We’re nowhere near good enough for it to matter.
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I’ve been seeing Kubb an awful lot, and given how infrequently it’s actually called that, I’m guessing it’s fair to say that it’s officially managed to fall into knock-off territory. My dad has been gifting buckets of “Yardzee” dice and associated laminated scorecards as gifts, and even those are starting to pop up as products on shelves. Riffing on gameplay concepts isn’t a new game in the game… game, but I can’t help wonder what folks are supposed to do when they invent the next horseshoes.
So totally stoked to eventually try that, though. My folks are officially coming into town in late August; we have a phony “grass” yard of known dimension… I’ll need to snap up a kit.
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Back to some face-to-face gaming this weekend after a 3 week lockdown sans visitors:
Summoner Wars 2e, my opponent struggled to grasp the strategy of this one a bit and it ended with his summoner penned in on all sides and waiting for death. The Polar Dwarves are probably a faction I’ll steer beginners away from from now on - striking the right balance between offense and defense with them seems a little tricky. I like the changes here though, and had plenty of fun with the Vanguards.
Azul, got my butt kicked again in this one. The second game was a bit closer for most of the game, but my opponent rocketed ahead in the last round (with like +30 points due to filling out three colours!) I’m really bad at this game, I probably don’t plan ahead enough and play way too tactically. It’s still good fun though.
Railroad Ink Challenge: Lush Green, another new game I was pleased to break out. The changes are fairly interesting (though those double curved routes are really unpleasant!). We didn’t play with either of the expansions this time though. It’s good, not like heaps better than the original, but all of the changes are fun and certainly mixes things up without veering into too much added complexity.
Welcome To…, I did really well at this one, ended up scoring 50 points in 5 house estates! Always one I’m happy to whip out, though I slightly worry playing it a lot on BGA has made me a little too good at the game. Thankfully its not a game that rubs in your face how good/bad you’re doing normally from turn to turn.
Super Skill Pinball, still haven’t played this one with anyone in person, but I’ve been having a great time playing it solo. I’ve had no luck at all with Cyberhack though, my scores are a good 30+ points behind my Carniball scores. I had a great run at Dragonslayer the other day though. All the tables are fun though. It’s a little long to be truly top tier roll and write, but it’s still super enjoyable with enough interesting decisions to justify its length.
Hadrian’s Wall, haven’t played this one with other humans yet either, but there’s a lot of depth there for a game of this style I feel and I’ve been really enjoying my solo plays. Though my scores have been rather inconsistent. I’m also not sure about the difficulty levels and balance - it feels like some buildings are much more important at higher difficulty than at lower ones. Small complaint though for my fave roll and write. Can’t wait to show it off to others.
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We made our set out of offcuts.
We are consistently terrible.
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I got a set as one of the discount supermarkets with a middle aisle of wonder had it for £12. It will be gone next week when they rotate the middle aisle stuff.
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I’ve been trying again with 7th Continent. The struggle I’ve had previously is the tension between survival and exploration - I’m far more interested in exploration; I do appreciate the survival mechanics lend structure and some challenge that might otherwise be lacking, but I don’t want that to be the main game.
My solution this time has been easy mode, which relieves a lot of the difficulties of survival, but doesn’t eliminate them. Consequently I have just completed my first curse and thoroughly enjoyed it, and yet… and yet… the survival system is elegant and long-winded and rewards a kind of hoarding and cautious style of play which is sort of satisfying but very, very slow. I’m still conflicted about the game.
I have some piccies but I’d better not spoil anything.
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Played Fort on Friday night with my 9 yo daughter. Nice little game. She managed to finish her fort before me, and beat me 35-30. I could not get an engine to work, as I only had one card to level up my fort, and half the time I had too much stuff and no cards to expend toys or pizza to get any improvement.
A tad too card luck dependent, but light enough for it to hit the table often, methinks. Specially as my children love the theme and cards art.
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A good day to get some unplayed games off the shelf of shame.
The Castles of Tuscany , first play. Obviously based on Castles of (Ron) Burgundy. It’s been a while since I played Burgundy. We like it, but it takes a bit of setup, and we don’t play it often enough to remember what all the special tiles do. We’ve always had fun with it tho. I bought Tuscany hoping it would capture the feel, but be a bit quicker to play. And I think that’s true. You start with three sections of map that you put together. There are three possible actions: draw region cards, take a tile from the centre, or play a tile. To play a tile you need two cards of the tiles colour. A pair of another colour counts as a single card. So, if you had two pairs (of the wrong colour), you could play them to put down anything. As in Burgundy, you get points based on the size of the coloured area you’ve finished, and a special action depending on the tile. And a bonus for covering all spaces of a certain colour. We enjoyed the game, and it was definitely less fiddley than Burgundy. We did seem to spend a lot of time just drawing cards, trying to get the regions we wanted to play, or, at the least, get pairs of another colour. Would play again.
Space Gate Odyssey , first play. The goal of the game is to colonise planets for victory points. You create a space station of three different types of tiles – space gates (which colonise the planets when full), Odyssey modules (give you a bonus when activated), and airlock modules (bring new settlers into your space station). Each tile can be one of three different colours, representing wildlife, water, and energy.
On your turn you will move one of your pieces to another space on the Odyssey board, which has five different control rooms – one of each colour, an airlock control room, and a new modules room. Once you select a room, you get action points according to how many pieces you have in that room. You carry out the actions, and then each other player with pieces in that room also get to do the action. If you select one of the coloured rooms, this allows you to move settlers into that colour of room in your station. If you select the airlock control room, then you can fill each of the airlocks in your station with new settlers from your supply. And the new modules room lets you add new modules of any type. New modules start out inactive, the first settler you send into the room activates it (and is then discarded).
We had a bit of AP at the start, and probably made some bad moves. It’s an interesting puzzle. We played the short game variant from the rules, still took us two hours or so. I’m glad we didn’t play the full game, would have just taken too long. We enjoyed it, definitely want to play again.
Bruxelles 1897 , first play. A small box game. I’ve played the board game it’s based upon (Bruxelles 1893) once. You have five different decks: money, artwork, buildings, materials, and people. For 3p, three cards are taken from each deck and shuffled together, and then laid out in four columns and three rows. You have a hand of architect cards, with a different value on each side of the card, for example one and three. On your turn, you can replace one of the grid cards with an architect, paying the money according to the architect card you used. If you take an artwork card, it goes into your tableau. If you take a money card, you are selling an artwork that you own. If you take a materials card, it can be used later when you take a building card. Your first building cost you one material, second costs you two, etc (each material card has two resources on it). You can take a person to activate their special ability. Then you can either discard them, or keep them to use again. But any people you have at the end of the game will cost you two money, or you lose three VP.
There’s also the Expo card, which allows you to hold an exhibition. Each player in turn can get two VP by showing an artwork, but once a particular colour is shown, you can’t show it again.
There’s another area you can play cards into, above the grid. There are three special actions possible here, and you don’t need to pay money to use them. You can get five money, or activate your noble cards, or perform an action of your choice (ie get an artwork, sell it, take materials, construct a building, or use a noble). The only action you can’t do from here is the Exhibition action. You don’t pay money to use one of these action, but you do have to use cards. If you’re the first person to use the action, it will cost you one card. Second, two cards, etc. At the end of the round the player with the most cards played to this area will lose a card and place it under the Prison card.
Each column of the grid has a random bonus assigned. The bonuses are to move up on each of the three tracks, and to get a card back from the Prison. At the end of the round, you count player cards for each row and the winner gets the bonus. This is why you would play a higher card into that area. Also at the end of the round, if four cards are placed together so that their corners create a complete coat of arms, then whoever had the most gets VPs.
There are three tracks to move up on. Architecture, Nobility, and Prestige. Architecture is how many points you get for each building at the end of the game. Nobility is how many noble cards you can activate in a round. And Prestige is how many points you get from having majority when you score coats of arms.
So, there’s a bit going on here, and a bit to think about. It was good fun, hoping to play again.
For Sale , something light to finish the day. How good is this game? It’s so simple to explain and play, and it’s always entertaining. I should play it more. And I noticed it has an expansion out this year, adding a third phase to the game. Not sure if I’m keen, it’s such a great, simple game, not sure it can be improved.
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Went to visit friends yesterday, but left the kids at home and they sent their kiddo off with her grandparents, so it was kid-free game day! As such, we actually managed to play a few games.
First up was our first ever game of Chinatown. It went over pretty well with everyone, none of us really having played a pure negotiation game like this. Although I soured my wife on it a bit when I inadvertently broke faith with her during a trading phase after a third person got involved, but she has decided to let it go and be willing to try it again sometime, which I appreciate. One of our friends won, beating me by just $10k!
After that, I introduced them all to Galaxy Trucker, which I am familiar with due to the app. As such, I won the game overall, but per the rules, we all won as everyone had money at the end of the game. The second round was so weird as there were a ton of Open Space cards and very few hazards, but funny enough we had all forgotten to look at the cards while building our ships, so none of us really planned around that. Third round was pretty brutal with two Combat Zones, both of which hit my wife rather hard. It’s really hard to know what you need on your ship when first starting out, and beyond saying that you want as many lasers, engines, and batteries as you can get, with some cargo and shields, that only goes so far. Until you’ve experienced the hazards and seen how they work, it’s tricky to design an effective ship. Despite that, everyone still had decent ships by the end of each round, no one getting utterly obliterated by any of the hazards. It was fun, and I think everyone enjoyed it.
We wrapped up the day with their copy of Sushi Roll, a dice based version of Sushi Go. Surprising to me, I actually came really close to winning this one, but I got the fewest puddings, which cost me 6 points at the end of the game and knocked me back into second place. The game was a lot of fun and still gives the feel of the original card drafting game, with the added twist of rerolling dice and swapping them from other players mid-round.
So, two games off my shelf of shame so far this weekend, and a couple more plays for my 2021 challenge.
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Played New York Zoo today. At the moment I think I prefer Bärenpark, although New York Zoo is significantly less faff to set up, so it’s got that going for it 
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Low faf is probably in my top 3 reasons for liking a game nowadays.
We’ve been recently playing Bullet♥️ And my partner is a complete monster at it. We haven’t played the real time mode yet but I’m more than happy with how the game balances both a continuously evolving puzzle with weird powers. There’s a lot to like in the game.
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Masked outdoor games with Wyvern and Luna:
VOLT: I’m not saying there isn’t still room for Robo Rally in the world, but this is the robot battle programming game I reach for first.
Rush ‘n’ Crush: one central chunk of mechanical randomness, but I really like the way it forces followers to take chances to catch up.
Leaving Earth: a demo coop game, but I think things came together.
Hanamikoji: still don’t love the theme but my word that’s a tight and effective game.
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There is a version of the game that plays exactly the same but with “male scholars” as opposed to geisha. Jixia Academy.
I do wish they had rethemed Hanamikoji and somehow managed to keep most of the art assets, though, because the artwork is beautiful, but Jixia is definitely worth a look as a less problematically-themed game.
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Yeah it was a fun session!
VOLT was a fun indeed. Even with 3 players! I wish it allowed more players 5 or perhaps 6. I think it can get away with it a bit. Not sure
Glad I got Leaving Earth now that I played it. The coop was fine to try it out, but I would defo prefer the competitive. It has a lot of maths (which isn’t my forte) but I do like the risk-taking you must do here. There’s just not enough time to do everything. And it’s just so thematic
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Yeah, thinking about that.
It is indeed!
[VOLT]
I think you might need to expand the arena a bit, but it might be interesting to give it a try.
[Leaving Earth]
Next time try ion drives. 
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Had another game of Fort with my daughter on a very rainy Sunday evening. Went a lot faster this time. I went for a different strategy, where I started building up my fort strong at the beginning. I went for a perk that allowed me to recruit more, but at the end of the game I was regretting it, had too many cards on my engine and could not keep up with my daughter. I was not finding my upgrade fort cards often enough.
In the end, we drew 31 all, but she got the win as she built the 5th level fort while I still was on 4th level.
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One of the things I like about it is the feel comes from something like Wipeout rather than basing it off a real racing situation. Allows for that hefty push your luck element to suit the game rather than be a random nonsense that just drags it down. Also bonus points for clever reimagining of the see through pawn as a gear stick.
Thanks again for teaching Leaving Earth. Definitely needs more plays to get what’s going on and start to unpick which efficiencies are currently hidden from me. I had particular fun with the monte carlo rockets.
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Which ones are those? Juno because you never test them properly?
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I chipped away at a two-handed solo game of Forbidden Stars today, pitting the Orks against the Space Marines.
Things started out feisty right away, as the map ended up in a configuration that might as well have been 2x2 (it’s 2x3). The Marines tucked into their corner hoping to exploit some air superiority, while the Orks had a nice string of planets to hop around from. I didn’t notice just how resource-poor the Ultramarines’ little pocket was, however, and it ended up being their downfall.
The marines started out pretty hot, making good use of their special ability and getting on the offensive. Unfortunately, their ineptitude in combat revealed itself early and often. At least they were enthusiastic! This thinned them out a little and put a spotlight on their economic situation pretty fast. By mid-game, their income had crashed entirely, and their prospects for resource tokens were grim.
Don’t go to war without a bankroll, folks. The Orks basically just had to sit back, proliferate (and die) as they like to do, and mop up the system rock by rock. They dipped in for an objective once, but otherwise basically sat back and grew.
The Ork attack on their first objective was ostensibly the climactic battle of the game, with both main forces gathered for a clash, but again the Ultramarines totally flopped on the defense and lost all of their units in the fracas. They made a limp final attempt to grab a lightly defended objective near the end of the game, but the Orks planted a well timed bastion. This meant the marines couldn’t soften the forces with an orbital strike first… yet onward they hobbled.
This was a closer fight than it had any right to be, actually, and had the marines won, there was a good chance they could have ridden out the last round to try for an (unlikely) tiebreaker. As it was, however, the last ditch effort had failed and I conceded to myself (it’s the sporting thing to to).
It’s amazing how much fun this still was. The Orks got a chance to really go full-on ground animals (literally no ships all game!) and some savvy purchases from both sides made for some exciting moments in the combat. I’m really looking forward to getting this one played with some folks, hopefully by the end of the summer.
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