Letters from Whitechapel arrived so we decided to give it a go fairly early on yesterday. I was hoping the hidden movement element would be something she’d enjoy seeing as she really likes fugitive.
Fortunately it was a massive hit with her, and by the end of the evening we’d played 4 games. In both my plays with Jack I got through to the fourth night and was a couple of spaces from home before being arrested. My girlfriend had a tougher time with her first play as Jack, I managed to track down her hideout pretty quickly and had it surrounded so she ran out of moves. Her second turn as Jack she had me second guessing the whole time and managed the win.
All 4 plays were tense and exciting, and have such great moments. One moment I was right on her tail, and suddenly it’s as if she’s disappeared. Satisfying for her, funny and frustrating for me but it also meant each game was creating it’s own story. After each game we sat around for 5-10 minutes just talking through some of the crazy moments of when as Jack we thought we were done for, or how we managed to lose the police with a clever move.
This will be top of my list to play with a bigger group once lockdown restrictions are eased tomorrow.
My husband suggested last night that we spend Sunday playing a long narrative game. With the recent discussions of Sleeping Gods vs Forgotten Waters over in another thread, I had them on the brain so immediately suggested one of those two and he picked Forgotten Waters.
We played the Spoils of the Damned storyline and enjoyed it. It was a good story but also seemed like a pretty easy one. Some of the others we’ve played have definitely felt more challenging. I don’t think there was ever any time we were in real danger on any of the essential stats tracks except supplies, and that was only because we were playing the two-player variant which requires spending extra supplies over the normal game. Crew and hull were always pretty high and discontent was always pretty low so we were never in danger of losing the game overall.
Tonight instead of the Beyond the Sun duel of the last three (or four?) week-ends, we played a game of Wingspan because for that we have a third player and I have not played in ages I came in at 2nd place with 81/76/70 points none of us had a really great run. My bonus cards just messed up my game and it took me a whole round to get my first forest habitat bird… I still hold the opinion that the European birds mess up my engine building while nectar makes the game easier.
Afterwards, I thought I would do better on the app… but lost against the bot, too, with even less points (something around an embarrassing 50ish).
Played as Gasket in Too Many Bones very fun. I think it’s my fave so far with the weird hydro dices
Transatlantic - got to play this before Transatlantic II comes along. We played with the 2020 rules variant which streamlined the game. This game is an example on why I don’t take BGG comments seriously. It has a tighter board which made leeching easier - the complaints that there’s no map makes no sense when there’s little movement between regions.
The pseudo-stock holding is fun as it pulls you on two directions. In the game, when you buy a ship or two, the leftmost ship is discarded to a public discard. These cards will count as a multiplier to all the ships you bought at end game. e.g. If I have 3 red ships and there are 5 red ships in the public discard, then I score 15 pts. Red tiles on your personal player board increases the modifier too, but we’re gonna ignore that for now.
So you end up having to balance your purchase on each suit, on top of deciding which ships to buy for their revenue and stats. If you buy up all the red ships then no red ship will be discarded and wont be used as a multiplier. If you let the multiplier increase, it’ll tempt other players to buy reds.
It’s a more interesting scoring system than Concordia’s modern Euro style of multiplying the cards you bought with the houses you built.
What Transatlantic lacks in comparison to Concordia are the different maps, but I don’t call this “lacking in replayability”.
Lords of Xidit - I like the programming actions bit. But it can drag a bit in the 2nd half and the minis are very annoying to stand on the circular tiles and then they fall off. But there’s no point for these minis, imo. I’d rather play the older version called Himalaya
Played a few games on Saturday for my husband’s birthday (the difference from a regular Saturday being that he got to choose all of the games):
Age of Steam: played the Rust Belt map. Has anyone tried the two-player map (St Lucia), and if so is it any good?
Mississippi Queen: a pick up and deliver race game with paddle steamers on the Mississippi. Very quick and easy, and more fun than I was expecting
Glen More 2: chronicles: we played with the haggis chronicle. Collecting haggis gives you a good way to score lots of points. Unfortunately the word lost all meaning because of the number of times I said “haggis” while explaining the rules…
Yes, it’s not the same game. Cubes are already out. We don’t really play with 2. There are tons of resources on BGG. I believe Scotland is a good 2 player map and there’s a free PnP.
We played our learning game of Black Rose Wars, mostly over the course of Saturday. We just couldn’t catch any luck with unbroken play time in the early rounds, and so it was a bit of a slog in the beginning.
It was a close game until the final action phase where I managed to complete two high value quests AND a KO on my partner’s model, which cascaded into a definitive win in the final scoring for KO tokens. HUGE turn for me, but an unfortunate blowout in a game where my partner was already struggling to come to grips.
That said, she seemed to enjoy the decision space and even warmed up to the PvP element by the end. She scored a few particularly nasty combos of her own throughout and there was a little flicker in her eyes behind her cards on more than a few occasions. I’m not quite prepared to say she’s eager for more, but I am definitely hopeful subsequent plays will warm her up.
I loved it. I bloody loved it. I can’t wait to sit down with a group for a big session. It plays very well at two, but the area control aspect of the damage tracking means you end up with some classic 2P scaling hurdles that force you to play differently than with a group.
*Diatribe time.
Here’s where I’ll also mention that my partner struggled with her cardplay throughout much of the game thanks to rounds and turns getting the reverse treatment. We stopped to have a detailed conversation that lasted a solid—and frustrating—fifteen minutes going over the round structure in detail so she could wrap her head around the quests and events. Because of this reversal (which was noted when teaching, doesn’t matter. Never matters.), quests she had obtained that were supposed to be easy appeared impossible and vice-versa. She was so stymied by this that I needed to reassure her that I had vetted the rule ahead of time and pointed her to the designer FAQ on the matter.
This isn’t my first rodeo, so I wasn’t as tripped up by it as she was, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t constantly having to check myself (and my partner) throughout the game to ensure we weren’t “flipping back” to reality from our little vacation in Bizarro-world. This shit needs to be standardized, seriously.
Game Night yesterday, we played a good 6 or 7 rounds of Spyfall between 6. We had a good laugh on a few scenarios. I think the Spy got caught or did not guess the location right. Still was fun, some of the questions were brilliant. Specially one: “What year are we in?” (to blatantly rule out the Crusades scenario).
Then we continued the Hidden Role games with three games of Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. It is a decent enough game, but still does not convince me. If the clues and murder weapons are random enough, the Murderer can get away easily.
We finished with a game of Splendor between 3. I narrowly lost 15-16. One of the most random games I have had, were on two occasions, 7 out of the 8 lower cards (green and orange tier) were red. The winner had been quick to get diamonds, sapphires and onyx when they came out, so I went to town with red to bag a couple of blue cards worth 4, but still the nobles tipped the scales in his favour. Great game.
EDIT:
Just logging my plays, I happened to realize all three games were from 2014…
Just tried P.I. on BGA for the twice-monthly Monday evening games – surprisingly enjoyable once I worked out what was going on and built a record-keeping system.
Chewy77, I think I’ve seen the murderer win a bit less than half the time in Deception.
So it is a tile laying city builder that both sprawls outward or stacks upward.
Everyone selects their action simultaneously. Then they are resolved starting with current first player.
Each turn you play a card from your current set of 4 hand cards. You have three options:
play it for a resource or a new city tile
play a letter card with a tile to extend the city in that location.
play a numbered building card with a tile to add another level to that building.
Pass your hand to the next player, draw a card and continue.
Buildings come in three colors with tiles numbered from 1 to 20. The city starts with a 3x3 grid of the three 1-3 buildings in each color. To build upward normally you match colors and must place higher numbers on top of lower. But you can pay resources and or VP to break those rules.
The neat thing is that when you do your action you gain bonuses from your buildings and characters (a drafted set of starting resources and bonuses). Resources are needed to pay for and mark your buildings. If you build over a building you get to keep the card you played for future bonuses.
New buildings cards enter the deck whenever it runs out. They are mixed with the discard to form a new draw stack. As the city sprawls more and more numbered cards enter the deck (if you build up the number leaves the deck to become your bonus card)
VP are gained for being kicked off buildings when someone builds over yours and from action bonuses from your cards. There are also endgame bonuses from some cards and from having majority in colored districts of multiple buildings.
The game ends when one player has placed all their resources in the city or if the tile stack has run out a second time.
I think last night the murderer won all three games, and the time I played previously the rate was higher than 50%. Maybe in my group we are really bad investigators and great murderers…??
I did try the solo mode of Ginkgopolis and it is simple to handle, fun to play and… hard to beat? The bot just always builds.
Well, now I lost this game twice. Once to my right hand (not the one I really play in two handed mode) and once to the bot. This is almost like me losing Wingspan or Root on repeat
I’ve rated this an instant 8 on BGG which doesn’t happen often after only two “half plays” (without human Mitspieler)
We played Alhambra for the first time yesterday on Boardgame Arena. It’s kind of fun but also feels really lucky. I wonder also how much advantage there is just knowing the deck of tiles. Not really keen on that in a light game.
Wait a second–the solo mode for Ginkgopolis is a bot? I always thought it was beat-your-own-score, which turned me off. I may have to give this one another look…
I came in at 2nd place with 81/76/70 points none of us had a really great run. My bonus cards just messed up my game and it took me a whole round to get my first forest habitat bird… I still hold the opinion that the European birds mess up my engine building while nectar makes the game easier.
