Got a game of Concordia in with my wife today. Played on the Italia map. I don’t think either of us was feeling really good about how we were doing, but funny enough we were both planning to end the game on the same turn through building houses. She moved first, which gave her the 7 point Concordia card and prevented my planned move, so I was only able to build two of my final three houses on my last turn.
As we scored, we were very evenly matched until the Mercvrivs cards scored, as I only had one, but she had three, throwing her into the lead. However, she had no Minerva cards, while I had the Mason and Farmer, which gave me the win, 107 - 96. Close game.
I took Merchants Cove for a spin yesterday, finishing up the last day this morning. I played solo versus the Peddler using the Alchemist.
What a fun (big!) little game this is. The central, shared mechanism of populating and moving boats into port turns out to be a ruthless little speculation gambit. The AI can be used to flesh out a 2P game but to be honest, in this case I think it might actually dilute the competition at that count. If my partner likes the game, she may actually prefer including the bot as a result, but we’ll see. Either way, it’s simple to use and wouldn’t be a problem.
I started with the Alchemist to familiarize myself with her mechanics since it was my (correct) guess that my partner would probably gravitate to her first. It uses a small, simple marble drop toy as its core conceit, which you use to obtain ingredients (hopefully many) to make potions. That’s about it, but it’s just tricky enough that when paired with the variable market conditions, makes for a nice little crunch.
I’m guessing the other three characters will present a similar depth of play, just with their own mechanisms to overcome, and I’m hopeful of that. The fact that this has turned out lighter than expected has been a pleasant surprise. I may have finally found a “unique roles” game I can actually get off the shelf!
Monday Night Games last night. Managed to play 3 new games.
First The Shining, based on the Stanley Kubrick movie / Stephen King novel. Interesting between 4, in the end it became a game of managing resources that deplete really fast. I was murdered on the very last round of our last month in the hotel, so we lost that first one. On the second game, we were 5, and not depleting resources is nearly impossible, makes you think that the game is broken or unwinnable. Interesting experience, that could be attractive to non-gamers for its simplicity on the board, and with an optional hidden traitor role, that actually, if you discover just gives you a little boost that round. I think there was potential here, but fell a bit short off the mark. Still good enough that we gave it another try.
Then we played two rounds of Werebeasts. Which was enough. Very simple bidding game, where each player has two goal suits to go for, sharing one with each player sitting next to each other. With an extra bit of accusation that can get a player out of the game and you get to own their cards or coins (well, they are like meat cans). I won the first and made a big mistake on the second one that gave my neighbour some of the cards I was after as well. A bit meh after two games.
And finally we had the highlight of the night, at least for me. We played Space Base between four. I did really enjoy this one. The guy who taught us the game won, but I came second way ahead of the other 2 (winner low 50s I got a mid 30s score, the other 2 barely double figures). I did really enjoy the simple mechanics of the game, I rate this way higher (at least for fun and for now) that games like Roll for the Galaxy. definitely will give it another go if the opportunity arises.
My partner and I rarely find an occasion when we both have the energy and the brainpower at the same time. Often, when we make an effort to carve out some time, we play something mindless and/or short; fare such as Fluxx (Star Fluxx and Firefly Fluxx being some of the better flavors) or Skipbo (a game my partner likes waaaay too much, but I knew that going in before we actually got married). But, occasionally, we play something worth mentioning:
Ticket to Ride – Heart of Africa – I have made a habit of buying my partner a Ticket to Ride product of some sort for every special occasion (birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day, wedding anniversary) for the last few years, which means we’re practically “caught up” on the available products. I recently gifted her the Map Collection: Volume 1 – Team Asia Asia & Legendary Asia and Map Collection 3: The Heart of Africa; 1 for her birthday and the other for Mother’s Day (I don’t remember which for which… I could go look but it doesn’t actually matter).
I regret to inform you, dear readers, that our play of Heart of Africa included more than building rails and completing tickets in the heart of Africa – we used the entire map! Early on in the game, I felt as though the money spent on the expansion was probably not worthwhile; I was making sure to use the Terrain Cards to double almost all of my routes and I had kept all 4 of my initial tickets and was making great progress on them. Through the course of the game, we ended up dividing up and completely blocking each other out of portions of the map; I had routes connecting the south with almost all of the eastern portion of Africa, whereas my partner had concentrated her route building on the south and western areas. This division of the continent had a strong role to play in what occurred next: I kept drawing tickets that were impossible for me to complete. My partner also struggled, but fared slightly better and was able to come up with 9 completed tickets, most of which were worth 12+ points. I ended up losing 22 points to routes that she cut me out of (in both cases, just before I was about to claim the critical link); but even if I had made those 22 points, I still would have lost by 20+ points.
All-in-all, Heart of Africa is a a great addition to a Ticket to Ride map collection. My biggest gripe of the whole thing is how much I felt like a white male of European descent covering Africa in railroads for my own purposes. I don’t know if the game is problematic… but it does provide some additional geographic education that I would otherwise miss out on, as the subject of “Cities in Africa” does not come up very often in my day-to-day life.
Got in a couple of games outside on Saturday. First up was Spicy which is a little bluffing card game like the 52-card game Cheat, but changed in a few ways so that calling people out is more encouraged, and a bit more exciting, and it’s a snappier little game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Really good fun, we played twice with 6 and I’m excited to get it out again at some point.
Then we played Survive: Escape from Atlantis, which is silly and fun and chaotic at six (with the expansion) which makes it very difficult to feel like you have much agency. Not for a competitive group but perfect for a very casual time with friends. We played once with the vanilla rules and then again with the dolphin expansion, which makes things even more chaotic with higher variability on the creature movements. I really enjoyed it although it was a bit too mean for some at the table.
This is precisely what I’m hoping to get out of Spicy (picked up recently). I’ve heard it described as bluffer’s Uno, which feels pretty apt too. Face to face interactions are a few weeks away for me, and this is one I’ll be keeping in my backpack just in case.
I thought I’d like Spicy for some quick fun. But realised that when when you got down to your last card, if you were lucky you can play it, otherwise everyone expects you to bluff.
It’s a generous game, just give give give get stuff every turn. But at the same time I found a gateship that I used to slowly port all my best ships into the 1-6 slots and eventually pummeled the table with points over the last three turns.
Maybe shorter, I don’t know. Due to the passive gains, it may be more about a number of rolls of the dice as opposed to a number of turns. With only one passive gain between our own turns, we didn’t save up much money and spent a long time on the 1 market ships before advancing. However it falls out, at 2 it felt like the right length.
How recently? That’s been on my wishlist for years due to the team variant and I haven’t been able to find it for less than a ransom. It once popped up on a stock alert at Boardlandia but they then cancelled my order saying it had been a computer glitch.
Been losing Hardback on BGA for a bit.
We are also trying the new beta feature: other languages. I cannot recommend because they only switched out the dictionary but apparently not the cards? At least it feels like those are the same cards as the English version and I know for a fact they shouldn’t be.
Quite so. It is bad, every hand I see I feel english words in my head. We should have Umlaute for one thing and the letters should be valued differently.
It is probably similar to scrabble
One example is Z we have so many more words with Z in German making it only 3 points while in English it is a 10 point letter. We especially have a lot of words starting with Z. Y in English is almost like a vocal while it is quite rare in German.
Blood Rage - I really enjoyed this more than Rising Sun. The trouble with Rising Sun is that it felt like I’m playing an old school Euro with troops-on-a-map dressing. I love both, but for some reason RS feels weird. BR has this trait as well, but not as strong as RS. BR, I think, is smack in the “Eurotrash” territory like Cyclades. While I would prefer Inis for the draafting, BR is still great.
I had the Serpent clan, which is an all-women clan. And greeeeaaat, it has boob armour and sexualised outfits. Eye rolling stuff.
