Look at that luscious table hog!
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To be fair, itās a pretty teeny coffee table
I hope John Elway caught a touchdown pass from Steve Sewell sometime in the 2nd quarter.
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Iām defiintely keen to. That was a good game!
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Played Legendary over webcam chat with a local gaming buddy last night. It worked well enough. We both own the game and know it very well. I shuffled everything up on my side and had a camera aimed at my board. He kept everything in neatly organized unshuffled piles on his side so he could grab the cards that matched what came out of the shuffled decks on my side when he needed. He kept his own individual player deck, shuffled that, put cards into it, and told me what to take out of the HQ and city on my end. It took a bit longer to play than it would have in person because of the necessity of talking through all our moves a bit, but it let us play together in a more direct way than any of the online implementations feel to us.
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Yeah, but did you beat the Mastermind? Enquiring minds want to know.
Legendary is a game I wrote off when it comes to playing over video chat, but you came up with a great workaround. Unfortunately, am the only one in my circle who owns it so I canāt follow suit.
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I have to say, though, that it sounds like a nice, relaxing, conversational way to play.
Thereās something luxurious and comforting about riffling through a deck of cards, so the idea of having to manually cull cards on each side, to me, seems practically therapeutic.
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I played Maracaibo with my wife on easy non-story mode and it was ridiculously easy as I scored highly before small people demanded our attention. That was a physical, real copy, where I moved cubes and stuff and I really enjoy all that!
Virtually, Iāve resurrected Irregular Tuesday Night Games and weāve had a few games of Seasons (I never see end game scoring cards in the draft) which are always good fun, loads of fillers such as Coloretto, Incan Gold - a lovely little push your luck, that and of course Mystic Terry which I donāt actually get just yet. I like it because itās cubes. All this on boardgamearena.
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Nice. Welcome, FunkJem!
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Welcome to the forum! I do miss pushing cubes at the moment. Iām trying to find a decent fairly-light game for three players without too much ātake-thatā in the mechanics to play with my flatmates. So far I have Quacks of Quedlinberg which I love but didnāt really hit with one of them as they werenāt really any risks, and Azul but even that has a lot of tactical blocking.
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Glad to see you made it over @FunkJem!
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Gotten a decent bit of stuff in over the last couple of weeks.
My partner got me Scythe for my birthday and she completely surprised me with that one. Sheās clever, she is. Iāve played plenty of times on Steam, so when it got to the table with the group I had a totally unfair advantage. I kept reiterating to the other two that certain strategies were risky, but tried not to be insufferable but rather informative. One of them was not grokking it until the very end. The other got very excited because he got the first star and then I felt terrible for crushing them by ending the game about an hour later getting 3 stars on one turn and taking the win by about 40 points. It was very much a learning game and I absolutely did not play ruthlessly until the game was going long and we knew it was time for an ending. Honestly, Scythe for me is less about competing with the other players for the most part and more about me trying to optimize what I have in front of me. I havenāt played it with the automa, but I might try that in the next few days before my classes really begin.
I picked up Root to support my FLGS (and my habit). I have been on the fence about it for a long time, but itās come up in a number of things lately so I decided to give it a shot. We had a 3-player game with the Cats, Eyrie, and Woodland Alliance. The cats took a very early lead as the alliance didnāt use their revolt or sympathy very effectively to curb them in the beginning. I had a decent showing before falling into turmoil and losing a good 5 points. I couldnāt get across the map to really impact the catsā engines, but came close to a win later on with a dominance card. The cats ended up taking it by 15 points. We didnāt take it too seriously as we were really just getting a feel for it. Iām very interested in all of the factions except the cats. They seemed pretty bland and straightforward to me, probably the most obvious of the factions, though I could be wrong about this. I really enjoyed playing the Eyrie and the risk/reward of programming. Weāre all looking forward to playing this again, and Iām very glad I picked it up. Iām curious about any opinions on the expansions and comparisons to Pax Pamir (do I need to pledge for the reprint if Iām really liking Root?).
Treasure Island and The Mind with my partnerās family. Her dad found the treasure on the 7th turn. I was irked he found my stash so quickly, but we all had some fun. Several games into The Mind and I have yet to ever get past level 5 with any group. Thereās always someone who goes wild and 3 seconds after someone puts down something in the teens theyāre like āSurely no one has anything in between 13 and 76ā SLAP!
Lords of Vegas is an absolute blast, even when losing by a good 12 points. One player got a two-tile golden casino on their second turn (with a 4 and a 6) and it paid out on the next 4 turns in a row (I swear we shuffled the cards). This led to an extremely early lead allowing them to monopolize and sprawl with purple casinos which then paid out all 9 times throughout the game. Neither I or the third player pulled any lots close enough to compete and we ended up just feuding with each other. I donāt care at all that I lost because I had an incredible turn that saw me sprawling to control a 5-tile silver (which never paid out), reorganizing to take a 5-tile green (which never paid out), and also reorganizing to take a 3-tile silver (read above). This was only halfway through the game, so it was super painful that silver and green never came out. At the end we looked at the cards behind the end game card and, yep, there were all of the green and silver that we hadnāt already drawn. Brutal.
Karuba is as fun and light as ever, and it angers me that everyone will play this yet still refuse to play Railroad Ink with me (Fine! Iāll play it by myself!). They have similar decisions, I feel, and they both always satisfy me.
Air, Land, & Sea is so simple, so satisfying, and I just wish that the theme were different so I could get my partner interested in it. She is very drawn in by a good looking game and has no interest in the war theme, which I can understand. I struggle with some themes myself.
Lastly, I played the Capital Vierzon solo scenario for Orleans. I pulled out the win on the very last turn. I just love this game. Iāve been going at it solo because the group has really been taken by other games recently, but Iāve put my foot down that the next game night is going to be Orleans and Oceans (I rarely, if ever, make the game decision despite providing most of the games because I just feel bad and domineering, but Iāve really got these two on my mind).
Whew.
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Hi
I love Great Western Trail so Iām very tempted by Maracaibo. Itās not cheap though
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Re: Legendary
We played to a draw. Got 3 hits in on the Mastermind but couldnāt get that 4th one in before the villain deck ran out. We were doing his first run at the New Mutants expansion so we were played with all 5 of those heroes and they donāt have as much synergy as some teams do when you run everyone from one small box expansion together. They fight each other somewhat because of a sunlight vs moonlight mechanic introduced there. That made it a bit rough on us, especially early game.
Our webcam setup really did work well for us. Weāre both pretty tactile people, I think, perhaps him a little more so than me, so it was really nice to be able to physically shuffle and slide around the cards. It was also nice just to āseeā and chat with each other more than we have in a while during the game. We text and facebook during the pandemic, but thatās not the same when weāre used to our monthly game group meetups. We also didnāt mind or perhaps even enjoyed the slower, conversation-based, paceā¦ until it started getting later than weād anticipated the game going and we were getting tired. That we played all the way through the villain deck, and that the villain deck was bigger than normal since the scheme called for an extra villain group, didnāt help any there either. It was a LONG game for Legendary.
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Our group has really gotten into Karuba, Lanterns, Horrified, and Barenpark as our lighter games that donāt have any take-that. We almost always play at 3. Barenpark would get out so much more if it werenāt for set-up time.
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Finished up our third game of TTS Iron Dragon last night. The events were especially brutal; one player got stuck on a piece of track between two flooded rivers one turn before he was going to make a delivery, and we had to give him the mercy rule of taking a 100%-interest loan in order to salvage him because otherwise he was going absolutely nowhere for the rest of the game. The War Tax came out right before the turn I was going to win, but thankfully it affected lots of people, so I was still able to sneak a win, but it was very close. Everyone was just a few turns away from winning.
Here is a picture of our tracks with the map removed (Iām the green).
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Two people went for Dragons? Iām impressed! Usually thereās really only enough demand to make it worthwhile for one (or so it would seem, Iāve only ever played at 2-players)
Played Pax Porfiriana alone as 4 players. I got a some rules wrong (awfully written rulebook) and some rules questions so i kept going back to the rulebook.
I stopped after the first topple (the gameās scoring card). And I really like this. I really do!
Enjoy my bedsheet.
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Yup! That was a late-game move by Pink who already had the track to Borgofort, so not much further to go to get to Nordkassel. And I donāt think she actually made any dragon deliveries, but she had a delivery from the Olde World to Nordkassel facilitated by the Rainbow Bridge, so it was definitely more worth it to cut a direct path than go down to Railla and take Orangeās up and down.
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Last night, my partner made an effort to conserve some of her energy and brainpower for playing a birthday gift I had given her nearly 2 months ago: Disneyās Villainous.
Honestly, I watched two different instructional videos on this game and nearly fell asleep from both; I canāt fault the videos - this game is just dull when trying to explain it; in fact, after playing once, I see the actual excitement involved is in the details and idiosyncrasies of the villains themselves and not the rulebook. For such a well-produced game with an otherwise fantastic eye for usability, they really missed the mark by not playing up the villains more in the rules.
I gave up on finding a video to show my partner and opted to just read the rulebook and explain it myself; my The Teachā¢ lasted half as long as either of the videos (but I did opt to teach the game specific to the characters we were playing rather than in general).
My partner chose Prince John (which was a shame because I was totally going to choose him), so I chose Captain Hook. Getting the Neverland Map was super easy (I actually ended up getting it, accidentally cheating and shuffling it back into my deck and then getting it again before even halfway through the game), but Peter Pan was the 3rd card from the bottom of my Plot Deck.
Additionally, I had very little agency in taking power tokens from Prince John- mostly I was consigned, when meddling with my partnerās fate, to stealing it temporarily and also just being a general nuisance.
Eventually, Peter Pan was one turn from the Jolly Roger and I was poised to move and defeat him the very next turn when my partner declared victory by having 20 power tokens at the beginning of her turn. It was a very close game.
I went into this expecting to come away cold but entertained- I wasnāt prepared to really get engaged and become eager to check out the other villains. I think Captain Hookās character/deck was fairly 1 dimensional and Iām not eager to play him again but I think Prince John probably has a lot of replayability.
After one play, I absolutely recommend Villainous, which is not something I expected. Iām also eyeing the smaller boxes as future gift ideas for my partner.
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