Yesterday after I got home from work, but before I needed to pick up our kids, my wife and I played a couple of games of Kingdomino.
I managed to squeak out a win the first game, 50 - 45. Then she destroyed me in the second game with a ton of points from swamps, winning 46 - 25.
Guess we’ll need to play a tiebreaker at some point.
I don’t think the timer is that necessary. The race to the good power keeps the pace up.
We’ve only played it untimed and it’s kept it’s lustre.
Oh for sure, I don’t doubt that it’ll stand long-term without the timer (and heck, all the other modes are untimed in the first place). That doesn’t mean I don’t see a whole lot of fun to extract from that simple conceit. I feel like the game becomes (even more of) an impossible task under those conditions, and frantically trying to stay alive between rounds for those sweet AP and pattern refreshes should really ramp up the tension as we try to be the last person standing.
Played 2 games 3 player last night. First up was Tyrants of the Underdark. As deck builders with a board go this one does a fun job. It’s a bit like risk but fast and fun. It’s quite swingy but the area control is smooth enough that I still enjoy it a lot.
Next up was Teotihuacan. I still love this as a euro. So smooth, so variable and so interesting. Really played around with stuff yesterday and got a cheeky second on a high score. I’m trying to work out timings and efficiencies on locking dice. I think I could have done better with out long-covid so lost focus on the last eclipse. Ah well, fun was still had.
Played Everdell today with my wife and her brother. I was not feeling confident at all after the first season as I did not feel like I really had any resources and only had critters in my hand, with only a Shopkeeper played.
However, that feeling went away in the Spring as I managed to really draw out my seasons after that and got a ton of Production cards out, so going into Autumn gave me a lot of resources. I ended up winning with 66, followed by her brother with 57, and my wife in last at 42.
To be fair, she is on some meds after being rear ended the other day, so she is not on her A game.
Played 1846: Race for the Midwest. I screwed up with my company and sold it off, and went on as an investor.
The rush to Chicago was done on the first round. It was THAT fast. Well, the companies havent reached Chicago yet, but I saw how the game will unfold and went for Plan B, which is St. Louis. Thats when people invested to my company and I immediately bailed.
I remain a bit competitive even if I dont control a company. But inevitably lost. The game ended too fast for me to catch up and I made more mistakes.
I realised something with 1846. As it is designed by Thomas Lehman. I can see the design philosophy of Race for the Galaxy in here. If Race is a Euro efficiency game at breakneck speed, 1846 is 18xx at that same speed too.
I am appreciating it more now. But I dont think it’ll be a fave. What I like about 18xx is predicting how the game unfolds and buy/sell shares at the right company at the right time. Plan your long term plans. And also using your control of companies to change the board state to your favour. 1846 lacks the destruction of the train rush and the timing of when to shift companies.
Two more sessions of Descent:LOTD. I’m liking this more each run through. The app saves so much token fiddliness, and the ability to work out percentages for effects behind the scenes is great.
Made some more progress on various challenges yesterday.
From my friend’s 10x10:
From my “play all my unplayed games”:
Just for fun:
Our group meta for Inis seems to be a rush to build sanctuaries, so I need to work on disrupting that next time. I almost pulled off a win with presence in 6 territories, but couldn’t hold on to them for long enough.
Does piggybacking work? Sanctuaries are for everyone. Emissaries would be cool in this kind of plays.
It comes down to who can win the clashes in that situation. There was a lot of tactical passing going on to conserve action cards.
Had a couple games of Scapegoat on Friday (one win for me as the Scapegoat when someone else got cold feet—I had no clue, and the second time we framed an also rather clueless scapegoat sucessfully).
We followed up with a few rounds of Concept—not as a game but an activity. I still love picking apart a word or idiom and finding interesting ways to communicate. Some stuff is surprisingly easy „Once Upon a Time in the West“ has a German title that is trivial to communicate „Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod“… the Great Wall is easy too and but others are more difficult. Sometimes you need someone specific to guess from „Movie 3, with male lead, and the curvy line“ that I meant the whip from Indiana Jones 
Each person has their unique style abstracting concepts. It‘s lovely, but I am just bad at guessing. I very much prefer creating the communication. And same as with Dixit, the better you know the people the better it gets.
Yesterday we played a 2 player of Ares Expedition which went 47 to 45 points for me. I hate animal strategies. I always throw away every single card with animal tokens. It brought my partner close to winning though.
I had a super great combo where I was getting new cards by playing events and then earning more income from the event tags…. My partner does not like engine builders (he is very much enjoying our current game of Splendor though) and complained it was taking too long for him to lose. Then he was rather surprised how close the game was.
I need more plays to better judge the game. But I had fun playing. One thing I noticed is that with two players it took a surprising amount of turns to finish the game after I was more or less done building my engine so I am thinking we either played far from optimal (my partner didn‘t terraform much, I made most of my score from the Terraform rating) or the alternative would be a sad conclusion that the game runs too long. We will see how quick future games go.
This is one of my favourite parts of Everdell, that after the first season you feel as though you’ve achieved NOTHING and your village is EMPTY. And then by the last round everything is manic and you’ve run out of room 
I will say that the boss mode in Bullet is very strong and unless you just don’t like coop play, much more than a diversion. It’s probably the main way I will be playing it.
Got out, setup and played Last Bastion and gosh it’s fun, co-op defense game with a totally high fantasy theme. Very well balanced but with the ability to whupass whilst feeling fun as fun can be, even in defeat.
Boss mode looks fantastic and I’ll definitely be sinking my time into that once I get a little more comfortable with one of the characters. For now I’m having fun trying out each of them! So far they really do all play quite differently, which is amazing.
I found boss mode to be brutal and was struggling to figure out what I could do to fare better. I really should get the game setup again and see if I can do better sans-Triangles.
True that, my first ever play of Everdell, after the first season I was feeling I had no hope.
Then after two more seasons, everybody was trying to take me down. And still managed to get away with the game…
I had the Olympics on yesterday evening, all the girls were in bed, and after the pain of seeing Spain smashing ball against ball against the Hungarian goalie in water polo, I decided to play another game of Spirit Island.
Turns out my fate was the same as the Spanish swimmers, started well in the first half of the game, but I was overrun in the second. I played with Tunderspeaker and Vital Strength of the Earth against the Swedish, level 1.
Started containing the Swedish really well, but I got the Dahan cornered in a wetland of Thunderspeaker half of the island, so soon its hands were tied, as most cards are connected to the Dahan presence, and did cost me a lot of presence as well to lose them. The other half of the island was being contained nicely, so I started searching in the Minor powers with Thunderspeaker looking for the card that turns invaders into Dahan. It took forever for it to appear, and by then the Blight card had flipped and Vital was losing powers and presence rapidly due to its effect.
Tried to bail out some of the downpour, and nearly cleared the Vital half, but by the third level 3 card of the invaders, there was only one icon left on the blight card, and I could avoid blight happening only on two out of the three wetlands crammed with invaders.
So that mistake made me pay dearly, and now the island must be a Swedish lush touristic destination…
I’m not sure your friend (holding the box) agrees that its fun!
(edited for your/you’re)
Ha ha! That’s my son and he loved it so much he bought his own copy the next day when he got home!
I think he was channeling socialist realism and grit in the picture!
