Last night I gave Shards of Infinity w/Relics of the Future expansion another solo-spin.
This game is brutal. First game of the night I lost -18 to 43 (the bot over-killed me by 18 health while still being above 40 health). In the second game, the bot won by getting 30 Mastery while I was still at 10.
I’m not entirely sure the solo mode is even possible?
Another round of Spirit Island this time Downpour Drenches the World and Heart of the Wildfire took on Scotland level 6 and managed to scare the invaders off!! Penultimate turn we managed to win on emptying the fear deck. The level 6 building explosion is rude and the Scotland invaders are a menace, but we did it. Things got hairy with the amount of blight left, which is likely with Wildfire but 1 left on the card at game end was a tight rope. Both spirits are fun but maybe an easy combination. Downpour has blight removal and innate defence while Wildfire gets blight removal and is aggressive so I might need another game against Scotland 6 with something a touch less synergistic before moving on to the next adversary. Probably Hapsburg Monarchy
Had a game night with two rounds of Obscurio. The first ended pretty quickly because the book (cluegiver) was not getting much synergy between the door card and the clue cards he had to work with, so we only successfully guessed once, and every other round there were much more obvious connections to the incorrect cards. He was fairly frustrated.
Which made it even funnier that when we played again with me as the book, my cards often had specific elements that matched very closely to the correct card (two cards with dogs on them when the correct card had a wolf, or being able to point at a rose and a key when the correct card had both very obviously). I ribbed him a bit: “I don’t know what you found so hard, if there’s a dog just point to all the dogs on your clue cards!” 
Needless to say we won that one, then finished off the night with some Sushi Go Party!
Just tried out The Search for Planet X against the bot. What a fun little game! Bastard beat me by 1 point, 27 - 26, but I had made a bad assumption for Planet X, and when I figured it out two turns later, the bot guessed it before I could.
Interesting that we both had 5 correct theories, 3 of which overlapped, though I put mine in first for 2 of those, and simultaneously with the third.
If I had been one turn quicker, or just one more sector back, I would have won this game. Next time, bot!
This has become a refrain. 
The other day before dinner we managed to squeeze in a few games.
Two games of Royal Visit. I lost the first after some back and forth. On the second I decided the best course of action would be to always play all the cards for a type and preferably the one I had the most of and won easily. I should hope this strategy doesn‘t always work. Also rules question: can I play to Jester „M“ cards in a row? Even when it doesn‘t change the board state?
After that we played a round of Great Plains in which in my enthusiasm for area control I managed to secure the one area worth 6 points quickly and out maneuvered my partner for another one… after which he quickly gave up his attempts to confront me. (There were some bad news bears involved). The game only went 19 to 16 points for me but nevertheless he declared he had no chance to beat me at such a game. So it appears this was the only time I got to play that game. Sad. I liked it. It‘s quick to set up, quick to teach and quick to play. Area control/majority doesn‘t get much smaller than that.
My game night with my cousin is canceled (would have been tomorrow, but his daughter brought home that kindergarten virus everyone has and even though I had a version of it in July, with all of our vacation plans in the balance… we‘re going to take a walk together outside instead of gaming)
Re: Great Plains
I have a feeling I’ll end up mirroring this perfectly. I may end up wrong about it, but I’ll know once we have a few games under our belts.
One note, if you wanted to coax him into another go or two (it’s so fast, after all!): I wasn’t really able to see the overall strategy/goal of the game until my second play, and didn’t play remotely competently until my third. Small though it is, it’s also crunchy, and it’s important to suss out the big contentious areas ahead of the game. This encouraged my partner to keep trying for a bit, anyway.
This morning I played another two rounds of Mind MGMT. The first game was an intense race and I had the Recruiter’s scent right off the bat. As a consequence, I was a little reckless with my capture attempts and that meant when they used their Mind Slip, it was super effective. I lost to time on that one.
For my second game, we had another intense chase, though they slipped me in the mid- to late-game after an ugly combination of a mind slip and two diagonal fountain moves. Thankfully I had enough information to keep my agents in the general vicinity, and my clues allowed me to pick apart their mind slip, positioning them just one turn earlier. On the final round of the game and with only two agent actions left, I was able to determine the Recruiter was in one of two locations (both accessible by my remaining Rogue Agent). Neither were spots that could earn them a recruit, but I bet on them choosing the location with a pool since I had struck out with an Ask action on the last turn.
I was right (on my last possible action, it should be said)! My first win logged, and here’s what it looked like (won’t look any different than a loss ). It’s SO satisfying to reveal that map afterwards (as it is with a real opponent), especially when you had it bang-on.
Both games had my heart racing early and straight through to the end. I adore it.
This morning I got in what will end up being my last game of Warp’s Edge, and I took a win against the 1-star mothership. This was on the last of 4 warps, but playing it out was a bit of a gimme as I had more than enough in my bag to clear the deck and the boss by that point.
I logged this as a sale in the associated thread this morning after giving the game its last chance. It’s a damn fine game and I genuinely find the gameplay loop both tense and satisfying, but it’s too darn long. In each of my games I found myself disinterested by the final warp (round), which is especially frustrating because the power arc escalates consistently and the final round should theoretically be the most fun/interesting. It’s a shame because there’s a good amount of challenge and replayability in the box, and the core mechanic strikes a pretty great balance between blasting satisfaction, gamey crunch and real peril.
I sold it to a friend for a buddy price, I hope he gets a good amount of fun from it.
Last night my partner and I played Mind MGMT against the app, and we got wrecked. We had the recruiter pegged, but they made a devastating mind slip at the perfect time and location, and we were never able to recover (though we stayed close). Because of their path, we had no idea what their three objective markers were, which was a big factor in why the mind slip was so effective.
Anyway, loss aside, this comes with a huge mission accomplished: suddenly I’m the one lobbying for another two games of the training mode, with my partner pushing to jump into the full game! 
We’ve decided to run one more training game cooperatively, followed by a final training game with her as the Recruiter (she hasn’t played them yet). After that the big boy and girl pants go on for the full experience.
[EDIT] Per the above, we got our cooperative game done over nap time and we won!! We thought we lost it on the second to last turn, but forgot we had another two actions before the reveal (and inevitable loss confirmation), giving us two last chances. We had two spots we could run a capture on, with some certainty of success, but if we didn’t have two agents in position I’d have put our chances at less than 50%. As it stood, our first guess was correct and we both let out a big cheer after a grueling match. The app does a fantastic job using the limited toolset and I’m so glad we got to revisit the game post-launch to warm up for the main event.
Lookit me playing all the games again! Hard City, so you know it got rough.
This was my second attempt at the mission after just a brutal dismantling the first time. I was afforded a softer start with little in the way of resistance for my first two activations, and even managed to close off one of the three manholes (primary objectives in the solo mode) on my first turn. My first cutscene drawn would let me play steamroller with the police cruiser when the time was right… I was sitting pretty! For about ten seconds.
The onslaught that followed was unbelievable. I had event after event with “draw again” come up, leading to long strings of mutant spawns and activations. They were coming in from all sides—and the sewers!—and all of my cops were hurt, some badly. The doctor had racked up 6 points to my 3 by the time I was able to put up any kind of a resistance to the swarm.
Fortunately and finally, I was able to make a big move. I had scratched and clawed my way into another two points from sealing a second manhole but even better I was able to make use of that first cutscene I had been sitting on, and take the cruiser for a ride. I was just barely in range to end on the square I really had my eyes on, and with no shortage of mouthed sound effects I squashed nine mutants in one fell swoop. It was enough for another point and a second level up, but that was the end of the second wind.
Tied at 6-6, I had Jenny in position next to a (now) clear manhole and no nearby mutants. Donathan and Hammer were just completely overrun, but could survive an escape attempt. Miranda, however, was hurt bad and no longer had the shelter of the cruiser to shield her. Well doesn’t FUBAR come in for a second to say “hi” just as every mutant on the field gets to activate, and then activate again.
Miranda didn’t make it.
7-6 for the bad doctor and another damn good time.
Is that just a gargantuan hand (or forearm) emerging out of the ground, ready to grab and crush one of your heroes in its grasp?!
Since buying Happy City, my spawns have insisted on playing it six times.
I was done with it after one play, but it’s a great example of a 6/10 game that will stay here for a bit.
That’s FUBAR. Do NOT let him hear you talk about his hand like that. 
[EDIT] I’m responding to the master punnery sergeant here, so do note the partially obscured petrol station sign is for “Hard Gas”. It’s a very serious game.
Finally had my first 2 player game of Oceans with my partner to the sound of the waves crashing outside.
I had a group of 3 rather successful creatures one of which died just before the last round because I couldn’t attack anyone as all my own species were immune from attack and my partner’s were more or less dead already. (The one that died was a Transparent Swarm of Leviathans—they were rather hungry by the end)
The game went 69 to 53 points for me. I had managed to get my little stationary colony fed from both neighbors while my partner didn’t figure out a way to keep 3 species alive with feeding from just 1 per turn and then we had a scenario card that added an additional point of aging that put a lot of pressure on all species.
I like the game quite a bit—the comboing is fun, especially with the deep cards.
PS: sry for the background, the Spirit Island playmat is the one that is best suited to travel.
Ok so last night I got a game of Star Wars rebellion. It’s a really swingy flawed game but as a head to head long game with a really rich theme (to me) I can’t think of much else.
We played with the new combat rules and new mission/ objective/ project cards from the expansion.
Having won as the rebel player (the imperials were one star system away from finding me on Ryloth), I’m feeling some of the newer cards favour the rebels, if this is just correcting a slight imbalance in the base set, I cannot yet say.
I think it was @Captbnut told me, and I now agree the new combat is a lot simpler and more meaningful. Sending speeders to tie up AT-AT’s is about as Star Wars as it gets.
A quick game of Meteor first up. This is a five minute game – literally, since there are five hourglasses, each about a minute. Each hourglass represents the altitude of incoming meteors. Obviously you lose if you don’t stop them after altitude one. Each meteor card shows a range on the back, and you don’t see the actual value until you shoot. We played with cards face up, as suggested. Player build rockets based on resources in their hands. You can play a card to another players rocket. When you launch a rocket at a meteor, if your rocket value is less than the meteor, it has effect. And if it’s higher, it blows up, but sends all the other meteors down to the next altitude. Normally there is no communication, but first game, so allowed. Fun little game, have to try it without knowing the value of the meteors, that will make it harder.
Huel doch! Mau Mau . I don’t know what Mau Mau means, but the rest of it translates as “Go ahead and cry!”. And the game comes with a tissue to cry into. yup – seriously,. It’s a pretty simple game, you have a play pile, and a hand of four cards. You want to play cards to your pile – these are worth points for you. But if you can play a card to either of your neighbours, then you have to do that, and give them points. Obviously you want to do this as little as possible. A card can be played on a pile if it matches either the colour or the value of the previous card. If you don’t want to play a card (or cannot), then you can play a card facedown, showing a crying onion (the artwork on each card is hilarious). Anything can be played on an onion. But, at the end of the game, you count your onions, and those value cards don’t count for your total. For example, if you had five crying onions, then all your value five cards don’t count. For a simple game, we had some trouble with the rules. First, the other players thought you could always play a card to your own pile. Then, another player thought if you had any card you could play on another pile, you had to play it. We thought he was deliberately tanking the game. But, we sorted it all, and had three games of it. Fun filler, but yeah, you might need that tissue.
Photograph (aka Wind the Film), talked about this last week, really good, puzzley game.
A couple of quick games of Fantasy Realms . Great little game, doesn’t look like much. Couldn’t be easier to play either. Play a card, discard a card. I finally won a game, with the highest score we’ve had so far (214). Got lucky with a Gem of Order card, which gives points for runs in card values. I already had a few in a row, and managed to get another few, giving me a 6 card run, and a bonus 100 points. Generally our top scores have been around the 150 mark. So I was pretty happy with that.
Cthulhu:Death May Die , our first game with four players. I had the strangest game, I died, and was barely up to my first insanity marker. Barely fought anything, rolled terribly, couldn’t even take down a cultist. In the end, I sacrificed myself for the good of the team, and dragged Cthulhi and a few followers away to another room. And no, I didn’t have stealth, so everyone came with me. Ended up in a room with the big C, five cultists, and three deep ones. Needless to say, I did not survive. We lost another player, but, somehow the others pulled out the win. Sure, I would like to have been alive when it happened…
Nova Luna , again, never played at 4p. I had a terrible game, just couldn’t get anything happening.
Silver and Gold , our 50th game! It’s been our goto finishing game for so long.
This was a one-v-many game? My local shop has this on sale, and I’m tempted. I believe it has full cooperative as well, which is probably the way we would play it.
Some games over the past week or so: Some more Ohanami with my wife, which is terrific (though I’m a little miffed my cards aren’t linen finished - some copies seem to be and it seems entirely unpredictable which ones… )
Today we played some Bananagrams (no pics of this one), Love Letter and Morels.
And I introduced her to Boardgamearena this week, which she’s quite taken with. And we’ve played a number of games together: mostly Patchwork (which I own and enjoy a lot) and Abandon All Artichokes (which is fine - easy to teach and play but there’s not much to it)
1 vs. all and cooperative/solo available, yeah. The solo/co-op deck is excellent (though absolutely ruthless) and I’ve had a ton of fun with it so far. That said, be aware that it does end up changing the missions to some degree. As an example, the mission I posted about recently has the Doctor stealing mutagen barrels as their main scoring opportunity. In the 1 vs. All mode, the Doctor player has special rules and literally needs to mount a smuggling run before the cops can seal the manholes. In the co-op/solo game, this is simply abstracted to a set of instructions when a “special” card is drawn; Basically “remove a barrel from the truck and score the Doctor 1vp”. I only mention this because oh MAN am I eager to play this with a live Doctor player.
A few quirks to be aware of:
[EDIT] I got my third attempt at the second scenario done this morning, and it was a reversal of the beating I took in the first run. For those keeping score, I lost 1-7, 6-7 and just won 7-1.
I drew a different layout this time around and started out hot. I was able to park close enough to two manholes that by my second activation, I had two manholes (of 3) sealed and had 4 points on the board for it. I had to burn two turns for it, but it was worth it. Making things easier for me, I kept drawing the Doctor’s most devastating cards early—these are powerful but a little more circumstantial, so they executed with a bit of a whimper. On the other hand, they did not draw any episode specials, and even if they did I had a cop in position to nullify it. Brutal.
I didn’t get out unscathed, as each of my cops took a pretty heavy beating throughout, but none got knocked down. Because I had such a leg up (points lead = time, generally) I was emboldened to move out of crowded spaces and take some free hits. I secured my 10th kill eventually bumping me to 5, and then sealed the last manhole for the 6th and 7th points to win the game.
See you next time in episode 3: Toxic Revenge
My partner and I just finished up a head to head game of Mind MGMT, with her in the recruiter’s role. This was a wickedly fast game and ended at 09:00 (effectively turn 4). I won by Capture, but it was a hazy guess forced by desperation because she already had 7/9 recruits (5 before the game started!!), I was certain she had her 8th in her pocket, and surely would have the 9th by the end of the following turn.
She had just used her mind slip and I didn’t have nearly enough information to make a guess under better circumstances, but if one of my choices was right and I asked about it, she would be next to a Shrine making it easy to slip out of my grasp (and with my agents way out of position due to a bad early guess). I went with the capture instead and nabbed her cold. She had not actually collected her 8th recruit but that wouldn’t have mattered. Had I asked about the space instead, she’d have been out of reach and my game was lost.
Hair raising. So good.
We had our first 2 games of Regicide yesterday. We managed to get to the final Queen both times but then we just ran out of cards in hand. I really hate Karo (the color that isn’t hearts, spades or clubs). First game we just didn’t have any more Karo and second game the final Queen was Karo and prevented us from refilling our hand.
Question: can I play the ace with a combo? It only came up once and we lost a turn later.
We also played a round of Roll for the Galaxy which I won with a meager 32 points over my partner’s 28. I played tons of quick small tiles for a fast end. My partner struggled to build his first 5 strength planet all game long and swore about things not working out, but refused to discard it to scout something better. This was the first game with the first half of the first expansion. Jjust the black dice and new tiles for now—I really need to work on my teaching skills. My partner still hasn’t grasped scouting 3 games later.
