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Oops supposed to be in the Reading thread
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That’s good advertising strategy for the reading thread! 
Failed to report 2 games on Saturday night (while having the Olympics on TV and distracting me a bit) of Under Falling Skies. Failed twice to defend Mexico City, with the reinforcements scenario, which I think is really harsh
For six turns you have only 4 dice, and a random 1 to 6 free movement for the alien ships, which makes things really tricky. On both occasions I had no chance to reach the top of the research track trying to fend of a myriad of attacking fighters. This is where having had the pilot character I think it would have helped, I did not need him in Montreal at all…
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Games with @EnterTheWyvern and @lalunaverde this afternoon: Dinosaur Tea Party, much more fun with the physical bits than on BGA; Whitehall Mystery, my daring plan almost paid off; and, since the rain was coming round the edges of our tent, Too Many Bones, which I’d play again but I can’t see myself ever owning a copy.
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Switch & Signal , first play. This is the German copy, not available in English yet. There’s no language on the cards, and there’s an unofficial translation of the rulebook up on BGG, so it wasn’t too bad to get into. The game comes with a double sided map, Central Europe on one side, and North America on the other. We played the European side, since it’s supposed to be the easier of the two. The objective of the game is to transfer goods cubes to a port city. The Europe map has one destination (Marseille). And to do this you have to direct your trains along the rail routes. There are three trains in three colours. The grey trains are the slowest, then the brown and finally the black are the fastest. Each colour has it’s own die for movement, with higher values for the faster trains.
There is a deck of driving instructions, which are drawn at the start of each player’s turn. If the deck runs out, you’ve lost. The driving instruction cards will either move trains out of the depot (where they start), or along a rail route. If a colour is specified, then all trains of that colour are moved (die roll for each). At the start you lay out the signals and switches. Signals allow travel along a route, without a green signal token, a train will stop. Switches are black discs placed where the track converges. Three way points have a single disc, four way points have two discs. Switches direct the train travel. Goods cubes start in the main cities, according to colour (there are four colours, so eight cubes in total).
On your turn, you can use any number of your action cards. There are three types: change a signal, change a switch, and move a train of your choice. Two of any card can substitute for any single type, so you can always do what you want. Play is usually pretty quick. It’s a cooperative game, and there don’t seem to be any restrictions on communication.
There are also three helpers, each of which can be used once. The Logistics specialist allows you to reroll a movement die, but you have to take the second roll. The Scheduler lets you keep moving through a city (usually you stop in a city). And the last helper, the Train Driver, allows you to ignore the movement for a particular colour.
Each time you make a mistake you lose on your time tokens. So if a train stops without using all of it’s movement (red signal, wrong switches), you lose a token for each waste movement. Obviously hitting other trains is frowned upon as well. You start with seven time tokens, when all are used, you lose a card from the driving instructions deck.
It plays out pretty quickly, and it’s a decent puzzle. It seems easy at first, although you look at the driving instructions deck and realise you have limited turns. I’m not sure how easy or hard others are finding it, but in our two games we lost both. Although on the second play we just needed one more cube – but that cube was nowhere near being picked up. I’d like to beat it normally myself, I like a challenge, especially in a cooperative game. There are suggestions for making the game easier or harder. Enjoyed the game, well worth playing, looking forward to playing again.
Castles of Tuscany , second play of this. Went easily enough. I need to play Burgundy again to really compare the two games. Tuscany is a lot quicker to setup and play, but doesn’t have the satisfying comboes of Burgundy. To be able to place a tile in Tuscany, you need a pair of cards of the correct colour. Or two pairs of another colour. In both the games we’ve played of this, we’ve spend turn after turn drawing cards, hoping to get either the correct colour, or at least pairs of another colour. That’s a bit annoying.
Sunday gaming:
Switch & Signal again. And again, we lost, but it was fairly close, needed just one more cube. It’s a tight game, you can’t afford to waste time. We made an error on one train, had it loop around, which wasn’t good. Next time…
Beta Colony , first play. This is an area control game. There are three colonies to be populated by colonization pods. Each player has four dice. The start player for the round rolls their dice, and the other players use the same dice rolls. You have two actions each round, each using two dice. You use the first die to move your ship around the locations on the central planets, and then the second die will be used for that location. There’s seven locations, one for collecting resources (green/yellow cubes, pink/red, or orange/blue), two for taking and placing colonization pods, one location for collecting ful, and finally, a location where you can take any resource and a full, or building a cultural achievement, which is either a building or a statue. The building are just worth points, the statues have a condition (like giving VP for resources at the end of the game).
Fuel allows you to alter a dice. Each fuel can add or subtract a pip, so you can move more than six spaces.
Most of the action is adding colonization pods to one of the three colonies. Each pod tile is one of five colours, and you need to have that colour resource to take it. Then, you place it on a colony space, which again is one of five colours, and you need to pay that as well. There are two rings around a central point on each colony. You get an influence point (not a VP) for placing on the inner ring, and also points for connecting colours (doesn’t matter who owns them). And finally, you get the points on the actual tile, from zero to three. So, the maximum you could get is six (three from the tile, one for the inner, two for connecting colours). Each colony has an influence track, which offers various rewards as you move around. Finally, after placing, you put one of your crew meeples on the tile, and these count for area control.
It was a fairly close game, each colony was hotly contested. At the end of the game, each colony scores according to the difference between you and the lowest player there. A difference of one gives you one VP, two gives you three, three gives you six, four gives you ten, and five and above gives fifteen VP. We were so close on two of the colonies, but, thanks to some late game colonization, the winner managed to get the full fifteen VP and take the game. Just one less crew and he would have lost. I was way off the pace, managed a total of one VP from area control. Good game tho, really enjoyed it.
Project Elite , we attempted a Capture mission. You have three capture points, with four action spaces for dice. And adjacent to each token were two traps. When the token was full of dice, the trap closes, and hopefully you’ve got an alien in it. It was pretty tough, and we failed. We read on BGG that the Capture missions are the hardest to do. You’ve got to cooperate, since each capture token has four slots, and you only have four action dice. Once placed, they are locked until the end of the round. And of course we had the usual crowd control problems, pesky aliens getting past us and running for the start space (if they make it, you lose). Good frantic dice rolling fun.
Marshmallow Test , an easy game to finish up on.
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I got a chance to play Too Many Bones today, and played my first two-handed solo game using Boomer and Patches. I went in blind against Mulmesh, and paid the price for it (the game openly invites you to explore the boss cards ahead of time), as I spent time trying to beef up against a boss that seems to get exponentially more powerful as time goes on.
Anyway, it was a fine lead-up, as I had enough points to challenge the boss by the end of round 4, and continued pretty well unabated aside from a particularly grueling but ultimately inconsequential loss, and a tyrant encounter that piled onto the already doomed finale.
In the end it was simply the setup which damned me; The BP by turn 9 was such that I was up against three 5GP and four 1BP enemies before Mulmesh would even enter the field. The opening rush would see two more added to my queue thanks to Inspire abilities, and I was starting out against two Hardy enemies, and one ranged group(!) attacker who would just keep us constantly poisoned.
I had to chuckle a little. Took a break before deciding just to pack up and use that extra 30 minutes elsewhere. A crushing defeat, but no less entertaining for the experience.
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It was Mulmesh I was up against yesterday with Luna and Wyvern. My bold experiment with a child die didn’t work (if he’d just done one more point!), so I was dead for most of it, but I’m pretty sure we won in about round 3-ish, certainly before the auto-damaging rounds.
Poison and Bleed were our main weapons, I think.
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Was it a Big Lurker or Manticore with the poison shots and which lane were they in? I hate manticores. It sounds like you had a rough set up but did you fight it out? Were the hardy baddies also compound attackers? Taking out poison dude and the 1s would probably have been my approach if not and just sort of avoiding managing the hardy boys. But also depends on how you set up Boomer.
We took on Mulmesh and got a big slice of luck when @RogerBW /patches put a big poison 3 on him and it went smoothly to avoid mulmesh running off and then keeling over as the damage took him from just above the threshold to dead. Also our Mulmesh started as we had a 21 point bq and the 20 point ‘only’ added one more 5pt baddie.
I really enjoyed Whitehall Mystery. Probably as @lalunaverde and I caught the dastardly murderer. I massively preferred it to Fury of Dracula as it had no shit combat mechanics. Really reminded me of Scotland Yard but presumably a bit better. The special powers were a good kink in the deduction and planning but it all seemed to still come down to some working out a mix of probabilities along with some countering the dastardliness of roger the murderer and his deadly gambits. A few too many options to be brute calculation so playing by gut seemed necessary.
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WM is fun. Happy to keep my copy in my kallax. I would be more incline to give control of an investigator to one person to have some direct responsibility while playing as a team. Because I agree that it’s not a game of pure optimisation
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I would have done that had we had three (non-murdery) human players rather than two. 
I’ve never played Scotland Yard and I suspect I probably ought to try it some time just to see what’s different. I do tend to like “pure” mechanics, and WM is definitely more of a “pure” hidden movement game than FoD, just as The Resistance is a more “pure” social deduction game that Battlestar Galactica.
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Went to a board game cafe for the first time in a long while! Didn’t get to try anything hugely exciting, but I did get to play a few lighter games with my partner.
Abandon All Artichokes: Massively underwhelmed by this one. The core idea is solid, but there are only 8 or so abilities in the deck, and none of them have particularly interesting interactions, at least with 2 players. It’s passable, but not even in my top 3 food-themed filler games, which is a bad sign.
Battle Line: I really enjoyed this one, but like a few Knizia card games, this feels like a game that was designed with a deck of cards, then had more suits added so it could be sold. I know that’s a reductive viewpoint, and the internet says you can’t use four suits without breaking the hand probabilities…but I don’t need my games to be mathematically perfect! I’ll probably just work out a four-suit variant to play in the future, because I did think it was pretty great, and my partner seemed to enjoy it as well.
Lost Cities: Speaking of “standard” card games with extra suits added, it’s another Knizia! This one I know works with a deck of cards, because I’ve played it and loved it that way for years. That said, the art is excellent, and the game itself is unassailable as a light push-your-luck filler.
Sky Tango: This is a boring game, but I did get to block my partner three turns in a row, at which point she promptly asked to play another game, so… some fun was had!
Onitama: Very approachable and engaging, but too chess-like for our tastes. The copy was also missing the Sensei pieces (or whatever you call the king analogue), so we were duking it out with a red wooden car and a blue Chthulhu-tentacle miniature.
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Agreed, but my kids love it so it’s stays. It’s an interesting concept but doesn’t have staying power.
Played Beyond the Sun 2 player. Great fun. Jockeying for position on the boards. Want to play the advanced boards next time
And London (2nd Ed) better than first edition.
And that’s my hot take.
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Started our campaign of The Crew with friends who live nearby. It was a great success! After a few initial hurdles (one friend had exaggerated how much her boyfriend knew about trick taking games) we clearly improved throughout the night - where we struggled with a 3-task mission at the beginning, our last mission of 10 with 4 tasks we completed in just 2 tries.
Thankfully our communication was better than over text, when I said “Monday night confirmed for the crew!” So when we got there my friend asked “So how many more are we expecting?” I was confused why she thought I would invite other people to her house, and she said, “Oh I thought you said there was a whole crew coming!”
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Because it was my cakeday today I not only got cake, I also got to choose a game to play and so I got my first non solo of Imperium Classics. I played as the Scythians and my partner as the Persians. I had a good feeling for most of the game, I managed to keep my deck small and go through my developments reasonably fast while keeping Unrest at bay…. While my partner was struggling to understand how the rules worked. Then came the final scoring and well it went 82 for him to my 65. Oops.
So, I am not sure how many of you have played the game or seen playthroughs of it. Let me give a short overview.
At its heart the game is a deckbuilder, where everyone chooses one tribe and tries to guide them from Barbarism to a Nation. So a deck building civilization game. The game has several possible endings but the most common is probably when one player has completed all their nation specific developments.
Lol short…
Everyone starts as a small tribe with a specific starting deck. Each starting deck has a few nation specific cards but most of them also have Conquer, Advance and Prosperity cards. So there are some similarities. The game is played in rounds. Each turn the player can choose between a standard “Activate” turn that gives him 3 actions or alternatively choose to Innovate—to obtain a card without cost—or Revolt—to get rid of a number of Unrest cards. Both of these latter ones are a bit of Verlegenheitsaktion… but sometimes you cannot avoid them. In a standard turn you get 3 action tokens that would usually be used to play cards.
Some of these cards allow you to obtain cards from the market. The market offers Regions to conquer, Tributaries to rule and civilised and uncivilised developments for your deck. Some cards will be played (semi-)permanently into your tableau, others will go into your discard after playing and some will directly go into your history.
Once per round when you have to reshuffle your deck, you get to add another of your nation specific cards until you reach the turning point card f.e. Julius Caesar for the Romans. Then you turn from a tribe of Barbarians into an Empire. This means you can no longer play certain cards but instead you can play others and from then on you get to develop powerful cards for each reshuffle and edge ever closer to victory.
So for many decks the game goes like this: cycle through your deck over and over to gain all of your nation cards. To do this every nation has their own strategy and special actions and VP conditions.
What fascinates me, is how the game allows you several options to keep your deck small and give you powerful combos. Some cards are added to your history where they are (usually) out of the game but still count for VP. When you play region cards, you can choose to garrison a card with them, which remains out of your deck for as long as the region remains in play. And there are quite a few cards that allow for card drawing/discarding thus helping with the cycling. And Unrest cards can be removed from the deck via an action and returned to the Unrest stack.
And then there is the Glory card. Every nation I have played has this. To gain the precious and powerful fame cards you play Glory. But you need to return three played regions to your discard and allong with all the cards garrisoned in these regions so suddenly your deck has grown by up to 7 cards in one single action. Oops. Brilliant and dangerous but so rewarding.
So much for the good stuff. Sadly, not all is good but the issues are minor: as previously mentioned the insert is meh and the setup of the main deck requires a lot of card shuffling.
The tokens for the three resources could be better. There are 1x/5x/10x tokens for each but they are too similar in size and especially the 5 and 10 tokens are easily mixed up.
The handling of actions and exhausting of cards is awfully fiddly with tokens because apparently people cannot keep track of their actions without tokens (which is probably a correct assumption given how many freeplay and exhaust actions accumulate in a given deck and tableau)
Understanding when and how often you get new cards from your nation deck was a bit of a challenge which brings me to the rulebook. This has a very good glossary, and a nice list of of the Nations and card and setup explanations but it lacks a few examples of play and in general reads a bit disjointed leaving you without a clear impression of what the game plays like or what certain mechanisms are supposed to do.
Finally the solo mode. The solo mode is good but again the rules are too sparse and lack a few examples to give it a soul. There are tables for all the Nations as solo opponents and you basically give the bot a number of actions and then reveal cards check on them in the table what they do… sounds easy? There are just a few too many ambiguities that the table doesn’t resolve at a glance and then you spend a lot of time looking at the table and figuring out what is happening. As just one example I played against the Romans and the game ended when the Romans had gobbled up all the Unrest cards in the game leading to a special end condition called Collapse which they could only loose because in Collapse those with the fewest Unrest cards win. I am reasonably sure I made a mistake somewhere in there playing the bot… but I still cannot see what it was. (See my post below, there are errata that fix this, apparently a section about how the bot handles unrest was missing from the rulebook)
Overall though this has tons of replayabilitiy because I want to explore all those 16 nations (8 per box) and all the different cards from the common decks. The deck building is quite unique and lovely in the options for deconstruction it offers. As previously mentioned one of my favorite parts of deckbuilding is making a small combo-tastic deck and even when it doesn’t work out that way it is so much fun to try.
It does run a bit long and my partner who ended the game on some wild on-going mega-combo said he had smoke coming out of his ears (I didn’t see it but he insists his brain ran hot).
If you like the tropes of Civ games and deck building and don’t shy a way from a two hour card game that needs four cards in the rulebook to explain card anatomy… I recommend this game.
Oh and turns out this wasn’t short. Sorry about that. Or not.
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Happy cake day! I hope it was good (the cake, that is; but also the day!)
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New York Pizza - very fun filler game! The “I split; you choose” mechanism is very interesting, as it is coupled with area majority. Paying attention on how you slice the pizza in context with what kind of pizza slices that everyone has made New York Pizza filled with interesting decisions. Although the game can be computable to find the optimal decision, that would require some repeated plays to get there though. I really enjoyed this.
Startups - still superb
Imperial 2030 - remains a sublime game. I ditch the dumb basic set up and went for the advanced set up where we take turns buying shares from each country one at a time. I started with Europe and India under my control. Somewhere at the midpoint of the game, I saw China and Brazil ramping up for a big expansion. I only have enough capital to buy and control either so I went for Brazil. Immediately went for that big aggressive expansion and a fast tax and investor payout cycle to milk Brazil. The former Brazil controller went to take control of Russia and she did the same cycle there - alas, I didn’t had enough to invest in Russia as I went all in on Brazil.
Brazil ended with the coveted 5x modifer. Russia close at 4x. and the other powers are at a lower multiplier. So I scored loads and won with a big lead as I made a big gamble at investing big on Brazil at mid game. Fantastic game. The best Mac Gerdts game ever.
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Family away game night 2!
Hols de Geier/Beat the Buzzard - excellent double think game. Never feels bad because games are 5 minutes long
Fantasy Realms - Interesting drafter. Not sure it has staying power though
Durian - the kind if push your luck I like.
Antike Won this one. Straight from the old school euro book. Rondel, a little bit of mean interaction. Lovely.
Finished with me being benevolent rules master on Pan Am
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Happy cake day! 
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I had to pause about midway (daddy shift starting), but I got my feet wet with Atlantis Rising this morning, going with a 3-handed learning game to start.
I’m not sure if this got downplayed among reviewers of the second edition, or if maybe I just didn’t pay attention enough, but I had gone into this one thinking the turn structure and WP element seemed like a cool conceit for cooperation. I did not expect how much of a dice-fest it is—more specifically, how much of a gamble-fest it is. The resource gathering is about as mundane as it gets, but the absolute mayhem the turn structure creates when paired with the diceyness of the dice is just fantastic.
Wrath of the gods indeed. This is in good company alongside Rallyman and Space Base (beloved and permanent fixtures on the shelf); each offers something dramatically different, but they all lean hard into the thrill of the gamble. You don’t mitigate your odds as much as revel in them. Much fun to be had here, and will be a good one to show just about anyone!
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I think when learning new games (with my stress soaked mom brain), I do better when I can compare elements to other games I’ve played to give me a starting strategy. Even if it doesn’t fit exactly. It gives me a start.
With Nidavellir, the aspect of getting a bonus card after chaining one of each, is a lot how I look at completing quests in “Lord’s of Waterdeep.”
With Waterdeep I try to get quests that will give me what I need to complete the next quest.
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