We played our first game of Galilean Moons last night, and it’s going straight into the “hard permanent” section of the collection.
It’s not ideal at 2P, nor was it expected to be, but it seems like it will be fully enjoyable with a little more experience. Even if that doesn’t prove to be the case, I can already see a simple (but substantial) house rule to tighten up the board, and there’s always the AI which can be used to play solo or add an extra opponent.
This is a major hit, right off the bat. My partner pretty eagerly started talking about it after the game last night, and even called it “elegant” (she isn’t tuned into gaming culture, so this is a compliment, not an eye-roller ). The gameplay is simple and direct, but wholly dynamic and fluid, which makes every turn delightfully agonizing. Each draw action brings new possibilities, but also inches the endgame closer. Buying technology lets you specialize and become more efficient, but you pay for it in earned VP (for all intents and purposes) and need to use that new potential to earn it back… which you better do quick, because the game is brutally short (in the best possible way: curse-inducing but oh-so satisfying).
It’s spectacular. I can show it to my folks. I can show it to my friends who act like babies when presented a 2 page ruleset. You can literally learn the game by reading the 4 little cards and getting a quick board explanation, and yet the asymmetry that develops and random board setup—to say nothing of any kind of table meta that might develop!—make this a game that feels infinitely playable.
I haven’t been this blown away by a light design in quite a while. Absolutely spectacular.
Is the difference in rating just because of the number of plays and familiarity, or is there something better about playing digitally? Good to see another convert to the Innovation flock!
The automation helps, and the ability to quickly see how many of each symbol we have, rather than counting. It just speeds everything up.
Irl we’d be playing some dogmas wrong - so a “draw a 1” dogma would be ignored irl if that stack was empty, but BGA automates it to “draw from the next available pile”.
Familiarity is helping, but online (even say next to each other) is giving us a greater desire to play.
I’m interested to see how I feel about it next time we play with the actual cards.
Getting the rules right certainly makes a big difference. I think you’ll find that now you understand the rules better, and have gained familiarity with the cards, the physical game is just as good.
Another solo game of Spirit Island, this time as River Surges in Sunlight. Interesting how differently it played compared to Shadows Flicker Like Flame. With Shadows, it is really easy to generate Fear, whereas River did it only by destroying Towns at first, finally getting some Power cards that generated more as the game went on.
Never felt as “on the ropes” with River, compared to how close to losing I came with Shadows, but I still did not feel overpowered, and only survived, I think, due to drawing some really good Defend cards. My coastal Wetlands was out of control for most of the game until I finally was able to trigger the highest level of its special effect after playing Flash Flood, doing 2 damage to the one City there with it, then 2 damage to every Invader in that land, taking out the City and four Explorers in one go. It was so nice to finally have that land clear.
With that City destroyed, there were only Towns and Explorers left on the board, and with a couple more cards on the next turn, I was able to generate enough Fear to get to level 3, winning the game.
Really enjoying this. It is a great brain burner, trying to figure out how to keep the Invaders from spreading too quickly, but sometimes wanting them to build so you have a town to destroy to get some fear. Just wonderful fun.
51st State Master Set, we shuffled in the Winter expansion and I think I prefer it to New Era. I had a rough first turn but then picked up the pace and was able to gain a solid lead that carried me to victory. Helped by triggering the end of the game before one of my opponents was able to get his engine running full blast. This game is terrific - the multi-use cards are great fun and the engine building is really satisfying. My only complaint is only getting 4 factions in the set (though they’re not massively different really). I’ll be on the lookout for the promo ones from Portal, though I worry shipping might be silly to Australia
Biblios, I did really really badly at this - I didn’t win any of the dice, and I wasn’t even close honestly! Still good fun and the other players were close in score at least…
Garbage Day, I feel like other people seem to like this game more than me. I’d tend to prefer Go Cuckoo myself as it doesn’t have as much ‘take that’ or player elimination. But Garbage Day still gets requested, so I doubt I’ll be getting rid of it anytime soon, despite it’s failings.
A friend and I played Arboretum today – the first time for us both.
I followed the Eize Basa method of initially explaining the rules without describing the “earning the right to score a tree” rule at all – so we both got to score all of our trees. The nice thing is that it’s actually still a decent game and a nice puzzle when played like that; and crucially it gives everyone the opportunity to get their heads around crafting paths, without the additional anguish of not knowing whether or not it’s actually safe to play a card : ) It really does make for a smooth introduction of a game which could otherwise come across as excessively complicated up front, so I would happily recommend this approach to anyone teaching the game.
As we’re both gaming enthusiasts, I went ahead and introduced the additional rules for game two, and oh boy was that a different experience. I continually had seven cards I didn’t want to let go of at all (not helped by getting several 1s and 8s in my hand relatively early), so deciding what to discard was a bit agonising most of the time!
I was absolutely trounced in game one, with my friend having a dramatically better grasp than myself for how to accumulate valuable paths for most of the trees; but in game two I managed to claim four of the six trees for myself, with pretty solid paths into the bargain, and took the win.
Great game.
We followed up with a game of Hive which we agreed to end in a stalemate at a point where they could only move their queen bee, and I could only move a beetle. I’ve had games suddenly come to life again unexpectedly after seeming to be drawn, but this looked pretty locked up, and we opted not to waste time looking for a way out.
On Wednesday I got a friend to teach me Troyes, so that I had a vague idea of what I was doing in the asynchronous game with people here. I then immediately got on the bad side of @Captbnut by buying one of his dice and then using it to kick him out of a building
You’ve nailed the heart of the Arboretum experience. Within the first few plays, you end up with a hand full of cards that all feel essential. Not sure if any other game comes close to the feeling of having to pick a card to lose, I certainly haven’t found anything. More games should make cards feel valuable beyond playing them. Playing, keeping or discarding are all ways that you can score (or give away) points and it means that you’re constantly filtering down to a hand full of cards where you want to use or get rid of all of them but can’t. Such a tight design.
Mark from Board Game Barrage loves Arboretum. He says the move he always wants to take is to pass because everything feels terrible. I’ve only played it once, I loved that aspect of it but my family didn’t enjoy it.
I’ve not played Hanamikoji, but I understand it has similar feelings of ‘I really don’t want to do this’
I played a solo game of Galilean Moons and the less said about the result of this game the better.
The bot rules are fabulous and… really freaking challenging. It almost doubled my score on easy mode. That said, it also feels very “gameable”, so my guess is the challenge has a bit of a shelf life. All in all though, it’s a really fun solo mode and it definitely feels like a solid inclusion for 2P (or even 3P) games as well.
). The gameplay is simple and direct, but wholly dynamic and fluid, which makes every turn delightfully agonizing. Each draw action brings new possibilities, but also inches the endgame closer. Buying technology lets you specialize and become more efficient, but you pay for it in earned VP (for all intents and purposes) and need to use that new potential to earn it back… which you better do quick, because the game is brutally short (in the best possible way: curse-inducing but oh-so satisfying).
