Yeh, I think it’s gone into the “if it appears in a sale” column.
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My wife and I had our first game with our new copy of The Voyages of Marco Polo (which we had previously tried on Yucata). It was still quite fun and felt like quite a different game from the first! She took the pooper (aka the guy who drops a trading post in every city he passes through), so she focused very strongly on travel, and I took Kublai Khan (starting in Beijing instead of Venice) and focused more on contracts, which were more easily done by the extra goods I got from being first to the more eastern cities. How did that work out for us? She managed to pour everything she had into her last travel action and place all of her trading posts, and won the game by a single point!
I’m excited to play again; it’s been so long since we’ve bought and played a new big(ish) game like this, and with the dice rolls and the different cities and characters the games have much different feels to them.
3 Likes
Had another game of Nemesis yesterday, with two new players. We went with semi-co-op this time around. And again, it was a loooooong game, 6+ hours. Not quite sure where the time goes – player turns are fairly fast with two actions.
We played semi co-op for this game, to add a bit more spice. First encounter, and it’s the Queen, of course. Early drama as one of the engines is checked, and we don’t believe the player when he says its okay. We started using air quotes whenever we checked the engines. We all ended up checking the same engine, so we knew the first player was a bit shifty. And he later set the self destruct as well. I thought the player I trusted had checked one of the other engines (meaning we had two functioning engines). But, as it turned out, he didn’t. Our shifty mate locked an escape pod while another player was trying to get in there, so I was trying not to move too far away from the generator room (which locks/unlocks pods). There’s no direct way you can fight a traitor player, but you can try and trap them in rooms with aliens, or fire, whatever is available. Time was running out as we tried to get to the pods. You have to roll for noise when you enter a pod, if you get an intruder you’re pulled out of the pod. I had an alien, but managed to kill it. Then, stupidly, I elected to wait for another player instead of just launching. For some reason, I thought ejecting while the ship was on course to earth would count. I blame the long game, wasn’t thinking straight. I took a chance that the engines would be ok, and as it turned out…they weren’t. If I’d launched straight away I would have fulfilled my other objective, which was to be the only survivor. Not sure what I was thinking.
1 Like
Had another go at the Meddling of Meowlathotep scenario for Arkham Horror the card game tonight. It did not go well. Bark Harrigan went insane about 6 or 7 turns in, and managed to draw both of his weaknesses in that time frame. One of them gave him a Horror any time he got damaged, which accounted for 3 Horror before I got rid of it. Then an encounter card made him test Mind and do 1 Horror for every point he failed by, which was enough to end it. Only had one card in the Victory display, and one Meowsk revealed.
Since it was such a short game, I dug out my new (used) copy of Firefly: the Game and tried out the solo story card. Man, that game is a table hog! I can only imagine how bad it will be once I add Blue Sun. I chose the “End the game with $15k” as the victory condition.
Things started off okay, but after my first couple of jobs, I realized I had forgotten to pay my crew their shares. I retroactively paid $1k, and since I had a crew member that could remove 1 disgruntled token per turn, I called it good. Illegal jobs refused to go my way because of the Misbehave cards. Took two tries for my first illegal job, and then the second one was completely failed after two tries when the card options were a ridiculous tech roll to proceed, or an automatic botch option, but only if I had a particular gear type, which I didn’t. So, Warrant for me, and right near the end of the game, too.
Very last move of the game, I pulled the Alliance contact card which warped the Cruiser to my location and boarded me. Luckily I had no Contraband, Fugitives or wanted crew, just my warrant which I had to pay off. Ended the game with $11,100, would have been $12k if I didn’t need to pay for the warrant, and if the illegal job had succeeded and I stiffed my crew, I think I would have just squeaked into a win.
I think the game really needs other players to really shine, as just playing against a clock is not all that fun. Plus you have no incentive to move the ships anywhere near your ship or your destinations, which seems a major part of the interaction between players (in the base game).
Also, the rules do leave a little to be desired. When you complete a job, you keep it to reflect you are solid with that contact, but you lose that if you get a warrant while working for them. So what happens to that card? Nowhere in the rules does it say, or what to do with a completed job card if you are already solid with the contact. There were a few other things that were not very clear either, but I am failing to remember them right now.
Still fun, though.
3 Likes
One of the playthroughs I saw was a solo game as well, and I think the guy houseruled that when he had to move a ship like the Cruiser or a Reaver, he would roll a dice to decide if to move towards his ship (1-3), or anywhere else. But yes, the time limit can look a bit tricky.
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Yeah, that sort of thing is why I wrote my own rulebook for Firefly. (But also because of having a bunch of separate expansion rulebooks dealing with related subjects, which makes it less useful to you playing the base game.) I believe in both cases the completed job card is out of the game. (The one you got a warrant working goes back to the contact’s discard pile.)
4 Likes
If I buy the game (which is highly likely) I might ask you for it if you don’t mind.
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It’s on BGG, and in the first post of the game thread. 
2 Likes
Noted (scribbles down)
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That, at least, was in the rules. 
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We just finished up our back half of our first game of Wasteland Express Delivery Service, started on Saturday. That probably makes it sound like a slog, and the game seems to have a bit of a reputation for running long, but actually it ran really quick! Not counting a fairly big (but easy) teach, I figure we spent about 2 hours of actual game time, which seems just right for a game of this scope.
Anyway, I don’t have much time for commentary, but suffice it to say that: my partner and I had a great time, it all boiled down to a really tight race (I won by two turns, one if my partner thought to purchase an escort the round prior), turns were dynamic, went quickly and tracked well enough to survive repeat interruptions. Above all else it was really fun.
Far more Xia-lite than I expected (and I did expect that), it ended up ticking off way more fun-factor boxes than I expected it to, and I think even a few of its design elements are properly ingenious (Raiders in particular). I think we’re both looking forward to another round.
6 Likes
Game #2 of Root, this time with three players. Last time we were two players running through the tutorial scenario (which requires all four factions, so we’d had two each).
My Woodland Alliance was in second place for most of the game, but was permitted to run rampant by the other players, and ultimately became too powerful to stop. The Eyrie had an absolutely abysmal time of it, never getting out of the starting blocks, and suffering endless Turmoil and virtually no points at all. The Marquise de Cat maintained a decent lead for most of the game, until the mice did me the really tremendous favour of destroying not only the warriors and regular buildings at the cat’s Keep (which I did expect), but also the Keep itself (which came as a complete surprise to me). That Favour of Mice card is a freaking WMD (if the other players don’t stop you from being able to use it, which clearly they ought to).
5 Likes
After a month completed the first proper hunt of the new Kingdom Death Monster campaign.
How the hunt phase went.
Step 1. Lose all survival.
Step 2. Move directly to the next space.
Step 3. A living wall of flesh ‘disassembles’ one of the party to increase its own size unless you spend a survival. (See Step 1)
So I had to undertake the fight with only three survivors and things went… ok?
Stuffed up who was supposed to go first, and again I need to fully understand collisions, but uncovered a tactic that seemed effective for once.
Again, only found a single bone, so this is going to be the big limiting factor. Planning on continuing to fight only lions for now.
3 Likes
So after my teaching session on Tuesday, we had ourselves a game of Pax Pamir 2nd in TTS
This is my first synchronous actual multiplayer 
Four players.
What I should have expected is that I kept having to explain details and that people were overlooking so many possibilities that I had to spent the first half hour to hour helping along with ideas for moves. This makes my usual sneakily quiet strategies harder.
First dominance check went to Blue because Blue got that Herat card that can create new spies and so Blue had the most pieces in play when no faction was dominant.
Second dominance check, Afghanistan was dominant and so that was shared between White (me) and Orange who both had the same influence with Black coming in third.
Right after that first Black than White changed their loyalty to the British Empire and White became the ruler of Punjab. There was a bit of a scary moment when Black bought the event that lets a player remove all tribes and armies in a region and the others urged Black to raze Punjab. But they went for Kabul instead decimating Orange’s court. As Orange was quite leveraged they lost a lot of cards on their turn.
We had to take a break playing. If I could have got a dominance check in the market by my next turn, I could have ended the game–I am rich I could have easily bought it and a present to gain the most influence and would have been in the lead with enough points 9 points over 4. But Orange declined to take anything from the market after I announced the possibility in an attempt to finish the game. We’ll continue the game Sunday afternoon. One of the good things about TTS is the ability to save.
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Today I played a game of Terra Mystica. First game with my MT swap copy if this. Haven’t played in years so was without strategy largely but much fun was had. The wooden pieces are ludicrously jolly, even playing the darklings and using black pieces was jolly. My brian melted, I finished last by 1 point but I did some fun stuff and spent a lot of VPs on moving mana.
I think I’m happy to keep Clans of Caledonia as well as it’s so different and much faster.
6 Likes
Not helping 
I’ve been eyeing this one to replace Isle of Skye as my Scotland game but stayed away because of the supposed similarities to TM.
I am glad you had fun with TM, I should get mine out I haven’t even played with the newest expansion yet. And that is at least 2 years old now.
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I’ve never played Terra Mystica, but I played Clans of Caledonia once and was really disappointed; I went into it expecting to really enjoy the game, but I found the fun parts of the game were very “once-and-done” whereas the path to winning involved doing uninteresting things repeatedly – like, focusing most of your time on doing protracted resource production/conversion that you had already done multiple times. Also, the final scoring was nearly a-thematic; seemingly a balancing mechanism to offset… something?
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You what? Do you even have a copy of TM? I mean it has „boats“ and… bridges…
But then what you describe in not enjoying about Caledonia could very well hold true for TM as well. So maybe not your kind of game.
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I got a copy of Gaia Project for my birthday (over 6 months ago) but haven’t gotten the energy in the evenings to crack open the rule book and teach myself the solo mode.
I really need to get on that.
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