It’s not. I was told wrong 
Is it an Emperor S4 game?
Do you think they lied to you to get you to play it? 
7 Likes
I’m sure they would never… hhmmmmmmm 
5 Likes
Last night, my wife and I played The Red Cathedral for the first time. What a fun little game! Thematically, the players are building St. Basil’s Cathedral. Functionally, they are claiming portions of the structure (represented by cards), getting resources using dice on a rondel, and transporting those resources from their workshop to claimed portions to actually build the structure. Additionally, players have four decorations the can build on any completed portion to improve their control of that column and a chance to gain points.
There’s a lot going on in this small box, and Matt was correct in his review that it is really easy to forget to roll the dice after you use them. Seems like it should be easy to remember, you just moved it, roll any dice in that space. But you get involved with doing your action and just forget.
When you claim a portion of the cathedral to build, you get a tile which you can pay to slot into your workshop, which has six areas assigned to different colors of dice. Once slotted in, you get the shown bonus every time you move that color die, in addition to the resources shown on the rondel. There are also four influence cards, one in each quadrant of the rondel, which you can choose to interact with for more options. One just gives you points, another lets you sell resources, another exchange resources for another at a 2-1 rate, etc. Each card has two options on it, and the players choose one to perform.
There is a lot of variability in the game setup, with the resources being randomly distributed around the rondel, the bonus tiles being randomly placed on the construction cards, three of each type of influence card and randomly dealing one to each quadrant, even the layout of the construction cards varies from game to game. As such, I think it won’t get stale after a few plays.
As for our game, it looked like I was going to win, but my wife made some good moves to secure control over one of the columns that I was trying to claim. She also built her last card one turn before I could, which grants 3 bonus points. I could have finished before her, but there was a risk she could gain control of that column as well, costing me even more.
Once all was said and done, she won 44 - 40. Looking forward to playing it again sometime.
10 Likes
Sorry for the double post, but just wrapped up a game of Jaipur which ended my losing streak! I lost the first round, but came back to win the next two. To be fair, I got really lucky at the end of the second round, as my wife took camels and ended up revealing three rubies, which I took and won the game with.
I also had a lucky starting hand for the third round, with all five cards being rubies, gold, or silver.
9 Likes
Blockbuster - films trivia party game. Simple enough to get into it. The tension on head-to-head is pretty good - I suck at it though. But I love it. Not good enough to compete with Monikers though. The latter is still one of my top tier party games.
5 Likes
The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game , third chapter, we won, but it was pretty close at the end. We would have lost (sorry, been interrupted) if we had drawn the wrong plot card. So we played safe, used a miracle to get three cards (hoping to get the right cards to do the final objective). And we got the right cards (after trading with another player). And as it turned out, the plot card would have been fine, but I still back our decision, percentage play and all that.
TEN , first play. This is a pretty light push your luck game. You draw cards, and if you get over ten, you bust. But if you draw a wildcard, you have an auction before continuing (using currency tokens) . At the end of the game you score for the longer sequence in each of the four colours. It was fun, I guess, but it’s pretty light stuff, just draw and see what happens.
Brass: Birmingham , we finally finished a game! It took over four hours, not sure how, just lots of long turns. I know, I know, it shouldn’t take anywhere that long. It fell pretty flat for me, just wasn’t enjoying it at all. Can’t see this getting played again.
The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X 3, still loving this. We found it pretty tough, we were all drawing a lot of cards and just searching for that one card that would break the case open. So great when that happens and you can start actually solving it. Just for fun, we swapped our cards around in the first play to see if someone else could solve it. I solved the second and third games, but used way too many cards, have to be smarter about that.
Fantasy Realms X 3
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We didn’t get the Friday night game we had hoped for thanks to headaches all 'round, but today I taught my partner The Loop and it was a huge success. After my initial solo games I was confident this had precisely the kind of mental challenge she tends to enjoy (and excel at), and she was keen on the weird design already, but it’s always nice to certify a game as a keeper so quickly.
We had some incredible luck with the clone draws and cube drops, but I can’t discount the fact that I brought a wrecking ball into my corner for this matchup. My partner just tore apart our mission objectives with ruthless efficiency, and by the end of Dr. Faux’s first cycle it was looking pretty good already.
By about halfway through the second cycle the board was starting to crowd a little and we earned our first vortex for it, but it didn’t matter much. We had been ignoring most of a quadrant of the board because it allowed us to focus so heavily on rushing the win. To some degree I wish we had a harder time here. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for my partner to have won on her first attempt, but she made a few real dandy moves that didn’t really fire off with the kind of impact they might have under greater duress.
This was my first game playing cooperatively and we both commented at how wonderful it is to be able to sit and suss out your turn without too much external input. This is another major way The Loop differentiates itself in a meaningful way from Atlantis Rising, which also has an excellent approach to cooperation: where Atlantis has the group figuring out the tasks together and then assigning the right person to the job, The Loop lets players work out a nice, crunchy individual turn, with the group making high level suggestions about board resources and priorities based on their upcoming turn.
I’m very much not a co-op fan, so to have added two of them with this much fanfare in only a few months is pretty unusual.
3 Likes
First time in about a year(?) that I could attend my regular monthly gaming session.
Mottainai first play with a new (old) set bought to replace my PnP. Teaching game.
Race for the Galaxy super fast military rush, low scores.
Twilight Struggle against a guy who has played 600+ times, was great to get this to the table again.
QE the game with infinite money. First time playing, I bid early for millions to guarantee a win, so I had to push the baseline up to match. The final bid started at 500,000,000. Interesting game, but in the end came down to a choice between who to let win out of 2 players in a 5 player game.
Scapegoat 5-player game, turned out I was the scapegoat, and I figured it out literally the turn before the next player was going to frame me (and everyone had the right cards to do it).
Also got to eat some really fresh Granny Smith apple slices that someone brought - a rare delicacy in Japan!
14 Likes
The best apple.
Great games too
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This might be a silly question, but is it Granny Smiths in particular or apples in general that are unusual in Japan?
Back on topic… We had a double board game weekend this week: Ulm, Camel Up, and Wingspan yesterday with our regular gaming buddy and his sister; Beyond the Sun and Brew with a new gaming friend who brought us homemade cheesecake 
I hadn’t come across Brew before. It seemed to be mostly set collection, area majority, and very spiteful dice placement 
5 Likes
Granny Smiths. Apples here tend to be very sweet, with a skin that’s better off removed.
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Played the second scenario of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, continuing on with the Demolitionist and the Voidwarden. Another easy win, though the Demo did take a bit of damage in the first round. Luckily the Voidwarden was there with some healing, though it wasn’t really needed as the enemies did not manage to damage me again.
4 Likes
Well OK @EnterTheWyvern and @lalunaverde haven’t posted yet so…
We got together yesterday for a game session, and you were all right – I did love Spirit Island. (Playing mostly base game, with some expansion cards because sorting the decks would have been a lot of work.) In particular as someone who’s spent a fair bit of time with Flash Point I like the way it builds on the basic spreading-bad-stuff mechanic, and the fast/slow power split is fascinating. I did start to lose track a little by the very end, but I think I need to internalise what happens in a Build phase a bit better. Won on the last card.
Then the thoroughly athematic Sumeria. About as dry as it gets, and five years ago I wouldn’t have touched it, but I still had a good time.
Lemminge and I still haven’t found anyone who dislikes this. Quick and easy to teach, but there’s a remarkable complexity of game in there.
The gorgeously-produced Cosmic Frog – I can’t see myself ever buying it (the aggressiveness felt quite like Cosmic Encounter, which I owned for several years but hardly ever got off the shelf) but I had a really good time playing it.
And finally Ominoes, one of those games that isn’t going to shake the world but is still decent fun.
13 Likes
We’ve been playing a lot of 7 wonders architects which is essentially a marketed babies 7 wonders. The thing I think it draws from the 7 wonders big boy is you play with the two people adjacent to you and you pick cards to make buildings. What you lose is mostly any sort of long term strategy.
What I like is the game is pretty tight and you can definitely play different ways but some also feel better. And also, unusually, trolling moves are rarely hugely damaging to yourself which might be a bad or good thing I guess.
It’s a perfectly nice game for something that is fairly light.
3 Likes
This morning I’m now thinking of this as feeling to me like the game other people describe when they like Quest for El Dorado. I didn’t like that, found it’s deck building a bit boring and annoying but the hand management here seemed to me arbitrary but a bit more fun and exciting for the race. Thanks for bringing it over!
I really enjoyed getting Sumeria out again, I like it being such a small perfect information game and the atmosphere in the room was good for this play.
Cosmic Frog was good silly fun and Ominoes nicely hit enough of the vibe and I’d for sure play that one again. Spirit Island remains a classic and it was nice to see Roger’s first steps in to the behemoth
7 Likes
I played a bunch of Hive with my other half, and I’m pretty stoked to be able to report that my recent losses were no fluke – I found myself nicely out-played on multiple occasions. I wasn’t keeping track, but overall we seemed quite evenly matched. One game in particular was one of those delightful cases where, with the board pretty clogged, we alternated in thinking we were doomed but then finding that “one good move” to get out of a tight spot and turn the tables – only to change the board in such a way that the other player then goes through the exact same process. Back and forth so many times that trying to predict the outcome seemed entirely futile… (Until I lost : )
Having a game that (a) I love and (b) they are also good at (and, I think, significantly more willing to play as a result) feels like a huge win. They’ve admittedly always quite liked Hive, but this recent win:loss ratio is a significant change. I won’t bet on it leading to any other games being played more often, but if it simply boosts the number of games of Hive that we play and the likelihood of them suggesting a game, then I’ll be thrilled.
2 Likes
I finally managed to play Taverns of Tiefenthal, 2-player.
You, and the SUSD review, were right - as a basic game it was quite ‘nice’ but seems to be missing something. And the luck of the draw can really make a difference (I ran away with it 71-34). Will definitely play it again, introducing the modules and see how it goes.
Also played Sprawlopolis, a nice little brainteaser. We managed the scoring conditions quite easily so not sure if we were just lucky, played well or its just not that hard.
And finally, Ticket to Ride: London. I like the shortness of it. Its neat, tidy and a bit more directly competitive than Europe.
5 Likes