Seriously pretty, and everything feels good to handle too. I think I finally gave in and bought it after seeing it on multiple “most beautiful board games” lists.
Big day of games today. Started out with Quarriors so much fun we played 4 times in a row. Lighter, fun, silly but with just enough strategy to feel engaging.
Next Tournament at Camelot hit the table. Was most ambivalent about this one of games I played today. Maybe there’s something there maybe there isn’t. I’m not convinced there’s enough space for clever plays to give it legs.
Shamans was next. This game is weird. I’m very intrigued. It might need a few more to see but the feel is there’s some potential even if it’s a bit opaque. Also tbc but more positive initial view.
Cthulhu Wars saw Creeping Chaos, Opener of the Way, Sleeper and Windwalker duke it out for dominion of the ruins of earth. Still great fun. I won as Sleeper so Sleeper’s best and so am I.
Finally as we still had time Stick ‘Em got a round in and was still brutal. Awesome.
6 Likes
Major win night for yours truly. We had 3 players so started with Suburbia, where I was lucky enough to pick up a very early PR Firm (don’t lose reputation when you cross a red line on the population board) as soon as it appeared. That let me just focus on blasting up my reputation to 15 and then getting green tiles to bump up my score even more. Getting all three public goals also in addition meant that I ended with an absolutely monster score of 169.
Then we played Potion Explosion, which I’m usually not that good at, but once again the stars aligned and I was able to complete potion after potion and win handily there as well. The gaming goddess was smiling on me tonight that’s for sure.
6 Likes
Had an opportunity to play Ankh: Gods of Egypt yesterday (the third game in the series that also includes Blood Rage and Rising Sun). I liked it a lot, much more than Rising Sun. There’s an interesting mechanism where each of the four potential actions is available a limited number of times before triggering an event, so you have to balance what you want to do on the board with timing the events to your advantage.
I managed to spend a lot of the game engineering the fights so that the other players would lose points by killing one of my units (a mummified cat). You can’t just go around messing with cats in ancient Egypt…
7 Likes
I ran another game of “Road to Ruin”, the first scenario in Waste Knights whereby Johnny Taylor, motivated by the deep coffers of the Western Mining Corporation, did proceed to use his hawk-eye and silver-tongue to sow chaos along the Northern Road.
Without getting too into story spoilers, I’ll just say that the game really lets you make some awful decisions (with real consequences). I spent most of the game spreading corporate propaganda and union busting, but really crossed the line into super villain territory when I spread rumours about a virus in a crowded blockade which resulted in a massacre. Hardly knightly behaviour, and I was duly rewarded with an appropriately nihilistic ending for my misanthropy. On my first play, I took an ambivalent approach and was provided an appropriately ambivalent ending.
I really appreciate the endings this game offers so far, and I’m flatly delighted by the narrative approach overall. The design finds a nice split between the storybook and the gameplay, with the latter providing randomized encounters and vignettes to flesh out the scripted (if wildly branching) proceedings of the former.
Also appreciated is the fact that there’s no campaign here, just a series of stories about the Wastes and how they have been affected. The Waste “Knights” themselves are just catalysts for the plot points; you can imagine these stories being told and retold as legends over a campfire, tall tales about how the Wastes came to be and the over-the-top characters that shaped them. There’s enough meat to the gameplay elements to offer you personal agency, but in the end the character that you’re developing is that of the Wastes as a living, thriving (or suffering) slice of life after the apocalypse. Pretty neat!
4 Likes
After playing Cthulhu Wars with Wyvern, I played more Cthulhu Wars! 3 players with the Black Goat, Opener of the Way, and the Sleeper. I lost at last place again!
Sidereal Confluence: Remastered edition was a pretty good remake imo. The depiction of the brownish small cube was awful. But through process of elimination, we judge it correctly. Played as the Im’dril Nomads who don’t have any colonies. But they get some really good converters. Another hitch is that I need to build up fleets which works as a “capacity” on how many converters I can run.
Excellent game. Definitely up in the top tier negotiation game with Bohnanza and Santiago.
8 Likes
Today’s achievement was a new high score in Everdell (82), followed by a much less stellar performance in Pack and Stack (a game about fitting ridiculous amounts of furniture into a removal lorry) and String Railway (a game about building railways in Japan).
6 Likes
Played a game of La Granja and boy do I love this game still. Got a massive score of 93 so that helps but the joy of balancing the cards, getting the engine going, sequencing and timing all the things you need to do is a constant challenge. Really pleased to be playing this one again and even more disappointed about the stupid box size from the Board & Dice reprint.
As we weren’t done with the evening we followed it up with a game of Quacks of Quedlinburg. I also got a crushing victory in this one too so maybe the best games night ever? I comboed blue chips that meant a bust in x chips after the blue meant you could still get VPs and cash with green ones that doubled if your white chip score was exactly 7 at round end. I’m not 100% the combo was stellar bit it was psychologically satisfying. Also bought a solitary black and a single purple for variety. This game is definitely improved by the geek bits and another reminder was had of how fun this game is getting to play in person again. I really hope I can carry on gaming now. Fingers crossed for vaccines vs variants going well plus all the other factors that need to fallout favourably 
7 Likes
Zendo , first play. This is described as an inductive logic game. It comes with a whole lot of pieces, three different colours (red, blue, yellow), and three different shapes (pyramids, wedges, blocks). One player is the moderator, and they select a card that will describe a rule for constructing a piece. Simple rules might be something like “have three objects”, or “use all three colours”. There’s a deck of cards, with difficulty ranging from easy to medium to hard. The moderator, after choosing a card, then makes two structures, one that follows the rule (which they will mark with a white token), and one that doesn’t (marked with a black token). The other players have to find the rule. It almost feels like a co-op, but it is competitive.
On a players turn, they will make their own structure, and then ask the moderator to either “tell” or “quiz” their design. If you say “tell”, then the moderator just markes the pieces with a white (correct) or black (incorrect) token. If you say “quiz” then all players can choose whether or not they think the structure is correct or not. If your vote is correct, you get a green guessing token. And if you have a guessing token, you can make a guess at the end of your turn. To guess, you just state what you think the rule is. If you’re right, you win! If you’re wrong, then the moderator will make another structure based on that to disprove the guess. They can either make a structure that follows the rule but your guess says does not, or build something that does not follow the rule but which your guess says does not.
I’m unsure what the moderator should be doing. They can’t win, but should they be trying to help the other players, or hinder them. You could make an elaborate construction that follows the rule, but will confuse the players. We had a few goes at this, each player taking a turn to be the moderator, and the rule was guessed each time. Not sure if it will get another play, didn’t go over all that well.
Heul Doch! Mau Mau
Ginkgopolis , one of my all time favourite games. Even though we hadn’t played for a while, it played out relatively quickly. The winner was evident about half way through, had a huge territory in the middle, and also had the end game bonus card that gave points for the resources in that huge territory. Still, we all enjoyed the game.
Fantasy Realms , where my glorious high score of 214 was beaten, I only got to gloat for a week, and then my reign was over. The new high score is an amazing 238.
Project: ELITE , extermination mission. And…we lost in the first round. Drew almost all runners, who proceeded to bolt for our starting area and we failed to stop them because of bad dice rolling. So we tried again, same results. Third game, we managed to get through the first round, and then we lost. Fairly demoralising. We’ve never had this much trouble before. We didn’t even have any bosses out. It was on the harder side of the board, the crashed ship side.
Juicy Fruits , where the ice cream strategy didn’t work. Possibly because I managed to get one of the big scoring ice creams, but couldn’t get anymore, due to bad planning. I like this game, but the ice creams seem a bit OP if you let them get them all, at least.
6 Likes
The traditional failure mode of Zendo (without cards) is that moderators come up with over-complex rules which nobody can guess. I’ve not seen the cards but it sounds as though you could stand to go for the harder end.
3 Likes
For some reason it’s a struggle for me to learn this game by myself, but once internalised, I can easily teach it to others now. I should be playing more of Ginkgopolis
3 Likes
Received a few new games for my birthday recently, so managed to get to play these a little this weekend.
Started with Summoner Wars. I played as the Ice Dwarves (I think?) and my friend played as the Citadel faction (paladin looking bunch). It took us a while to get to grips with what specific words meant, and how to actually play. Took us even longer to grasp even basic tactics, but it seems a lot of fun. Once I had started to make more of my summoner, the parapets and ice golems (who function as gates) I won fairly easily. My friend had managed to burn through his cards pretty quickly so it made my life a lot easier!
Next was a 3 player game of Search for Planet X. I had managed a couple of games against the bot at this point, but playing with other people really allows you more of a chance to take a punt on things. One of the other players’ moves and subsequent theory submission made it pretty likely where both comets were, which gave me a pretty big clue as to where Planet X. I ended up winning 27, 24, 17. Great game, really enjoying this.
Next was a 4 player game of Mysterium Park. I adore Mysterium but it’s such a faff to set up. This is such a streamlined version of the game that I reckon in the time it takes to set the original up and play a single game, you could probably play 2 or 3 full games of Mysterium Park. We had a first time ghost, though they’d played the original game before so knew what they needed to do. We just scraped through to the final round, but lost out. Anyone who loves Mysterium but fails to get it to the table, I highly recommend this. I’d never played the 2 player variant of Mysterium purely because it didn’t seem worth all the effort of set up, but I can see this being a lot better. It would almost player as a one-sided version of codenames duet, except you’re trying to draw them towards people/places using pictures.
We finished with Raiders if Scythia, not my game but the hosts. I’ve got the North Sea version with no expansions, so this was familiar enough to know what I was doing but different enough to mean I got my butt handed to me!
9 Likes
Played a 3 player game of 18NewEngland today. Wow. For an operational game this one had plenty of shenanigans, jostling and positioning. It stayed interesting right to the end with stuff to play for all through. All 3 of us really enjoyed the game. Not articulate enough just now to say more bit all round positive reaction for a first play.
4 Likes
Last night I got Marvel Champions to the table for the first time in a while. I decided to try out the Wrecking Crew for the villains, as they require little set up as they don’t use cards outside of their pack. I tried out a Marvel team-up of Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel, the latter of which I had not played before.
Once I got the game started, I could tell this was going to be a tough game due to the negative effects caused when any villain reached 10 threat on their side-schemes, and I was right.
I started out focusing on Wrecker, and managed to take him out relatively quickly, but in that time, Bulldozer triggered his scheme, making the Marvel ladies discard 10 cards from their decks. Sometime after he fell, Pile-driver got an upgrade which made it so I could only attack him, and gave him a bit more health. Meanwhile I was getting hammered back and forth, busy trying to keep ahead of the schemes and mostly failing, being forced to discard upgrades or discard more cards, etc.
Finally took out Pile-driver, and eventually managed to eliminate Bulldozer as well, leaving just Thunderball. However, by that point there were three acceleration tokens on the main scheme,.so it was getting 4 threat at the beginning of each villain turn, and Thunderball had an upgrade which added another when he attacked, and I just couldn’t keep up. Had him almost halfway defeated when the main scheme hit it’s 12 threat limit and I lost.
Game took close to 2 hours, which is a little longer than Champions should go IMO. It was a bit more frustrating than fun, I think, but probably due to being unfamiliar with the villains, and with Ms. Marvel.
4 Likes
After what seems like ages I finally got a Sunday to myself and a chance to try two of the games I bought earlier in the summer.
First off was an afternoon of two solo games of Dungeons and Dragons: Castle Ravenloft and I think I have found my solo dungeon crawler at last. Quick to setup and easy to learn, plus the starter solo adventure was tense enough in my trial games with the Dwarven Cleric and then the Eladrin Wizard. Sure, it might not be as rewarding an experience as Gloomhaven and others, but I know I won’t have the time or interest in a multi-session campaign or legacy game so just getting an hour or two at a time every so often to go bashing wolves, skeletons and, perhaps one day, Strahd himself will be perfect for me. It might prove a way to get my non-gamer friends into roleplaying in the future too if they enjoy the exploration and combat aspects.
In the evening, I finally got Firefly to the table. Just a quick solo two-hander using the introductory scenario but it felt good playing the physical version after our online forum game here earlier this year. Might be just a solo game for a while but that’s fine - although even the base game alone is a table hog so once I get into my new apartment in a month or two I’ll buy a bigger table to cope with it all.
With luck tonight or tomorrow night I’ll get round to trialling my remaining unplayed purchase of the summer Le Havre, then get my statistical hat back on for a couple of weeks to complete the 2021 IPL and Hundred versions of my cricket game before the T20 World Cup starts.
9 Likes
I really like Ravenloft. Or at least I think I still do – I haven’t played it in yonks. I really must get a game in sometime. I’ve not been good at teaching it quickly in the past, and then with lots of players it can run a bit long. The combination meant that I inadvertently lied horrendously about how long it would take the last time I introduced it to a group… I can only hope everyone enjoyed it regardless.
“An endless stream of bad things happening to you” is how I think of the game. But, you know, in a fun way : )
6 Likes
Antiquity with 4 players was a pretty fun “gold standard” heavy resource management game, which kills my desire for other resource management games. But then, I had to think about my collection and decided to let it go. The 4 player setup was fun as famine ramps up fast with 4 of us exploring and expanding. But I feel that there are other 10-ish heavy games I would play first. But I won’t hesitate on a game of Antiquity.
9 Likes
Oh yeah, forgot that we played CuBirds as well. Looks terrific, adorable little cube birds, but didn’t seem to much to the play. To win, you need either seven different birds, or two birds of at least three. There are four rows of three birds initially. Gameplay is easy, play a card, if you enclose a row of that bird, take all the cards in between. Each bird has two values, the first value for a small flock, and the second for a large flock. At the end of your turn you can make a flock of a type. If you put down a small flock, one card goes to your tableau. For a large flock, two cards are kept. And that’s about it. It seemed long for a simple filler. Everytime you make a flock, you have to discard all your cards except the one of two you keep. And if you play out all your cards, everyone discards their cards and you start a new round. I expected more.
Played my second game of Everdell solo today. Decided to dial up the difficulty to Year 2 (of 3). Lost 44 to 51. Those increased penalties for not acheiving the special events are harsh given how big the deck is - I cycled through dozens of cards and still only managed to acheive one of the four (I think I saw the cards for a second but didn’t have them in my hand at the same time 
). Still a great game, I’ll be super keen to get it to the table with real humans when able, where I expect the ‘problem’ will be less of an issue.
6 Likes
I taught myself and played a round of 2-handed Lamaland. Here’s the setup for 2:
Every player builds up their own little mountain area to farm potatoes, corn and cacao in with villages and temples in between. They also raise lamas on the grasslands. The winner is the person who scores the most points from their lamas, fulfilled scoring conditions (each player gets to choose 4 of the seven throughout the game) and leftover resources.
The game goes in rounds until the lamas or the tiles are gone.
Each turn a player chooses the top tile of one of the 5 different polyominoes tile stacks and places it adjacent to their area or on top of it without covering any empty spots (each player gets 3 1x1 bases to help out with that) or lamas. When you cover any resource spots you get those resources. For villages you get villagers who help you out from then on and for temples you get coins. If you have four of a resource you can then buy a lama and place it on one of the grass spots (beware you cannot cover that spot with a tile later). To buy a lama you spend the resources (2 coins can replace a resource) and take the highest scoring lama card of that type and a lama meeple. (If you have amassed a certain number of resources you HAVE to buy a lama and place it, and you can only buy 1 per round so you will only rarely wait „tactically“ to buy later as lamas are selling quickly…)
If you use a tile to extend your “base” you get to place one of your four scoring condition markers on the highest free spot on your chosen scoring condition. If you manage to fulfill the condition you gain the points (this is about a third to half of your score at the end). Conditions are for how you place lamas (f.e. 5 lamas on 1st level or 2 lamas on 5th level or lamas on 4 different levels or lamas 11 spaces apart) or for what kind of lamas you have or resources you have gathered… choose your scoring wisely because while you can reconsider later you may not get high-scoring spots.
It is surprisingly thinky and quite satisfying to place a new tile. I love playing with polyominoes tiles and stacking them makes the puzzle even better. It did remind me a bit of Nmbr 9 but it is more of a game and not only a puzzle. Complexity is somewhere between the base version of Miyabi (without any modules) and somewhat below Gingkopolis.
Left hand won:
Scores were around 120-130.
I was going to teach myself Squaring Circleville after that but with my partner watching Squid Game on the side I was only able to set up the game, discover that it has missing pieces (there should be 4 city quarter markers per color and there is one per color. I am reasonably sure this is a general production problem, I feel sorry for the publisher already. Luckily I will be able to make stand-in pieces from leftover components for other games until this clears up) and then I wasn‘t able to concentrate due to the show I was half-watching.
10 Likes