Yeah, but I have a dedicated Mars shelf…
Also I want to note be careful with that particular smiley while involved in a game of BotC
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It’s a good game… for a Bruno Faidutti 
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Ooooh KNIZIA BURN!
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I like Faidutti games 
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Apparently I have not played any of his numerous games which is weird … I own Vampire Vendetta but haven’t played yet. Never played Incan Gold or Citadels. I am more of a Cathala…
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I have multiple games by both the Brunos. Including some by both of them! 
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I must say, now you mention Citadels, I can see the role cards mechanics as similar. Implemented with different results, but that definitely is a resemblance.
As a light hearted game, I thought it ticked the box. Definitely the lightest Mars based game I ever played, and I think that is a good thing.
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I’ve gone sour with Citadel classic. I need to try the two expansions to see if I can change the assassin and the warlord.
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7 or 8 years ago a friend gave me Citadel during a clear out. Still not played it!
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I have played a lot of Citadels but not in many a year. Got bored but considering how much I played that’s not a criticism.
Changing the Assassin out for the witch became standard as I had one player who would always choose the assassin. Never won but they just liked killing people. I thought it was a shame when the big version was released that I was done with the game as the 3rd set of characters would have been very interesting to me at one point. C’est la vie.
Considering I was the first one to the gallows, I’m way past caring at this point 
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Just finished my first solo play of Sleeping Gods. Really enjoyed it and only touched a smidgeon of the content.
Picture is me about midway through the game. Some takeaways
- It is a table hog
- It took me me playing solo around 8+hours in 5 sessions to play through. It will take longer with more players but not necessarily less time based on familiarity.
- there is a lot of fun in the story - I had at least two wow! moments with things I uncovered.
- I played with the expansion but not the dungeon pack. You’ll want to play with the expansion from the off and I’ll play with the dungeon pack from now on.
- it will go away for a while now, probably bring it back out again when next i get some holiday time
- you can save the game state and it is not too bad to put together again, but I prefer keeping it up and doing an hour at a time.
- there are a few niggly or hard to find rules (it’s a Laukat game after all) but you’ll get there in the end (one in particular would have made the early part of the game a bit easier)
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So worth it as a solo experience?
In my view yes, indeed probably best as a solo.
The great thing is, others can drop in and out during a campaign - you collectively control the same roster of characters - so you can actually have the best of both worlds if anyone shows an interest …
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Just received Mercado de Lisboa and played it with my 9yo. Lisboa is my favorite big game, so I was excited to try something that focused on one aspect and might be accessible to him. (Getting a nicely-printed queen variant didn’t hurt either.)
About mid game, I scored some stands (equivalent to stores in Lisboa) that he’d let me cluster restaurants around (no equivalent in Lisboa that I can think of). It was a jump from me scoring two or three coins a turn (the same as him) to scoring 12 coins two turns in a row. That demoralized him quite a bit, and it was a struggle to get him to finish. I think he could have come back from it, except that he’d gone big into flower shops in the early game, and no 3-customer flower-buying customers (equivalent to public buildings in Lisboa) ever came out.
I’m not sure what I think of the game. I’d happily play it again. I’m not sorry I bought it. It makes me want to play Lisboa again soon. But on a first play, I felt like we both flailed until there were four or so shops out, and it felt like my 9yo’s game was severely hampered by the distribution of customer and shop tiles that were available to him. In contrast, Lisboa has bonuses printed on the board that suggest where you might want to built to pick them up. (MdL sort of has this, in the form of the restaurant tiles that you pick up to place, open side up, on a future turn, to enhance the scoring of your shops, but less than half its spaces have these at the beginning of the game, and you don’t know what kinds of shops you’ll be building mid- to late-game at that point.) And most of the randomness in that part of Lisboa is determined beforehand. (Lisboa has store locations whose price is variable but known at the beginning of the game/controllable by the players, has fixed scoring values per store location, and has only four different categories which need to be matched in order to score. MdL has variable pricing based on what’s been built so far, variable scoring values depending on both customer tiles and positioning, and five different categories which need to be matched.)
TL;DR: I like Mercado de Lisboa. On its own, I’m interested to play it again and get better at it. But it is going to get compared to Lisboa, and it’s not as good. I’ll play it with my 9yo because it’s shorter and easier to grok. But I don’t think I’ll be teaching it to my spouse. We’ll just play the better game.
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Fisher Price’s My First Lisboa
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We played no thanks on BGA tonight. On the app it’s got a box with no merci which i think is a fun double meaning name (it doesn’t feel like accurate french or English to me!)
I like it. It feels like one of those games that you’re supposed to play a hundred times to see who the really good players are because so much might rely on what might be missing I think. But it’s super simple and is can be tense when deciding whether to stick our twist.
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We had years of playing No Thanks as the first game of each games night. It’s got a nice flow going round the group, flexible player size, you don’t have to focus on any rules, welcoming to newcomers, and it picks up a strange meta. It’s wholesome and comforting!
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I’ve got the big box but have only played once with a different setup. It was slower than usual thanks to the roles being a bit more complicated and everyone not knowing them by heart.
But it was better than the big version of Coup (G54 or something?) where having to re-read a role just ruins the game.
Interesting to know! I was avoiding it because campaign games don’t interest me, but solo would be worth a shot.
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Frankly it’s like a tricked up fighting fantasy book (though inevitably with more complexity/content) - if that sounds good and not put off by the price …
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