Finally got Agricola to the table. 2 players. Obviously I lost. I don’t have strong feelings, which is odd; I was expecting to either love this game or hate it. I can’t remember what changes with the action board compared to when we played with 4, but forest and fishing were always available, at least on the turn after you needed them. I was able to fill my farm, whereas my wife used the occupation cards (like she does in Feast for Odin) to hoover up some points. I’m at a point atm where I’m wondering when I’m going to play this weight and length of game. I’m partially tempted to put it on sale for a silly price on geekmarket and let it go if someone wants it badly enough.
7 Likes
We just finished our first game of Rocketmen.
Including learning the game together (mostly, I had started yesterday) it took us something between 2 and 3 hours to finish the first game. I expect this time to go to around 2 hours with two people and some practice maybe as fast as 90 minutes. But I doubt that.
This is a deck building game about the space race. It feels quite unique in its composition of mechanisms. The biggest difference to every other deck builder I have ever played was that by the end of the game the draw deck had been bought up completely. ZERO cards left in the market and it doesn’t end the game (at least not without variants–I haven’t looked up what those do) and it includes a continuous deconstruction element as you play cards to your planned mission… more on that below.
The game ended very close with 31 to 29 points…
I forgot to take pics this time… my bad.
So here's the details. Beware: verbose.
In any case, each player’s starting deck has 12 mission cards. Each player has 6 mission tokens. There are different types of missions (spaceships, satellites, asteroid mining, space hotels …) and 3 different destinations to got to (Earth Orbit, Moon & Mars). Many missions allow to choose the destination.
There is a mostly random market of 6 cards. The draw deck for the market is constructed per player in the game and it’s very tight–as noted above we ran out of stuff to buy. There are two “eras” of tech one can buy and in between the tech cards are disaster cards like climate change that give VP to whoever “solves” each disaster (by buying it or using associated cards like Solar Panels solve Climate Change) but the disaster cards are just dead weight in the deck (see VP in Dominion).
Each card you play can provide either rocket engines, 1 of three asset symbols (or a joker) or money. Some provide both money and a symbol, a few cards provide nothing… many cards have special effects that either help with buying cards, discarding or drawing cards, during a mission. You can buy as many cards as you have money and assets (cards can cost assets, too). Engine cards are separate from the market, one can only buy 1 engine per round.
Buying cards is half the game. The other half is playing them on your launchpad. But first you have to play a mission. Playing a mission or cards to the launchpad
To launch a mission–you can try once each turn but you’ll probably want to build up over several turns–you need enough engines to get to your mission destination (it’s on the card something between 3 and 12 or so engine points). Each destination can be reached easier if you have certain assets. Computers make it easier to launch into earth orbit. Composite Materials make it easier to reach the moon and the third one (DNA?) is needed for Mars.
Each attempt starts the mission track at 0 with (~)6/8/12 steps needed to reach Earth Orbit/Moon/Mars. Initially, advance as many steps as there are the matching assets as part of the mission. Then draw from a special “Mission Sucess Deck” to advance further. Each destination has a max number of cards that can be drawn (3/4/5). If at any point before the last card you decide you aren’t going to reach the target (12 steps to Mars, 8 to the Moon and 6 to Earth) you can abort. Abortion costs though, you’ll need to discard cards from your mission as many as you drew from the Mission Success Deck minus 1. If you draw the last card and don’t reach the destination: mission failure, discard all cards from your mission and the mission. If you reach the destination, place a mission marker on that particular mission spot, gain VP and the mission specific “achievement” (permanent bonuses include money, engines, assets or +1 handsize). Successful missions get taken out of the game into your junkyard.
The game ends either when a certain number of VP are reached by a player or someone plays all their mission tokens–unless one destination has no mission then all players need to finish all their missions, preventing someone from an early end with just doing Earth missions over and over again)
What I liked about the game:
- the on-going element of deck deconstruction which is one of my favorite mechanisms in deck builders. It’s really satisfying to play stuff to the mission to get it out of your deck. Only to land back with a huge oomph after a success or failure.
- after an initial bit of irritation the small number of cards proved interesting, one cannot get to Mars without taking some risk there just aren’t enough cards…(we both completed one Mars mission successfully)
- the race element shines when you play certain cards that take advantage of your opponent’s mission planning and then they just complete their mission and you are sitting on your Industrial Espionage with nothing to show for it.
- While not as intricate as Leaving Earth in simulating the space race, it does evoke the theme.
- The puzzle how to build up your deck and which cards to buy and which to get rid of and how to use them each turn continued to evolve throughout the game with turns getting more and more interesting including all the usual deck building tropes of discarding, drawing, junking cards… allowing for a (limited) number of combos.
- As your deck grows and you have a few mission rewards to boost you every round, you can take on more difficult missions much quicker. The game really picked up the pace at some point as we had kind of learned how much luck we would need or had cards to mitigate bad luck…
- It ended really close. I am not sure if there are truly multiple ways to win as the number of VP available in the game is very limited but the competition for them was open until the very last round.
However…
- the start of the game dragged on and on, though this may be because it was a first game
- play time was seriously too long, we’ll need to see if this changes with more plays
- The cards are so different and unique that it was really hard to follow what my partner was doing. There are only a very small number of cards that are in the game twice for two players and those are in different “eras”
- obviously as a card junky I want more different cards (not really a complaint this is also part of the appeal–see above)
- the materials, sure I opted for the cheapest version but the board could have been a bit nicer. The box is full of air to accomodate the people who went with minis…it wasn’t really expensive so complaining about materials feels a bit wrong
- I really really wish they had not put the game title on the card backs and the board and if they had to at least omit the designer’s name. Just saying. I know what I am playing at any given moment and if I don’t then it’s probably Cosmic Encounter and not Rocketmen.
So most of my complaints are possibly due to this being the first game. I’ll want to play again soon making this an 8/10 for now but eventually it’ll drop to a 7. I am glad I got to play this and we’ll see how exciting further games are.
4 Likes
There’s a monopoly board stuck to your wall…
4 Likes
Yes there is. And cluedo.
I’d love to put the Ticket to Ride boards up, but that would be expensive.
We had a horrible fireplace taken out, so as a quick, cheap fix put a board up. Then we decided to put game boards on it as decorations.
8 Likes
Just taught my non gamer family (including my increasingly tech inept parents) Haiclue on BGA over Zoom. F*$k me. It was like pulling teeth!
Really good game though
5 Likes
That last negative alone is a huge irrational irritation of mine.
Sounds fun though. I too have the cheapest version on preorder.
1 Like
My partner and I got some decent gaming in this weekend, starting out with a half-play of Far Away. We got about an hour in last night and again this morning, but it’s been slow going with the kid. We haven’t faced too much in the way of serious danger yet, but the potential is growing, and our little biome has started to get pretty wild. It hasn’t set either of our worlds on fire yet, but there is a pleasing tension to the gameplay, and I think it’ll be enhanced once we play without communication as intended (which we are decidedly not). As it stands, I’m handling the wildlife entirely, but we’re working out behaviours together. I don’t see this part ever changing, but we’ll see.
We paused with about half of our main mission complete, and two of three contingencies have been initiated. The mission structure is really quite enjoyable as well, and rolls out beautifully.
Meanwhile, we ended out the night with a couple of rounds of Men at Work, having secured a new copy this evening. I got the coveted “let’s play again” after I ended our first game in catastrophe. The second game was a whopper and we spent the back half of the game in sudden death, with 3 employee of the month tokens each. I managed to snag a 4th, but my partner took an overly bold move and collapsed the whole thing in grand fashion.
I played this at SHUX along with the other Pretzel games, and vowed to have 'em all (don’t mention Dead of Winter Flick 'em Up). This completes that promise, with arguably my favourite of the three.
6 Likes
How is “1812: Overchooer” not a game?
4 Likes
I know. I can’t look at it without going “Why?”
It’s like running around with brand names stuck to your clothing (off topic: I wear so much outdoor gear and those companies as much as I love some of their products are guilty of this, too. I mean how do you recognize a German tourist in the wild? Right by the huge Jack Wolfskin logo on the pants, the Deuter/Vaude backpack and their Meindl shoes.)
4 Likes
Played a ridiculously long game of Brass Lancashire on TTS last night with @Whistle_Pig 3 hours + with no set up and tear down. At least half an hour of that was me trying to pick up groups of things!
It’s really good. I think I was beginning to prefer this to Birmingham (although not played BB in a year), but the cotton demand track is a bit fiddly and annoying imo. Really want to play BB again, maybe I’ll find it too loose with too many options
2 Likes
Yeah. Thats TTS being TTS. 
1 Like
Come back round my frustrations with TTS, some of which are a product of my old laptop (9 years old is).
My chief complaint is I want to play a game, not a physics simulator with a game skin.
4 Likes
We had a fun time playing haiclue on BGA last night.
1 Like
Yesterday, my copy of Red Rising arrived. My partner almost started drooling over the nice materials of the CE as we unpacked together. It’s what I expect of Stonemaier games though. Also: a really nice insert. Big improvement since Wingspan.
I immediately played two solos. The automa actions are somewhat random but they still provide a challenge. My first game I lost badly with 191 to 220 for the automa. 300 is a good score the rulebook says. Second game I did much better with 341 vs 240 for the bot. Before I get into the rest of it: The automa is easy to learn and easy to handle.
It’s not a difficult game to learn. In a huge contrast with Rocketmen, this one has a lot of cards and in a game against the bot I got through maybe half of it in the second game and a third in the first?All the cards are unique and while some have similar effects there is a lot of text to read and a lot of puzzling to be done in how to best combine everything. It should in theory be a fast playing game: The core loop goes like this:
play a card to 1 of 4 locations, resolve card deploy effect, take another card from one of the other locations and take the location bonus
Game end: when either 2 or 3 of the location bonusses (fleet meter, influence cubes, red crystals) hit the magic number of 7 for either one player or combined for all players. Note: The fourth location bonus is faction specific.
VP are a combination of the achieved bonusses and whatever is on your cards. Each card has a base value and gets bonus points (sometimes a malus) depending on what other cards you hold or what conditions on the game board.
I spent the whole first game flailing about trying to optimize usage of card effects versus bonusses gained. Second game I had more luck with the cards as I got a triple of gold cards (representing the named characters of the Gold ruling class in the series) that went well together.
I am glad this game comes with card holders that allow me to look at all the cards without having to put them on the table. In a solo that would be fine of course but not so much when playing with others.
Thoughts:
- I liked the book series and find myself in need of rereading.
- I like the combo-nature of the card puzzle
- As with all games with huge card stacks, there is a luck element in play (joker colors grey and orange help with that one)
- I can already see how my partner is going to get stuck on this one. There is a lot of text to read and much possibility for optimization and hence AP.
- the game state changes an awful lot between turns (the automa simulates that by doing two turns for each of yours) and longterm strategy becomes much harder when it is very likely a card you want is no longer there.
- while very beautifully designed, the gameplay itself is not exactly evoking the theme (for me). I don’t mind but a direct comparison with Rocketmen makes the latter way more thematic driving home the huge difference between pretty art and thematic gameplay. (is the art then evoking the setting? this it does very much)
For now an 8/10 but that goes with already liking the setting from the books.
2 Likes
I quite liked Red Rising.
I think the thing I felt was happening was that you get to a point where you look for cards because of what they are (red, blue, first letter of name) rather than what they do so the first turns are quite slow but then they ramp up in pace as you start looking for things to make your deck work.
2 Likes
I found it extremely difficult to get additional cards in hand. It took me several turns to set up a state where I was able to draw two cards instead of just 1. My first game ended with 5 cards in hand.
In the second game I was already much better determining what was going to work.
I find grey and orange quite useful as they provide a named card or a color to fill out the hand but on the other hand keeping in mind which card I am using for what bonus…
I can’t wait to play again.
2 Likes
Blitzball League is not going well for the elves. Had 2 close loses where the opponent had a BS ability card to pull into the lead and I didn’t quite have the needed actions/cards to claw back a lead. One I could’ve forced a draw, but I wanted to risk it for a chance to take the lead. Didn’t quite work out. Then one confident win against the dark elves. A few challenges and early TDs were enough to keep a good lead. Almost had an overwhelming victory, but rolled a shove when all I wanted was a tackle.
6 out of 8 games in the playoffs. Score of 8. Need to win my last two games to make it to semis I think.
1 Like
My partner and I played a quick game of Junk Art last night, going Paris>Monaco>Hometown.
I had to push pretty hard in the Hometown game if I expected to win, and I had a pretty good shot until I collapsed the entire thing at once, earning all 5 of my fallen pieces and ending the game. Hubris? Hubris. Final tally was (my) 11 fans to (her) 14.
This morning I posted my first lap time on the Sweden track in Rallyman GT… and I’m gonna have another go at it. 
Lap time: 7m3s.
Not counting the amount of time I spent off the track, I did pretty well. My luck was weird. I’d take obvious opportunities to go flat out and fail catastrophically. But then, on the back foot and forced to be dangerous, I was nailing massive dice chains and raking in the tokens. 6/11 turns logged in 6th gear… But 4 spent in 00/0. 
(For reference that’s 6 minutes spent in park.)
[EDIT] I just can’t help myself (probably why I love it so much). 2nd attempt at 5m31s, with 3 minutes in the grass, and a back half with one fewer brake and coast die. It’s these damned mid-rear cars, is all. [This was in 11 turns again.]
[DOUBLE EDIT] Redemption. And the power of restraint. I finished a full turn shorter (10 taken) and, importantly, stayed on the damn road. With 16 tokens I clocked a 2m19s time.
5 Likes
Is it weird to say that I wish Red Rising wasn’t published by Stonemaier? The gameplay looks really interesting, but everything I’ve seen about it makes it look like a small box card game in an extremely overproduced box, which is an instant turn-off for me.
3 Likes
It’s heavily inspired by Fantasy Realms.
2 Likes