Played Stephenson’s Rocket. I lost really, really badly.
It’s a funny game to play initially. Very little seems to happen and then suddenly loads goes on. Merging the trains is of great consequence, but we didn’t realise until the end of the game. The game ended in a bit of a rush.
I think it will get better with repeat plays as we understand it. It’s quite unusual, but the decisions towards the end really ramped up.
I’m going to learn Taverns of Tiefenthal tomorrow as a two player. Any tips?
So as promised to myself I played a “big” solo game tonight. This is my Paladins of the West Kingdom + City of Crowns board in its final glorious state. After about 2 hours spent on setting up and learning/relearning the rules, remembering why I hate the bot—despite good reminders on the bot side of the board, it really needs a helper sheet with reminders for the specifics of the actions. Over all the whole game is in desperate need of some player aids that go beyond the back of the rulebooks. This is one of those games where I keep going back to the rulebook all the time, every single game.
It’s a table hog. This is just a small part of the game. See here.
I feel inadequate at explaining this monstrosity (I like it, but that doesn’t change the fact that my partner goes running for the hills when the box comes out and he hates running). So shortest possible explanation: Over seven rounds you place your bunch of more or less randomly collected workers on the board in order to build walls, monasteries, camps and collect blue vases, convert strangers and hire townsfolk—all in a quest to raise your faith, power and (whatever blue is) ratings to get points but which are also prerequisites to be able to use the actions. The major actions each reward you with a certain rating while they require a different one. For each rating combination there is a different type of major action. You cannot do it all and the rewards get better the more you invest into one or two things. But you really need three to get going… so maybe you can fake the third by getting short-lived bonuses from your eponymous paladins (a card you choose from your deck every round).
Lots of the same tropes as the other West Kingdom games: debt deeds and crime paying off (or not). This time there is an inquisition punishing those who use criminals.
In the first 2 rounds, you have maybe 6 workers and no money, no provisions and all the good actions require 3 of your workers. The board seems daunting but by round 6 or 7 you manage to wrangle a lot more actions and workers out of it, scraping by with one more worker from a card here, converting a criminal (joker color) into 3 laborers (who are only useful for the most basic of spots) with the King’s Favor…
It’s quite fun and I’d love to play multiplayer because the bot at best gets in my way taking cards from the different markets or blocking spots for my camps & monks but it isn’t really competing while requiring a whole lot of remembering how it performs each action.
I cannot truly post a score on this—though by my count I won by a lot—because I know I made a bunch of mistakes. I wish this was a solo like Nusfjord where I just have to fight my own plans. The game itself is already such a huge puzzle and the bot takes me away from my own board too much.
PS: City of Crowns adds yet another “rating” to the point salad and 2 fun new actions with 2 new card types: Negotiate and Muster. Those make the game easier because they allow you to circumvent the strict requirements for the other actions sometimes. I played Negotiate on every turn and 3 times in the last turn alone (having to “pray” the worker spot free twice)
Tackled the second chapter of The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game , had one interruption, then won. Some confusion about how and when you move the ship along, not sure if we did that correctly.
The Key:Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land , first play. First game went badly (for me), just couldn’t put anything together. Sometimes you just need one vital bit of information and it falls into place, but it wasn’t happening for me. Won the next two games of it though, that felt good. It’s cool that each game in this series has a new bit you haven’t seen, but mostly they are the same, using the same icons and everything. This game is rated as one out of three, you are only generating a three digit code (Murder at the Oakdale Club is rated two out of three, and requires a four digit code).
Brass: Birmingham , had this game for so long, finally sat down to learn it. Rodney does a good video on it too, and we watched a bit of that on the day. In a round, each player gets two actions. Actions are build, sell, take out a loan, scout (get wild cards), develop, and network (place a link between two cities). Build is the most involved action. To build, you need a card with a location, or an industry card. You have to take your lowest building tile of an industry first. Some buildings give you coal, iron, or beer, which can then be used by yourself or anyone else. You want your coal/iron to be used up, because then that tile flips, giving you points, and increasing your income level. For other tiles, you flip by using a sell action. There are two eras to go through – canal and rail. In the canal era, you can only build boat links between locations. In the rail era you get to build rail links.
It’s slow going at first, your income starts at zero, so you’ll find yourself having to take out a loan or two to get started. We ended up only playing the first (canal) era, it was just taking too long. One player didn’t seem to like it, and I can’t say it was very exciting for me. One player seemed to be doing quite well ,although he was annoyed when I managed to sell a tile using mostly his connections (it was unintentional). We might have another crack at it next week, before we forget how to play. Really didn’t grab me.
The Key: Theft at Cliffrock Villa first play. This is actually the first in the series, and, like Lucky Llama Land, it’s rated as one out of three. Did pretty badly. I was very confused by a certain card type, which shows a blurred picture. I thought it was a picture of a persons backpack, but, after cough checking the rulebook (and checking Rodneys how to play), it turns out its a character portrait, with one very small detail shown not blurred. I think I got one out of ten correct, very hard to make it out. Why did I keep taking those cards? Ummmm, not sure. The other two players didn’t take any and seemed to work it out ok. I did a bit better in the second game, got the solution, but waaaaaay too many cards used. And in the third game, didn’t figure it out at all, and had so many cards (even more than for game two). Those blurred id cards were killing me, but, without them, couldn’t make any connections. Still fun, but a bit frustrating. My ranking for the three games would be Oakdale, Llama land, Cliffrock.
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
Fantasy Realms , X 2. No high scores, won the second game (just!)
Best gaming in ages. My partner actually suggested to me that we play some Hive and Hansa Teutonica, and we then played two games of the former and one of the latter, and I lost all three games! I couldn’t be any happier about this sequence of events : )
I thought the first Hive game was going my way, but suddenly found myself trapped late in the piece. The second game didn’t last nearly as long before I again found myself with no way out. We then had a very close game of HT with extremely different strategies but an end score difference of only two points (neither of us knew who had won until the very final piece of scoring!).
The D&D game I ran finished early (it was just a one-shot and two players couldn’t make it), so we played a few games of my newly purchased Infinity Gauntlet.
We only played two-player, but it was still pretty good. Different enough from Love Letter to justify owning both. And it’s quicker as it’s just 1 vs many, meaning no player elimination and no waiting for someone to get enough wins to end the game.
Does anyone have any Mottainai teaching tips? I know we have a few fans among us and I will be teaching my partner this afternoon. I think I’ve got a decent grip on how to present the rules, but I’m hoping for a few fundamental tips for play that might us through the learning process.
I’m a little wary of a rough first impression here because it feels like the kind of game we’ll dive into hard, but the overt take-that nature of several cards has me concerned. This isn’t usually a problem for us, but they can sour an experience fast if you get spanked when nobody knows what they’re doing.
Any tips on how to keep it from getting too salty for the first few games would be appreciated, with apologies for the short notice!
Asmadi have a YouTube channel. We watched the official video on there.
Other than that, I’m looking forward to the responses.
Probably a bit too late now, but I’d suggest starting with at least a couple of the extra modules thrown in if not all of them. For me, the basic game is fine but it really sings with all of them. The biggest criticism in most reviews is the lack of mitigation for bad dice rolls, but the modules provide you with quite a few.
What I did when I was teaching it was set up an example few turns so they can see how the cards move around. So start with a clay and a paper on the floor. First player plays a Monk and hires a Clerk. Second player plays a Potter, hires a Potter with 1P’s Monk, then does two Potter actions to collect the other two materials on the floor. Now you’ve demonstrated hiring, collecting materials, and how helpers increase your actions.
Then, 1P’s turn again, they play a Clerk. They use the Potter to collect the stone they just put on the floor, and use their 2 Clerk actions (since they hired a Clerk helper on the first turn) to sell that stone and to craft a paper work from their hand. This now is a good time to talk about works, which wing you place them in, and covering helpers/sales.
At this point, 2P choose not to play a task and just prays (demonstrating that ability) after doing whatever (maybe converting to pray) with 1P’s Clerk task. Then 1P plays a Tailor to demonstrate how that action works. Finally, hopefully at this point 2P will have something in their hand that works with Smith and you can demonstrate that, and you’ve pretty much got all the actions covered. Then it’s just talking about game end, points, and backorders, and that’s all the basic rules and now it’s just the cards themselves.
As for the take that, there’s not much and there are often good counters - the games are short enough that I wouldn’t worry too much about the chance of a beatdown since the tides of fortune may turn in the next one.
My only tip is to emphasize that a card is only ever really indeterminate in hand. When it is here it is only and forever the material, when it is here it is only and forever the assistant, when it is here it is the item. That kind of thing. There’s a lot of info on cards on the table, and it can really help to narrow attention to only the relevant info.
Very true. At first we felt the impulse to read the powers of the cards on the floor but they’re not those works anymore, only the suit matters.
Thanks for the tips gang, the teach went pretty well. Something about the concept really engaged my partner as well, so as much as it was all a bit circular, she was on the ball with clarifying questions and I was able to get a pretty comprehensive rundown covered in about 15 minutes. @InkyBloc running the demo actions was essential advice, thanks.
Baby woke up just as we got rolling, so here’s hoping for minimal edge cases when we fire back up.
Played Insider and Wits and Wagers in our Halloween Party.
Wits and Wagers was rowdy and fun. Although I do wonder if we can get card packs that aren’t US-based questions. The deck didn’t seem to have loads of them so it wasn’t a huge problem. We simply move to the next set of questions if the current two are meh.
When it was my turn, I had a train-based question (what is the width of the standard US gauge in inches). And since I’m the train guy of the club, I MUST ask the question.
This is pure speculation but consider this: you have precisely the correct set of questions for your region. My friend’s copy is riddled with baffling questions about the UK census and whatnot. The game is at its best when players are wildly speculating like I am right now.
[EDIT] Wakeup #2 around the mid-point of our game and it is still going swimmingly. Neither of us are likely playing well at all, but it’s SO satisfying to work out your turns and being forced to look one turn ahead at all times is such a great touch. So far my partner seems to enjoy the crunch too, so it’s looking good for a second game at least.
Had friends over today for a small birthday get-together for our older son (it got pushed back twice), but after the festivities we continued our Betrayal Legacy campaign. Today was Chapter 9. The heroes managed to win with a very lucky roll, but we only had one person not die out of the 5 players.
Game took about 5 hours to play, but that was mostly due to pausing to deal with the kids, as it feels that the game should not take longer than 2 hours to me. Does make things a bit frustrating though, as I think I was away from the table more than I was at it while playing.
Had the opportunity yesterday to play with 5 people (instead of the usual 3) so we played Sidereal Confluence 
I’ve got to say… I’m considering swapping my original version for the new edition, because they’ve made some small changes that considerably lessen the faff. I don’t really care about the changes to the art, but having faction boards instead of a double-sided A4 sheet of paper for every player made a surprising amount of difference, as did changing the sizes of the resource cubes.
We also played Dreadful Circus, which was released at Essen this year. It’s a set collection game where you buy and sell cards from each player’s starting hand. The bidding is blind, and once the seller has looked at another player’s bid, they have to reject it outright or accept it without looking at any further bids, so there’s an element of bluffing as well. I don’t think I’d buy it, but I’d happily play again.
We got it done. A first run of Mottainai is complete and if I had to guess, I’d say it all went about as well as I could have hoped. My partner slaughtered me by almost double points—I had her beat if not for a rookie error that kept me from forcing the endgame, but the extra time was enough to make a massive conversion on materials (ultimately the big differentiator for her). She enjoyed the loop (and especially the crunch surrounding said loop) and will be more than willing to give it another play at the least.
I think this is an absolute banger of a design and I’m pretty sure this will end up in our regular 2P competitive rotation in a big way.
My first game of Cthulhu: Death May Die. It’s a bit of a pig to set up and tear down1, (but I’ve seen worse). The game is as ludicrous as advertised, and has quite an entertaining arc whereby the chosen Big Bad begins the game on its own track away from the map, causing bad things to happen on a regular basis, but not really there – until suddenly it is; and I had a genuine “Ohhh sh#*%…” moment when I realised that thing was now going to enter the map, as I had no idea what that specifically entailed. The game then builds to a crescendo, as your characters get dramatically more powerful as they get closer and closer to the brink of madness, while the Great Old One also progresses through phases, accumulating new abilities and potentially driving the player characters over the edge. It seemed to me that the nearer your characters are to insanity, the more you have to double-down and just hurl everything you have at the Old One and hope for the best, because you’re only going to go mad anyway if you don’t. The character abilities as you level up are outrageous – the game seems geared towards creating a crazy show-down of great powers. At the end my surviving character was rolling 7 bonus dice on top of the 3 normal dice (which is two more bonus dice than were provided with the game – although that is more a criticism of the publisher who sells extra sets of dice because they didn’t include enough in the box); and with an increased chance of doing damage with each die.
It was touch and go, but I was victorious in my first outing. I rather look forward to seeing what the other characters are like. I think each has an ability which is unique to them, and which will no doubt make them seem crazy powerful in different ways to the others, so it should be fun to discover those.
Having played so many tiny games recently, though, this seemed like a lot of effort. Time will tell whether or not I enjoy it enough to want to do that on a regular basis. I’m sure it’ll get a bit easier with practice, though. I’d watched a couple of video tutorials the other day, so I mostly knew what I was doing in terms of gameplay, and the whole process (from opening the box to having it packed away again afterwards) took around 3 hours.
1 I’ve never owned a game box as big as this where I wished that it had been bigger! Upon opening, the space is almost entirely taken up by boxes and plastic moulds (which will remain their original volumes thereafter), along with boards of tiles and tokens to punch (which definitely will not remain as neat flat layers thereafter). Furthermore, the small boxes may contain additional boards of tokens to punch, with NO chance of fitting all of those back where they came from. I can’t quite fathom how this is going to work once all of this stuff has been opened. One of the plastic moulds had enough hollow space underneath for me to massage a bag of tokens into it, and that was pretty much the only empty space in the box.
