That is a lot of roads between Transcaspia and Kabul. Spie networks for the win 
I have not been playing spies enough in my last games. Omg I can talk plural now about the game. Congratulations on both playing and winning.
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I was really happy when they tore up my court and at one point all three had a strong British coalition and it looked hopeless for me. Felt like they were all having a great time. Unfortunately, the guy who was winning kind of played himself into a corner with his betrayal of the British and he ended up the only player with a negative first impression. āBad designā that you can end up with no rupees through no fault of your own, ābad designā to double the final VPs. First time playing anything with any of them though, and if heās one of those need to win types, no great loss.
One very positive, one need to try again, one negative, not a bad result.
3 Likes
Like with my game the one player putting things to luck of the drawā¦
I usually have trouble deciding between several tasty moves. But I kept hearing: I cannot see what I can do. Which is weird there is always something to do.
Yes, yes this game is about winning as much and more than some others but it is also about the friends we abandoned along the wayā¦
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Iām just remembering how very close the guy having a great time only to eventually hate the game came to winning. The second dominance check was a double dominance card draw, Conflict Fatigue was out, and he merely had to place one more block instead of purchasing twice to win. Funny how if that had happened, he would have left with a really positive first impressionā¦
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I introduced my partner to Troyes Dice and broke him. He scored a very respectable 93 points to my 96. I played a few games before and really like the game. But he suffered heavy AP and says it broke his brain. Luckily this one plays well as a solo.
I have never played the big Troyes game. I want to but havenāt managed.
The dice game is played over 8 days with morning and afternoon each. 4 dice are rolled, 1 is black. They are put in order of value (black is always lower than same number on transparent die) on the rondel representing the different quartiers in the city. Each cartier has one of three colors: red for military, yellow for commerce and white for faith. The dice take on the quartier colors except for black. The rondel determines how much each die costs. You choose one and build the building on your sheet that corresponds to the color and number. Each spot has two buildings. The black die from day 3 onwards not only blocks one quartier but also destroys building spaces permanently.
Each color has one building type that gives that color and one type that has a special ability:
- red has fortresses that protect a whole column from the black die
- yellow has trade Kontors that produce huge numbers resources based on colored dice
- white has cathedrals that enable scoring for a building type
You can also use dice to generate income instead of building but that is mostly a Verlegenheitsaktion. Buildings give you either followers in one of the three colors (best source of VP) or one of three resources (flags that you use to increase or decrease dice values, coins to pay for dice from the rondel and faith to change dice colors).
VP are generated from leftover resources, followers and buildings but only for those buildings where you built the related white cathedral to enable scoring for that type.
There are combo bonusses everywhere on the sheet and taking into account those with the ability to change colors and value of dice and that resources are also VPā¦
I like it and would play multiple roundsā¦ there is also a mini expansion called Banquets in the box. Those give additional bonusses for some quartiers until the black dice turns them into a malus instead. Usually that happens before you can use the bonus
As stated before jumped straight to being my second favorite Roll&Write (Railroad Ink ftw)
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Ooooh, I donāt think the mini expansion is in the English version
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Plenty of games played yesterday in an event that we organised in the Hastings Public Library, Nerdvana. The Guild gathered forces, and at some point we had a good dozen tables going.
Played:
Cryptids (x4)
Magic Maze
Flipology (x3), which was more successful than I expected.
Taught Pandemic to two kids and supervised their game. They managed to win with a bit of guidance.
Hey, thatās my fish: great little game.
Cockroach Poker (they cornered me with 3 flies early on, eventually only had flies left in my hand, and lost by running out of cards)
Love Letter
Ticket to Ride (lost by 3 points)
Forbidden Island (we won easy)
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I taught my partner a new-to-him game and after I was in the lead for a bit he wanted to give up and I said his game was not lost and to give it one more round and we played a bit more and he won.
The game?
Kemet!
And it was mean.: the game ended because I was over 9 fameā¦ the problem was that he was at 10
This is by no means a trivial game and I am happy because too often I win his first games because I know the game better and I end up frustrating him.
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Played some games this past week:
Finca, we played this as a bit of a warm-up, first time Iāve used the updated quantities for the fruit. Itās really interesting and has such a big impact on the way the game plays - makes it much more tight and vicious, but enjoyably so. Iāll probably insist on it going forward (Though this game is one of Mumās favorites and Iām not sure how sheāll feel about this tweak, so wait and see on that one).
Welcome Toā¦, itās still my favourite roll/flip and write - Iāve played it quite a lot at this stage but itās still interesting and with plenty of tricky decisions
Metro X, first game of this with other humans. Itās good, I didnāt do particularly well - far too many uncrossed stations and only one of my transfers was in a good spot. Fun though.
Ticket to Ride: India, this was a rematch with my wife (with a couple of other players at the table). I did okay, good points on tickets, but had the 8 length ferry route stolen one turn before I could fulfill it - that hurt. My wife wiped the floor with the rest of us quite handily.
Coatl, second game of this one. We played without the special powers but it still held up. Delightful puzzle and the fact that you canāt discard cards or coatl pieces has a really interesting impact on how you plan. I won this one by a decent amount, which I didnāt quite expect - 3 decent but not amazing coatls, but they added up. Rather like this one, little bit more complicated than Azul but not much and feels a bit similar to me. I may like it more than Azul. But theyāre both great. And both nice lookers to boot.
Red Rising played this one at a monthly game group meetup near where I live - always nice to be able to try the hot new games without having to buy them! This one was just okay though. Thereās some interesting decisions but in general it just felt quite chaotic - things would change so much that you couldnāt really plan ahead. I suspect that will be less of an issue at smaller player counts though (we played with 5). And because a lot of your points are secret, itās hard to judge whoās in the lead at any point. So yeah, not a winner for me.
Tidal Blades, same meetup and I was pretty apprehensive about trying this one - that big box (for the deluxe edition) is intimidating. I worried that itād be yet another kickstarter miniās fest with too many rules and too clunky to be fun. So I was very pleasantly surprised to find out itās actually pretty good! Itās a worker placement game at itās core, and the placement was tense and interesting. In it youāre building up your characterās stats by completing challenges as well as fighting monsters for points, all driven by an interesting dice-pool system. Thereās a bit going on, but I wouldnāt say it was super complicated - lots of options but all are fairly straightforward. The production was also rather nice (though the deluxe additions are mostly unnecessary and seem to take up more space than theyāre worth - though the squishy fruit are great). I came second and wouldāve (but for time) happily played another game of it immediately. Really interesting, Iāll be keeping an eye out for a copy, though even the regular retail edition is relatively expensive here, so I may be waiting awhile for a good sale.
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We got a good few games in yesterday:
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Altiplano: played with the traveller expansion, but didnāt use it much. I wonder whether a higher player count would encourage more trading.
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Roam: Nice little spatial puzzle. My favourite part is that one of the character cards is āBlops the pack turtleā
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Oceans: Went down much better this time! Lots of parasitism going on. We didnāt get to the Cambrian Explosion until very late in the game, so not many Deep cards got played. The box is large enough that I was considering getting hold of a copy of Evolution and keeping them together
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Minute Realms: a quick tableu builder. Nothing special but it was only a tenner
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Everdell: with the Bellfaire expansion. I did terribly this time due to some difficulty in obtaining production cards
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This morning my partner got a teach in three parts for Maracaibo thanks to a sick yet remarkably pleasant little girl needing our attention. Frequent starts meant more breaks though too, so we managed it ok, being able to break it down into compartmentalized chunks. Explaining ācombatā in particular was a struggle at first; I tried to position it as something of a currency exchange with respect to how taking combat actions works, but it fell flat. Iāll need to revisit my approach here for any teaches in the future since itās really not hard to grasp once you see it played out.
And thatās really a running theme so far. Thereās no question itās a chunky beast of a game, but it plays very smoothly and leaves you to scratch your head over the wide and dynamic range of decisions in front of you after only a couple of turns. I feel like my partner has taken a pretty sound lead so far, but weāre also both pretty confident that neither of us are performing particularly well. That said, weāre both having a great time with it.
We called it quits this evening after scoring round 2/4, smack in the middle and accounting for about 90 minutes so far. Iām confident thisāll be a 90-120 minute full game at 2 with some familiarity, but heavy card play as usual translates to some pretty heavy onboarding.
Iām impressed by an awful lot here, and itās certainly offering something different from my other Euros, even though I joked with my partner as I unveiled the ghastly mess of a board (how can something so colourful still be so beige?) and pointed at all the usual suspects: track, track, track, action selection ring, another track, victory point border. Checklist complete.
Thereās something economic-adjacent that Iām really enjoying and which Iāll probably only come to appreciate more. Itās another big point salad, but youāve gotta work pretty hard for those vee pees, and the board is highly dynamic, so working things out is really a fascinating and frequently enticing affair.
Weāll hopefully finish off the back half at some point tomorrow, when the true gulf between our scores will be revealed. I have so much more wheel spinning to do.
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We finally got back to our Pandemic Season 2. After we lost both March games, we had a bit of trouble finding the motivation as there was some pressure on to finally win a game.
And April went (thanks for the tips) much betterā¦ after a quick connect and search operation in Lima we won easily directly after the third epidemic hit, partial thanks to an event which gave us a Quiet Night.
April brought some surprising developments like vaccinations and our discovery of a lost Zuflucht we named with much hybris Daā Win (as it is right where the Galapagos Islands would be). We now have a city with population 8 thanks to a permanent Versorgungszentrum in Washington and overall only lost a single population this round while gaining fourā¦
Managed another TTS play of Under Falling Skies this morning. This game was much easier, as I managed to get every ship on an explosion space on the second round and destroy them all. I won after maybe 7 rounds (I was not keeping track, but it felt quick), with the mothership only reducing my excavations and research once each. Base took just 2 damage all game.
I will say that it was a bit exhilarating when I realized I could wipe out all the attacking ships that round. Still liking the decision space around dice placement, and whether to try to do what you can with the grey dice you have, or to place a white die and gamble on a reroll.
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Met @EnterTheWyvern and a friend to play some games that - surprise! - arenāt about trains. No, not at all.
The first game we played was I canāt believe itās not trains! - which is shorten to Impulse, designed by Carl Chudyk. It was more of a learning game but we pretty much internalised most of it. I just need to re-read the rules and sort out the edge cases.
Next in our train-free session was Too Many Bones, which is a ādice building RPGā. Played as Duster. Levelled up to get more dice and better dice stats. Very tactile game and itās always great to chuck some dice. But I wonder if thereās a way to tune the difficulty a bit more.
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Third in the series of our Sunday duel of Beyond the Sun. My first time researching a level 4 techā¦ and that was all the VP I needed to win. Also my first time ever accidentally completing an achievement: we had a new one that triggered when you had six systems colonized or controlled that shared a type and I needed lots of ore to research my level 4 tech and distributed my ships to optimize automizationā¦ and accidentally ended the game.
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Nemesis , played in full co-op, managed the win, only one of us died. And we managed to finish in about three hours, which is much better than six or seven hours.
Abandon All Artichokes , first play. A pretty simple game, all you have to do to win is draw a hand and not have any artichokes in it. Each player starts with a deck of ten artichokes. You lay out a line of cards from the draw deck, and on your turn you take a card, and then play as many cards from your own deck as you can. All the non-artichoke cards have an ability, which often involves composting (ie discarding out of the game) artichoke cards. Itās pretty simple to pick up. At first I didnāt think much of it, but by the end I was having a good time.
Inkling , first play. In this game, you are trying to get your neighbours to guess words from your secret clue card. And obviously, youāre trying to guess the neighbours clues as well. You make up words using letter cards, but you are encouraged to use the cards in different ways. Like a āZā could be turned on its side and become an āNā. Or a āBā could be partially covered up by other card to make it into a āPā. It was quite fun, and we all ended up a point apart.
Rallyman GT . first play. Obviously, youāre trying to get your car around the track before anyone else. You have three types of dice: black, white, and red. The actual numbers of each die depend on what tyres youāve got on. You use black die to move up or down through the gears. A white dice continues at the same gear, and red dice are used for breaking. Most corners have a maximum gear you need to be in, and going too fast will make your car spin out of control. You lay out your dice from the current position of your car. Then you can roll each die. Each die has at least one face showing a hazard. If you roll too many of these, you spin out of control. Instead of rolling one die at a time, you can roll all of your dice at once. And if you do, you are rewarded with focus tokens, which can be used in future turns to lock dice in place (so they donāt need to be rolled). It took a while to setup, because we used a track layout from the rulebook, and had trouble locating a certain numbered tile, which turned out to be the pits (which doesnāt actually connect to the track). Good fun, want to play again.
Honey Buzz , first play. You play tiles to your hive, each tile having its own power. When you have 3 tiles enclosing a space, you get to perform each of the actions. These can be giving you a new worker, collecting nectar, getting money, using the market to sell nectar/fulfil orders, and a wild card action. The owner of the game smashed us all.
Are you Dumber than a Box of Rocks , wooo, we beat the rocks (just barelyā¦)
Oriflamme
Cthulhu: Death May Die , probably shouldnāt play this at the end of a gaming session. We made so many rules stuffups, some that helped us, some that didnāt. In any case, we lost. Cthulhu came out on the board before we had disrupted the ritual, so that wasnāt good. We defeated one of his stages, but that was it.
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Abandon All Artichokes wa, as a result of the pandemic,y most played game last year. The eight year old loves it. Iām done with it but as a fun game that one of the kids will play itās staying for now.
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The rulebook format isnāt ideal. Iām working on a better one. 
Pro tem, the Rallyman GT app (games.holygrail.rallymangt) has a mode in which it shows a large tile number overlay in the right place on the layout.
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The day was fun, it was nice to play something a bit more thematic and tactical.
That being said I agree about yesterdayās difficulty. The boss fight was particularly disappointing with how easy it was. In general the difficulty is swingy however I think several things made this one easier from an underlying. Firstly Undertow hands out tons of training points, more so than the base game. Secondly Duster is amongst the better Gearlocs. Her high initiative really makes the difference as well as her aggressive skills and the smoke, before you even add in the wolf.
Barnacle as written doesnāt seem to scale with the days and consequently the Gearlocs improve but the boss doesnāt get more challenging.
In general you are right it would be nice to have a way to tweak up the challenge a touch when necessary.
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