Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Boardgames
4511

I taught my partner Blitz Bowl yesterday, words I definitely never expected to type. I think she must’ve taken some pity on me for all the two-handed “solo” play I’ve needed to endure with my scrappy games. She kicked my butt, though I called the game early thinking I had lost even before she got her final turn; I actually would have had another turn to close it out, but very little chance I’d manage a win anyway.

I’m sure the victory helped a little, but she enjoyed it! I think she appreciated that the fighting was softened somewhat by the sport dressing, and I was pretty sure she was going to like the round-by-round tactics of the crowd cards.

This comes as a bit of a double-edged sword though, as our game took a whopping two-and-a-half hours (with teach and a major night-long interruption)! :grimacing: I’m sure with a little more familiarity she’ll understand she can’t (and shouldn’t) Bobby Fischer every single action in the game, but with her being AP-prone already, it may not be one that sees a ton of play with her. We’ll see, it was still a blast and a learning game (well outside her comfort zone), after all.

7 Likes
4512

Had another round of BGA games with some Toronto-based friends.

Played a couple rounds of LLAMA (which, apparently, has officially been renamed Don’t LLAMA). The start was slow, but after a round everyone caught on. Still just a better version of Uno, but some actual strategy (albeit limited). Mostly luck-dominated, but that’s okay occasionally.

Then we tried another game of Go Nuts for Donuts, much to my surprise. The player who, on turn 2, loudly proclaimed that they hated the game ended up victorious. Interesting note: First place failed to get a card 9 times, second and third place were tied at 11 failures, and the last two spots both had 13 failures. Probably not coincidental? I still fail to see much strategy in the game, but again, sometimes that’s okay.

4 Likes
4513

I took my usual selection of “heavy” games along, spent the morning playing unsatisfying simple games, and taught a guy Innovation who hated it.

Then, to my surprise, someone asked to play Napoleon’s Triumph! First outing for this game, played way faster than I expected. He called it “a wargame for dummies” and made the usual Stratego comparison, but then “very simple but also very complex” and after the game ended he resolved to watch a YouTube video to figure out how to play better.

9 Likes
4514

Put this on the Family Crest! It’s the refrain for every Chudyk fan.

In other news, a bit of a Knizia post. Recently got both Blue Lagoon and Babylonia in.

Blue Lagoon was… ok? Hard to say after one play. The upside was it was eminently teachable, especially across a language divide which was the situation. Only one rule failed to make it through the English to Taiwanese wall. We all want to play again. It’s a situation where I was having fun even while nursing a suspicion that I was playing something subpar. I think there’s no tension simply because everything gives points and there’s no way to block everything. So yes,you’re trying to accomplish a specific goal, and someone may block you, but you just go do something else equally valuable.

Scoring was hell, and you do it twice.

But I lost, and spent some time thinking about the game after, so that suggests there’s more here to find. Yet I suspect that what Blue Lagoon does, Babylonia does better, and I’ll only keep it around for that ease of teaching variable (same was San Juan sticks around despite the dominant Race for the Galaxy).

Babylonia was another good time. I played with my parents, which is always nice. And in an unspoken compliment, they turned into a team game where I would go, then they would spend five minutes discussing how to coordinate blocking me.

I’m impressed, as always, with how much game comes out of the slender Knizia rules. And new wrinkles always come out - they really leveraged the “tied cities score no points for anyone” to discard way more cities than I’d seen before, just to deprive me. It was a clever take.

Not quite clever enough, though, as I comfortably won. I think they spent too much of their resources defensively, and it’s just not that type of game.

3 Likes
4515

It does seem like that, but there is depth. But I’m not sure how much effort you can give until it stops giving back as I have sold it a while ago.

3 Likes
4516

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Martian Dice It’s dumb, It’s fun. Better than HeckMeck in some ways worse in others.

6 Likes
4517

Played a few games of Mandala with my girlfriend winning 2-1 overall. We hadn’t played this for a while, but it always amazes how much game is packed in to such a basic design. It’s very more-ish. After one game we were both saying “wow, I forgot how good this was”.

A couple of quick games of Star Realms . Similar to Mandala in that it had been a long time since we had played it and again it packs a surprisingly good punch for a small box. I had bought a lot of the extra cards for this, but reducing it back to the base Frontiers box seemed to improve the game somewhat. I won both games we played, though they were incredibly close.

Another game of War of Whispers, which continues to impress. I can’t wait to play this at 3 or 4 players. There can be quite big swings back and forth with two, and oddly in the game we the net impact on the board was to almost reset it to how it started. By the end maybe only one or two cities had changed hands, perhaps proving the futility of war.

Last but not least was our first two player playthrough of Clank in space. I enjoy deck builders and loved how El Dorado combined this with a board and movement. I was a little wary that Clank might end up being a little too similar. Although mechanically it shares similarities, the arc of the game felt very different. A lot of fun for a first playthrough. My girlfriend is often on the fence with any new game but she really enjoyed this. My greed got the better of me, so rather than escaping the ship I stuck around for one round to many and ended up losing out on the 20 points for escaping the ship. Thus handing her the win. Look forward to getting this to the table again soon.

8 Likes
4518

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary. Normally, one thing we would do to celebrate is go to a local pizza parlor which has an offer for a free small pizza, two salads and two drinks for your anniversary, take a few games and just enjoy a bit of time away from home. This year, in addition to pandemic, we have superjaz’s tonsillectomy recovery, so that just wasn’t happening.

However, we did play a game of The Red Cathedral last night as an anniversary game. We were really close throughout the game, and at the end it looked like I had just squeezed out a win, but then remembered she got 3 PP for ending the game, which jumped her ahead of me, 32 - 30.

16 Likes
4519

Hearty congratulations on your anniversary, dear Maestro and Jaz of the Super variety (may she heal quickly)! Many more ahead I hope!

6 Likes
4520

We’re continuing to have a lot of fun with Roll Player Adventures. It’s done a great job as a family RPG, as there are most often non-violent options to resolve the conflicts. The dice mitigation tools are simple enough for the younger kids to get it, and the story has been pretty clever so far.

2 Likes
4521

One of our usual virtual Iron Dragon players was out so instead me and my wife played A Feast For Odin. Always a wonderful time. My hunting rolls left some to be desired but after the first round I kept getting swords from the weapon deck so I decided to be a violent guy instead. Got the English crown, which fit perfectly on my newly obtained Labrador. I was rolling in bonuses, but wood and stone was an issue for me throughout the whole game.

4 Likes
4522

In a fit of nostalgia, my wife and I broke out Kero yesterday for a couple of games. Hadn’t played in a couple of years. It’s a fun little game, lots of random chance and a bit of stress involved since it’s real-time.

2 Likes
4523

Played more So Clover. I changed my mind in regards to Just One. Both have their strengths. I’m happy to keep both

Age of Steam with the Germany map, 4 players - oh boy. This is one of the best games I had of AoS. Germany seems to be better than the Rust Belt. Eager to play more with this map and also the France map too.

Paris: La Cite de la Lumiere

Brian Boru - trick taking with area control. I really had a tough and fun time playing this. Eager to play more.

Dreadful Circus - a double blind bidding game where players offer their bid blind, but the auctioneer have to look at them one by one - once you open a box, you have to make a decision there to pass or accept. Intriguing that you can play well on which box to open first. Perhaps the best Bruno Faidutti game I’ve seen so far. The art and theme is also very charming to me.

3 Likes
4524

I take it you didn’t think much of it?

1 Like
4525

The Germany map is crazy with the extra costs for the big cities

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4526

Played Pax Pamir 2 on TTS last night. 3 players. It was my third or fourth play but first for ages. The other two both own it but had never played. Still got done in just over 2 hours - I reckon familiarity and playing in person would shave 45 minutes off that.

I think it’s an excellent game with lots of different paths to victory. I don’t think I’d buy it, but it’s very cheap (£40) at Zatu at the moment

1 Like
4527

There’s stuff I like and don’t like. I don’t hate it.

2 Likes
4528

I played a couple of games of Paper Dungeons last night and this morning, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit! Ostensibly I’m doing the “campaign”, although that doesn’t amount to much more than a little flavour text at the top of a session, and a grand prize for most points by the end (rendered moot playing solo). You lose out on the little competitive touches by playing solo, but a forced variant and special rules for events means that you still have a few incentives to race.

This is a good one. The game is hardly thematic by dungeon crawler standards, but the basic setup (four heroes go a-dungeoning) goes a really long way to informing your choices and keeping the usual “shrinking checklist” feeling of most roll and writes in check. This is a nice alternative to Fleet Dice for when I want a quick go but don’t want to melt my brain working out the perfect choices.

1 Like
4529

And here I thought it looked much like the game title implied :stuck_out_tongue:
Is it any similar to Sheriff of Nottingham. I never played that one, I just seem to remember that it included envelopes being passed and either opened or not…

And I really really need to pick up so “So Kleever” (Klee = Clover, Klever = clever). Especially since community votes imply it can be “played” with 2. I assume it becomes an activity then rather than a game. But the idea is just so…

2 Likes
4530

I treated myself to a 2 handed learning game for my new arrival…. Long overdue: Petrichor.

This game is absurdly pretty. So so so pretty.

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Early first round, no expansions, setup for 2 players.

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Close-up of a thundercloud over a field of wheat.

I played terribly bad. I forgot that I could use 2 identical cards as a joker.

Game is played over 4 or 6 rounds in which players take turns, playing cards for either 1 or 2 actions. There are 4 actions in the base game: create a cloud, grow a cloud, move a cloud and rain a little bit. Clouds that merge or become big become thunderclouds (took me ages to figure out what that meant).

After each action you get to vote on the weather that will be resolved at the end of the round. Alternatively, you can spend your vote to reduce one of the harvest dice by a pip. If all three show the harvest symbol, at the end of the round the harvest phase takes place.

The board is made up of random tiles. Most tiles in the base game have simple majority scoring when they are harvested and they need a minimum amount of water drops on them to be “growing”.

End of the round weather happens. As with the four types of actions, there are 4 types of weather with different effects.

I really enjoyed the flow of it. There is some depth to the strategy, I would have said the weight is a bit below what BGG suggests (3.0) but I haven’t seen that much of the game and my left hand lost badly against right-hand. (I always focus on left hand as I am left-handed, so basically I lost)

Looking forward very much to trying the Turczi solo mode as much as I dislike automas, I am glad there is one. I think I can get people to play this. The base game doesn’t have that many rules. It doesn’t feel AP inducing while still giving you enough options—but I am always surprised by what makes people go into AP mode.

And of course I need to try the 3 expansions (Flowers, Bees and farting Cows—there is methane in that expansion) and all the promo tiles. There’s a vulcano!

Edit: oh and the rulebook for the CE is done very nicely with color coded sections for the expansions… very easy to learn just what you need!

7 Likes