Furnace by Ivan Lashin. I like the auction. If you win, you get the card. If you lose, you get to use the top ability of the card X amount of times, based on X amount of your losing bids. The losing bids bit is what made Furnace a bit more smarter than I initially thought. However, my initial impression that it is a soulless cube conversion game is absolutely right. Aside from the bidding, it is incredibly solitaire.
Rise of Empires by Martin Wallace. We played with 5 and it was fun, but too long. It was rather abstract, unlike HIstory of the World, but it was the AB-AB-AB system is what made Rise of Empires so interesting. There are 3 Eras and each era is divided into an A Round and a B Round. You have this worker placement-esque bit where you put your disc on an action row. If you take the territory action, you put one of your disc on the rightmost free slot of that action. And when B Round kicks in, when you take an action, you have to take that respective token you placed on A Round, and pay resources based on the number of tokens to the left of the token.
But it is too long and has Martin Wallaceās typical convoluted rule set.
War of Whisperers - fun game of shared incentives and secret allegiances but Iām still having some beef with the game on how the allegiance works.
Murder of Crows - a Knizia game about trying to spell M U R D E R on your tableau. Itās really meh with its take-thats and simplistic gameplay, but Iām charmed by the theme and the fact that if you read your finished tableau, it tells you a story on how a murder took place. Its theme reminds me heavily of Gloom.
Citadels (latest remake) - played without any of the characters from the OG set - they are a mixture from the two expansions. It was good. I really donāt like OG Citadels because of the Assassin and the Warlord. It drags the game on and on and on. Assassin was replaced by the Witch, which allows you to name a character, as usual, but youāll take your turn instead. Sure. The victim gets a āskip a turnā, but they can still get 2 coins or 2 cards. But this fixes the Assassinās biggest issues: the Assassin player will ātakes the hit for the teamā.
The Warlord was replaced by the Marshal. The Marshall will now steal a card, rather than destroying it. But they still have to pay the victim full cost. Again, fixes my issues with the Warlord. No value was lost, it merely changed hands. And the Marshal player doesnāt ātake a hit of the teamā.
The Crew 2
Played The Bottle Imp, Terra Mystica, and Heul Doch Mau Mau with @EnterTheWyvern
Bottle Imp was a fun risk-taking trick taking game, where the price of the bottle imp starts at 19. You win a trick by having the highest card as usual, if everyone is above the Bottle Impās price. However, if a player went lower than 19, they buy the bottle at that price (e.g. 13) and becomes the new price. But the trade off is that they will win the trick, regardless of how high everyone else are.
The kicker here is that the possessor of the bottle will score nothing and will receive penalty point instead. You score according to the coins in the cards. The high cards got more coins in them, so you might be tempted on buying the bottle if you see a lot of high cards in a trick. Just make sure you wont be holding it at the end of the round.
Terra Mystica is still an absolute banger of a Euro. Played as the Witches.
) to keep track of. Donāt feel confident enough for a teach yet, I want to try a two-fisted game first, but itās coming. Oh, itās coming. Looks VERY interesting.
