
- Serve Fish (3 Plates)
- Build a Building (Bank)
- Use an Elder (Constructor) to Build a Ship (Sloop)
Round 6
- Build a Building (Construction Yard)
- Take an Elder (Harbour Master) to upgrade Sloop to Cutter
- Copy an Action: Build a Building (Boat Hall) to swap Cutter for 2 Sloops
Round 7
- Build a Building (Forest House)
- Reforest
- Serve Fish (3 Plates)
Final Score: 43 pts (Buildings 25 pts, Ships 6 pts, Gold 7pts, Shares 5pts, Empty Spaces 0pts)
5 Likes
Managed a solo game of Space Hulk: Death Angel today. Actually got to the final room with 4 of my 6 marines still alive. It was the Launch Control Room, so when activating the control panel, you can either add a token to the panel or roll the die and try to roll <= the number of tokens on the panel. I missed a rule that you can only activate things once per turn, so in two rounds, I had 5 tokens on the panel and “won” the game.
It was so easy seeming that I immediately checked the rules and found my mistake. Unfortunately, I had to leave to get my kids soon after, so I did not have the time to undo it and retry that section. Next time, I will play it right.
6 Likes
Jaws of the Lion, i ran out of cards one turn from the end, but the others managed to complete the objective. Hmmm, maybe I have too many discardable cards?
Dungeon Lords, first play. Such a long teach…and it feels longer when you don’t know the game well. We tried to follow the rulebook, which starts off explaining combat. I assume that’s because until you understand how the combat works, you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to do in the game, since combat finishes each of the 2 years. And then we found a whole bit of the combat (wizards and spells) wasn’t even covered by the tutorial. The game itself progressed ok, but our first year combat was all over the place. We decided to finish the game up there, but I think the group will try again. Possibly not next week. I have memories of Dungeon Petz being similar, I eventually sold it because I couldn’t face explaining it over and over.
Canvas, almost relaxing, but the symbols I needed just werent coming out.
Silver and Gold, lost, but thats normal. I think we need a new filler to close out the night. I suggested Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps, but no one was onboard
5 Likes
Are you the Demolitionist?
Nope, Hatchet
The only way I don’t run out of cards on turn THREE is by never using discard powers until nearly the end, and always carrying stamina potions.
I’m about to get braver with using discards, but honestly I find the game’s movement demands pretty tight and I usually end up discarding at least one to cancel damage (only played the 5 intro missions so far, though).
I usually try not to lose any cards until the end, I probably hang onto them for too long. I think its the first time I’ve been exhausted, in JOTL at least.
In this game I thought “well, if I hit this guy with a big card, we will progress faster to the next bit”.
2 Likes
Although the teach for Lords is longer, I think the game is also a lot better than Petz.
1 Like
It’s fairly simple to work out the number of turns you’ll have based on hand size and working out permutations based on when you use discard cards and how many in any loop of playing and refilling. It’s quite eye opening in how many turns you lose from using a discard card but also in how many turns you actually have in each scenario. I didn’t make a number of turns based on hand size and discards equation but maybe I should 
It’s more that I have to estimate how many turns of the game are left, and how quickly I can cross the remaining area. “There’s only two enemies left, and then I just need to get to that door. So I can definitely afford to discard this card for a powerful ability now”. No. No, you cannot. On the early levels at least (I’m only just up to adding my first lvl2 card) you absolutely cannot.
…Or maybe I need to get better at this game 
1 Like
First cardboard play of Troyes (thanks @michaelg) after a couple of exploratory plays on BGA. Let’s say we’re still learning how things work! It’s really tight, I never seemed to have enough money or actions to do what I wanted. I can see there is a good game here, but learning that mechanics at a not ideal player count doesn’t make it shine brightly atm. We both really want to play this more.
Which leads to…Troyes BGA Asynchronous Game Recruitment
4 Likes
Played a quick learning round of Wrestlenomicon with my GF in TTS. Pretty fun little game. One player plays Cthulhu (me in this case), the other the King in Yellow, trying to defeat the other Great Old One in a no-holds-barred wrestling match, complete with gloriously punny card names and gloriously gnarly eldritch tentacly art. It features an interesting system where you can take one of three actions on your turn: play an attack card, play a permanent card, or pass and draw 2 (/3 if you also discard a card). Attack cards go onto a track of 6 cards with a seventh Ground Zero card at the end. Your attack will specify a position it’s played to on that track, and a Momentum value that it lends to another card you already have on the track to move it closer to Ground Zero (sometimes, they’ll move everything). When an attack reaches Ground Zero, it fires, doing its attack ability and possibly also a Slam ability if the opponent’s most recent attack is of the right type. You can only attack once per turn, and you can only have one card in each position on the track, so timing and positioning is definitely a factor, especially considering Slam effects.
Permanent cards do something when brought into play, and then offer some passive benefit as they remain in play (you can have two at most). For example, as Cthulhu I got a card called “Let’s Take This Outside” (into space), which got me card draw to start and then damaged my opponent whenever they passed to draw cards. (Sadly, it never fired as she got a card off that destroyed one of my permanents before she passed.) You can also have Combo cards that don’t count as an action for that turn but can only be played under specific circumstances. And the final wrinkle, is that some card effects get you Cultists worshipping you, which you can sacrifice when applying momentum to add momentum, one for one.
Things were very close, with both of us down to one HP before the end. But I was able to maneuver an attack into going off before she could get one (that did damage, at least) into range, so I won. Barely. Should have significant replayability as well, not least because you at most see a little over half the total deck for a character during any particular game - 25 of your cards at random form your Guts (HP) pool.
PS: You won’t (yet?) find this mod on the Workshop…because I made it myself. Yep, I’ve taken my first steps into TTS modding. Some teething pains along the way, but it was good fun for the most part and I am quite satisfied with the results. Hoping to get some Dice Throne Adventures and Hexplore It modding going soon, although both are significantly more substantial tasks than this little purely-cards game. Hexplore It in particular poses the question of how to implement those dry erase player sheets.
3 Likes
I always, always get a rule wrong in that game. I play it about once a year so always check through the rules first, but at the end I always have a niggling feeling that I didn’t play something right, and sure enough…
2 Likes
Played Terraforming Mars for what feels like the first time in a year. We both played corps we don’t know very well which made it fun.
It’s a really enjoyable activity because we’re both so comfortable with the game. It can drag at the end with 2 players when you’re trying to max out the final parameter and maximise points, which gets a bit frustrating at times.
My wife is better than me at TM, which means with 2 players it’s just about who pulls the best cards (can’t be bothered with drafting).
Just realised that this sounds miserable. TM is my most played game of all time, I love the way every play is different, even when you know the cards. It’s a great game
2 Likes
In fairness to you, the organisation of the rule book is pretty awful – I can see that they tried to structure things in some kind of logical fashion, but for practical purposes it’s a bit of a mess. The BGG files section contains numerous rules summaries attempting to address that, and I think it’s worth having a look though those, and printing out something to add to the box.
I always have to do a refresher, and it’s good if that’s not the rule book.
1 Like
I hear this a lot, but I never found the rule book hard to follow or poorly organized. The only reason I missed this rule is because I did not review all the rules before starting, and when going back to look for the activation rule, I found it very quickly.
OT: We played 1.5 games of Hanamikoji today. I won the first game in the first round, 11 - 7.
Because it was so quick, we decided to play another one. However, then our kids started going apes**t crazy. Once things calmed down to the point we could play again, we could not remember how the game had played out to that point, so we just stopped. We were aggravated after dealing with the kids anyway, and is just another example of why we barely ever play games during the day.
1 Like
Game day this past Saturday:
Nut, won this one with 2 squirrels to my opponent’s 4 - it’s gone a long way to assuage my concerns that getting the squirrels is the most important thing you can do in the game. They’re good and I’m not sure you could be competitive without any, but they are not the holy grail.
Babylonia, this one was tense and two of us were neck and neck in the late game. Could’ve gone either way - he was banking on scoring for lots of cities, I was depending on my crazy big network. In the end I won - and without a ziggurat power to boot!
No Thanks, couple of three player games of this - it still works with three, it feels quite different, but still good fun.
The Quest for El Dorado, this one keeps moving up in my estimation - the combo of race game and deck building works so well, and striking the balance between buffing up your deck and actually progressing across the boards is so interesting. Our winner was the player who was in the lead for most of the game, though the rest of us were only a turn behind him. In the end we were undone by not having water movement at the moment we really needed it.
Ticket to Ride Switzerland, this is still one of my favourite maps for TTR, so tight and vicious! Our winner kept and fulfilled all their initial tickets, while the rest of us got a bit distracted by trying to make all of our country-country connections score for the maximum. Also, I had the worst luck with tunnels I’ve ever seen 
Evolution: Climate, we were hit by a couple of wildfires early on that made food a bit scarce for awhile, but the climate ended up pretty stable after that. I played pretty aggressively, and was the first to go carnivore, and stayed that way for the rest of the game. I’d engineered two species that could prey on each other if need be, though they ended up nomming on my opponents species instead (pack hunting plus max pop and significant body size meant their defenses were largely inadequate). I managed to drop the food supply significantly at the same time and cruised to a comfortable win.
3 Likes
Had a long session of games yesterday, it was National holiday on Monday, so the Monday Nights game became a Monday Afternoon Onwards, just because we could. I only arrived at 16.30, so had three games of Coup (of which I won one with a Contessa, yay) before pizza arrived at 17.30, and then two main games.
Played Brass: Lancashire with four, including teaching it, which was less challenging than I expected. Hopefully I did not get many rules wrong, the only problem was that I forgot there are two extra cards from the old version that I didn’t remove and we had extra cards in hand at the end of the canal era. We removed them and considered them like the 4 that are under the Locomotive cardboard, and moved on. I must admit that being looking after three people had my brains turned to mush by the end of the railway era, I forgot that I could not take any more loans (after reminding everybody) and really struggled on the last few rounds, so I finished third as the coal market collapsed and building anything became really, really dear. A half decent third (somewhat around 110 points), with the guy that went for two shipyards getting away on the high 130s. Everybody enjoyed the game, and they could see how after 4 or 5 rounds it made sense, so that was a relief. Hopefully I won’t have to nursemaid so much next time and focus more on my game.
Then played Tiny Epic Dinosaurs with three (after teaching it), losing hardly achieving 60 points, while two private contracts from my opponents on round 6 put them on a neck to neck 77 to 78. I enjoyed that final count (of course there was a recount) to top up the day. After 6 hours of games (minus a pizza break), it was time to go home and sleep.
9 Likes
Had a virtual game night with a friend. First up we played Grand Austria Hotel (newly on Yucata) because I had heard it was fun. And it is! Lots of fun in fact, when you get combo turns like “oh if I hire this guy then I can deliver these items and complete this guest and that will allow me to take more cubes and complete this guest and-“ etc etc.
Then we finished with a best of three of Mottainai, our usual. He won the second by ending the game quickly and hoping I didn’t have enough back order points to break the tie that he would win (I didn’t). He tried it again in the third game but I had a single back order, which put me two points ahead.
4 Likes