If you mean can you play a combo (say, three 3s) plus an ace, then no; animal companions can’t be added to combos – you can only add them to a single other card.
If you mean can you play a combo consisting of aces, then officially that’s also a no, unless it’s a ‘combo’ of only two aces (a.k.a. adding an animal companion to another ace card), or if you have special dispensation : )
My wife and I played Istanbul yesterday, using Mocha and Baksheesh expansion again. It looked pretty likely I was going to win about halfway through the game, when I was up 4 - 1, which did pan out, but my wife did manage to get four rubies before the end of the game, and would have had a fifth with another turn.
I’m not sure if she was trying a new strategy, or that to her the best moves didn’t include these, but she never upgraded her wheelbarrow, and only got one mosque tile (red, reroll dice) for the whole game. She did get one of the tavern upgrades to not have to pay for encounters with the governor, smuggler, and coffee trader, but that’s all. She did have a lot of bonus cards and coffee though, which she used to great effect.
Meanwhile, I started out with a lucky roll at the Black Market, which then let me get my extra assistant from the blue mosque tile. I then got a free wheelbarrow upgrade from the Guild Hall, used another Guild card to get 20 Lira from three goods, which I then used to finish the wheelbarrow upgrades. Got all the other mosque tiles, a couple of rubies from the Sultan’s Palace, and then got my last one from the Coffee House.
I’m really liking the expansion. It adds a lot of new variables that really improve the game.
Got a nice wee catch-up night with a couple of friends and my brother at the weekend.
Some Coup and Just One while the young one was still up before bed (best clue of the night definitely Oxbow for Lake)
A few rounds of Neuroshima Hex, including an infuriating 2 v 1 game with my brother where he was running about with the odd Dancer army. Quite a bit for us to get used to after just a couple of proper games.
First play of The Expanse after we got it for my friend’s birthday in April last year, mid-lockdowns. Really good game tbh. One of those games that hits a lot of ‘just right’
Tonight it’s a wee game of Comanauts to myself
Played the BathHouse scenario of Chronicles of Crime: 1400 and very much did not win 
It’s a great looking game (under the blur, because the table layout is technically a spoiler) :
So some solo gaming yesterday:
Played some Cartographers/Heroes - decided to try out one of the many expansions I backed (some would say unwisely… 
) - Affril: Plane of Knowledge.
Basically it’s a bunch of connected islands. I hadn’t realised the scale is different though - the squares are way smaller than the normal map. Probably necessary to have enough space to fill, and things still felt tight, though I didn’t expand to all the islands. I also largely forgot to use the skills on offer 
Seems to happen to me a lot with this game, though I’m yet to play it with other humans, so that might change things. Excuse my terrible drawing.
Then played a game of Glass Road, which I hadn’t played in awhile. The solo game is pretty interesting (though the multiplayer is superior for sure). Lent heavily on the Village Church, Warehouse and Friends of Nature House for end game points. Didn’t actually manage much of an engine though during the game. Ended up with a score of 25, which seemed decent given I haven’t played in yonks.
I didn’t know there was a 1400 version. Might have to look into that
I’ve only played this one, but reviews say it adds a lot to the previous versions by having your character see “visions” before the case starts (they’re the scenes in the lower left of my photo).
Also, you get a nice dog.
So it adds in Mysterium to the game!
We played 2 games last night. A game of Fort (our first) that seemed to last forever and because I messed up the „made up rules“ stay hidden, my partner knew I needed a lot of cards. It was brutal. He always took cards from my yard. He ended up winning by 44 over 40 points and apparently winning the first game makes the game way better. I liked it as well. I want to play more to figure out if it is always this slow because it felt quite slow (for a deckbuilder).
We also played a first game of my newly arrived Lunar Base (a small kickstarter that was overdue for a while).
This was my base 1 turn before I would have won—but my partner finished before me. I am impressed by this little game. It plays 2-6 in about 20-30 minutes (more players would take longer, there are turns not parallel play).
The goal is to build the best moon base. In the basic version there are 3 categories (aka win conditions) in which your base can excel: wealth (gain 20 credits), no-ledge (gain 5 different science symbols) or size (get 10 colonists depicted on your cards).
The basic game has 2 types of cards: agents and modules. Both are paid for in credits with the cost listed in the upper right corner as little colored dots. Each matching color circle in your base reduces credit cost by one.
The fun part is placing a new module which can be either part of an agent card or a main action. When placing the module you have to color match the half circles at the edges. Gray is wild and you always have to make complete matching circles in yellow, red or blue. It‘s a fun little spatial puzzle.
The whole thing makes for a an arc that starts rather slow and then takes off at lightning speed at some point in the game.
It has a bit of interaction through agent cards that allow you to steal certain modules from an opponent or mess with their outpost card or force them to discard or resell cards.
There is an „advanced“ version of the game that includes influence cards and a fourth win condition. These influence cards serve as counters to agent cards and as rule-breakers and supply chain obstacles.
Overall, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. The spatial puzzle is just the right complexity for the length of the game. The only thing I am worried about is replayability but with a somewhat large possible player count of 6, I assume that this may be one of those games that get to the table as a start or dessert for a game night and have enough chaos interaction to remain fun. We‘ll see. For now I‘ll rate it 7.5/10 (something I will propose to play because it is new to me)
Give it a few games (at least 3); my partner and I had it down to about 30-45 minutes (absolute tops) by about our 5th game. It’s a small deck but that means everything is important so it can take a few games to really parse things.
Got together with our friends to continue our campaign of The Crew. We love this game! We completed six missions tonight without major hitches, passing the halfway mark, until we got to mission 28 (1 first task, 1 final task, 4 tasks in between, no communication until the 3rd trick), and hoo boy. I think a combination of being tired and some really bad card distribution means that we are currently at 6 attempts for this one (our highest ever) and we decided to put a pin in it for the night. I’m not sure if there was supposed to be a major jump in difficulty for this one or if we just need to work on our strategy, but yeah it’s a real wall for us.
That one sounds difficult. But doable with 3 or 4 but 5 is going to be immensely difficult with everyone getting a task. You also need a bit of luck with the card distribution sometimes. Some setups give you only a very narrow window for success and with not being able to communicate for 3 turns…
It is one of the ones where you can use the special 5-player rule (I think someone giving someone else a task?). We may end up using the distress signal for the first time. Or we’ll come back to it and beat it first try! Who knows?
Played Paris Connection 3 times with the econ clique. It’s quick and simple that we just played it again rather than clean up and set up a different game.
Then, we played Ra. My copy was the old UberPlay edition with the nice Geekbits that I got from the auction. Enjoyable. The push your luck aspect was tense.
Paris Connection was on sale at one of my haunts for 10€the other day. Would have meant buying more games though so I didn’t (yet 
). I remember it being one of your recs for train games for beginners…
Played Ginkgopolis and it was pretty good. The 3D stacking is pretty fun. If you guys have played these sort of 3D games that aren’t dexterity, you can tag me to entice me because I really enjoy these.
Imperium Classics/Legends - okay. I see the charm in this game and why people love it. But it’s not for me. Sort of thematic and that’s great. Playing as the Qin and the Arthurians really feel like playing as them. But it’s a bit solitairish with SOME interaction. To the point that I found myself bored at some of the lull points of the game.
Also, I found that the composition of the factions in a game doesn’t significantly changes the playstyle of these factions, nor really molds the emerging development of that game. So, as the Egyptians, you still play mostly the same way. Which means that you can play a faction for a few times and found your “Zen phase” with the faction and then proceed with the others.
Good news, at least, there are loads of faction to play with (especially when combining the two packs). So you can find yourself stuck with Imperium for quite a while.
Always happy to see negative reviews, thanks.
(Makes me feel better about missing out.)
Played 2 rounds of (button shy’s) Death Valley yesterday. That teaches me to buy games because of the pretty color scheme. The 18 card formula can produce great games (Sprawlopolis), it can produce decent games like Tussie Mussie or Food Chain Island. And it produces games like Death Valley where I am not sure if we just didn’t compete hard enough for the points… but after 2 games it was like I had grokked the cards and that was that. Replayability done. The game is:
Person with the most VP wins when there is only 1 card left in the desert. VP are either Stars on cards or gained from “card scoring conditions”.
The thing is, we never busted. The strategic decisions are minimal. And there is a card that allows you to peek at the top of the deck and play the card to either your or your opponents trip and so I caused the only bust in the game for my partner.
The “expansions” are just a few cards you can exchange with the basic deck which has to remain 18 cards to guarantee the hazard distribution. I think this goes in the “give away” bin immediately. It is really pretty though.
As a palate cleanser I followed up with a nice juicy game of Sprawlopolis which after not having played a while gave me a nice 13 point score I had not expected but Looping Lanes is just so good.
We had a bit of an issue at first because it was unclear if my partner’s character card wasn’t a bit unbalanced and possibly a translation error as it stated he could (when trading) fulfill any contract not just those in the right-most row. It seemed quite powerful as he could get the higher value contracts easily while I had to do with the small-points single tea-cube ones. However, that proved to be his downfall.
I ended up trading an awful lot spending action upon action to get to the good contracts deeper in the stacks. So by the end, I had managed to get to the last spot on all 3 tea masteries by some carefully managed tea production and selling in the local market several times as well. Additionally our historical events also gave additional points for having a lot of mastery and contracts at game end…
For me, having suffered a lot of Rosenberg worker placement punishment (I like his games, it’s just they are a bit more difficult and they do punish players for not feeding the workers), this one was on the easy side. There is not a lot my partner could do to prevent me from reaching all the masteries and so it becomes a race for points and who can optimize better.
I liked the flow of the game, the harvest, bringing the tea to the factory, the production with the tea masters and then selling the tea. It is—as stated above—a good game for a relaxed afternoon with a few cups of thematic beverage. I want to play again but due to the huge point difference at the end my partner was quite frustrated through no fault of his own.
Went to visit a fairly local friend whom I still hadn’t seen in person since last year.
(Not helped by ripping the sidewall of a tyre dodging a bus, and finding that the people who replaced the locking wheel nuts had not in fact supplied the tool for shifting the replacement trim-holder that they said they had. Fortunately not far from home.)
Anyway.
Godzilla: Tokyo Clash (uncredited “Prospero Hall”): monsters battle across Tokyo. Some great ideas: the main things you do are destroy buildings/vehicles and attack other monsters, the former getting you energy, the latter victory points, but sometimes you can combine the two. Many cards cost energy to play, but here are plenty of 0-cost in there, as well as standard actions you can do by discarding any card. Nobody’s knocked out, but cards are taken out of your deck when you’re damaged, so you gradually lose options. Interesting, and I even got a slight feel of Sakura Arms in some of the tactics. Probably more potential for depth than we got into.
Lemminge (Sebastian Bleasdale): well, I have a physical copy now. And this has advanced from “some weird thing on yucata” to become one of my favourite games. Very quick to teach, too. I think this may join my “unjustly forgotten games” list along with Senators.
Couple of games on BGA tonight. PARKS which was quite interesting in a light, Ticket to Ride kind of way. Interesting semi rondel action selection/ worker placement type thing with some contract fulfilment thrown in. The big thing though is that it is gorgeous, even on BGA. I can only imagine what this would look like irl. Tempted to buy it.
Finished with Azul. Another pretty game. Abstract strategy with the potential to be pretty mean to each other. Another one I’d be keen to buy. I reckon both would be (just about) playable with my parents. My only concern is will we play them with our game group?
