I agree, not worth the effort
3 Likes
Thunderbirds were Go last night after a little persistence (nagging) from yours truly. She finds the creepy little buggers just intolerably ugly (they are), and so when I first asked if she wanted to play, I was met with âAww, gross. I thought that was just for you to solo?â (it mostly is). After some reassurance that it was just Pandemic with an emphasis on logistics, she relented, and we proceeded to lose badly.
We got off to a hot start, and The Hood wasnât ever much of an existential threat thanks to a slow reveal through disasters and never rolling him on the dice. Distance didnât matter much in the end, though, as we got nipped with an early event card that neutralized our player powers.
Those damned hypnotic eyes.
This wouldnât have been such a bear to knock off the track, except the flipside to our good fortune with The Hoodâs progress was an absolute nightmare on the disaster track. Within three turns we had threats requiring 6 unique Pod vehicles (only one of which had been constructed by that point), and we had just earned our third concurrent disaster in space. I had half the team up in TB5 (with TB3 docked and ready for a handy FAB card offering free travel), so we were poised to knock out all the threats in spaceâŚ
âŚexcept I made a brutal error that cost us. Thinking only about the movement action I would save next round by using my FAB card for a huge jump, I failed to consider using it for the single-space move up to the station. Had I done so, Iâd have had a spare action and been in the right position to use a SCAN that turn, sending our most imminent threat in Europe back a space.
This forced my partner to attempt the European disaster entirely unassisted, and with only two chances to succeed. She rolled a single one on her first attempt (plus a hood movement), and on her last attempt she rolled 7. With a +2 token it was a valiant effort, but a single point short of success.
The Hood wins today.
Moments before disaster strikes
6 Likes
Plyed a game called Queenz. Itâs about bees and flowers and making large areas of colour using polyominoes. Itâs fine. Itâs got a three kinds of scoring, all of which feel like viable priorities but its a bit too vanilla.
3 Likes
I love Thunderbirds - it was my first kickstarter (c2015). Doesnât come to the table enough but always a brain burner with very few wins!
4 Likes
Met @lalunaverde yesterday for some games and a friend joined us who hasnât played with us irl in ages due to covid fears around his close contact with an elderly family member.
We started back by easing D in with a game of The Great Zimbabwe. As always really good fun. Mr Verde played really well and got an inevitable win. My play was unfocussed and so there was not much pressure in the first player auction. D enjoyed his first game though so weâll easily get more games in and next one should be a touch more competitive.
Then we went nuts and got out 18NewEngland which on second play continues to delight. Itâs operational and seems like a bit of a blend of 1846 and 1861 but with itâs own twist of partial cap where shares cost market value but always put par value in to company. The mergers are reasonably interesting but the main twist is that at no point can majors be formed without mergers. I caught a break where I stole a company with cash to fund an 8E train in to my first major which snuck me victory as it kept me up on the double value jumps with all my main shares which out stripped, just, LLVs mid game hefty cash flow. Still a game Iâm eager to play, I do now want to go back to 1861 and 1846 to see some of the elements in this game again with the new perspective.
5 Likes
Every single one of those shows gave me the heebie jeebies. I watched them because I loved sci-fi and rocket ships and submarines and adventures; but the way those freakish things moved wigged me out big time. They were not right.
4 Likes
The Great Zimbabwe - Adopted the god that only gives me +1 VR whenever I take a technology, spammed craftsmen around the map for VPs, Wyvern exasperated âGah! I have to give money to you!â, and then win. This was one of the rare times where my strategy went really well on any game.
18New England - I really enjoyed this game. It follows the same design framework of merger games like 1861: The Railways of the Russian Empire. But this one seem shorter and with improvements that I like. First, itâs easy to push the game to Phase 3 without slowing down the game and you have literally zero decisions for a number of rounds.
The cap rules are very interesting , no doubt this was done to kneecap the snowballing effect that is usually seen in these ârun good companiesâ games.
The vast improvement this one has is the fact that players can still run minor companies on mid and late game. Small rule change, but it opened this interesting avenue for players. This gives players two distinct ways of earning cash:
1.) running minor companies, which you only have 1 certificate on your limit, yet they give 50% to you and 50% to the company (standard minor company rules). This gives significant dividends, but no increase in share value. By the end of our game, I was earning far more in that one share than anything in that game. (I decided not to convert this one, while everyone does converted theirs to majors)
2.) Major companies that works like your standard company of 10 shares but requires you to handle more paper than minors but they appreciate value the higher they are on the market track. Only having a few shares initially so your companies will keep earning money to itself, then pivot to owning a lot as you want to ramp up its value in the market.
One can go strongly on one or the other or a mix of both. The addition of the end game criteria of reaching the end of the market track is interesting, in theory, because a player can try to rush a company to the max value on the market, ending the game, before the other players can play long term. Interesting in theory because havenât seen it in action.
The other title that Scott Petersen have done was 18Chesapeake, which I thought was a good intro, but ultimately not as âfun carnageâ as 1830 or 1882:Assiniboia. But 18New England is something I will see myself returning again.
6 Likes
So 18New England (not to be confused with 18NE it seems), looks like it might be might type of 18XX
5 Likes
Scott Petersen in the latest AAG news letter announced a cut down version designed to work well for 2 players that also goes up to 4 is on the way. Same rules but smaller map and less companies. Iâm quite interested in that one but also wanted to mention it here in case that would suit even more.
3 Likes
Iâve been getting a few games of Mice & Mystics in with the family. Just about a year ago I tried it out with my daughter, but she bounced off it a bit, struggling with concentrating fully over the required game length. However, I did leave the box around for her to play with the components and made up other ways to play with the various pieces. Sheâs now just turned six, and asked about playing the game properly over the Christmas holidays, and it went down a storm. It looks like playing a chapter of the campaign will be a regular weekend feature for the next couple of months, probably longer if we break out the expansion content.
Super pleased about this, as the game was originally purchased with an eye towards future family play.
7 Likes
Yesterday, after about a year, we finished our Pandemic 2 Legacy campaign with a an early December win. Yay. We did it. We saved the worldâagain.
One of my characters decided to be a carrier, her sacrifice will be remembered. We did get a bit lucky here with the finale because in Novemberâafter losing we were able to utilize events and brought in the one that allows a sea route to cross red lines and we built one from Jakarta to Shanghai. Also we had many many games ago built a permanent âHospitalâ in Johannesburg. So all we had to do was send enough cards to my character to get through the 4 red cities on the way, build one more land route between Kalkutta and New Mumbai and survive 3 more rounds.
Hereâs an image of our final map (definitely SPOILERS!)
As for the US, weâre sorry but we turned the US into a wasteland (early campaign spoilers, mid campaign should be fine)
Our overall score was on the upper end because with our final points we were able to revitalize the cities we lostânot that manyâwe spent a good chunk of our cards this game on preventing any outbreaks and quite a few actions luring the zombies away from our cities and concentrating them where we could afford to. We made a few mistakes strewn across all the games but I assume most people do. We strove to correct them where we couldâŚ
I am quite impressed by this second iteration as well. It is of course different from the first. The evolution of the ruleset felt a bit smoother here. There were a few twists that almost broke us in the first campaignâand yet maybe we were expecting them here.
A few things in our strategy that really paid off were (still putting it in spoiler tags but if you have played PL 1, none of what follows is entirely new)
- preventing our characters from gaining scars.
- building permanent structures
- playing with mostly the same characters for the whole campaignâwe had 5 overall that were in regular use and we spent the gains from one full game on giving the 5th one enough abilities to be able to replace one.
A PL2 specific tip I got from someone when we were struggling in the early months was to focus on searching which was very valuable.
Overall great game but the final games became rather tense. Didnât help that we had several months break between playing October and the finale. We already have PL0 but this will need to wait a bit. I night something a bit lighter for our next campaign, so My City is up.
3 Likes
After the New Year break and my last weekend away camping, I had not gone to Monday Night Games this year yet. So caught up yesterday, big time.
First played The Bloody Inn between 3, which was fun. I had an early sort of lead, and managed to kill an bury a fat level 3 gunman that gave me plenty of cash, but I could no manage to bag a good annex, and that gave the edge to the final winner, as on the final round I had to bury the last corpse in his shed, and split the cash with him. He managed to win by having more bodies buried, with the same final money as me.
Then we went on to Machi Koro 2. Sweet little game, it can be very satisfactory getting the cards to earn you money. What impressed me more was the coins, that being made of plastic, had a sort of metallic sound to them.
Then we went up in player number to play Bristol 1350. We were 6, and I was really lucky to start in the lead. With a start hand of 5 (6 of more on your two cards in your hand and you get the plague) I was really struggling to get good remedies to swap cards. I caught the plague half way up the road, but because our cart was always in the lead, we were everybodyâs target. The second half of the game was a series of hilarious pushes, shoves and jumps. We managed to break away a great distance on the birch wagon, and win with only two people left in the wagon, and everybody else on the oak wagon (ours was birch). The funniest thing was when the cedar wagon that was empty started to catch up with us as nobody was giving the monkeys about it and we kept rolling red apples to move it forward. So when we finally got out and the other cart failed to leave the city, my cart companion says: you know what, we lost too, I just got the plague on the last stretch when we were forced to mingle, to which I replied laughing: Iâve been ill since way back to our second mingle! To what the whole table burst out laughing. So nobody won; well, the plague did.
Then we had 40 minutes to spare and we played 3 games of Werewords, at which I did terrible, Werewolves won the first, I got spotted as the Seer on the second, and as a Werewolf we failed to spot the Seer on the last one.
3 Likes
Stop that. Thatâs our job!
6 Likes
Iâve always liked this game. I think this is succinct about itâs merits. Itâs got itâs flaws in some ways but itâs thrills and spills are just fun.
2 Likes
I got to play Spirit Island tonight! Not solo!
I set up the game before my friend arrivedâshe had specifically requested we find time to play the game sooner rather than later.
Since this was only her 2nd game, I decided we would still play without any complications from Prussia or Sweden. I let her choose the spirits though. Everything âvery highâ still seemed a no-go, she took one look at Finder of Paths Unseen and concurred.
In the end, she chose a combo of Oceans Hungry Grasp for herself and I had to play Lure of the Deep Wilderness. I had only played the latter once and didnât remember much how it worked.
It took us 5 rounds to a solid win by destroying the final cities and villages.
I think while the two spirits complement each other wellâone handles inland, the other coastsâthey do not synergize that much. The most synergy we got was that I got 2 energy from one of Oceanâs powers twice which allowed me to grow my card playing ability instead of energy generation and gave me the room to get a major power in round 4 which I got to play in round 5.
Playing Lure was great fun though, they put out beast, badlands and wilderness tokens like throwing candy during Karneval parade. I neglected to take a picture but the board ended up looking like a wilderness with all those tokens. It helped me clear one boardâs inland part by round 3 so we only had to make it so Ocean could drown everything at the coasts. So Lure only had to convert a couple of villages into explorersâwhat a nice abilityâand: game over for the invaders.
7 Likes
Funny you should mention that.
The Stars Are Right first (I did say âdoes anyone really dislike spatial puzzle gamesâ before I got it out). Something of a nostalgia trip for me; I used to demo this for SJGames and itâs one of my favourite games of that era, but I can see its problems â in particular, a bit like Alien Frontiers, you canât really plan your turn much before your turn actually starts. (The other problem is easily fixed: when someone hits 10+ points, rather than stopping instantly, finish the round, and if the lead players are tied play another round.)
Then Red Dragon Inn, very random, very take-that, but one of the other players likes it a lot and it wasnât terrible.
5 Likes
Sat down for session 5 of Roll Player Adventures to discover that weâre missing a key component. We left on a pretty massive cliffhanger, so hereâs hoping Thunderworks comes through with a quick replacement.
7 Likes
And they were! Less than an hour and a replacement is in the mail, and a digital version in my inbox.
Dang, Thunderworks!
9 Likes
Just wrapped up a game of Ethnos with my wife, using Halflings, Centaurs, Minotaurs, Orcs, and Giants.
First age we were very close, both finishing in the mid 30âs or so, and I needed to use 4 Orc markers to pull ahead of her by 6.
Second age went my way, however, as I managed to pull ahead in some key regions, and managed to deploy more and larger bands overall than she did. I won, 117 - 98, and thinking about it, I may not have scored my 5 point Giant tokenâŚ
Good game. Both of us struggled to get a large enough band to place claim markers as the game neared the end.
7 Likes
âUncanny valleyâ, the tendency of people to react poorly to things that look almost, but not quite, human.
Want to lose sleep at night? Then just think about the fact that most things that give us that âheebie jeebieâ feeling are evolutionary adaptations to protect us: poisonous or venomous insects, injuries and sickness, etc⌠etc⌠and then realize that at some point in our evolution we encountered something that looked almost, but not quite, human, and that it was enough of a persistent threat that we now have the Uncanny Valley reaction.
Who needs sleep anyway?
3 Likes