Yeah, unlike @COMaestro I do find it to be a pretty bad layout. I’ll definitely have a look at the BGG files section. If it was a game I played more often I’d probably have done that already, so good shout. 
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A couple of nights ago, my partner, in an attempt to experiment with environmental influences on some health issues, decided to go the evening without television, computer or phones (let’s be honest, all three of those things are firmly in the category: “computers”). She has a number of hobbies that allow for this: reading, knitting and, of course, listening to her partner talk about boardgames.
She has been wanting to play some games lately, but she’s (due to health issues) usually too tired to brain at night once our kids are asleep. So, while she has been asking about Wingspan lately, she felt it was too much thinking for the occasion. Instead, we played 2 rounds of Oz Fluxx (I won both rounds, thus further solidifying the fact that between the two of us, the person who likes a game the least will typically win). And then we got Morels out for a cutthroat(?) hike through the moldy woods. I won handily. This time, instead of being overwhelmed the entire game, I was merely overwhelmed with the breakneck speeds in which we were dashing through the woods for the last half of the game – in the early part of the game I managed to build up some resources of frypans and walking sticks (I’m sure you can imagine me sprinting through the woods as fast as possible carrying 4 frying pans and 9 walking sticks). I won by nearly double, but she still enjoyed the game.
Last night, she was mentally exhausted again, but wanted to sit in a comfier chair, so she spent the evening knitting and reading a book. I, on the other hand, spent the evening playing some games solo (since I was not being guilted into sitting next to her on the couch in what we like to call “quality time when you have kids” where you just try to be close to each other but also not wake the other if they happen to fall asleep watching TV.)
I started with Alubari and had to brush up on some rules – not because I had read them and forgotten, but rather that it was almost Snowdonia but with some tea leaves and pots of tea, and I had to figure out how the tea worked. All-in-all, I’m glad I grabbed a copy of Alubari. I think it’s interesting enough to stand on its own next to Snowdonia and it may have a slightly better solo experience (though I haven’t yet tried to play against the Snowdonia’s Deluxe Master Set’s Botdell).
Feeling energetic still at 10:30, I opted to get something else going. Fearing my energy was short-lived, I finally got Aerion to the table. What a beautiful, joyous game. After just 2 turns I thought to myself, “Why the heck have I let this sit for X months on my shelf unplayed?”. I really enjoyed it; I had been apprehensive about it being too much like Onirim, of which I have the app and I do not care for. Aerion is extremely good and I absolutely adore the art direction.
Aerion got me smiling and feeling energetic, so I decided to break out Pandemic: The Cure – which oddly is not just a mashup of Matt Leacock’s classic design where you play as, instead of the CDC, a gothic post-punk band. Instead, and much like real CDC employees, your skills are represented by tiny (perfectly-sized, in my opinion) dice. I set the difficulty to “way too simple” because it had been a while since I had played and my first time running dual-characters (my only previous experience was with 3 in which we failed miserably). A quick perusal of the rules later and I was out, saving the world from cuboid, be-pipped diseases. Due to the incredibly-easy difficulty and a lot of incredibly lucky rolls, I knocked out all 4 diseases before the 2nd outbreak using the Containment Specialist and the Scientist.
In one particularly unlucky roll, I had 4 disease samples in the same space as the Scientist and managed to roll four 1s, remarkably failing – which I believe this represented 2020 within the game.
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Append “and children” to “due to health issues” and you’ve just described my wife most nights!
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Yes, children, as well, are part of this particular cocktail of this particular soul crushing ennui
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Just wrapped up my first game of Spirit Island. I actually managed to win due to a really lucky card draw. I played with Shadows Flicker Like Flame, interested by the high Fear generation effects, and also its ability to target any land with cards if there is a Dahan there by paying 1 energy.
It definitely takes a bit to wrap your head around the flow of the game, between the fast and slow powers and how the Invaders act in between those. As such, I would plan my turn, pick my cards, then realize I can’t do exactly what I wanted because the board state changed before my slow powers took effect.
So Blight started covering the island pretty quickly, and even hit my starting Sacred Site, making my innate power worthless for a bit as it needs to be targeted from a Sacred Site. I managed to get a couple of minor powers that could cure Blight, which was good as I was down to one remaining in the supply.
Things were looking pretty dire, but I was generating a lot of Fear, and actually managed to hit level 3. In what I expected to be the last turn, as I only had 2 Blight left, but Coastal lands were about to Ravage with enough force to place them, I flipped the Fear card I had, and it gave 9 Defend to Coastal lands! No Blight was placed, and my Dahan even wiped out everything in two of the lands.
The remaining Coastal land had the only City, a couple of Towns and 3 Explorers, but I had just put my Presence there and was able to use the Power card that let me downgrade a City to a Town, winning the game!
It is definitely a tough game, at least to start with. Probably didn’t help that I picked a Spirit with low destructive capability. It did have a lot of moving Dahan and even generating Dahan though, which helped immensely. Really enjoyed it.
However, turns out that my copy is missing pieces. There are supposed to be 13 Presence tokens in each of the 4 colors. Instead, I have 8 Yellow, 6 Blue, 6 Red, and 4 Purple. I have contacted the manufacturer, so I guess I will have to wait and see if they will send me replacements. At least they are easy to proxy, if needed.
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I am so looking forward to finally playing my copy after finally deciding to get it before Christmas (I have played the game before but only once).
That one is so high up on my wishlist of “games to grab when I see a copy no matter what else I just bought”
Sounds you had some great gaming 
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As stated elsewhere… it takes a bit to get all the rules internalized and there are a few. I still have timing issues sometimes with the slow powers. And targeting… how often have I missed some targeting constraint when playing a card only to notice later that it wouldn’t work out.
I love that each spirit needs a distinctly different strategy to win the game. And fear strategies are very powerful but also quite scary for me as a player because it always comes down to the “now or never” turn.
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Yeah, one of the cards needed to target a land with a Dahan present. I almost screwed that up a couple of times because the effect would have been SO much more useful in a land that DIDN’T have one in it.
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I haven’t “reported in” for a while. So here’s a write up of recent games we played. I’ll go backwards I think 
So today with a beautiful day of snow and on vacation we had two new-to-us games on the table. First we played Rajas of the Ganges Dice Charmers (the roll & write, we have never played the big game). My partner won this as a surprise to both me and him, one move before I would have finished the game. It’s the most involved Roll & Write I have played so far taking that “trophy” from Welcome To. As a bonus, I found it easier to learn than Welcome To. It’s not solo-able. There are 4 different colors of dice, two of each color. Each color corresponds to an area similarly to the “Einfach Clever” games. But the actions here are different… green is a route building mini game. Purple is goods collecting. There is a ship that travels along a river and a palace. There are Glory and Money at the border of the sheet running towards each other from opposite ends and the game ends when they cross. There is a ton of combo-ing and chaining just like “Einfach Clever”. But especially in 2 player where you take 2 dice each round it is not quite possible to take turns in parallel and the chaining gives a bit of down time and today the game was new but my partner stated immediately after winning he’d be prone to come down with a case of AP in the future. Still, I enjoyed it and hope to get it back to the table again. It plays in around 30 min I think.
In the afternoon we learned Orleans together–I traded my copy on BGG and it had some minor box damage but was unpunched. I had not realized before that Paladins of the West Kingdom is the grandchild of this We both had fun with the game–though one of us regularly took a bit longer to arrange the “workers” on the actions. We ended the game with 123 to 123 points and I won by tie-breaker. This is far simpler than Paladins luckily and my partner enjoyed the bag building a lot and neither of us missed the press-your-luck element of Quacks
On Monday we played our first post-campaign game of Clank! Legacy and it was a lot of fun. Clank! is just a solid deckbuilder and the personalized game with all of our little drawings and written on cards is just so nice. I lost this game because my partner nearly freaked out when the first artifact I took was the one he was going for as his second. So when my next move could have brought me to the one he was going to take instead, I chose to do an extremely stupid move instead by going off in a different direction so we wouldn’t cross paths. It is the first time ever in a game of Clank! that I didn’t make it back to the tavern 
That made me somewhat unhappy. Not the losing but losing by a lot because I was missing a single boot at the end. In any case, we both knew had I played that other move I would have won easily. And maybe I need to do this more often. Because I win too much and that just means my partner wants to play less.
And we played a few games of NMBR 9 because it’s so short and apparently my partner has a better grasp on this and so he wins
I had my worst loss of Sprawlopolis since I started counting with -9 (the setup was Tourist Traps, Concrete Jungle and Park Hopping which is just hopeless) but I also had a few wins recently. The game just never gets old.
At the end of January, we had our first two player of Cloud Age (I played the previous games as two-handed solo) and it’s a nice pleasant not too difficult game. But… overall I am neither impressed by the story, nor the gameplay. Although playing just 1 hand was a bit more satisfying than having to keep switching. I just think the ark of this game falls flat for me. Sure you can get bigger longer moves at the end but there is a finite number of things you can do, despite lots of cards to play there are virtually no combo or chaining opportunities. After hearing about GWT and Maracaibo I really expected a lot more complexity. So I think I will finish playing through the story and then do my best to trade it away–ideally for GWT 
And a day before this we played a game of Nidavellir which is a pretty neat little auction game where you have a set of five coins that you use to bid on 3 sets of cards each round (every player gets one card from each set–uhm tavern–and higher coins get first choice). The cards are dwarfs that come in different suits (5 I think) and each suit has a different way to count the victory points. You can upgrade your coins for more valuable bids and more victory points. For sets of dwarfs from different suits there are bonuses. Overall the bidding with the coins is very smooth and I love that they have fixed values. I think this is probably a lot more exciting with more players. Since we do not have a lot of auctions games I cannot easily compare. I am not sure if it is similar to Ra in any way as you keep your own coins… but definitely quite a fun quick game that my partner is sure to want to play again
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I played some solo Marvel Champions.
I’d bought but not played Ant-Man, partly because he has cards that combo with Wasp and her pack hadn’t been released yet. But I just managed to get Wasp, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, so tonight I played Ant-Man and Wasp against the 2nd Red Skull campaign scenario.
As heroes, they’re very good! I thought it might be a bit fiddly, but their own cards are so strong you don’t want to spend on other aspect cards. More thoughts on how they play:
They both pack a HELL of a punch through attack events - I remember Doctor Strange getting two 7-damage cards off in a row and thinking that was way overpowered, well these both do it at a similar level. I won, by going all out on damage, but they look like good all-round heroes with some amazing self-heal.
Tomorrow I’ll try Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch together (they also have a pair card). Thoughts:
He just gets back up again and again, and she can pay for powers by spending the bad guy’s deck: free in the moment, but when the enemy deck runs out the game gets permanently faster, so you’re just storing up much worse trouble for later. She also has TWO obligation cards, as her craziness is stronger than most.
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Did you have a left over pile of tome cards at the end in clank Legacy?
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It might be worth for Spirit Island fans to have a look at the 3 minutes board games ranking of all spirits… Not quite his usual video (it’s way longer than 3 mins).
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Played a couple of rounds of No Thanks, which I got in a trade last week. Light, silly fun, but I think there could be some decent decisions, especially at high player counts. I reckon this could also become a drinking game, which is always good.
It is as simple as you turn over a card in the centre of the table. You either take it, or put a chip on it to make the next player choose. If you take the card you get all the chips (which are taken away from your score at the end of the game). Lowest score wins. The nice strategy twist is that if you can get consecutive cards (eg 10 &11), only the lowest card counts towards your score. So you could get 15-25 and only get 15 points. The other twist is that 9 cards are always removed from the game, so you don’t know if the card you need is actually in the game.
Also playing tons of Innovation on BGA. I love this implementation. In real life this game was a 6 or a 7, now it’s a firm 9.5 if not a 10. Every game is different and crazy and super swingy. Some games see an absolute beatdown, whereas others go to the final card draw. We’ve got a constant game on and both play between patients in work. Last night we destroyed each other’s score piles, so were drawing 8s&9s but had 2 points. We’re developing a meta and there is utter dismay when your opponent plays a well known card which you have to fight to counter.
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Having zipped through the first 12 which I have deep knowledge of I’m not sure how much use this is from a strategy point of view. Sharp Fangs is a weaker and quite fragile spirit that he likes playing. In terms of effectiveness A tier is far too high but it is a fun spirit. Also River Surges in Sunlight is the most powerful of the starting spirits. Basically easy mode and putting it on B tier is sure as s**t not a power assessment as 2 glaring examples. In terms of him liking spirits it’s up to him. Whatever makes him happy.
Thanks for posting, pondering how I’d rank them will pass some time today 
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I think there were a few leftover cards I mean the point is that we have a unique game so I am fine with not getting all the cards into our deck
I’ve played this a little on BGA. Whatever decision I make seems to be the wrong one. I should probably work out what I want to do, then do the opposite…
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I went through all the passages afterwards because i thought we did everything.
Those tome cards are kind of fun but I’m not sure if they make the game better.
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we mostly forgot the one we had for our game… except the starting setup.
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I did have a look What I cannot guess is where he’s from…
In any case, I mostly agree with his rankings except where I don’t. I’d rank Oceans a bit higher and Heart of Wildfire lower of the older spirits.
I haven’t played most of the new spirits more than once and none of them more than twice. But I disagree a bit more frequently about their rankings. Finder of Paths Unseen is definitely in my Top Tier while I’d rank Mists and Grinning Trickster way lower. I agree about how awesome Downpour is and that’s the spirit I plan to have my partner play next game (his first of Jagged Earth whenever we finally get to it). Shifting Memory is one of those I played twice because he’s somewhat easy to understand how to get the most out of…
That’s one thing I noticed about the tiers is that he tends to downrank the very high complexity spirits which just means that most people haven’t played them enough to bring them to their potential.
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Caught up with friends again last weekend to play Oceans based on watching SUSD play it a while back. Good fun, but we’ll definitely be adding the Deep cards if we play it again. For the second time this year, my friend and I finished with the same score, but with the tie breaker going his way this time.
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