Played some evergreens: For Sale, Q.E., and Liars Dice.
Someone introduced me to Strike which is a fun game of throwing a dice and try to get some pairs, 3 of a kind, etc. It was fun as my first. I have doubts with the longevity. But happy to be proven wrong. Still, I’d rather play that than some 2 hour heads down resource coversion malarkey.
Whats best is that you dont need to buy the game. A bowl and some dice is enough.
Nothing heavy but I will leave that on Sunday with 1861: Russian Empire
Terra never felt to be a resource conversion game, since resources come to you as income, and then expend them for buildings.
I got tired of Caledonia when the game is more tactical than strategic, unlike Terra. Contracts is unescapable. And it’s hard to deduce which market will be hot, to exploit an opportunity, unlike say Container.
Three at our weekly gaming gathering this week, we played:
Quarriors, as much as I know I really hold onto this one because of good memories of playing it with my wife early in our relationship, it’s still decent. There’s a lot of randomness, and some of the special powers are a bit overwrought, but it’s still good fun building a bag and rolling lots of custom dice. It’s probably been superseded by Quacks for me but it’s an interesting throw-back. I went for all the wizards in our first game (and nabbed 4 of them) but lost that round when I couldn’t seem to get them summoned and in our second nabbed only 1 wizard but won that one, quality over quantity applies to wizards apparently…
Incan Gold, classic push your luck game - we played a couple of rounds of it. In the first one, one of us (not me) got a solid early lead, leaving the rest of the game a bit of a desperate (and failed) attempt for the rest of us to catch up. The second was much closer, and in the end I won it by a few points thanks to bailing early on a couple of the runs and nabbing some artifacts.
Metro X, got in a solo play of this new acquisition today after a learning game the other day (where I misunderstood how transfers worked). I’m looking forward to playing it with others - very clean design with a bunch of tricky decisions - a nice little addition to swelling my roll and write collection.
Two games of Oceans the last couple of days, first with my 8yo daughter, today with my OH. Some really wicked Deep cards these two games, really wow.
Won both, which won’t help getting it back to the table any soon. Still love how the game has every species connecting and interacting in the board ecosystem.
Do you mean shuffling money around or the end of turn production ‘chains’?
Resource conversion always felt an inconsequential part of the game to me. I think it has a hint of logistics, but is mainly about tempo and board positioning with using the market to make choices between turns and goods to fulfil the contracts. I think the contracts work well until the last go when they become a touch arbitrary. That also links to the tempo where getting a choice from 3 increases the odds of getting good ones.
I also disagree about the end game scoring being athematic. It’s a very crude abstraction of notions of supply and demand. I find it enjoyably tense trying to work out if you can fulfil less optimal contracts to bump resources up to get them more popular than your main one.
I think @lalunaverde is accurate to point out how tactical it is, however I don’t think that means it’s not also strategic. It’s nowhere near as heavy as TM and it’s not got that think of the whole game at once in every decision crunch. That’s maybe what I like so much about it though, for a medium euro it’s got enough about it to be a fun 90-120 minutes with some market stuff and some sense of building out on a board. Is it perfect? No but it does enough well that I’m always keen to play it.
I also wonder if it’d be a particularly bad one to play async online. It’s mechanics aren’t rigorous but the player interaction is real from tempo and spatial considerations. The sterile land of async online is terrible for what’s going on in the game.
Usual caveat of subjectivity in games applies of course. I was just trying to see if I could articulate some of what I enjoy in the game.
Oceans arrived within the last week and my girlfriend is still getting to grips with it so we’ve not introduced the deep deck yet. I’m still really impressed with how everything interacts playing the game at a pretty basic level but I’m itching to get some of the deep cards in.
Jaws of the Lion , another kill everything that moves mission. I was exhausted a turn from the end, but the team pulled it out.
Project Elite , first play. Yet another kill all the aliens game, but the gimmick is that there is a real time action phase, where you all simultaneously roll your dice to move around and kill the invading aliens. There are a few different game modes, we chose Extermination, which meant completing objectives on the board by matching their symbol. There are eight rounds, and each round has the same structure: draw an event card, draw a swarm spawn card per player (which add aliens to the board), boss spawn. Basic aliens are runners, shooter, and biters, and the name gives you an idea of what they do. They all have a single health, so any hit will kill them. Bosses are nastier, and have more health. Then you have a two minute action phase, where you try and roll dice as fast as you can. You can reroll any of all of your dice, but red dice are alien movement, and you must resolve them first. Weapons require dice to ready them, and have various effects. The weapons have a range, the number of hit dice they roll, and what value is required for a successful hit. You need move action dice to move (duh), and search dice to search for items. After the action phase (which is over sooner than you think…) is the aliens turn to fight back, and move forward. We destroyed a couple of bosses, but managed to complete none of the objectives required. It was a full time job just keeping the aliens back. Good fun tho. Quite nice minis as well, the bosses look particularly nasty.
Are You Dumber than a Box of Rocks , first play. Picked this up cheap. It’s a trivia game, where every answer is either zero, one, or two. You give your answer, and then two rocks are shaken up inside the box. Each rock is marked with a 1, so they give the answer of zero, one, or two. Embarrassingly, we lost the first game. Some of the questions are a bit odd, and I’m not sure who would know the answer. Like how many weeks a flower will survive after being given Viagra. Weird. We did beat the rocks in the second game, so that’s…good I suppose?
99 , first play. This is a trick taking game based around a standard deck of cards. I heard about it on reddit, so wanted to give it a go. It has all the trick taking aspects you expect, but the clever bit is that you have to use three cards from your hand (of twelve) to predict exactly how many tricks you will win. The values of the bid cards don’t matter – just their suit. A diamond is zero, a spade is one, a heart is two, and a club is three. So the minimum bid is zero (three diamonds), and the maximum is nine (three clubs). It’s an easy enough game to pick up and play, if you’ve ever played a trick taking game. It was fun, but I’m not any major hurry to play again.
Nova Luna , always fun. At least when I win. Which I did.
Are You Dumber than a Box of Rocks again. Not taken too seriously this time, but still a bit of fun.
Project Elite , another bash. Much more successful this time. I still sucked, but the other players were smashing it, going thru the standard aliens and the bosses like a hot knife thru butter. Probably would have won, but some idiot (ie me) didn’t remember that to successfully complete the mission, you have to make it back to the start area. Oopsie.
Nidavellir , mostly fun. Except I tried to use the app for scoring, only to find some cards couldn’t be selected. Turns out there are some cards taken out if you’re not playing with 5p. I don’t think I’ve ever taken cards out. And we’ve always done scoring manually. We decided just to go ahead, no easy way to fix it. I lost by quite a lot, which was no surprise. I think I had one hero card. Still fun tho.
Biblios , we needed a quick one to finish up, and I’ll never turn down a game of Biblios. Pretty simple to play, and good fun. I can’t remember what people have taken, so I just bumble along.
Had a really nice exploration of the Xia TTS module with some forumizens (forum denizens?) last night. Played a 5 point trial game and I think we need to do a repeat for more points now that I understand that a D6 engine is just too slow to catch a smuggler 
(this is not what happened but the sentence sounds good and paraphrases what I learned.)
I also learned “don’t take a mission when the origin point hasn’t been drawn yet, because you have only one not-yet-started-mission slot”.
That’s something that got changed/fixed with the Embers expansion, if you found the mission restriction too limiting. You can get m-chips for your ship that allow you to hold more missions at once.
It wasn’t that it was restrictive, it was that I didn’t realise I would be locking myself to that mission. I loved the game and definitely want to play it more. (Rules are… less than ideal, particularly since they’re desperately pixelly PDF pages that take an age to render even on my fairly grunty machines.)
After another 2 rounds our game of Pax Pamir 2 ended rather abruptly when the third dominance check was triggered by the fourth entering the market (they were really close together, 10 cards left in the deck) and while I only came in second for the British in influence the person who came in first was so far behind me that I ended up leading with 1 point.
I will not soon forget the battles (few battles, lots of spooky backstabbing) we fought, the thrones we held and the precarious balance of my own court as I watched other’s courts get decimated.
One player tried to debate the game had “too much luck” because in this game he just didn’t get the same good cards he got in the trial game. The rest argued that he would have had to match his strategy to what was in the market then.
They also immediately wanted to set a date for another game “before they forgot the rules again” 
We played our first two player game of Empyreal Spells and Steam. It’s an engine builder which feels has this really odd pace. You race to lay things easily but by the end you hope your engine has enough variety to cope with diminishing stuff.
The game comes with a lot of variable powers but most feel kind of pointless and detract from doing the main job at hand. The paciness of the game seems to outrun the need to be too clever.
It could easily be the case the premium player count is exactly four. Half way beetween easy freedom and tight enough to justify needing to be cleverer and more sharp with placement.
Got to play two games tonight. First up was Jaipur, which my wife and I played while she was cooking dinner. First round was rather odd, as no rubies were sold. I had three in hand and was about to, but my wife was able to end the round first. I won that one.
She got the second round, by the margin of the camel bonus token, but to be fair, if I hadn’t traded away my camels for her to take, I likely would not have scored as much as I did. Third round, and the game, went to me, due to having higher valued bonus tokens which broke our 54 point tie.
Then tonight we roped her brother in to try out Everdell, his first time playing, and only our second. Never really felt like I got my engine fully up and running, and was always short on resources. Came in a close second to him though, with my wife bringing up the rear. His engine really fired up though going into Autumn, getting him a ton of twigs and a number of all the other resources. I also blundered going into Summer because I had enough Production cards to take the Festival event token, but did not do it on my first play of the season, which let him swoop in and grab it, for a 6 point swing that might have given me the win.
Oh well, people are more likely to play again when they win, right?
I got a Games Night to report on (if a bit late). Finally got to play Architects of the West Kingdom. Loved it. I think it has everything that I like from Raiders without the fussy set up, and probably, no, definitely more original mechanics. I particularly enjoyed the jail system, with black market and rounding up groups of other players. We played between four with entry rules, and I managed a very decent second place, just one turn away from building a final step on the cathedral that would have given me a draw with the leader.
After that, we played, still between four, two games of Pocket Mars. Ended up last the first game (not very sure about what I was doing) but won the second (got good cards to start with, and the player who closed the game did not realise I was ahead in the points). Enjoyable filler. Would not buy it, but would play it if offered.
And finally a game of Stick’em between 5, where I don’t think we got the rules right from the teach. Didn’t realise the cards that were not negative did not count as their value but just one point, no matter their number value, so was playing it completely wrong (and another two players as well) while the couple that owned it stick us with heaps of points. I have seen way better classic trick taking games, if I am honest.
Still, really happy that I tried a game I had heard so much of (Architects) and knowing that I really like it.
I love how most worker placement gives you like 3 workers or maybe 6 if it is generous and Architects gives you 20. I find it has this quick flow that I want from a game because there are so few blocking spots and so many workers. The worker prison is just icing on that cake
Funny enough, at one point I was so carried away I did not realize I had used my last worker. We could backtrack a bit so I could use the jail power…
Last night: Abyss and The Crew on BGA. I have played a physical copy of Abyss, and while the little “pearls” are a major hazard if you’re playing in a board game café with a slippery table and a hard floor (ahem) they do add a lot to the physical experience.
I don’t think I’m going to stop playing on BGA when I can do face-to-face gaming again but I’m certainly going to play there an awful lot less.
I’m not renewing my premium membership for sure. It has become a bit of background activity for me.
Keep a couple of games on the go and dive in when you need a short distraction.
I’m quite annoyed at BGA. I think my Rallyman GT dice are rigged. And I would have to pay for premium to see the stats.