I’ve heard a lot of people describe Herbaceous as a relaxing game, and I don’t understand it. For my partner and I, there is no game more likely to poison our relationship from the roots, and we play Overcooked on a regular basis.
4 Likes
Ah, well my partner loves Lost Cities and that feels a bit more directly targeted at denying your opponent than Herbaceous. But you’re right, the outcome was very much decided by “because your opponent did a thing”.
3 Likes
Played a 3 player of Pax Pamir on TTS last night. (One player couldn’t make it)
At least one of the players had by now internalized all the rules but the other one still needed a bit of coaching throughout most of the game.
For the first Dominance Check we all sided with Russia and I managed to snag another loyalty point right before buying the check. So we had a 5/3/1 situation.
The board cleared, and one player quickly sided with the British and started putting tons of armies on the board. I was going to assassinate one of my own cards to switch to British loyalty, too but the player prevented that ultimately causing his own downfall because I then switched to Afghanistan and proceeded to decimate his armies in revenge of him killing of my court.
The next dominance check came up and the third player, who was still allied with Russia had so many spies and tribes that he easily took over with a 1 point lead. The new situation was 6/5/1.
And because I had been squabbling with the player allied with the British we both missed the opportunity to stop the guy who then proceeded–on my advice–to hoard money and spies until the next check came up giving him a 4 point lead that neither of the two others were able to take from him even by doing nothing else but trying to keep him from winning for two rounds.
My bad. I was so pre-occupied with preventing the British dominance from happening–because if I couldn’t join them they were surely not going to take home any kind of advantage–I totally missed the thing that the third player was going to win on playing pieces.
It was awesome.
The only thing niggling at me was that the player who won kept saying he didn’t know what he was doing and I am very suspicious it was an act for most of the game. Whining at me during games throws me off my own game. I do like being underestimated as a newbie but I do hope I don’t flaunt it that way. I am not innocent about whining though, I know this and so… (in any case: see the recent SVWAG about whining)
Final board:
PS: my personal favorite moment of the game was, when I bought the event card that let me switch my hand with someone else. Before that I played a Russian patriot and after switching hands I had two cards again instead of one and I got his Russian patriot that way… which is the reason I snagged those initial 5 points 
3 Likes
Those pieces look lost on that map. I wonder why they scaled them down so much? Or is it that the map has been made huge? Edit: Looks like the latter.
1 Like
It’s the official mod. I haven’t done anything to it. It also sadly lacks scripting for the market. I really need to look into that.
One of my best friends does this whenever he learns a new game. He invariably wins (I teach most of the games and never win). We all want to do physical violence to him for it. Still we all have our quirks and it’s better than two of the others who take forrrrrreevvvveeerrrr to take a turn!
5 Likes
Polynesia - oohhh this one is interesting. It’s dry but strategic and has high player interaction game of logistics. You island hop away from the volcano with as many people are you can. You claim routes and set the price (either shells or fish) and any latecomer who wants to build a route there too must pay the player with 2 of that selected resource. They can also use your routes, but there should be a person of your own team in that route to “guide” the meeples to the island. This is muutally beneficial as you get to move your meeples for free while they get to use your route without the need to claim! On the long term, you want to place your Polynesian meeples onto the islands you want to score the end game points.
I like the small decisions the game asks you. There are 3 turns on a round: Phase 3, 2, and then 1 (yes, in that order). The phase number dictates how many you can do with the selected action you did. However, some actions are best used at Phase 3 and some at Phase 1. But the game pulls you to do the suboptimal moves to help your priorities.
The only random bit is the game duration, which is when the volcano explodes. It requires a certain amount of red cubes to show up, which balances the random chance.
I like it already. In a way, I prefer this one over Friesse’s Fresh Fish, which is a dry but mean route building game, The long-term decisions and positive player interaction is more of my style. I’m still not sure if I want to keep it. I will play more of it. I wonder if you feel the same way @yashima ?
1861: Railways of the Russian Empire - it’s still fun. Compare to most heavy games, I would choose this. But compare to other 18xx, I’m happy to play something else. Moscow is just too good. The best paying city (slightly better than Kiev and St. Petersburg until very late game) plus the Moscow-Ekaterinburg is just too good that running multiple routes between those pays very well. A Moscow station is pretty much a must, since you can do the usually Moscow-Ekaterinburg and then continue on to hit SPB and/or Kiev and Poland.
This stands in contrasts with 18Mex where Mexico City pays the best, but you can have Texas and Cali as alternatives if you got blocked to get into Mexico City.
Towns remain an afterthought. I don’t see the point of them other than to serve as a nexus. Having to add 10 Roubles is a bit of a tedious consolation prize.
I still found the starting phase to be slow where you’re spamming minor corps. on the map. But it does pick up the pace by phase 3 and beyond. I don’t find tempo considerations to be sufficient. Since you guys have loads of money. it’s a bit dismaying that you must keep floating minor corps. The game then becomes a series of timing questions which I like: When do you want to upgrade/merge your minors into major corps? When do you buy and sell the right shares at the right time? The train rush is tense enough that you can’t be complacent on running your minor corporations.
There are other “run good companies” titles I would rather play: 1844: Switzerland, 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties, or 1846: Race to the Midwest.
6 Likes
I have only played a couple of games so far. I particularly like the idea of hitching a ride with another player and the resource production from the islands.
I think the goal cards are a bit on the boring side.
For me it is staying until I can get a few plays in. It is–as the manual notes–really an abstract game with a theme painted on. I want to see how it plays with more players if it stays as relaxed as my 2 player games suggest.
And I also liked the 3 2 1 phases dictating action strength and some actions being better suited to each phase but you needing to do something in a different order and constantly compromising.
3 Likes
Polynesia has been on my radar for a while, thanks for the review…
Plenty of games played this past week:
Anomia, a few games of this with different groups. It’s a lot of fun, my wife in particular has really fallen for it. I’m kind of regretting not getting Anomia Party - I don’t tend to play party games often, was my thinking. I wasn’t counting on how much my wife would enjoy it though - also nice that it does smaller playercounts better than a lot of other party games.
Love Letter, played this at the end of a night with some friends. It’s kind of predictably enjoyable without being particularly deep or compelling.
Ticket to Ride: London, another surprise hit with my wife - a friend brought his copy over to try out. It’s exactly what it appears to be - Ticket to Ride but in a shorter timeframe. It was pretty good, we may end up picking up a game in the series ourselves.
Incan Gold (or Diamant now), played the heck out of this one, 4 games total. I did pretty poorly but still lots of fun - a great, quite pure push your luck game. The player count is also pretty flexible, though I’ve never played with the upper limit of players (8 I believe)
Garbage Day, this one is silly fun, mix of dexterity and take-that. It’s certainly not my favourite dexterity game, but my wife likes it a lot so it’s sticking around in the collection.
Super Big Boggle, a few rounds of this with my wife. Unusually, I won all our games. Best word was freezer
5 Likes
I’ve been playing CuBirds on BGA recently. I think its just the kind of lightweight card game that my family will like.
Played Concordia last night with my wife, using the Creta map. I was feeling pretty bad about my chances when the game ended, as she had just taken two of the last three cards from the track, bringing her card count over mine, but as the scoring happened, it turned out I had better positioning than her on the map than I realized. Having Mason, Farmer, and Smith with a number of cities for each pretty much sealed my victory, 132 - 114.
4 Likes
A couple more years of Kingdom Death with more walls of rending flesh thankfully avoided. The plan being to only attack white lions.
Playing kingdom of the stars, I’ve suddenly realised getting new survivors is a lot harder than in base game, and I was just about to start tracking level 2 monsters.
But then my survivors got lost in the mist, which means they are allowed to stumble into a new group of survivors and start again from year 1 (but keep all my equipment)
So my survivors decided to abandon their old lives, steal all their equipment and start again.
Sorry original village. 
3 Likes
Just played Ra for the first time on triqqy. We had some issues; God tiles didn’t work and I’m pretty sure I got boned out of a good few points in the last turn (may be that a rule I didn’t know got enforced without an idiot warning). Anyway, I was terrible at it.
It’s a Knizia auction classic. Very simple turn structure, very few actions to choose, but all the choices were of great consequence.
All 3 of us were new. It’s really, really good. Every decision felt tense and there were some excellent push your luck moments. 3 new players on a clunky system took around an hour as well.
Very much want to play again and will be watching the reprint avidly.
9 Likes
I’m waiting on the reprint to see if it improves my FFG but French copy.
A smaller box would be a good start
3 Likes
I just got done my second (solitaire) game of Fleet Dice and netted (h’yuk!) a score of 61, an improvement of 4 over my first solo game. I focused heavily on a simple fish+income strategy after Captain Ruth(less) basically destroyed my wharf area. I needed to make a whole bunch of suboptimal die selections throughout the game to keep Ruth from wreaking even more havoc on my scoring potential.
I remain fabulously enamoured by this little gem. Tough choices galore, and wonderful explosive potential to exploit.
9 Likes
Started with Isle of Skye. Still enjoyed it. You can calculate the optimal move (not good) but still fun setting prices and exploit opponents miscalculations.
Then we went up to 6 players as the rest of the group arrived. Never played Bohnanza at 6 players. I have now. Not an optimal number with newbies. Still the best Uwe Rosemberg game
EDIT: I forgot to mention how much the phrase “This is the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals” was used in that game.
2 Likes
Just tried out the demo of Under Falling Skies on TTS. Very fun solo game. I like the pressure that starts to build as the mothership gets lower and lower on the sky track as you are struggling to push up your research token on its track. Meanwhile, deciding where to put your dice in your base, wondering if you should risk taking a damage from a descending ship to get a little further ahead in research, or take a gamble and place a white die which forces a re-roll of all your remaining dice makes for wonderfully brain-burning decisions. Definitely going to play this some more.
4 Likes
Played Vampire: Vendetta on TTS again tonight. Tried out the Brujah and got utterly demolished. I do feel I had a bad draw order, doing okay on the first round, but terribly on the next two. Only Frenzied one player twice, but was set up a couple of times to do more, but players withdrew from the location, which did rob me of some points, but even then, I would not have been doing well. Still fun though.
2 Likes
Played Pax Pamir 2e with three new players on Vassal. Felt sooo good to play a live game with adult humans!
Also really happy with the new dominance indicator, and the new “flare” indicator to show where you are pointing. Made teaching a lot easier.
The British were pouring in troops, the Russians infrastructure. Only a last-minute betrayal of the British by tan enabled a failed dominance check and a win for my spy network.
9 Likes