Yeah, my wife and I had oursrlves a loght game night yesterday, with three games each kf Patchwork, The Fuzzies and Jaipur. Great fun was had!
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One of my friends tested positive for covid and had to isolate, so we switched our planned session to online last night.
I managed to beat everyone quite handily at Azul 
Didnât do quite so well at Canât Stop, Potion Explosion, 6 Nimmt, and Splendor 
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And now we got our first game of Lost Ruins of Arnak in! The streak of excellent games continues for 2021! Woo-hoo!
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Managed to get a few first plays in yesterday:
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Francis Drake: this is one of the first âbigâ games I played years ago, and I picked it up in a maths trade a couple of months ago. I still think itâs quite good, although I suspect it plays better with >3, since we werenât in much competition for mission locations.
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Oriflamme: ablaze: this is, unsurprisingly, very similar to Oriflamme. There are some interesting new characters and the added option to stack your cards instead of playing them at either end of the queue. Iâm looking forward to playing this more.
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Village Green: very point-salady. The theme of petty grudges between English villages competing for pointless awards doesnât really come through, but I like the puzzle and can see myself playing it solo.
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The Expanse: not a first play. A bit like a very diet version of TI4. The other two factions spent the whole time fighting each other for control of Saturn so I ran away with it.
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We also had a BGA session last night
Troyes
Iâd forgotten a lot of the minutiae but this is just so, so good. Crunchy, strategic, tactical, mean and good at any player count. All in under an hour.
For Sale
A light auction game. Playable with 3 but I imagine better at 4-6. Shades of Biblios and No Thanks. I imagine in person this could be awesome
Azul
Itâs still fantastic.
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I took out my recently acquired copy of Five Tribes to play the game for the first time in ages. And for the first time with expansions. I added both the Artisans of Naqala and Whims of the Sultan because I find that one often settles into a certain set of rules for a game and thatâs that. It makes for a nice large map with some interesting features.
This was a 2 handed relearning game. As is usual in 2 handed play one hand is just going through the motions. My right hand did reasonably well for that and it looked pretty good for a while. However, left-hand accidentally stumbled across such a powerful combo it basically broke the game: one djinn to place additional palm trees on any oasis and another to make palm trees worth 5 instead of 3 points and the oasis in question was placed next to the great lake that doubles the value of the palm trees.
Right-hand was unable to stop left-hand from triggering the djinnâs ability over and over again. Maybe I read some rules wrong but it said âany oasisâ on the explanation and the rules also said there was no limit to the amount of palm trees that could be placed on a location. SoâŚ
I guess if I had payed full attention to right-hand I could have stopped the combo in its tracks by going for one of the djinn before lefty or later countered the combo by denying access to fakirs or white meeples or just taking the remaining palm trees and put them on my own cards. But this is not a good sign and if it had happened to my partner would probably have ended the game mid-way.
But I definitely still love the mancala mechanic and enjoyed the additions of both expansions. Both the sultanâs whims cards to obtain on the special cities and the items obtained from the purple artisans or the workshops added a bit of fluff to the game. The real winner were the additional locations which made for a nice large board with some impassable tiles and âmountainsâ forcing me to think around those places for my moves.
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Yup, my friend got this one time. She literally had the most points you could possibly get from palm trees in the base game because she had every single one.
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In all fairness, we knew it would be close, but both times the score lived up to my condition of âDiscoverer of the final scoreâ 46, 48, 51⌠oh no, I won again 
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Played a couple of solo games if Village Green today, before accidentally knocking one of the cards into the catâs water bowl 
. It plays quite quickly solo and Iâm enjoying the puzzle.
Also played a learning game of Crystal Palace. Itâs okay with two, but I think it will be much better at higher player counts.
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A new level of legacy games
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My partner and I played the tutorial scenario of Chronicles of Crime: 2400.
She hated it. I would go so far as to say she loathed it. Which, not gonna lie, was a bit of a surprise⌠I had a good time, but yeah, Andy⌠hate-hate-hates it.
Our final score was 130 out of a possible 100 (not a typo), but she is super upset because I deduced my way to 1/3rd of the solution. Iâll throw up some spoiler tags here just in case: So we discovered where the stolen goods were, no problem, we discovered who murdered the driver no issue, but the last question asks you to identify who the Bull avatar is, extrapolating that they are the ones responsible for the AI hack that gets the truck attacked in the first place. To me, itâs an obvious solution⌠there is the person who hired us (Luc), there is the driver who is dead, there is the guy who was arrested by the security robot (who was under arrest when we met the Bull avatar), and there is the woman who is literally plugged into the DeliveryAI programme. Dâuh. obviously itâs her. She hacked the system for money, sold it to the gang for money⌠itâs her.
But the problem is that there is no specific evidence that we found that proves that. No card we scanned said âOh, by the by, THAT person did this thingâ, and so Andy is upset. Nowhere in the rules does it say that we will have to use inference or deduction to solve the case, and so she feels stupid because she canât make the leap of logic and doesnât like that it is expected of her.
⌠I enjoyed it! I will be playing the other scenarios on my own (which, sad trombone music, fine, but what else can ya do? I love Cyberpunk, and this is literally a cyberpunk world with cyberpunk crimes! Itâs great!).
Fun aside: today was our 15 year anniversary. This is⌠not how I wanted the day to go, but Iâm getting used to saying that particular phrase a lot. What can ya do? Lessons were learned, and I look forward to knowing not to play logic-deduction games with her in the future⌠except Search for Planet X, which she was amazing at last time we played.
Anyhoo!
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Another X-Wing Miniatures solo bout. Not really solo. This time my 10YO joined me as a handful of Scum ships took on the Empire. The HWK 290 has always been âherâ ship, so she flew a pair of those while I trudged along with the Scurrg bomber and a Fang fighter.
This time, I set it up on a 36" turntable. It totally changes oneâs perception of the play space, and makes the game feel much more dynamic.
The most recent updates to the solo system smoothed things out nicely, I hope they polish it up a bit more and release it officially. An app would be great for determining enemy movement and actions.
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The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game , the last chapter! And we won! I think we only lost a scenario once, from memory. Itâs not a bad game, they have done a good job with the events from the movie.
Cafe , first play. I guess you would call this a tile laying game? Each tile is a two by three grid, with actions on each space. The aim of the game is to process coffee beans and deliver them to a cafe. Each round a new selection of cards are available. When you take a card, you must overlay it on your tableau so that the new card covers two, three, or four squares. And obviously you can only use visible spaces.
Spaces are marked as types A, B, C and D. A is production, you put a cube of that colour on the space. Producing takes one action, but if you have multiple A spaces next to each other, then you can produce on all of them for a single action. Action B is drying, each space can dry multiple cubes of a single colour (from multiple production spaces). If your drying spaces are adjacent, then you can dry multiple colours for a single action. Next is roasting, type C. You take all the cubes on a drying space. Again, its more efficient with multiple adjacent roasting spaces â you can take multiple colours for a single action. The final action (D) is deliver. A shop will show you what coffee they want, and the number of victory points that is worth. You can also deliver to your warehouse â but you canât stockpile coffee for a later delivery.
The number of actions you can take is shown by the number of coffee cups on your grid. Itâs a cool puzzle, itâs all about efficiency, trying to put action spaces together so you can produce/process multiple cubes. Good fun.
Bargain Hunter , first play. This is set collection/trick taking. From your initial hand, you select a card, and thats the value you need to collect for points, anything else is put in a junk pile. But after each round, you can go through your junk pile and select a card that you will be collecting from now on.
Black Spy first play. This is another trick taker, where all the black cards are worth points. The black spy cards are worth ten points. The object of the game is to have the lowest total.
Subastral , first play. Cards are laid out in six piles, numbered from one to six. You play a card from your hand in the correct pile (so a three goes into the third pile). Then you take all the cards from another pile. If the pile you choose is to the left of the pile you played into, then you add the cards into your hand. If you take a pile from the right of the original pile then you play the cards to your tableau. The object of the game is to have complete sets of cards (according to their type). But you canât change the order of your piles. You can only count a set up to the first gap in your cards. So I had a full set, but only had one card in my first pile, so I couldnât score anymore. You also score for cards of the same type, according to their position in the piles. I ended up with five cards in my sixth pile, so 30 points right there.
Wild Space , first play. This is such a quick game. You have five ships, and each ship can land on a planet tile, and then be moved to the top part of the same card. So, you only get ten actions. Each planet card has its own action, usually allowing you to draw cards or play a card. You want to chain as many actions as you can. Cards you play may also have actions you can do (like being able to add another card). Some cards are worth points, some give you end game points for meeting some criteria. The art is very cool.
The Key: Sabotage at Lucky Llama Land , always time for a quick game or three. Sabotaged my chance of winning by twice taking the wrong colour card. Actually, probably didnât make any difference. I think the winning score in the first game was 18, which is pretty good.
Fantasy Realms , quick game to finish up, won with 225
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Got a few games to the table this weekend.
Started with Orleans on Saturday with my wife, where I had my best score ever, coming in at 161 to her 107. I just kept being able to snatch up citizen tiles before she could, including squeezing in one more guildhall to exceed her total to win the last tile awarded at the end of the game. Plus I reached the end of the development track. It was a good game, though both of us had a couple of rounds where we just did not draw the right tokens to really accomplish anything.
Then today, we played Loony Quest for the first time. Pretty fun, and my wife has great spatial awareness and did wonderful at it, winning 33-28. Definitely feels like a game to bring out as a cool off after a bigger, main event style game. That, or a warm up for such a game.
After that, since the kids were being pretty chill, we played Takenoko, which we have not played in quite a while. Game seemed pretty close, as we both had a similar number of objective cards played, but I had more valuable ones. I would have played the 9th card to end the game in any case, but on my last turn I drew a Gardener card, which I was able to play immediately, and then go ahead and do my last action to play a Panda objective, giving me 10 completed cards, and also the Emperorâs binus card. I won, 49 - 37.
Decent weekend of gaming.
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I really love deduction games but I also found the base game of Chronicles of Crime (which I have been trying to get rid of for a while now) had the same issue. There are leaps you must take that are not deducable by logic. I felt like I was expected to either know certain tropes or play by âgut feelingâ which sucks. I havenât played any other Crime Solvers and this game lessened my desire to do so. I didnât hate it but I also didnât even want to finish the cases in the base game. And at least the original definitely has flaws where you can sometimes get clues without having found an earlier one that the clue should have depended on.
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I strangely really like this game, even tho it is just a simple push your luck game. It still feels satisfying when you win.
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I wouldnât be surprised if a new version gets released soon. The amount of people who got introduced to it via BGA is probably pretty high.
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canât make the leap of logic
My experience (with Chronicles of Crime 1400) was that making the leaps of logic didnât help much, because even if you had reasoned out who you thought the murderer was, unless you went to place A and did precisely thing B the game wouldnât recognise it. I found myself thinking more about how to tell the game I wanted to find X instead of deducing things about the case in my mind.
I still enjoy it though, and itâs an issue which hits a lot of other deduction games too.
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I am coming to the conclusion that there are different types of deduction games.
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One side are Social Deduction games mostly in the form of hidden role games where the input parameters are âsoftâ as in sometimes the most important information comes from clues like a player winking to another. Sure there can be some âhardâ deduction here that may take the form of âwe know we have a Poisoner and if we believe that the Empath is the Empath he must have been poisoned this or last round which lets us deduce thatâŚâ But for the most part these games allow for and even require leaps of intuition⌠because it is never a given that all the information necessary to solve the riddle is hard-coded into the game.
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At the other end one finds mathy games like Planet X or Cryptid which are more like Einsteinpuzzles. The types of input parameters are fixed and the answers you get are preciseâso much so that I have seen people trying to solve Cryptid like a sudoku (kind ofâŚ)
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Crime Solvers are somewhere between those 2 games. I would say cases usually have some kind of predefined structure that I as a player would expect to have all the information present for hard deduction. But apparently some of these games require those leaps of intuition. An added complication of Chronicles of Crime (and possibly others) is that it is not always easy to know wether you acquired all possible input parameters for the deductionâŚ
So while it is obvious that Werewolf-likes and puzzles like Planet X are not the same type of game, crime solvers seem to be falling into a grey area in the middle that is prone to leading to false expectations?
Obviously making a leap or taking a risky guess with incomplete information is something that can and will happen in all those games. Thatâs fine but I want to be aware that I am doing it. Ah it is so hard to explain what bugs me about the cases of Chronicles of Crime I playedâŚ
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Imperial Steam TOOT! TOOT! 
Same designer of Lignum, so I thought this game should, at the very least, lean on the positive side. It did. Set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (theme is incredibly irrelevant. I didnât even know the theme until we started playing). A lot of forward planning and good decisions. But, like Lignum, I donât find it to be that great to warrant it as a Kondo Keeper. Not enough player interaction. Interaction is mostly âI did this before you did, now you have to pay more ahahaâ. Too many mechanisms and not enough fun to justify it. âWhy not play a Splotter instead?â I thought as we clean up the game.
Played with @EnterTheWyvern We played:
Innovation - Me and Wyvern kept feeding the 3rd player. Unsurprisingly, he smashed the competition. Still had a great time.
Last Train to Wensleydale - been thinking more about this and concluded that I didnât like it. Felt that the options are transparent enough that players will know what to do once you went pass the interesting auction phase.
The City - another fast pace card-tableau from Lehmann. Itâs super fast, but even more solitaire than Race for the Galaxy and lacks strategic depth in comparison to Res Arcana with its Turn 0 drafting. Still, I thought it was fun and his games are pretty much the F1âs of the genre.
More Dinosaur Tea Party!!
Another tough game of Sumeria. I really prefer this at 4 players. But the others prefer it at 3.
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