I’m really enjoying the Yucata game. Unfortunately the only copy I can find is in Germany with all the associated costs of getting it here
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And print-and-play would not be trivial. (5 card suits each of values 0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,4 would need printing and sleeving.)
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Sounds like it’s time to dig out old MtG lands and sharpie numbers onto them!
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I’ve just ordered a fine-tip white marker pen because the turn order cards in ST:A have “6” and “9” with no underline or dot or anything…
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Had a great game night tonight with 7. We started with Pit Crew, which was a big hit. My team was way ahead at the end of the first and second rounds, but another team made huge strides in the third round, so the game ended much closer than we expected - still eked out a win though.
Then we split up, so 3 went upstairs to play Alien Frontiers while my group first played Meeple Circus (always fun) where barrels were in high demand (at one point all 4 point cards had barrels involved). Then we played New York Slice, where I took two 11s right out the gate (and got the split slice with half an 11 as well). Nobody else fought me for it and all ate their 11s, so in the end I used a special to eat all my 11s and won them with just the half.
Then we finished with Gravwell which is always fast fun. One player pointed out to another that she would have to use her emergency stop to prevent me from winning (which she did) and then went on to win when we didn’t have any stops left to stop him. Dastardly!
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My partner and I polished off a game of Maracaibo we started on Friday night, this evening. We usually get pretty lucky with interruptions, but I think it’s safe to say there was an exception to the rule this time.
In spite of the multi-day gap, we both performed well and had explosive final laps. She pushed hard into exploring and quests, while I dove into combat and basically milked a crazy income engine with a village elder and assistants. It was tight, but in the end I was able to buy an extra prestige building, which tipped the scales and netted me the win by only 8 points. Final scores were 187-179. She was a single step shy of the 10 point exploration space—not enough to close the gap on its own, but I’m pretty confident she had what she needed to win had she gotten its associated free village action.
This remains a top favourite of ours, but it’s also the heaviest game in our regular rotation and we put a pretty big gap between our last game. We had to go manual diving a few times throughout, mostly just for icon clarifications, but it still slowed things at times. We played with the campaign rules this time though, so hopefully a little extra incentive to really dig in for a while.
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My partner and I tried a game of Red Cathedral for the first time! Lovely, lovely little box, and the setup and teardown wasn’t nearly as imposing as I thought it was going to be.
I had some difficulty mid-game not being able to see the resources I needed due to an atmospheric blockage between my workers and the cathedral itself…
Hurricane Koko was very comfortable, and so I was forced to construct around her.
End game score was close… Andy’s 42 to my 40. A well earned victory, and a neat little game! Glad to have finally tried it, looking forward to next time having a bit better idea of which of the upgrades are good!
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Played some games this evening, a game of Summoner Wars with a bud - Phoenix Elves vs Tundra Orcs - I ended up getting all three of my champions out early which left him scrambling for magic and burning through his deck aggressively to keep up the pressure. So I outlasted him for the win.
We ended up with 5 of us this evening so after a round of Archaeology, I was thrilled to finally get Werewords to the table. We played like 6 games back to back - lots of fun! I really like how customisable it is, easy to tweak the difficulty and time limit and vary things up. Our 20 questions skills were a bit lacking though, even without the deduction layer we were finding working out the word quite tough!
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The best kind of hurricane though. She looks sweet and comfortable there between the game pieces 
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What a beautiful cat 
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She really is beautiful… both of our cats are Torties (Tortoiseshell). Donut is a distinguished old lady who stays upstairs where it is warmer, Koko is more adventurous and likes hanging out wherever my partner is.
She’s dumb as a brick (hard to explain, but when you know her, you just kinda get that she’s lovely, sweet, and stupid), but just so sweet. My partner has trained her to ask for petting by bonking her head into Andy.
It’s exactly as adorable as it sounds.
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Last night I played the third scenario of Gloomhaven: JotL with my Demolitionist and Voidwarden. Made a few rules mistakes, as with my intermittent play, plus the introduction of new rules each time, I am forgetting things (like Short Rest makes you lose a random card, not one of your choice like Long Rest, or missing the reshuffle icon on the monster action decks) and needing to refer back to the rules.
Overall got through the scenario pretty easily. I only made that Short Rest mistake once, so I don’t think it was a huge contributor to my success. Still love the Voidwarden’s ability to move enemy units onto traps. Great fun!
Reading the prep for scenario 4, I feel like I’m really getting into the meat of the system, with the elements being introduced. Hopefully I won’t forget all the stuff I just learned by the time I get it to the table.
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I don’t know how invested you are, but after advice from on here we found the Gloomhaven Helper app to be fantastic for managing the monsters (plus your health and the spirits)
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Neta Tanka: Deluxe Edition - I had a feeling that I wouldn’t like it. And, indeed, I didn’t liked it. The worker placing combo is cool though.
Spectaculum - another great Knizia. A friend called it “Circus Gauge” because it’s a (Capital T, Capital G) Train Game that has a travelling circus theme on top.
Skull King
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I even track my characters on it, and their sheets. Great stuff.
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I got to play my newly arrived Clockwork Expansion for Root this afternoon. After I did my accounting for the last 2 months, we had a lovely visit to the local farmers market and a wonderful lunch, I set up, checked up on the—too many!—rules and decided to try my mettle as the Woodland Alliance on the lake map against the Dynamo Dynasties (my copy is German… so whatever that is called). Totally played on easy to figure out how the bot works.
So it seems mostly well-rounded rules-wise, but I have one question or two.
- The dynasties draw a card at the start of Dawn (?) and then it says they craft it, if it is an item and the example of course goes with the variant where the item cannot be crafted and it goes into their „Dekret“ but does it go there instead or does it always go there even if the item was crafted. To me it felt like just drawing an item gave them a VP so maybe they should also grow more powerful from it?
- The other thing I was unclear about was that sometimes there was a conflict with moving, there was a priority for where they were going to move and I decided that I would just add all the possible targets no matter „from where“ the move was starting and use the priority that way.
Root is a rules moloch. I really like Cole Wehrle‘s games and the way he writes his rulesbooks seems so concise but I always end up not finding certain things or clarifications because some stuff is just too much „between the lines“ so unless I know the whole of it I may never able to derive the ruling for my special case. It is very much so with Oath and Pax Pamir as well. But Root is the worst because of all the different factions… the other two I can normally find my way around the rulebook but Root….
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Logging a lightning fast round of Mottainai with my partner. We’re both very much in the discovery phase with this game so it caught us both by surprise when I laid down the Cup, prayed for my bonus action and poof! I win (after discarding the cup). I think we got 5 rounds in?
Anyway we’re deep into our second game now, already longer than our last, but got interrupted by a waking baby. My partner is the one rushing the endgame this time, but she may be underestimating my sales table.
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With the first rule, with the Eyrie in the normal game you discard cards after crafting (and only get 1 point for it no matter what you craft, as the Eyrie hates technology) so I wonder why it should be different in their robot version. To have 1 point (from crafting) plus decree seems overpowered to me.
For the second problem, I found this…
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I played the first collection of puzzles in Twisty Little Passages last night.
It’s basically the dry-erase book version of computer games like “Desktop Dungeons” (the nearest reference point I could recall, but I see the author suggests “DROD RPG”, “Tower of the Sorcerer”, “Myth Bearer”, and “Tactical Nexus” as other computer games which play similarly).
The book is a campaign/story which you progress through, but each page of the book is an independent puzzle – you don’t carry over any equipment or stats; it just tells you what you start with (equipment should be a match for what you finished the last one with; health usually starts higher because you will pretty much never have more than 1 health point left when you complete a puzzle : ) No doubt there was a health potion between the levels.
The story is a fairly bare-bones classic fantasy affair which isn’t hugely important. There’s just one page of introduction text, after which it gets drip-fed to you in the description of each new puzzle. I trust there will be an epilogue.
The puzzles are the point, and are essentially “figure out which order to do things in, so that you will (barely) survive”. You can see everything you need to do (which is always "get from point A to point B, where B is probably defended by a big nasty); you just have to figure out the correct way to do it. Levels are filled with locked doors, keys, healing potions, equipment, and monsters. Nothing is random; there’s “fighting” to eliminate monsters, but this is entirely deterministic – depending on the monster and your own attack and defence stats, a table shows you how many health points it will cost you to defeat each monster. Obtaining equipment will boost your stats, but probably also cost you health to obtain. There will also be different monster types, and different paths through the level, so you will often be choosing which monster(s) to fight to get to a part of the level (or whether you should go there at all).
Should you get the better shield before fighting the troll, or would you lose enough health getting it that you won’t survive the troll even with the shield?
Should you get the shield or the sword if you can only get one of the two? You will fare differently against different monster types depending on which you obtain… which will enable you to survive, and which will lead to inevitable failure?
The health potions frequently have different healing values and are behind locked doors or protected by monsters. Do you need to get it now, or do you come back for it later?
Etc, etc…
I used a dry-erase pen for the first puzzle, but after that decided to just track everything in my head and avoid the writing and erasing hassle, and the early puzzles are certainly small enough that this was totally fine. I believe the difficulty ramps up, so I may need a pen again later. (The book didn’t actually come with a pen, so I grabbed one from another game.)
I like it! The book quality is really good; the artwork is nice with varied scenarios and maps; and in general it does what I was expecting it to do. The computer game variants will certainly have more content and more complex gameplay; but I enjoy this style of puzzle, and it’s neat to have something like this in book form.
You can see/play the first set of puzzles in PDF form at Caravel Games - Twisty Little Passages
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Some games yesterday (after my wife’s yum cha event at our place during the day (which was also terrific)):
Ohanami, close 2 player game of this, snagging a bunch of greys secured the win for me.
Hansa Teutonica, wow what an unusual game! We got one small rule wrong, so I’m not about to answer decisively whether I love it, but even as it was - it was really interesting, and I look forward to playing it again soon!
Cascadia, this one was as much fun with 3 as it is at 2 - I like that you’re encouraged to keep an eye on what your opponents are doing and that playing well involves taking navigating when to compete and when to try and forge your own path forward!
Gem, a quick game of this one to close out the evening, I didn’t win, I rarely do in auction games but it’s a lot of fun and interesting decisions in a very small box/timeframe.
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