I don’t know, I was being a bit flippant. Wouldn’t be surprised though
1 Like
I’m going to be disciplined and wait until it’s a reasonable UK price, but it’s right up the top of games I want a physical copy of!
Got another quick game of Sheepy Time in with my partner this afternoon and stole another victory. She bailed after landing on her pillow, but I had a nasty combo in hand and no choice but to risk it all. I ended up 3 points past my pillow, and 6 points ahead overall for the win.
This was a big comeback win for me, as I busted in the first two races and really needed to keep on top of her. We had a bangin’ combo laid out which she was really able to exploit thanks to an infinite Zzz tile on one of them. Thankfully I was able to pop out a particularly juicy “perfect landing” tile and bank on it a few times, including as part of my big final move.
We’re both pretty surprised we were so eager to get back to this one at two players, but it’s been pretty enjoyable so far.
[EDIT] Got the chance to introduce my partner to The Search for Planet X this evening, and it’s a hit with her right away as well, so it’s firmly into the keeper pile.
It was a really tight race and I was gutted when my partner made an attempt at Planet X at least a few solid turns earlier than I’d have been able to. Thankfully she missed due to glossing over the gas cloud rule, which bought me a little time.
This ended up revealing just how crunchy the mechanical element (time spent=movement cost/turn order) can get, as I was forced to really plan my moves efficiently in hopes of squeezing out as much good information as I could between Theory phases, sneaking an extra turn wherever I could manage and plunking down bids for end game VP.
In the end, I didn’t have a lot of extra time as my partner made another (correct) guess only two of her turns later. I had no good theories to place for any meaningful points, so I took the thematic high road for 4 measly points and identified X as well. End score was 23-19 for her. I did well on theories, particularly in the 1st place bonuses, but it just wasn’t enough. Another fabulous time and one I’ll bet is going to see a lot of play.
[FURTHER EDIT] We snuck in another round of Planet X during nap time and I got spanked pretty good, losing 19-29. Bang-on neck-and-neck for points, so I really needed to find X which, for me, was another good turn away. A big ol’ Vee for my partner on this one… hopefully I’ll nab her soon!
[STILL EDITING] Quite the bender since yesterday! We played Lost Ruins of Arnak on the snake temple side tonight, and boy was it mean to us. We both logged scores on the lower end of our averages, but as usual it was a tight race. We were mostly neck and neck, but my (huge) card value edged out her big game strategy with guardians, and I managed a few extra points on the research track thanks to pushing my magnifying glass to the top. One more guardian would have pushed us to tiebreakers, a relatively common occurrence for us!
[FOR GOODNESS SAKE SOMEONE ELSE PLAY A GAME!] More morning coffee Search for Planet X against the bot. This was my 5th game overall and I was finally able to guess Planet X first. I didn’t think I had quite enough info to make it that turn, but I spent an extra minute and popped a beautiful Eureka moment. The dopamine hit when I realized I could take the shot was palpable, particularly since I wasn’t guessing. Perhaps this bodes well for the next time I go up against my partner.
6 Likes
We quit on our game of High Frontier 4 All because it was too complicated. We decided to quit and try a different approach.
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Played Forbidden Desert on novice.
Won on novice. Better than Pandemic IMHO
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After meeting our one week old nephew this afternoon, we came home and played a first 2 player of Aqua Garden. It is quite different from the solo optimization puzzle I tried before.
My partner is the one I bought the game for because he 
aquariums (I have been to aquariums where ever we traveled—in Scotland, Oregon, in Las Vegas in the … desert!!! The best ever ins in Bangkok in a large mall—well unless you count snorkeling in several oceans.)
So… he won. By a not small margin (58 to my 49 points) because he likes sharks and I underestimated the amount of game in this game 
As you can see by my lonely sea horse in the lower left… I never quite got into the game.
Aqua Garden may be one of those where one plays for a good long while with the base setup despite there being a bunch of different advanced fish with different scoring conditions one could use to spice up the game.
As an aside: For some reason, he doesn’t want me to buy Oceans (though Efka may have changed his mind the other day… which would be nice because I want the Legends from the Deep).
So because we discussed the thing with games with variable setup today we looked through the advanced fish and found this funny thing:
Sorry for the reflection … I only noticed how bad it was after we put the game away. In any case, we think it’s cute to have the editor’s note on the card. I think we still get what the card does.
Edit: I think I taught myself Regicide… 
So all of you solo-ing are playing two handed right? Or did I miss the solo rules?
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Played three games of dune imperium and I’m not sure I’ve got it at all. I think i play too much like a dog seeing a squirrel.
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Sounds a bit like what I did in Aqua Garden, I wanted that first Whale Shark so badly I ignored everything else and kind of handed my partner the victory.
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We played Concordia for the first time - a 2-player game on the Italy map and it was a decent enough time (albeit with a fiddlier setup than most of the games we play). I packed my hand with Jupiter cards and won 143-135. I feel that it would be a lot better at 3 or 4. I might look at some of the dedicated 2-player maps.
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You have to go looking for them, I’m afraid. They’re included in the printed rules booklet, but not in the online PDF. The Solo rules thread at BGG provides virtually identical text to the booklet, but I think the following is slightly clearer:
The changes for solo play are that you have a hand limit of 8 cards, and jokers are used completely differently: instead of nullifying the suit of an enemy (there is no way to do that when playing solo), they are simply a two-time resource which you can use before attacking or taking damage, which causes you to discard your hand and draw a new hand of eight cards. You don’t actually need joker cards as such – just to keep count of whether you did this action 0, 1, or 2 times (for gold, silver, or bronze victory respectively, if you win).
The official solo rules description
Set up the game as per usual but place the two Jesters to the side. You play with a single hand limited to 8 cards. Play as normal, playing each turn one after the other. However a Jester can be flipped to activate the following power: “Discard your hand and refill to 8 cards - this does not count as drawing for the purpose of enemy diamond immunity.” Since you have two Jesters this can be done twice per game. Flipping the Jesters in this way does not cancel immunity. You are allowed to use the Jester power a) at the start of step 1 before you play a card or b) at the start of step 4 before you have to take damage. Winning the game after using both Jesters achieves you a Bronze Victory. Winning after flipping only 1 Jester is called a Silver Victory and winning the game while having both Jesters untouched grants you the ever-elusive Gold Victory!
Note that playing the regular 2p rules two-handed means it’s open-handed, which is fine when starting out, but will eventually make the game too easy, with up to 14 visible cards at your disposal rather than 8.
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Played Kingdomino with my wife today. She got a good amount of plains and woods, which managed to equal my entire score. She won 42 - 28. I don’t seem to be doing well at games these days. 
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A few different games yesterday:
Played Scythe for the first time in 2 years, and still remembered almost all of the rules! We had a game with no combat at all, and two of us drew with 85 points each. I didn’t even bother to build any mechs 
I’m hoping we can get this out more often now that everyone has got over their campaign fatigue!
Our friend stopped by our local FLGS on his way over to take advantage of their free comic day, and ended up buying War of Whispers (so the shop’s ploy worked 
) The rules are delightfully straightforward so we got straight into a game. My initial impressions are that it’s a really interesting take on area control, given that you really need to consider other players’ motives when you do anything.
7 Likes
Let’s Dig for Treasure , first play. Another in the series of games using the art of Steven Rhodes. Last week it was Let’s Summon Demons. Again, this is a very light game, with more push your luck than LSD. You have three stacks of cards, and you draw from any of them, and keep on drawing until you decide to stop (and score what cards you have this turn), or draw a card that will end your turn. There are skeleton cards, or worm cards that will do this (only if you draw two worm cards). So, it’s a matter of drawing cards, doing whatever it says, and deciding to stop. There’s a bit of take that – I was the recipient of two cards each worth minus ten, all because they thought I was winning (and to be fair, I was…). I picked up another minus twenty card, which would have given me points for skeletons, so I threw the dice there a little, and it didn’t work for me. I had minus thirty points at the end of the game. And the winner had managed a thirty point card, which pretty much was the backbone of her game. Simple, easy fun, not much to think about.
Cthulhu:Death May Die . We’ve finished all the episodes from the core box, so it was time for episode 1 from the Season 2 box (I don’t have any of the cool KS stuff). We went with Hastur as the Elder One. Fairly simple objective, needed four gangster companions to be able to open the bank vault and disrupt the ritual. Seems a strange place to have a ritual, but I’m not a cultist, I don’t know how they think. There were loot tokens to pick up, which would allow you to take a gangster, but you don’t know what is required until you draw the discovery card. I got a bit lucky here, and had the right loot for my first gangster, who was a boss and counted as two gangsters.
If you couldn’t gain a gangster, you usually got stuck with a condition instead, and then when the Elder One advanced, you would lose health. This happened to one of the other players, but you can discard loot to get rid of all of your conditions.
So, we got the required gangsters fairly quickly, and proceeded to the vault. It felt like one of our easier wins eventually, although we would have lost if the track token had moved on just one more space.
Movie Quiz Game , first play. Picked this up from Officeworks, which is not where I expected to find any games. It’s not even in the BGG database. We didn’t score any points, we just took it in turns to ask questions and see who could answer. Most of them were fairly easy, and you got to choose from multiple options, so if the correct answer was on the tip of your tongue, you could answer. Light, pleasant fun, which we will never play again (we got through all the cards).
Crash Octopus , first play. What a great looking game! It’s a dexterity game, which has you steering you boat around and trying to flick treasures onto your boat by hitting it. To flick, you have to use a tiny flag, rather than just using your finger. To win, you need to load five different types of treasures, before the time runs out. Every time you load a treasure, you move a crab along the outside of the string used to form the boundaries of the game. At regular intervals the octopus will attack! This means each player gets to drop a die onto the octopus head, trying to hit another ship and force it to drop it’s treasures. If you don’t manage to hit a ship (and it’s not easy), you move either the octopus head, or one of it’s tentacles (depending on the die face).
It’s not that straightforward to even load treasure. It’s a small boat, and all the treasures will barely fit. The first one is easy enough, but after that you need to hit the boat with a treasure, but not so hard that any previously loaded treasures will fall off. Well, I had trouble with it, anyway. I was going ok, but then got smashed by an octopus attack, and lost all my stuff. Gutted! In the end two players had three treasures each (I had one…). Good fun! One of the players wasn’t enjoying it much, but she laughed her head off when her husband stuffed up. Hopefully we can get it played again. It’s a cool looking game, the octopus head and tentacles are bright and very solid. The treasures are pretty basic shapes, but it works. The KS has some extra stuff which would have been cool. Overall, great fun!
Here Comes the Dog , first play. Ok, this game is strange. It’s Japanese, so maybe that explains it. The theme is that you are villagers in the past, huddling around the bonfire, cooking your meat from the days hunt, while wild dogs prowl around…The fire starts off surrounded by a number of sticks, in three different colours. Most are white, representing meat, the black sticks are charcoal, and the red ones are fire (stick of fire, that makes sense, doesn’t it?)
There are five rounds. On your turn, you roll the three dice or exchange sticks with those from the fire. There are three dice, each die has two faces of the three colours (white, black, red). From the dice you roll, you pick two of them and take those coloured sticks from the fire. The round ends when you take all of the meat sticks (white), charcoal (black), or both. If the meat sticks are all taken, there is a “feed” event, where you can tame the wild dogs by using your meat sticks. You are trying to get the most tame dogs at the end of the game. If the charcoal sticks are all taken, there is an “assault” event. This is less good. You get attacked by a wild dog for each meat stick you have. For each two meat sticks, you’ll fend off a dog. Also, for each set of fire and charcoal sticks, you’ll also fend off a dog. Any dogs not dealt with will cause one of your villagers to faint (maybe they didn’t want to be too explicit here).
So, you want meat sticks to tame dogs, which are basically VPs. But if you have meat sticks and the dogs attack, you’ll probably lose villagers. If you lose (from fainting…) all of your villagers, you’ll lose all of the dogs you’ve tamed so far, and you lose one villager for good (death by fainting!).
There are also incidents that occur when certain combinations of dice are rolled. If you roll three meat, you do the “feed” action (the same as when all the meat sticks are taken). If you roll three charcoal, you’ll do an "assault (again, the same as when all the charcoal sticks are taken). if you roll all fire, then everyone puts their fire sticks back in the bonfire.
The other special combination you can get is one of each colour. This allows you to steal a stick from another player. So there’s a bit of take that. I never rolled this combination, which was a little surprising. Had plenty of stuff stolen from me tho…
Instead of rolling dice, you can choose to exchange sticks between you and the bonfire. A charcoal will get you a meat, and a fire stick can be exchanged for either two meat or two charcoal. But, importantly, you can’t exchange sticks if that would cause all of those sticks to be taken from the fire.
Weird, but pretty good fun. You have to keep an eye on what people are doing, and the dice may prevent you from doing exactly what you want. I thought it was pretty good fun. I probably wouldn’t want to play it for hours, but it was a pretty quick game, and I enjoyed it.
Juicy Fruits , first play. This is a colourful looking game. You start with an island where all the beaches are filled with various ships that you need to supply. You have five random tiles at the start, each with a fruit type. On your turn, you move a tile, and then take that fruit. Move two space, collect two fruit. Very simple, very addictive, very easy to play. And which one you move can affect one of your other tiles, so you have to watch that. As you gather fruit, you can supply your ships, which give you points, and also frees up a space on your board, so you can move tiles further and get even more fruit.
You can also purchase business tiles, which come in a few different types. You can buy a small venue token, which gives you points. You can buy a placeholder token, which come in either two or four in size, and again, give you points. But they take up two or four spaces on your board, which will limit how much you can move your fruit tiles around. You can take stall tokens, which give you points at the end of the game for various conditions.
Then you have mobile business tokens, which are either advanced collector tokens with a choice of two fruits, and ice cream tokens, which allow you to take ice creams or milkshake tokens for big points. Mobile business tokens can be moved around like the basic fruit tokens.
The various business tokens are laid out on the business board, and each row has it’s own cost. Each time you take a business token, you move a marker down. When it reaches zero, the game is over.
There’s a post on BGG about ice creams being a bit OP. I thought I’d done pretty well out of them, but still only came third (in a 3p game). I didn’t take the highest point ice creams, but I got all the yellow ice creams. Another player got the blue icecream tile, gathered fruit for half the game, and got 50+ points in the last turn, giving him (unsurprisingly) an easy victory. I tried to run the marker down and finish the game, but he still just managed to do it. Final scores were 103, 83, and 69. I enjoyed the game, it’s easy to learn and puzzling over your fruit tiles is a lot of fun.
Scout! , our second game of this. Quick update on rules, and we were into it. Runaway winner over three rounds. Scores were 27, 6, and 3. Just takes one good combo that people can’t beat and have to scout, ending the round. And then you lose points for cards in your hand, if you weren’t the player who ended the round. Oh well, it was still good fun.
Zen Master , first play. This is a Reiner Knizia game, so obviously I bought it. The deck is made up of numbers from one thru to fifty. Each player gets nine cards to play. There’s a deck of ten scoring cards, of which only nine will be used. You turn over the score card, and then each player plays a single card. The scoring card will have a number in black, and a number in white. If you play the highest card, you’ll take the number of black tokens. If you play the lowest card, you’ll take the number of white tokens. And if you played in the middle, you don’t take any tokens. When you take tokens, you can pair off white and black tokens and discard them back to the supply. The idea is to have the least number of tokens – ideally none. This means you are in balance, very zen. You play as many games as there are players, and track the score from each game. If you manage to score zero in a round, you can erase your score from a previous game. Fairly close game, ended up with scores of 12, 14, and 24. And yup, I got 24. A good, simple game. For some reason I thought it was a trick taking game, not sure why I thought that. There are no suits, just numbers. Maybe I confused it with Marshmallow Test, another (excellent) Knizia, which is definitely a trick taking game.
Crash Octopus , still good fun. I had a terrible position, nowhere near most of the treasures, but I still managed to get four treasures loaded.
Beyond the Sun , pretty quick game at 2p. And it’s not bad to teach either. I lost, but wasn’t far off. But the winner was never in doubt.
Here Comes the Dog , where I got the win!
Pagoda , first play. A two player only game, not my copy. You compete to build multiple level pagodas. Each level has to have four pillars of the same colour, and then you can build a roof of that colour. The roof will have another four spaces for pillars, in a different colour, so you keep building up until you have four levels, and then you build a final roof. You have seven cards, five public and two in your hand, to choose from. Each pillar or roof requires a card of that colour to place. You get more and more points for pillars, as the structure is constructed. Anyone can work on any of the pagodas, but obviously you don’t want to let the other player take advantage of your hard work. Pretty quick game and fun too.
12 Likes
Solo win on The Lost Expedition last night. Really enjoy this one as a solo game; tricky and punishing enough to be a challenge every time, but always feels beatable
Wife and kid got roped into a few games of Marvel Legendary over the weekend too, and one solo of the Villains version for good measure. Dr Strange foiled my dastardly plans.
(all some procrastination gaming when I’m not totally in the right mindset to get truly stuck into the mini painting I probably should be doing)
8 Likes
Nice. Two fairly-healthy survivors is a very solid win. I’ve always enjoyed this series (including the Judge Dredd version, which I’ve only played a little).
3 Likes
Continued my Marvel Champions Red Skull campaign, this stage against Taskmaster. It was tough!
Played with Hawkeye and Spider Woman, and Hawkeye immediately went down to about 3 health and stayed there for most of the game. Eventually I was able to start drawing Allies for him (instead of just mostly arrows) and block a bit, but it was tricky. Spider Woman’s self-heal is very, very useful.
I stuck a surveilance van on the main scheme to increase how much threat I was allowed, and ended up going into the extra!
Here I am struggling a bit before I managed to turn it around:
3 Likes
Port Royal - it’s alright.
Iberian Gauge - another game of Iberian Gauge. The timing seems to be important, as in, it might not be wise to invest too hard too early. You also don’t want to invest lightly either, not getting enough dividends for you to re-invest. It seems you want an early game company that can give short burst of revenue to people, but you want to invest elsewhere later for the long-term company with loads of cash in their treasury - “stewed for a few rounds”, as I have said - which allows them to splash money by leasing other companies’ rail lines. This allows said late-burst company to literally teleport city to city and score big.
I definitely find Iberian Gauge interesting, as I am having a better understanding on what “the game behind the game” seems to be. However, I need more plays to see if there’s a degree of “shonkiness” in this game. I am happy to keep this one (for now). And fine with selling Irish Gauge, which was replaced by Chicago Express and Luzon Rails.
I am keen on trying out Trans Siberian Railroad, which is another Cube Rail from Amabel Holland. This also uses the leasing mechanism found in Iberian, so I am curious on how it is done here, and if it is done better.
Whale Riders: the Card Game - Modern Art: the Card Game is better as the latter does give incentives to diversify. Whale Riders seems to strongly favour being in the “in crowd” and there’s bigger risk with deviating. The only counter on this one seems to be players having situational awareness in the game. “Who benefits the most with the current setup of cards we all have played?” “Who has the dominant position in this game?” “Will my relative delta improve if I join in with Kelp or with Pearls?” A quick evaluation of these questions should stop players from just following the dominant trend. Unfortunately, the game is too open to coerce players to think this way. Hence why Modern Art: the Card Game is a more stable system. I will keep it though.
Knights of Charlemagne - felt like a multiplayer Schotten Totten/Battle Line. It has the same tension of hand management. Knizia continues to impress with how he introduces tense hand management to his players.
Medici: the Dice Game - still captures the spirit of Medici: the Board Game. But this is the weakest one, I think, compare to it siblings. The way players chooses which resources they want to get from the dice pool is shonky. i would rather play the card game or the board game instead.
8 Likes
Got the chance to play some games today!
Started off with Jazz: The Singing Card Game while we waited for my friend’s girlfriend to show up. Still a very funny game for how simple it is. And it gives you a wonderful sense of madness as you spend several minutes not saying any proper words, but constantly feeling like you’re not talking nonsense properly.
Then we had some 3-player Bullet 
. I enjoyed it a lot, but I can’t see myself ever being good at it. I don’t think my brain is any good at the kind of planning it needs.
Codex Naturalis was next. It’s kind of Splendor-like with its way of building up resources to allow you to play more valuable cards. But there’s a spacial element as well, along with hidden goals. I don’t think it would replace Splendor, but it’s fun and portable and extremely pretty.
I almost brought along something else, but I had an urge to play Cursed Court, so grabbed it instead. It’s not at its best at 3 (a lot less bumping of other players’ bids and opportunities to score on the various combos), but still good fun.
We lost my friend’s girlfriend to playing Vanguard, so we carried on with two-player games. First grabbing Rhino Hero out of the store’s meagre offering of games. Never played it before, but I can see why it’s so well-loved.
Finally, I remembered I had Tussie Mussie in the side-pocket of my bag. Brilliant at doing something so simple yet engaging with so few components. Definitely worth always having to hand.
6 Likes
4P mayhem with my partner, my folks, and The Fuzzies. We had an absolutely riotous set of three games, breathless giggle fits on full display, even from my dad which is just too rare and fun not to be a moment that’ll stick (yuk).
My mom wants it for Christmas. 
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Ah, don‘t tempt me so badly.
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