Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Boardgames
3650

Today I played in my first ever Star Wars Legion tournament. It was only a skirmish format (500 points, instead of the regular, and balanced, 800 points), but it was still very intimidating. I did my usual thing when I get nervous about a tournament…

I built a stupid list that has no chance of winning to remove all pressure and so I can just shrug and say that I didn’t actually want to win, because look how silly my list is. Ah, coping mechanisms…

Sadly, my stupid list isn’t actually tournament legal, so I waffled between two really fun but semi-serious lists:
Captain Rex with 3 squads of his clone brothers (one unit of Phase 1s, Phase 2s, and ARC Troopers) escorting Padme on a dangerous mission…
Or Anakin Skywalker, Hero of the Republic, with 3 units of bodyguards (Phase 1s) and Padme, on a dangerous mission…

At the last moment I settled on Anakin, hoping that his glowing stick would wreak havoc with my opponents.

First round I played one of my oldest, best friends who had driven down from London (Ontario, the dumb London) to play. He was playing a neat Imperial list with Iden commanding two units of Snowtroopers with flamethrowers and two units of crack Imperial Special Forces… we only finished 4 turns before we ran out of time, but Anakin was happily slicing his way through Nick’s army and, with a little more time, may have won me the game. Oh well! Round 2 I played Ben, who was also playing Imperials, led by Krennic and two units of Death Troopers with a unit of Shoretroopers as backup. My Clones moved up and opened fire with their Z-6s (basically a bucket of low probability dice), and when the smoke cleared Anakin leapt through to cleave his way through Krennic and two units basically unassisted. Round 3 was against Xander and his Droid army, and Cad Bane appeared to shoot up my Clones before Anakin cut off his hat (and probably the head underneath it). However, Bane’s stalling tactic left Anakin exposed, and Xander concentrated fire on my Jedi until Anakin dropped. Padme and a few lone Clones held the line until the last turn, keeping the game closer than it had any right to be, but at the end the Droids stood victorious.

All in all, a fun tournament (and I got some nice swag, always a bonus). Nick came over afterwards, since it’s the first time I’ve seen him since… gosh… February 2020? We caught up a little, ordered Mexican because his wife doesn’t like Mexican (and she was at home with his newborn), and then played The Search for Planet X, which was very, very satisfying. I managed to find Planet X, which felt great!.. and still lost because my partner discovered it on her one extra end-game action and had been first-to-publish several times (final scores: 25, 23, 20). Brainy game, but I enjoyed it… and it’s unlike anything else I own. So that’s nice.

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3651

If I search for “jedi glow-stick rave party” I’m definitely going to find results, aren’t I?

…

Oh… This is even better than I was hoping for.

https://hellogiggles.com/reviews-coverage/movies/fish-nuns-rave-last-jedi/

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3652

Tried to solo a game of Space Hulk: Blood Angel, which eventually happened, but it was an arduous process. I had just started when my older kid started acting up and my wife offered for us to play Mario Party with him to help calm him down.

As we started playing, we heard our younger kiddo tossing something around at the dining room table, and I quickly realized it was the die, so I took that away and held on to it until after Mario Party and I started playing again.

Got through a turn, then got caught up in a few chores. So my elder kiddo took the opportunity to throw everything on the floor. Cleaned it all up and set things back up from memory, only reshuffling and redealing the genestealers since I could not remember which symbols were out.

Then proceeded to have one of the worst games ever. Only rolled one successful defense, missed almost all of my attacks in the four or five rounds it took for all my marines to be killed. Only good attack was by the flamer, which took out four out of five in a swarm in the one attack he got to perform before dying.

I am convinced that the blood of tormented children is infused into these dice, which is why they are red, and all they know is rage and hatred and lash out at the player through terrible die rolls.

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3653

Perhaps I should have a game of Death Angel too… I mean, someone has to benefit from your bad luck, surely?

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3654

I’ve been playing solo games of Regicide while the PBF game unfolds. My attempts have been going generally poorly. A while ago I was winning more often than I lost, but the game is apparently now punishing me for getting too confident : )

My last game has ended with the corrupt King of Hearts in an endless pitched battle against my King of Spades. Alongside them lie the piled groaning injured bodies of literally every hero in the kingdom. I’d have healed some of them, but, you know, King of Hearts. The tavern is empty, and the bartender doesn’t seem keen to pitch in, so my remaining goblin friend is just shrugging their shoulders at me. I guess I’ll leave them all to it… *slinks away from the battle*

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3655

I also played a couple of rounds of solo Regicide tonight. First game went poorly, getting to the third queen, diamonds, after already having used my two jesters, so I just did not have the cards to take her down.

Won the second game though. I love getting the king of clubs by the exact number so he goes on top of the draw deck, as he is an instant win card against a later king. King of spades is nice as well.

4 Likes
3656

My partner and I sat down to play Destinies tonight. I’ve got a lot of positive things to say, particularly about the multiplayer experience, but ultimately I was left with a pretty sour taste in my mouth with the way much of it played out. In short, my partner’s session felt vastly more eventful than mine, and due to a single crummy roll, I missed out on any kind of a climax for my experience entirely.

It was a close game, but that sucks. No other way to put it. I’m left in an awkward place since I don’t really see the appeal of the game as a solitaire experience, but I don’t want another 3 hours lost for what amounts to really nothing.

It’s going to get another chance, obviously, and I do have a lot of good things to say about it, but I sure don’t feel like saying them right now.

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3657

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Another birthday gift, The Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples. The twist here is that you race out and back. Still a super simple, clean deck builder. In a 2 player game you have 2 pawns to move.

This is a brilliant game, first play, pretty divergent strategies and we finished on the same turn with me winning the tie breaker.

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3658

I finally managed a Regicide victory (Silver) following yet another defeat. I think it would have been Gold if only the final two Kings had come out in the opposite order, so pretty good going on this occasion at least.

I decided to play these past couple of games with a regular deck of cards, just for the heck of it, as I’d not yet done that. It does, of course, play identically; but there’s definitely a little something extra to it with the custom deck.

(I had Leonardo Da Vinci as my jokers, mind; and I rather like the idea that if I was in serious trouble, I could ask Da Vinci to come up with some bright new idea to keep the revolution going…)

Edit: Followed that with Silver/Bronze/Silver/Bronze victories. I’m back!

In my last game I was forced to use both jesters, but was able to toy with the final King like a play-thing, attacking it with the 5, 6, J, Q, K of diamonds for a total of 56 points of damage (16 more than necessary) solely for my own amusement : )

Edit 2: My next game was a Gold victory, but then the streak ended. I feel like that was a very solid sequence, though : )

3 Likes
3659

Ah, we‘re still watching Clone Wars for the first time…. This reminds me. We‘re Season 4 now and it‘s getting darker, your teams seem to be from happier days :wink:

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3660

We just finished our Pandemic Legacy 2 September… we‘re getting ahead of ourselves (original plan was month per month play) but the campaign is really ramping up nicely and I don‘t think we will wait long to finish it. I really want to know what is going on in October. September went well for us. Once again thanks to Frequency Scanning—I wonder when the hollow men will finally switch to a secure frequency. In any case, I got the luckiest scan of them all: 2 epidemic cards in a single 4 card draw. If we had got those back to back as actual epidemics that would have been BAD!

We also—after 3 or 4 games of trying—managed to complete that really important (to us) search in Johannesburg, finally finding that lab there that will make Epidemics that much easier to deal with.

Although, as expected after 6 months the efficacy of the vaccine starts to drop off and Delta is surging… oops wrong reality. No, the Hollow Men are and they seem to have a penchant for Frankfurt. So far we have only lost Los Angeles and with East Asia newly discovered we now have red cards for the first time. We immediately built a permanent bunker in Kalkutta because it seems to be key to get into East Asia…

We really need to lose a game to get some event cards. One specific one at least. Ah well, maybe October will bring something interesting…

3 Likes
3661

The last season, yashima…

Forget the last season. The last four episodes… there is an argument that they may be the best Star Wars ever made. Ever.

I got shivers just thinking about it. It’s SO GOOD.

But yes. My Clone Army is from happier days. I can’t wait to get an Ahsoka I can put in there. Yoda is the next release, and sure, he seems cool, but I just want Ahsoka. She’s my 2nd favourite SW character ever (Rey is still my favourite, but only by this much).

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3662

Whoever created Ahsoka deserves … everything. She‘s great :slight_smile:
I am sad however that the series leaves out where she gets her second glow-stick. Apparently, that is in one of the books that I had no intention of reading…

In other Star Wars news: we finally finished the 3 Star Wars Unlock scenarios. The first 2 we did well on (our first ever exit/unlock/etc) but we really failed on the last because we didn‘t grok (minor:) how to use the map. Now I can send it on to my friend who likes Star Wars so much…

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3663

Have the original and still need to play this a bit more to decide what to keep.

I don’t think I’ll ever play the combined game though.

1 Like
3664

Yeah, I’d definitely rather play it twice than one much longer game

3665

Meet up with the “econ clique” of our club and played Imperial 2030 again. Still good. Imperial remains a game of deciding which share to buy/upgrade rather than an actual wargame. Started with Europe and no one took it over as I was mismanaging it as my quick cash cow as I had my temporary glory as the controller of Brazil and China - two countries that end up being valuable.

Then, we played Luzon Rails, Philippine theme + Cube Rails!? It’s quite an easy back for me on KS. Now that we played it, it’s very Chicago Expressy but with action cards you select from a public draft. It’s a Chi-Ex variant that I am happy to keep.

Then we ended with more game of Lignum. The more I play it, the more it confirms that my decision to sell it was right. It’s a very good Euro game with front loaded decisions and players managing their pacing, as they go through the trail. Which is Lignum’s unique taste of player interaction. But it lacks shared-incentives that you usually get from economic games or a more aggressive interaction which is more of my wheel house nowadays.

Wildcatters - a game about setting up oil rigs, drill baby drill, and transport those oil barrels via trains (TRAINS!) or ships to several refineries. Wildcatters seems to emphasis piggybacking a lot and interdependency with other players. The player who tried to go solo have struggle to achieve strong presence on the area majority contests on the regions of the world.

I did well enough, but I didn’t had a good income to continue with my piggybacking, so I got buried in debt. Very good game and I am happy to open my copy and bag and sleeve the game. I am eager to play it more and get a better sense of it.

Clinic - rather boring. Very solitaire-ish. The interaction is based on simultaneous selection of actions, which is weird as they often don’t impact what you select! But when interaction matters, it is done in such a degenerate way. Interaction is simply “I got it before you do” and turn order is based on who is last to first.

The worse-faring patients seems to matter more as a no-brainer choice, as you have a tight amount of space and staff. There’s no trade off on choosing the healthier ones or the critical patients. The spawning of new patients is also very unsatisfactory. Players build up their clinic and increasing their tempo, but the influx of new patients is the same??? And so the degenerate thing about turn order depending on your score starts to exacerbate and it’s so stupid.

Solitaire, complicated but doesn’t give opaque deep decisions, obvious plays - it’s like Clinic is playing “piss off Lalunaverde bingo”

I shouldnt judge the designer based on one game, but I’ll be wary of playing any Alban Viard titles from now on.

10 Likes
3666

I just got finished introducing my partner to Sheepy Time, which I’m happy to report isn’t a total dud at 2P. There’s no question in my mind that 4 players is ideal, but the pressure from the nightmare is scaled for the player count, and there’s still enough player-dependent combo interactions to keep the wilder bits of the race interesting (if swingier).

We went into a 5th heat after a nearly instantaneous double-bust in race 4, but I’m glad it happened as it facilitated one hell of a finale. In the final race, I needed 10 points to win, while my partner needed 15. I cleared my first lap, dumped a card for 3 winks (points) and then lapped-and-bailed to close out at 13 points—enough to force the end game, with a little buffer.

Well doesn’t my partner go on to have an insane run (while under added last-sheep-standing pressure, mind), lapping almost three times and netting 13 points at the line. She had the card she needed to get that third lap (for 18 points which would have secured a tiebreaker victory for her), but drew three nightmare cards in a row and busted out.

Great fun again, and I can’t wait to get my folks to try it.

[EDIT] More fun with The Fuzzies which is a bonafide smash hit already. We played three games across about an hour, with the first epic game alone taking up about half that. My partner won the first game, closing out the first best-of-three we started yesterday, and then I managed to win the next two in a row, quickly closing out the second. And thus, a rivalry is born. Man this is a wonderful game.

4 Likes
3667

Had a work party yesterday. Usually we have a dinner at a mid-range restaurant (Montanas, Jack Astor, The Beer Market, those kinda places), but due to the 'Vid, the bosses decided to host an outdoor event at one of their homes. It’s a beautiful backyard with a pool and some nice tents (just the roofs of the tents, I don’t know what you call that, but for shade) and some hammocks… oh, and a fully stocked bar section with a tv and washroom and a massive BBQ. It was a nice space!

But it was also pretty hot (29C), and I don’t swim and I don’t like wearing shorts (I have body image issues), so it was hot. But that’s okay! It was nice, but exhausting, to hang out with my colleagues in a social way for a few hours (1pm until 6pm, basically).

And, bringing us finally to “the point”… we played games!
First up was a ridiculous game of Jungle Speed, which remains one of my favourite grab-and-go party games. 4 players this time (both of the boss’s wives, my partner and myself), and Natalie won handily. Great reaction time on that one, although she did occasionally grab prematurely.

After that we played a riotous game of Anomia, 5 players this time (added a colleague’s wife to the mix), and my partner managed to win that, although it was pretty close! Good times… the 5th player, Liz, had so much fun that I ended up giving her my copy of Anomia since I had an extra.

Lastly, we played a game of Wavelength, just a short quick one, but I managed to rope 8 players into it. Highlight was Maverick, one of my colleagues, getting the scale “Friend to Enemy”, and then looking another colleague straight in the eyes and saying his name (“Mike”). The final correct position? Directly between the two.

Ah-mazing.

Good times had. Taught some of my coworkers a few games, ate some delicious pizza (ordered from my 2 favourite pizza joints in town, one that does pan-style pizzas really well, and the other does spectacular thin crust), didn’t say anything that I think will get me fired.

We’re calling that a win.

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3668

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Sometimes a win in Hardback can happen quite suddenly. This was a very satisfying word (for 19 :star: and 2 c). The Doppler Effect is quite something… even I was surprised I ended the turn with 60 points.

We’re still playing without literary awards. Because. Those just always decide the game. Of course getting all the red cards does the same thing. But it is at first more subtle and then more sudden. I have now played one of my 2 nerdy word friends 12 times and the other 16 times. Not stopping any time soon it seems :slight_smile:

In a weird twist, while I am winning against the one friend in Hardback I am losing against him in Tash Kalar and when I am winning in Tash Kalar I am losing Hardback. Apparently, the games do not play nice with each other in my brain.

PS: all the colors have very valid strategies, just this time it was red :smiley: which I love best of them all.

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3669

You might call it a “grab-and-go-and-go-and-grab” game, even.

Sounds like an excellent time was had by all!

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