Got it!
I was thinking about how to counter-act the Marketeer milestone myself as it was a de-facto -$2 permanent discount without lowering your price…
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I met up with some people I know through the Board Game Barrage Discord this weekend. It’s the first time I’ve been unmasked indoors with people I don’t know well in over 18 months. I was pretty anxious about it, but I’ve been looking forward to it for ages and they were all cool with testing daily in the run up.
The result was a ridiculous amount of gaming - I’ll try to edit this with some thoughts later, but I played…
Biblios. First time with 4 players. Clever little auction game filler
Coloretto. Push your luck filler. Quicker, cheaper and more interactive than Quacks.
El Grande. Better every time I play it. It’s such an elegant design and great with 5
Iberian Gauge. My first ever play. I enjoyed it but came a distant last as I couldn’t grok the strategy at all
Hansa Teutonica. Still great, loads of divergence between strategies and all 5 of us were within 7 points at the end.
Point Salad. It’s alright for a quick set collection game
Cockroach Poker. I like it, but don’t love it.
Pictomania. I bought this as a Secret Santa present for one of the others. First play - I really enjoyed it. A drawing game for people who can’t draw
Lost Cities. I got destroyed
Watergate. I own this but have never played it. Really enjoyed it. It scratches the Twilight Struggle itch without the time commitment and sometimes feeling overwhelming
Modern Art. I’d love to know if this functions as a pure game. For me it’s 90 minutes of talking complete bullshit about paintings and painters. Love it
Just One. Very clever, but I don’t know if the highs are high enough or frequent enough in a crowded word game field
Yellow and Yangtze. I still don’t understand the post map resettling after combat. I think if I could play this 10 times in quick succession with the same group I may end up adoring it
Librium. The hardest dexterity game ever. We have the moving crane type set up for the base card. It’s not fun because it is soooo difficult. Getting the tripod version so hopefully that will actually be playable.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I love some quick social deduction.
A War of Whispers. Another first time with 4 players. A very clever area control style game where you don’t control what is on the board directly. It packs a lot of game into 45 minutes. And it has a circular board!
Pitch Car. We played some stunt rules. I have the jump expansion which we set up in front of a chicane and decided that if you took on the jump and landed the right way up then anything goes. I managed to go from 4th to winner by completing 5/6ths of my final lap in 2 flicks this way. The equivalent of skidding across the line with my car on fire, stopping and then all the wheels falling off. It is so much fun, landing the jump whilst bouncing over a barrier was my highlight of the weekend.
Edit
I forgot that we played Loopin’ Louie!
10 Likes
We were very tired and it was definitely a stumble through. Thanks for the rules clarification. Hopefully next time we’ll be mostly right with the rules.
2 Likes
Francis Drake - the action selection resembles of Lignum and it is very engaging. The bluffing bids and tokens are fun. But the game is a bit repetitive as you always reset every round (except for the trade goods tiles). I’ll play it every time.
Calimala - finally bought a copy to replace my broken copy. Had a good time playing an incredible beige game of Calimala
4 Likes
Calimala is pretty close to the top of my ‘want to play’ list. Did you find it new or secondhand?
2nd hand. Not easy to find tho
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I got Francis Drake in the last UK maths trade… But I haven’t got around to learning the rules yet
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I finally got out Ganymede and played a 2 handed learning game. I am surprised that I quite enjoyed it. It’s a quick little engine buildery thing that I bought because there’s Mars in the game.
The game is played until one player has launched 4 Settler ships from Ganymede. How do the settlers get on the ships? From Earth to Mars to Ganymede. On Earth you recruit settlers (up to 6) which you transport to Mars with the Earth shuttles. On Mars (up to 5 of them) stay until they can catch a Mars shuttle to the ships on Ganymede. Each player has up to 2 settler ships on their shipyards. The ships will take off as soon as they are filled up with settlers. Either 3 of the same type/color of settler or 4 different ones.
On their turn players can do one of three actions:
- take a “Settler Tile” of which they can have up to three and having several of the same type gives you bonus activations. Settler tiles mostly recruit settlers but some allow also for the so-called basic actions.
- play a shuttle (Earth or Mars) from the display and add it to your tableau. You can only play a shuttle if you have the correct types of settlers in the location from which the shuttle starts. In your tableau the bonus of the shuttle activates as many times as you already played that color of shuttle
- discard 1-3 settler tiles to perform basic actions (draw ship, recruit settler, change settler color or move settler)
If you manage to get a row of all 5 shuttle colors (white is a joker color) into your tableau one of your ships takes off for victory points immediately—even empty.
It’s quick and quite simple. Interaction will be mostly in denying other players cards or tiles. So basically no interaction. But I guess the game plays in around 20 minutes if you know what you are doing so…
I think I’ll allow it to stay for now and see if maybe it works for my partner or one of my groups.
On thing though:
This bugged me enough to look at videos and tutorials for reboxing games. But for now I decided that I will not use that rough method I saw on BGG and I am nowhere near professional enough to make it look as good as the person I saw on reddit. So big box stays until I can figure out a way to make a pretty box. PS: right now I am looking at the King is Dead which is the exact same size and too large in a different dimension. Hmf.
4 Likes
Played some games last night:
Orc - quick 2 player game of this while waiting for our third. I won off of my more extensive hand of orcs at the end. It really is one of the best 5-10 minute games in my collection, though that’s probably a fairly narrow field
Hansa Teutonica - well now that I’ve played with the correct rules, can confirm it’s terrific - this is really a top tier game for me. Such a great ratio of crunchy and satisfying choices to complexity/playtime. So good. Would play it again right now and love it, honestly.
Burger Up - I did terribly at this one, had a few top buns stolen from me that kind of tanked my score. And I ended with a colossal I couldn’t sell… 
still puzzly fun though there are better ‘puzzle’ games
7 Likes
What was the HT rule you’d gotten wrong the first time?
(When I first played, we’d failed to notice that one of the game-ending conditions is reaching the first corner of the score track. Someone was half-way down the long edge before we stopped to check : )
We were giving prestige points to everyone present in a town rather than just the one that controlled the town and we didn’t observe the rules for placing the bonus markers (that no one can be present on a route already when you add a marker and that there needs to be at least one open slot on either end of the route). So it ended a bit prematurely, and our winner had way more bonus markers than normal.
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Crime Hotel - this one is very fun. This is a trick taking game of deducing which hotel room the murder have happened. Funny how this doesn’t make sense thematically.
So one of the hotel rooms is set aside, which is the room the murder have occurred. And the deck is distributed. Leftovers are placed on the hotel as your initial information. Each card is a room and there are 3 suits: top, middle, and lower floors. Typical trick taking rules, but non matching suits are STILL considered when determining who wins the trick.
From highest to lowers, you determine turn order. The 1st and last players will make a guess which room it is and the middle one goes to the police station and take a worker placement spot to get a bonus: swap cards, look at cards, etc.
You play for 3 rounds and total up the pts.
Very interesting. I only played it once to see any big holes in the design and I want to play more of it. Hmmm… there’s only one copy in BGG, and it’s from Germany. Hmmm…
Flamme Rouge
K2 + K2 Broad Peak - the expansion significantly improves K2.
Oriflamme - finally played Oriflamme. Pretty good and quick card game. Gets what I want from Citadels - the interaction between characters, but does it pretty quick
5 Likes
Thanksgiving in the USA today. Last night my husband’s brother’s family got into town and I went over to my husband’s parents’ place to have dinner with everyone without my husband who had a weekly appointment. After dinner some of us played Suspicion, a light game mostly about moving pieces controlled by no one around a board to try to hide which of those pieces is your own secret identity, get information about which belongs to other people, and hopefully pick up some gems along the way that can score points at the end (along with correct guesses of identities) but also give clues to your identity when you pick them up.
It’s an ok little game normally but my husband’s 13 year old niece was determined she could figure out people’s identities based on context clues and body language that had nothing to do with the game such as when people got up to get more pizza. And she did end up winning the game, getting the same number of correct IDs as me but one more gem than me. That pissed off her 12 year old sister who claimed she didn’t care that she herself lost but the 13 year old did not deserve to win with her context clues nonsense. It was quite the game night.
We’re heading back over in an hour and are supposed to be taking some games over to possibly play this afternoon and I really don’t know what to take to reduce the odds of similar situations. I might “forget” games and we can just watch TV. Not at all my usual stance but we don’t need another in your face yelling of “You did not deserve to win!!” or similar.
5 Likes
Managed to get in a first play of Destinies with two players. Just the tutorial mission, but I’ll throw spoiler tags around it since the “Destinies” of the players are supposed to be a surprise…?
Right, so thank heavens (again) for Rodney Smith and his wonderful tutorials. Really got us up and running quickly. The game ran a bit long (slightly more than two hours), and it took both me and my partner about an hour to realize that there’s no real “downside” to failing a challenge or being attacked by wolves or whatever… you lose a few points of ability, which slows you down, but otherwise… it’s fine? I managed to get a pretty lucky set of pulls for the witch (specifically, I bought the Lantern the moment I discovered it at the Romani camp and then explored almost the entire map, gaining oodles of XP that way, and then found a Silver Crucifix that let me gain 2 Wisdom every turn? Yeah, pretty broken… oh, and then there was a turn I gained, like, 4 XP by a Bloody Trophy and a lucky roll or two… my partner found the Monkey Paw that wasn’t really a monkey and that helped her almost catch up, but I already had 2 followers at that point and was buff enough that I could motor through the Final Destiny.
Which, admittedly, may have been a mistake… my partner doesn’t like losing the first time she plays a game, and the endgame for the Noble is particularly mocking, which made her feel even worse about losing (a closely fought game, considering the early lead I jumped to, honestly, but still). She has thankfully requested to play it again, though, so that’s nice! We’ll try at least the first mission of the campaign, and we’ll see if that goes a bit better!
I’ll say I enjoyed it, and I think they did a good, albeit not great job with the writing… and I like the pacing and the difficulty (the not-being-able-to-die thing is a straight up bonus, IMO… ending your turn early is enough of a handicap). I don’t know if I would ever play with the “full” three players, honestly? It felt kinda long between turns sometimes.
Oh, and now I have to paint some very mini minis… I have a stack of Battletech to get through, but Clanners paint up really fast so that shouldn’t be an issue, and then a few Legion pieces, but after that I should be able to put really basic paint jobs on these tiny minis really quick.
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Just today I read an article that recommended cooperative games for such cases.
If you have any of those… maybe if they know tricktaking… The Crew? (Or for context-aficionados something like Dixit?)
But the article also recommended Catan as a non-competitive game about negotiating… so possible that article was satire?
(It wasn’t a bad article overall and I am happy they recommended gaming at all, but the Catan thing got some snorts from my half-asleep partner this morning–Our Catan destroying friend was over last-weekend claiming he was still sometimes playing with his family and of course he was still winning 25 years later.)
2 Likes
Today I had my best day of gaming since Father’s Day, I think.
My wife and I got a couple of games of Kingdomino in, and I actually won both of the games.
We followed that up with Azul, which I also won, and by a pretty good margin thanks to completing two of the tile colors.
Finished that stretch off with Hanamikoji, which I also won in the first round by getting 11 points.
A couple of hours later, we played two more games of Hanamikoji, the first of which I lost, but rallied to win the second game.
Then, this evening, a friend stopped by and he and I tried out War of Whispers. What a great game! We were both trying to figure out the strategy behind the game, and it was pretty obvious that we had the same x4 empire (blue bears) after a bit, and it was pretty clear by the end of the second round which empires each of us had at either x0 or x-1.
Going into the fourth and final round, we both chose to swap the scoring positions of two of our empires, both of us managing to put the green elephant empire into the x3 position. I had screwed up the brown horse empire enough that he swapped it into the x0 position, while the yellow lions went from x3 to x2 for me, as he kept messing with them.
I realize halfway through the round that I could reclaim two of the lions cities from blue with some good card use, which while it was my x4 empire, it was his as well, so the scoring change would only benefit me. This turned out to be the game winning move, the final scores being 33 - 26. Definitely feels like a game that you need to be subtle about your empire preferences in order to do well. I liked it a lot, and it was great to play something brand new, as I don’t have a game that feels like this one.
EDIT: Oops, forgot my wife and I played Ticket to Ride: London earlier as well, which I also won, although she had forgotten about the district bonuses while playing (though they were mentioned when we started), so that was definitely a negative impact on her score.
9 Likes
Some games on Saturday:
Superskill Pinball, a solo run of the Cyberhack table. Did okay (minus a very unlucky tilt halfway through my first ball), shy of my 300+ high score on that table though.
Cartographers, had some new goals I hadn’t played with this time around (one wanted a column of forest and the other 5+ terrain types per row - that one was particularly tough!) Did okay, though with the addition of the heroes and skills expansion, Master Cartographer doesn’t seem too hard to get consistently.
Concordia, taught my wife this one (She famously hates learning new games, so when she offered to learn any one new game to play with me, I jumped on it!
) We played on the Crete board with salt. Went very well - I like the new map and salt is just a nice, simple addition. I won in the end, but only by a little. Hopefully now that she knows the game we might have some more games of it in the future!
7 Likes
I remember having to use playing Concordia for the first time as a Father’s Day gift from my wife! Thankfully it went down really well and has become a favorite.
5 Likes
My partner and I ended up cranking out three games of 7 Wonders Architects (our first) before packing it in for the night. I managed to win all of them, but the first two were closer than our score gaps might have indicated, and our last game in particular was a hot race; I only did a rough count of my partner’s situation before deciding to end that game, so it was a nailbiter during the tally, but I snuck by with a 3 point advantage.
Early days so I won’t blow too hard, but I did want to make a comment about the production here: There’s a lot of plastic used. My partner and I both commented on how nice the little boxes are, particularly since they truly do facilitate quick setup and teardown, but it’s egregiously lavish for what is effectively a small box game. Right up there with the Roxley productions of Dice Throne, in my opinion. These feel like the billionaire space launches of the board game industry: Man, that’s freaking cool, you gauche monsters. 
I’m starting to see the second round of tables come in locally. My friend and I made a deal to each buy one, then split our copies (basically get all the content half price, at the expense of a hacked player count). I know we have fans around here but it’s nice to see it still getting pulled off the shelf.
3 Likes
ooh that’s not a bad idea - they do seem to be better at lower playercounts anyway…
1 Like