You can see the thresholds on a PC, if you hover over the art style icon at the top of the screen. However, I didn’t figure that out until the game was over.
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I will admit I’m feeling a bit lost. I can feel the machinery grinding all around me…
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Now you’re in the play test group you can set up and play with other members of the group.
Tbh I’m not in a rush for another game until I’ve worked out what I’m doing
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I can’t comment as I have no idea on what’s going on. I did kept buying them Art Noveau paintings, which is predictable of me, I guess 
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It’s doing something different enough for me to check out the cost of a physical copy, but I feel there’s slightly too much moving stuff to get a picture of the game online (and it’s in early public testing, so that may improve).
Looking back I think I cut the game short by aggressively buying money.
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I bought loads of money as well because I didn’t understand the powers and that I could use my paintings as money as well.
My second action was always a waste because I had no cards left!
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I’ve been pondering this. Weren’t you forced in to pushing the train rush as the other players were earning more? Possibly the second 3 was the mistake. Might have forced me in to another 3 to get the 4. Although it could have given D protection on his company (yellow?) that had only 2s. If he got a 3 then the delta wasn’t going to be in your favour either so it might have pushed you in to buying the trains anyway. I was a turn late on buying a 3 which might have conversely worked well for me due to the rush positioning.
As you were investing early I’m slightly wondering if you cut out and started your own company too soon. D pushed for blue early so getting in after blue had bought 2s rather than letting blue begin on a 3 could have been the better timing. Would have allowed you to do similar but buy less disposable trains.
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Arrghhh I don’t know! 
Yes. Agree. The 2nd 3 Train was too much, which opens everyone to buy the 4’s, which rusts the 2’s. At that point each player has two 2’s in their company.
The timing of the Purple Company and the 2nd company that early were the mistake. The Canadian National end up picking a poison 4’s and my Purple Train Company ( 
I only wanted to see you underneath the purple train ) have to buy 2’s and 3’s and ran out of money.
EDIT: No. If the 2’s rust. I’d end up with two 3 trains and you guys have to buy some. Starting the 2nd company too soon seems to be the issue???
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Canadian National got the 2nd of 3 4s and D was forced in to a 4 on the yellow as that had only had 2 trains. So you didn’t get ‘the’ poison 4. I think that’s what I was driving at, the national was maybe one SR too soon. I also think you didn’t quite strip purple enough before dumping it, another $100(canadian) would have been the difference between you jumping up a space as that would have forced an additional yellow sale. Although did D have the 2 purple shares at the time?
I’m not sure I deeply held back on trains, I did do some withholds on my lead company to push the train rush and get a permanent with low grit. The tempo might have slowed with player count. Only 2 companies to start dribbled the 2s but when the next tranche of companies came out it all picked up. The thing that held me back was the lack of money to be made on the Green as I was cautious with my track lays to try and get a city available. If I’d been more aggressive there trusting you or D to perform some upgrades for run money on your runs this game could have sped up. D held back due to the bank he was making from the pair of 2s.
The 4s in this game ran a long time as the D’s stalled for a set and a half of ORs until the last company founded. I wonder how usual that is.
This game seems to highlight in my head how deep the player interaction is in the genre. My initial plan was scuppered the moment you bough a red share rather than founding a company. My cautiousness on track stunting a company slowed things down. The timing of you going National changed the distribution of trains, Ds yellow strat on the blue skewed the speed of investment and so on. Indonesia captured this as well. Probably why it keeps it’s spot as my favourite Splotter.
Maybe we should continue this discussion via text if it’s boring others in the thread. If no dissenters we can keep talking here.
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Played Trans-Siberian Railroad by Holland. Same designer of Iberian Gauge so I thought I should play this next. First impressions: TSR seems to be more to my taste.
The money is tighter here, while IG gets flooded with cash. The threat of nationalisation gives more tension than the breezy Iberian.
I am liking this more, but I’m gonna need more plays. The tempo/timing question on whether to build just one rail or two is still a mystery to me. Basically, when players do a double action (double buy shares or double build plus some exceptions!!) than the timer for dividends goes down. This is very interesting in itself. To push the timer or not is something that still needs exploring. The question of double building to bump the value of your shares is still an unknown. Which shares to buy and do you want to have parity with another player on shares so both of you got the power to build, or do you want to dominate the company so you get the lion share but only you have the power to build?
Gah. The TSR is interesting! Perhaps more interesting than Irish Gauge itself. The latter is interesting too with the random cube pulls during payout, despite it being a derivative of Chicago Express. But TSR is just different altogether - giving different questions to the players.
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I played a morning coffee game of Project L using the solo rules today. This was using the standard difficulty, and I won 25-19. This was my first play of the game altogether, so winning was a bit of a surprise. It’s possible I got lucky but going forward I’ll surely use the hard mode.
That said, while the solo mode is functionally quite nice, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing for another (non-MP) game. The bot mechanisms are dead simple to manage and do provide a layer of strategy with respect to how you handle the card market, which is great, but I’m missing the competition at the puzzle level. None of the puzzle tiles are difficult to complete, but getting them finished as efficiently as possible is really the name of the game here.
Basically, it’s fine. Good, even! But it lacks the added tension of an opponent making a particularly nice placement, potentially saving an entire action in the process, leaving them free to (for example) snipe a high value card. I’m very much looking forward to introducing my partner to it.
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My very first game of Calico was one of the best scores I ever had. After that I started overthinking it 
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Calico is rocket science compared to Project L, though. Not nearly the brutally restrictive, sacrifice-laden hellscape that is my beloved kitty-quilter.
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Second game with the Taverns of Tiefenthal expansion, this time combining the first and third modules. The first adds sommeliers - mechanically, it acts as a dice for guests giving you more money to spend which is handy. The third module is the most interesting we’ve tried so far - it gives each person a unique bartender with their own special power. My girlfriend chose the one with their own reputation track which gave her a huge number of bonuses throughout the game. Mine made 3 and 4 dice rolls wild. Very close game ending in a loss for me by 183 points to 179.
Very much enjoying the expansion. None of the new modules have added much complexity so far, nor have they altered the fundamentals of the game. But they’ve refreshed it enough and provides new ways to increase the combos you can get, which is why I love the original game in the first place.
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Played a few solo games of Lost Kingdoms, a small tile-laying and area-control game, and it was quite good! Solo area control games are always pretty dicey, and this one doesn’t even have an opponent; you mostly get to run around unimpeded, aside from dinosaurs printed on tiles, and scoring is almost irrelevant. Instead, each of the three eras has a Cataclysm card, with some Survival condition on it. When you draw an asteroid tile (which triggers scoring in a multiplayer game), you check to see if you meet the Survival conditions up to that age; if you do, the Cataclysms wipe out a ton of your dinosaurs based on some criteria, and you have to re-build in time for the next asteroid tile. It doesn’t really feel like an area control game, but it is a really neat little survival game. Each era, you have to spread and consolidate intelligently in order to stay ahead of the Cataclysms, and the dinosaur powers on tiles have all been tweaked to work in solo mode, usually messing with your strategy in some way. The multiplayer game looks like fun too, but I’m really happy with the depth of the solo game.
Also played some Unbroken, which is… apparently not a dice game! I heard it compared to One Deck Dungeon a number of times and assumed it was a dice-based game, and was pleasantly surprised to see it’s not. That said, I didn’t get on it with it all that much. Instead of ODD, it actually reminded me more of The Lost Expedition, in that the vast majority of the game is exchanging icons for other icons: you spend a wood to get a food, spend two minor effort to get a major effort, so on and so forth. Problem is, I find Lost Expedition to be much more engaging. Each individual decision is so interconnected with the others, and the margin of error is so slim, that just placing a card in a row leads to a ton of thematic tension, even though the gameplay itself is quite abstract. Unbroken, on the other hand, feeds you a ton of tiny choices, but they all feel disconnected; you explore the path ahead, choose a card, and then repeat the process until you hit the next boss. The decisions aren’t uninteresting, but I never felt the tension, brain-burnery-ness, or satisfaction as playing Lost Expedition. Still, the art is incredible, and the replay value feels pretty high, so I’ll give it another play or two before making a final decision on it.
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Just wrapped up a game of Orleans with my wife. She’s still not 100% with her back pain and all, so she did struggle a bit here and there, taking some placement mulligans when needed.
Again, I think the tailor shop won it for me, getting me 5 silks for 25 points, especially after I put a technology tile on one of the spaces making it really easy to claim. While she got more citizen tiles than I did, I outpaced her on guild halls, and I reached the end of the development track. Final scores were 138 to 104.
Would love to try this at 4 player sometime.
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Amazonas - got hyped when I saw it was Stefan Dorra who designed it. It was meh.
Uptown aka Blockers - very old school, but felt that the players downstream of the turn order got an inherent advantage as the game’s length is fixed. This stands in contrast with Knizia’s Samurai where the player downstream will screw you up, but since the game isn’t fixed, the last player in the table doesn’t have an enormous advantage. It mitigated it in Samurai, but it’s still eh.
But I did end up enjoying Uptown still. The abstract-y game play where you can take advantage of tile positioning and player incentives feels really great. Shame about the issue mentioned above though
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Ravage: Dungeons of Plunder for the podcast – where I’ll talk about it more, but from a very simple rules base it provides a complex tactical game that’s outside my usual experience of dungeon-bashers.
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I ended up playing another solo game of Project L this morning, this time on the challenging difficulty which definitely feels like more of a sweet spot. I thought I was doing alright, but the bot outpaced me and won 25-20 (22 less 2).
On the standard difficulty I didn’t feel much pressure to play smart; basically I just needed to ensure I was completing puzzles every turn. This time, however, was different. I can think back on turns where I had the ability to stall the bot by not drawing new puzzles and instead spend actions manipulating my available tiles. I didn’t do this, and as a result I was always stuck using more actions than otherwise might have been necessary to complete them. Needless to say, this puts a little more emphasis on the engine building part of the game, which is far more satisfying to play.
Maybe this will enter the morning coffee rotation afterall.
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I’m taking a break to rest my poor craning back after playing through the scripted tutorial round of Oath (4-handed solo, naturally), and hope to at least get one round in with the training wheels off.
Any hot tips for a first timer? Easily forgotten stuff, very BASIC strategies, etc.? Naturally I have all of the materials in front of me ready to go, but the hope here is that I can at least get a good look at the game in some kind of a realistic state to help with future teaching; I’m wary of playing “weird” given my solitaire situation.
[EDIT] I got my second round done and I’m pretty sure my poor 4th player is already getting left in the dust, while the rest are all in a strong position. My blue exile could win at the beginning of turn 4 if they play things smart. The Chancellor is holding their own but they have time to kill, and red has a big ol’ stockpile already, plus the people’s favour and a relic.
Man I need to play this with other people. I think I’m going to like it more than Pamir 2.
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