I can’t see I’m going to have to learn this on BGA
Happy to teach you. I’ve got the same username over there
I have a group of friends who constantly want to play, in part because of the wonky bidding and swinginess. They are also the subset of gaming friends that were turned off by Rallyman GT’s careful pacing and plotting. I think it’s like the real world, where some folks watch racing for the strategy and satisfaction of seeing a driver find a good line, and some folks just want to see someone dramatically lose.
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That was glorious 
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I see. I like these sorts. I’m still looking for a copy of Knizia’s Winner’s Circle and I love Camel Cup. I just didn’t like how the incentive structure is done. I was told though that there’s a variant in this game where the further they are from the race, the higher the payout. Which is exactly the thing that would incentivise risky betting.
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This is adorable!
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Those horses look like the ones from pocket solitaire racing on 3ds
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I really want it, Amazon Japan ships it for £34. But it looks like they’ve halted the prepaid duties for now
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Played Railroad Ink (blue, but I didn’t use the expansion for my first game).
Got 46 points! It’s great, relaxing and happy-making. Very easy to understand, things get tight as the 7 rounds go on, perfect quick game.
Bit disappointed that there’s no real solo mode, as you don’t know the max points you could have got based on what the dice did each time so you can’t really judge your score except by the obvious “how many dead-ends did I make?” etc.
But generally I can see why it’s some folks on here’s favourite roll+write. I immediately want several more goes.
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Yeah, that’s the way I feel about it solo. (Ditto NMBR 9.)
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Catch up with Mum for the first time in quite awhile, we went to a new local cafe (I had okonomiyaki for the first time - it was pretty great!), drank copious amounts of tea and played:
Spring Meadow, an old favourite - one game is never enough, so we played several.
Splendor, Mum seems to never remember the names of games - ‘that diamond one with the chips’ led to a best of three of Splendor (I suspect she may have meant Jaipur instead though 
)
Boomerang: Australia, I love the theme and the the card drafting and multiple scoring criteria for this one, but the rules for when to reshuffle the deck with 2 are weird - as written you’re meant to play through the whole deck in 2 rounds (so half round one, other half round two), the predictability of that seems not great to me though, so we played reshuffling between rounds. But that’s not perfect either, as some sets just won’t work out played that way. It’s a pickle. I suspect a larger player count would help - I’ve only played it with 2 so far. So good, but bit weird with 2 unfortunately.
Blue Lagoon, this one has turned out to be a bit of a hit, she requested it specifically. It was very close, and lots of butting heads. We both scored lower than our first game, but I suspect that was because we had a better grasp on the game and how to block each other.
Kokoro, wow, I got completely trounced in this game! She had a bit of a slower start than me but I busted in round two - she just kept expanding her longest path, and it connected to both the lion and the lady by the end, so she got a crazy high score!
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That sounds like an awesome thing to be able to do 
This has been on my to try list since a while now. But I first saw it at SPIEL where I–I don’t know what I was thinking, I swear–declared that it was too simple a rulesset after all to be any good.
That was many years ago. Nope. 2018 is not many years ago. Lol. It was a time where I had already started “preparing” for SPIEL by looking up games before going and Blue Lagoon was on my list but on closer inspection I lost interest. Well, I was young and dumb.
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I’ve switched out my morning Sprawlopolis with Fairy Trails (that little Rosenberg that came out sometime last summer). After losing two times in a row one afternoon, I just had to figure out a strategy to win this reliably. I have now won twice in a row 
It’s quite addictive once you get started. It is sold as 1-2 player but it really is a solo game. We played with two once and my partner said “never again” after I trounced him.
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You have to factor in the time dilation effect that Covid had. If you do this, 2018 was actually 7 years ago. You are justified!
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Forgot to mention a couple of games played earlier this week. First was 7 Wonders Duel, with my wife. Things seemed pretty close the first two ages. I did not have a lot of resources, but got a lot of coins from two of my wonders, though she managed to build all of her before I could get my fourth built. I did manage to get the Economy science token, so she had to pay me for any resources she purchased, but it only triggered a couple of times.
Then, in the 3rd age, things started getting nasty. She went heavy into military, pushing into my side until there were just two spaces until I would lose. However, in doing so, she let me get another science token, and I picked Law, which was my fifth symbol. Due to the layout of cards, she had to be the one take the card which revealed the military card she needed to win and the card with the sixth science symbol I needed to win. Very close game.
Then the other day we played two games of Ticket to Ride: London. She won the first game, ending the game one turn before I would have, which cost me a completed ticket. I won the second in the same fashion.
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Playing some Res Arcana on BGA. Not a bad game, but I’m not totally sold on it yet. The core thing of having to get just enough of the right elements just in time seems a bit more finicky than such a short game warrants.
Some old-school Space Hulk with my eldest. I played the “humans”, without any command points. She enjoyed mobbing up the aliens and tearing my guys to pieces.
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Aliens:Another Glorious Day in the Corps , we’ve covered the basic missions now, and the next ones in order involve the Queen and the Power Loader, neither of which I’ve put together yet (ok, I’ve been a bit slack here). So we instead did the APC Chase, which is supposed to be recreating the scene from the movie when Ripley drives the APC into the alien hive and (more of less) saves everyone. Mostly everyone. I’d heard it was a bit easy, and so it was. We passed all our rolls for driving, so the APC was moving forward the maximum each time. There were a few aliens around, which were blasted away by the gunners in the APC. We were out before any nasty motion tracker card came up. Very disappointing, but now we know.
Burgle Bros 2:The Casino Capers , first play. Kickstarter edition (not mine). I’ve only played the first game a few times, but generally had fun with it. This seems a bit more streamlined, only two floors instead of three, and the guards dont get faster as they did with the first game. Still quite tricky, we had only just reached the second floor (where the safe is) when we died. Seemed like bad luck, a few locations made a commotion, which attracts the guard, and you add cubes each time you encounter one. Six cubes, and its game over.
Diamant , an old favourite. Certainly more fun with more players, but still a blast at 3p. Love this game.
Heist:One Team, One Mission , hadnt played this for a while. Should it even be called a board game? Theres no board, just a set of tools and an electronic box. Its good fun tho, but we were sadly out of practise.
The Search for Planet X , wasn’t the first to find Planet X (actually third, in a 3p player game), but had enough theories to get the win by a couple of points. I’m always up for a game of this – might be time to try the expert side.
Nova Luna , another great game
Oriflamme , enjoying this filler game. Couldn’t be simpler or faster to play. You have seven cards (you start with ten, but randomly discard three), you play one card each round, and you never play the last card. So, six rounds. But its pretty tense, as people put down cards and let them collect tokens. Is it a soldier under there, or maybe its the Ambush card (which gives points if someone else reveals it). Good fun, so quick to play. Perfect little filler.
Canvas , still fun, although points were hard to come by. My only criticism is that often there are often art cards that just don’t help in any objective. Still, its a unique experience.
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Looking in my book of traditional card games, I realised it described a couple of solo forms of Cribbage – a game I love but never get to play – so that occupied me for an hour or so tonight.
The first variant is like the normal game without the ‘play’ phase, and where you’re always the dealer. You deal six cards to yourself, two to the box, discard two from your hand to the box, draw a starter card, and then simply score both hands. You repeat until you’ve used the entire deck (six rounds), and ‘win’ if you reach 120 – which means averaging 20 points (across both hands) per round! (This target is so tough that I’ll be genuinely surprised if I ever manage it. I did manage a score of 32 in a single round in my last game, but that felt like pulling a rabbit from a hat, and my end game total was still ‘only’ 94.)
Then there’s a ‘patience’ game which was very different and pretty neat. You just draw and place cards one at a time until you have filled a 4x4 grid, with cards going into any empty space. Then you draw a starter card and score the eight hands represented by all the rows and columns, and you ‘win’ if you reach 61 points. So you’re trying to construct the best eight hands you can, with each card contributing to two independent hands, and without knowing in advance which cards are coming next, and with a continually shrinking set of available spaces to play into as the game proceeds.
(This variant feels a bit like Village Green, if you’ve played that.)
Neither is a patch on playing with another person, but they’re both enjoyable, and I was extremely happy to be putting my crib board to some kind of use, and will definitely be trying again to reach those target scores in the coming days : ) (My very best score in either game was about 3/4 of the target for ‘winning’, so I’m going to need rather a lot of luck.)
Edit: I found some other variants online, some of which include ‘play’ phases:
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Played Survive Escape from Atlantis with the children.
Both got the idea and made it a co-op game. Not sure if I’m proud or sad
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