We played some llamaland. It’s got a lot of rules and it’s not that exciting to play. Blah.
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I didn’t think Llamaland was that rules heavy but now that you said it, it took me a while to teach last Saturday… I thought it was because one player was distracted.
My biggest gripe in the multiplayer is that it takes too long for my turn to come around again and I am so not interested in what the others are doing.
PS: My copy is not on the sell-stack atm but it may yet get there in one of the next waves of clean up–when I decide which and how many family games I want to keep to play with friends (and their kids) casually. I think the puzzle in Miyabi is preferable (also stacking of polyminoes). Canvas is prettier. Flourish has more interaction. Cascadia (which I don’t own at this point) is just a better game. I keep thinking one day a game by PWH will agree with me more (other than Sushi Go–I had not realized that was him).
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Played some Targi digitally. It’s decent
Currently playing some Castles of Burgundy digitally. Forgot how much I enjoy it, I’ve sold it twice but am tempted to get it a third time.
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I agree that all of those games are better.
When I say lots of rules I mean kind of the lots of little rules - like how each scoring is different plus there’s about five powers.
I havenot played miyabi in a while but it’s a real good one.
I think Gingerbread house by Walker-Harding is a lot better even though they have a similar feel.
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Now I want to make a Pick-a-Path book/game using card drafting.
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Coming to the end game and now I remember why I sold it.
It’s good but very low interaction
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After Sunday’s game of 1870 I’m much more enamoured of it than @lalunaverde. While it’s true the train rush isn’t full of danger in terms of bankruptcy I don’t think it’s any less dangerous for your victory chances and has to be more bloated with the cash influxes. The timing of everything is very different, the cross investing is interesting, the map and tile set are both brutal. Company dumping may well be an oddity in this game. It doesn’t appear to have such an easy way to kill off a company for a newer one due to the time it takes to develop your routes. This is for sure a slow burn game, real strategic tendrils unfurling across multiple rounds. I also like the sort of non permanent 5 trains. To rust them is a stretch but maybe that’s necessary if someone has loads. They can generate some real strong income for their cost so they’re immense but do have an odd potential weakness. Definitely solves a lot of the problems around 4 trains in most 18xx games. Possibly could be my favourite title so far.
Played 3 round of Spirit Island yesterday all against the Hapsburg Monarchy. Started out at level 4 which was defeated by Many Minds Move as One and Volcano Looming High. Level 4 is quite the jump up but we got there in about the third 3 with a fear victory. Managing all their towns and they they zip around the board is quite the head ache. Next Heart if the Wildfire and Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds crushed level 5 Hapsburg utterly. First 3 card for the invaders saw no buildings left and we won still at terror level 2. With some string defence majors this proved pretty straight forward. I also think the fast slow spirit combo saw many issues snuffed out early and mitigated by both spirits having blight removal so we could run the blight high comfortably. After such a rousing victory we crashed to defeat against level 5 with Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble and Shroud of Silent Mist we were really close. I made a mistake at the end of killing volume rather than a city which meant we were one damage away from killing all the cities before we got blight cascaded to death a turn later. Also if I’d had a sacred on the board we’d have got away with it.
I really like Grinning Trickster. The gambling element is quite fun and there’s some solid combos of powers and innate that can really juice up their effectiveness. Managing that with your advancement is pretty knife edge. I think this game I benefitted from a chunk of extra powers that gave out beasts and strife so it all comboed swimmingly. I’ll blame my booster jab tiring me for that late lapse 
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Some 2p action today. Played Cooper Island , where you send your boats around your island, and eventually another players. You place terrain tiles, collect resources, create various buildings and statues. It was very very tight, and I did very very badly. Can’t say I really enjoyed it, but it was my mates game, so happy to play it with him.
Then we played a couple of games of Aeons End , just the base game. I’ve gone off deck builders a bit, but I thought a cooperative deck builder might be fun. And it was! So, you spend your turn casting spells you prepared the last turn (spells are played to breach tiles initially). And you have gem and relic cards to play as well. You generate energy each turn (ok, it’s called aether) which allows you to buy cards from the market. You cast spells to damage the big bad, while of course trying not to die. We won our first game against the basic bad guy, but then lost to a harder foe. Both games were a lot of fun, looking forward to more games.
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Had an office outing in a board game café yesterday evening (Level One/The Loft in Ottawa), great experience, great selection, good food, all in all a good time.
Played Coup for the first time, it was a lot of fun with six players! Lost, but that never mattered. Wouldn’t buy it because it can’t be played with just two players, but otherwise it’s great.
Also What Do You Meme, basically Cards Against Humanity but with memes. It was… Eh. Kinda funny at times, but I wouldn’t buy it because it wasn’t much fun.
Finally, played Catan for the first time, really really good, but again, not playable with two players. Too bad, I really enjoyed it. Won, too! Beginner’s luck!
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I think there were two player lockdown rules they released but never tried them to say if they work.
1846: Race to the Midwest - This is me realising Stockholm Syndrome in action. This game has Tom Lehmann’s fingerprints all over. It is strategic and it is a tense race (like that Lehmann card game that starts with “Race”). And it’s not my style. At all. At the start, at least.
It lacks the shifting of shares that is so common place on most games like 1830. The stock holding play is more akin to Imperial/Imperial 2030. Before you buy that share, you have to consider the short term implications and long term implications. How much share value and hard cash you’ll get out of it. How much benefit/damage will the company director get due to you buying this. With the certain difference to Imperial that you can still sell this share if a better one can be obtain in the future, in lieu of this one. (You’ll face such choice as you are limited due to cash and shares limit).
The track lay and station tokening is still cutthroat and WILL hurt feelings. (I know. I’ve been there. This game still makes me upset but that’s why I keep playing) and I still get blind-sided by competent players.
Aside from 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties, this is the most “Euro-y” with its snowbally gameplay, that this is what I will recommend if you want to stay on the “Euro-esque” side of the 18xx genre, despite the fact that 1846 and 1862 are so different to mainstream 18xx - which is precisely the point. It’s City of the Big Shoulders but without the BS gameplay (COTBS consists of 90% BS gameplay. 10% actual decisions. I may be exaggerating here…). But this is not an efficiency game though. It’s not about getting a company and be the most efficient player by mastering the game’s rule system. It is about the careful choice of where do you put your money? And if you do sell, when do you sell?
I am getting tired of 1830 (and its derivatives) of this classic old trick - someone invest on your upstream company with 20% or more. You asset strip it to your downstream company. And then dump that upstream company to them. Company dumping in 1846 is rare and situational. I still play 1830-esque titles because it’s fun thinking about timing issues. Which are the right shares do you need to hold at the right time as the train rush makes things so mind meltingly difficult? This is where 1846 avoids this problem but it can still happen if someone manage to control 2 companies.
This game offers something that cannot be seen anywhere, not even within the genre itself. I joke to myself how it’s like how Winston Smith smiles at the last chapter how he end up loving Big Brother. After countless of plays of this game that wasn’t my taste to begin with. 1846 won. I love 1846.
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Into the Blue - this is a fun filler Knizia dice chucking game with area majority - becasue it’s a Knizia, it needs an old school core design like area majority or auctions. Trying to roll dice 3 times to get what you want is really fun. Celebrations happen when someone makes a perfect dive. Good fun but not as good as…
Rumble Nation - El Grande in 30 minutes. Holy camoly. It’s dice chucking fun with area majority. That sounds basic, until you resolve the war phase and see how the hilarious cascade effect rule happens. When a player wins, they add TWO cubes on EVERY adjacent regions where they have a cube at least.
Dragon Boats of the Four Seas - I only bought this because it was by Michael Schacht. It was fine. I think I can start ignoring his stuff from now on. Coloretto, Web of Power/Han/Iwari, Spirits of the Forest, and Hansa will continue to stay in my collection.
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HELLO you have my attention.
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Actually, there are two player rules for Coup, which my wife and I played quite a bit in the past. It was okay, but definitely not as good as with more players though.
Ah, thank you for the information! It might be interesting for those occasions when there are more of us…
Mercado de Lisboa. It’s… alright
Abstract puzzle game with no direct interaction. Pretty simple and plays in well under 30 minutes. It has a fantastic insert.
Interested in how it plays with 3 or 4. But it’s not as good as Innovation (just about a filler imo) or The Field of the Cloth of Gold with 2 players or as Race for the Galaxy with 3 or 4.
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Quick aside: there is a two-player variant on Catan called Rivals for Catan (there was also a sci-fi version called Starship Catan that was superior IMO, but out of print for five-ever so I wouldn’t bother. It wasn’t much better, but it was a little better).
Rivals wasn’t necessary the greatest game ever, but it was a good, honest interpretation of Catan for 2 players. You get rid of the big hex board and each players has a line of “tiles” (technically square cards, whatever) that represent “your” part of the island. It’s not as cutthroat or aggressive as ye olde Catan, but there is a fair amount of interaction, the game doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it feels like Catan in a lot of ways (not least of which is the dice, a little sprinkle of random throughout the game). Also, if you don’t buy the (totally idiotic and pointless) “Deluxe” edition, it’s pretty affordable… I think we sell it for $26.99 CAD? Thereabouts.
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Ah, I THOUGHT I’d seen a two-player version, thanks for confirming I wasn’t hallucinating!
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I got my inaugural game of Seal Team Flix in this morning, running the first scenario as a standalone mission, using two SEALs. I wasn’t really up for a bigger session, but I wanted some kind of payoff after the effort made to get it all built and glued, so a quick game over coffee was in order. I do intend to use the campaign system for it once I get rolling for real, though.
It’s fun! I think once I can internalize the lengthy turn structure it’ll flow really nicely. The manual was a bit of a slog, but the designers seem to have put a lot of thought into the ruleset insofar as it’s comprehensive, but free of bloat and entirely in service of smooth AI handling. I had the manual nearby, but actually consulted it very little thanks to a detailed (and dense!) player aid on the back of the book, bless their souls.
I’m quite happy with the results of my assembly process. I took the time over a few days to get the maps together and set the walls with glue, and weighted them while they dried. All six turned out nicely flat (particularly compared to the warped mess I received upon opening), and the whole game is sitting beautifully in the box without any lift or need for the insert. Importantly (critically!) the maps aren’t spinning or sliding during use anymore, especially atop my playmat.
It’s an easy game to set up and tear down, so I expect to get a lot of use out of it over the coming weeks, as the really deep rainy months set in.
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Had our first full game of Mind MGMT, and the changes tipped it over to the Recruiter (my wife) winning, after the agents won both of our second set of training games. The full game feels more, well, full. Seems slightly more balanced. I think I definitely had a chance, but I may have busted my Black Ops Dolphin a little too early, and I wanted to try the Psychic Crosshairs power one of the agents has when I should have taken the chance to capture. I did manage a successful Shakedown, which was very exciting, and that really made me think that the agent that lets you do extra movement is probably the most powerful of the 4 (although the Immortal Recruitment blocking man did buy me some time).
I’m excited to play again, especially now that we opened the first Shift box for the agents. The little comic inside it is my favorite comic bit in the whole game so far. Kinda making me want to read the original!
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If I rightly remember the box cover from the SUSD coverage, this is the team that gives No Flix.
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