Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Boardgames
4210

The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game , chapter five. Most of the challenges involved getting characters to a certain place, in order to unlock another character. So, Fezzik needed to get to The Cottage to get Inigo on the board. Then, Inigo needed to get to the Pit of Despair in order to get Westley out. Then all of them needed to be at Miracle Maxs. All the while, Buttercup and the evil Prince Humperdinck are moving along an aisle at the church, and if they get to the end and get married, it’s game over. Fezzik needs to keep the Brutes (bad guys) in the barracks, because most plot cards advance Buttercup and the Prince if there is no one in the barracks. Luckily, Fezzik just has to move to the Brutes location to send them back. It was all looking a bit hard, didn’t have the right cards for the Miracle Max challenge. But we managed it, and then needed to get everyone to the castle gate. Someone used two special cards to get them almost up to the gate, and the next player moved them to it. Huzzah! And with Buttercup and the Prince only one step away from getting hitched.

Trickerion: Legends of Illusion , finally took this out of shrink. I had the legends KS box, bought it from a friend ages ago when he got the newer version. We didn’t finish the game, but we played out a couple of rounds. Everyone was happy with that, it was just a learning game. And we’ve got a fourth player who couldn’t make it, and he is pretty keen on playing. We just did the base game, so no dark alley components, and only the level one and two tricks. It was mostly pretty smooth, it’s just a worker placement. Place a worker, get action points, do actions. The only tricky space was the theatre, we watched a video that explained that pretty well. One of the players wasn’t happy that she was getting no bonus for her trick being performed on another players turn. The performing player was on Sunday, so got a bonus to stars and money. She was not performing, and only had a disc backstage, in one of the zero bonus days. Whereas I would get the bonus, because I didn’t have anyone in the theatre (meaning I get the bonus from the performer).

The Key: Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land X 3. Terrible first game, had 52 points in cards and barely knew anything. Second game was a bit better, got the solution, got 29, winner was 18. And in the third, got 30, winner was 26. Same winner in all three games. He reckons the “ÿellow” cards are best early. Well, we call them yellow cards, they have information on crimes from one to three, shown in a yellow box.

The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X 3. Nearly won the first game, tied with another player, but she had less value four cards. Second game had 34, winner was 30. And the third game, well that was just a mess, lots of cards and barely any useful information. Sometimes you just need a break and the whole thing falls into place. Winner had only 24, which is pretty damn good for Oakdale.

Fantasy Realms X 3. Got the Gem of Order in my hand for the first game, and a couple of low cards. Ended up with a 6 card run, good enough for a score of 176, winner got 180. Lost the next two games as well. No really high scores, nothing over 200.

7 Likes
4211

Well that escalated quickly! The pen was back in play in no time, and I’m already stumped on a puzzle – I’m sure I’m going to be annoyed with myself once I figure out what I’m not seeing, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. This thing might keep me busy for rather longer than I had anticipated…

Edit: Ok, that was driving me crazy for a bit… I thought my whole approach to the level must be wrong and so I was calculating every other unlikely approach I could think of; but in the end it was just a variant on the theme I’d initially gravitated towards, and I feel like I would have attempted the correct sequence already, so I’m wondering whether I’d been using the wrong table results for some of the combat. Definitely something to be wary of – one unwitting mistake on the numbers can send you on a wild goose chase.

3 Likes
4212

Played a first solo game of Dino island Rawr and write. I think the amber dice are a bit of a design mistake (insert goldblum quote here) but the game itself is quite good. It feels like a lot of meat for a roll and because it has two stages (a sort of set up and then run an engine phase).

I got two ranks from the bottom on the score list so not too bad. Will focus on other things in the future but it really depends on rolls and how conservative you feel you need to be. I don’t have a feel for the latte quite yet which means there’s some games to play still.

I don’t know how irritating it would be in a real game, as it feels like the chunky points require a lot of luck (from dice) and helpful rivals as they’re hard to achieve.

4213

Thank you. The first one is clear now. I didn‘t read the Eyrie rules again I just read the bot… ah well. In my German edition the movement rules are already the „fixed“ version. I think I still need to read up on that. I am always a little impatient and for all that I love playing new-to-me stuff I am terribly impatient with the rules learning. I just want to play :slight_smile:

But my guess is that I mostly did the right thing in throwing together all possible targets for the movement no matter the origin (the origin still had to qualify of course) and then picking the one with the right priority (weirdly sometimes the bot takes the lowest sometimes the highest. I think highest for movement, lowest for building new nests…

3 Likes
4214

Played Beyond the Sun twice with the econ clique. First was just the basic setup. Then, they want to play with the advanced so we did. The table agreed that advanced is much better. SVWAG is right - if you guys play mid to heavy weight games, don’t bother with the basic.

Teotihuacan with @EnterTheWyvern . I don’t dislike it now. But I think there’s a reason why I stepped away from Euros, in general. It was still fun with great decisions to be made.

Lemminge

Food Chain Magnate - played with the new milestones. I spent the entire game feeling like my engine wasn’t sufficient, then did a dirty pricing discount and manage to end at 2nd place with $10 just behind Wyvern

8 Likes
4215

Did the winner use marketing milestone? I’m wondering if there is any other choice if you play without any other Ketchup modules.

4216

Yes. We all had it though.

4217

Any experience using other modules that make other milestones viable?

4218

How are you enjoying the Princess Bride game? It is on sale here for $15 and I am tempted, but don’t want to get yet another game that will never or rarely reach the table when it is not a must-have. Is there replayability?

1 Like
4219

Yesterday, my wife and I got in a quickish game of Jaipur. I took the first round, but she obliterated me in the next two rounds to win the overall game.

Then today, we got in a game of Concordia while our older kid took a nap (he was up at 4 AM). I felt behind most of the game, as my wife was able to get a bunch of cloth early on, which she was able to ultimately convert into more houses in the board. She had all the cloth cities and two of the wine cities before I ever managed to even get a wine city of my own.

However, I was able to grab a number of brick, food, and tool cities, and get all of their Minerva cards. She managed to buy the last cards from the track, ending the game and getting the bonus 7 points.

Scores turned out much closer than I expected, 127 - 124, with my wife taking the win. Sadly, she was distracted through most of the game dealing with Amazon customer service trying to get a replacement kids tablet for the one which our older kid broke the screen on Thursday, and was supposed to have already been handled on Friday when she called about it, but it wasn’t. I am not sure if the distraction worked in her favor or not, though.

Lastly, we squeezed in a couple of games of Kingdomino, which I was actually able to break my losing streak. I won both games, even, the second one by a pretty decent margin.

6 Likes
4220

It’s…okay. I’m glad I didn’t buy it, and I’m not sure we’ll go back to it once we finish, Most of the chapters seem fairly straightforward, there don’t seem to be any major decisions to make. The last chapter we played (5) was probably the best so far, it had a couple of things going on.

1 Like
4221

This is the weirdest version of the Three Little Pigs.

5 Likes
4222

Played some Survive with the kids.

They played ‘gang up on Daddy’ but I still made 2nd place thanks to the youngest’s tactic of load up the boats then get them to the side islands and an early volcano draw. There was a 1/8 chance of the game end happening.

2 Likes
4223

Teotihuacan we played with 2 modules to change the building and decorations space plus some expansion techs. Really enjoyed this game as always. For a resource conversion euro it’s amongst my favourites. It had just enough player interaction to feel like you’re playing together plus the balance and timing of what you’re doing is an appropriately crunchy puzzle.

Lemminge fun, fast and quick. Well done bgg and @RogerBW

Food Chain Magnate with just Ketchup milestones. Second time with these modules for me and Mr Verde, third player first time. Opening turn everyone took recruiting girl so we all had a free EVP second turn everyone took a marketing trainee. I coupled with a trainer, @lalunaverde opted for waitress. This set the battle ground. The crucial advantage for me was selling first lemonade on the turn the other 2 sold first pizza and cola. 2 pizza radios later and I trained my pizza cook to a chef on the job and reaped pizza sales despite being furthest from the pizzas due to ability to fulfil demand. LaLuna got in to discounting first and took all the sales in the middle while I grabbed a few on my distant corner. Last turn I got a big chunk of cash with a regional manager opening a restaurant next to the pizza house that wasn’t on the main network and also adding a garden to it which was probably the main culprit of snagging me the extra $10 over Verde. We all used the reserve card which upped base price to $20 for a shorter game. We got done in around 2 hours so goal achieved in our unspoken alliance. This game mainly left me with more questions to explore around expansion milestones plus the map is interesting. I definitely felt a lack of sharpness in my play. Barely playing this in pandemic times has left me rusty and I’m now even more keen to pick this one up again.

4 Likes
4224

Wait, what? You all took the recruiting, EVP milestone? No-one took the amazing marketeer milestone? That seems to contradict what lalunaverde said upthread. Interesting to see that not everyone using the new milestones is making the same assumptions as me though.

4225

It’s all yucata’s fault. :slight_smile:

4226

Nope. We all did:
Turn 1 - recruting girl → EVP
Turn 2 - marketing trainee → marketing milestone

I havent tried any of the expansion modules other than the new milestones and reserve cards

4227

Yeah, the “marketing milestone” you refer to is one I forgot about, and distinct from the “marketeer milestone”, which I have long thought the only viable opening milestone when playing with the new milestones and no other modules.

(It’s the one that reduces sale distance by 2, and gives you 5 bucks for every thing you market. If you take recruiting girl turn 1, you cannot get marketeer.)

4228

Yes. We all had it. We all hired recruiting girl at Turn 1 and then hired a marketing trainee at Turn 2. Everyone can take EVP and Marketeer milestone if everyone is doing the same thing

4229

Ah, you played that wrong. The new milestones have a rule that the 3 OP milestones disappear and cannot be achieved if you don’t grab them from your first hire.

The “hard choices” module is baked into the new milestones.

2 Likes