Yeah, I love that.
And it’s fine! Because it’s not like there’s myths all over the world about non-human beings who steal children / look human but go back to the sea when you break an oath not to discover their true identity / hide in the forests / are dangerous in some way. So that’s okay.
I had already sharks for that. But thanks for the info.
I ended up two-handing a game of Tsukuyumi over the weekend to get a better handle on how it plays, and promptly put it up for sale. It’ll be going out tonight.
I didn’t hate it or anything—far from it, I think there’s a lot to like! But this is the type of game that needs a champion if it ever expects to see the table, and I’m not the guy for the job. The mental gymnastics of working out the no-luck combat “feature” was a slog for me, and I didn’t find anything about the process engaging, in spite of some really novel elements. It’s going to come down to a matter of taste, I’m sure, but this isn’t how you handle perfect information in a troops-on-a-map game, in my opinion.
I quite enjoyed just about everything else the game had to offer, but when I’ve got a major issue with the combat in a combat game, I’ve got a major issue with the game. And being honest, this no-luck BS can get out of town anyway; lemme roll some dice and let fate handle the uncertainties. Anyway, it wouldn’t be going out quite so fast but it’s one monster box and my shelves are heaving.
[EDIT] I played a couple of sessions of Mini Rogue after waking up in the wee hours of the morning and almost forgot to log them. My first session was on the Tower side, and I won by the skin of my teeth with the Cleric. The second was with a Wizard in the Dungeon, and I succumbed to starvation on floor 3 (area 6). I was making good progress on this one, particularly with XP, but I got nipped with poison early on and never had a chance to shake it, and I couldn’t scrounge food to save my life (literally, I suppose!).
I’m having a nice time with this one, and am super happy with myself for spending the extra for the lore expansion. I’m caught wondering how you classify an expansion like this, though. It’s utterly superfluous (though does add more tests, I suppose), not at all essential, and yet as an owner of it I would never conceive to play without it, and rated it 10/10 on BGG.
Played 6 player Keyflower on BGA last night. It was my first real time play, having had a couple of frustrating experiences playing it async.
Essentially there is an auction for worker placement spaces which can also be activated during the auction. There are 3 colours (plus an occasional 4th) in play and once a colour has been placed on a tile it locks it to that colour. Everyone has a secret amount of meeples (different amounts as well in the later stages) so sometimes you could bag a tile for 1 whereas some went for 5.
Tiles you win go into your tableau (village) we can be used by you and other players in subsequent rounds (seasons).
It was fantastic. Lots of getting in each others’ way, lots of sneaky bidding and loads of different stuff going on. It’s such a clever system. I’d thoroughly recommend it as an high player count, crunchy euro with a decent amount of player interaction. 4 new players (and 2 who needed a rules refresh) and we were done in 90 minutes.
I often describe Keyflower as the best design of all games in my collection. So many clever interlocking systems, still smooth play, has breadth and depth. Amazing euro. The only mark I find against it sometimes is it’s quite an aggressive game in a way I’m sometimes not in the mood for. Glad you enjoyed it. I would note though that it plays well at all player counts.
How are you finding Ethnos with 2 ?
I’ve only played it at higher counts, and I’ve always been very dubious about whether my partner would consider this one, but tbh I think along the way I’d forgotten 2 players was even an option.
Keyflower is fantabulous 
But it sucks if you play on BGA Async 
Whoowasit? - a kids game (Knizia did a lot of kids games) where I really enjoyed the experience. It is a roll & move deduction game of deducing who is the villain before the time runs out. The gadget that works as the moderator is fun. Game-wise, I thought it was meh. There’s no direction even on the deduction aspect. Yet the experience was very fun. And any kind of dice chucking is fun! The kids that I showed it to are very happy to keep it. And I’m so glad they enjoyed it.
So Clover
Tzolkin + Tribes & Prophesies - I thought this game would be meh to me after a few years. But no, I still enjoy it. The tightness of the decision of whether to put or remove workers is still interesting and frustrating. Tzolkin remains impenetrable to me. Will keep and play more.
Billabong - easily one of the best games I’ve play this year. Simple abstract game. Very much like a variant of checkers. But it is a race between teams of Kangaroos around a billabong!! You can only move one of your own Kangaroo by jumping over another one (regardless of ownership). But the jump has to be equidistant(?)
Example: Kangaroo 1 will jump over Kangaroo 2 and then Kangaroo 3. X is the only place it can go when it jumps over K2 and then jumps to y over K3.
x - - - K2 - - - K1
|
K3
|
y
You can move that Kangaroo, as many as you like. And so it results on a lot of clever moves. It’s also a game where the team has to carry the entire team, as you can only win by crossing all of them to the finish line. So if one of yours lags behind, they’ll have a hard time advancing as there will be fewer kangaroos to jump over.
Maskmen - another Oink game. The previous time I played it, we struggled with the awfully written rules that we gave up on trying to learn it. But reading up on BGG where people posted their simplified rules made me give Maskmen another chance. And it is a very good shedding game. The way that the suits have no inherent hierarchy between each other and it is only determined during the game is pretty fun. Will play more of it to see if the game has longevity.
Rrrats - Knizia push your luck dice rolling. Similar to Zombie Dice. Given away.
Including at two players? Because that game sounds fascinating.
Sorry, not awake yet: I’m talking about Keyflower.
Yeah it is a good 2 player game. There is a caveat though. As most 2 player games are zero sum this is it’s most competitive and cutthroat player count.
Anything with an auction is terrible async I think
It works, but is not ideal. The game length is about the same since you only use five tribes instead of six and only play 2 ages, same as 3 player, but that also lessens the overall options available to you.
The biggest change, of course, is that to place a control marker, you need to play a band that is larger than the combined total of markers already present in the region, not just your own, which means as the game progresses it gets a lot harder to place a marker. There’s also no score for second place in a region during the second age, so region control can be a bit more important in that age.
The increased restriction on placing control markers can be a bit frustrating, as if you are tied with your opponent at 3 markers each in a high scoring region, you need a band of 7 cards to place a marker, which is really hard to do with a hand limit of 10 cards. The Merfolk board helps with this, but they aren’t in every game. Beyond that, though, it’s still Ethnos and still fun, but I definitely prefer the game with more players.
What did you think about it? Jeremy Howard gave it high praise, and I am into getting another party game…
I like it. I kept both So Clover and Just One
Dinosaur Island: Rawr & Write - I found myself in a table that has a roll & write game being setup. HELP!!!
The game was decent as there is engine building and strategic planning of how to use your park space and utilise it properly. Takes too long and it suffers like in some Euro games where “the game” ended at the end of Round 6, yet the game continues on til Round 9. The last 3 rounds are almost lacking in any decisions and everything is affordable.
Rawr means “I love you” in dinosaur.
Just One
Rumble Nation - I hyped myself up on this one. And it was… fine. The cascade is fun but that’s it. Selling it.
Age of Civilization - interesting civilization game in a small box game. This is the kind of miniturisation of board gaming that is totally my jam! Like, it’s hard to convince me on middling Euros now when Red Cathedral exists
Played Treasure Island last night with some friends over TTS, and it was a lot of fun. The mod was a little janky, but did have some nice features. Most annoying things about it were while the players mini-maps automatically copied everything that happened on the main map, you could not write on it yourself, and if you put anything on it (like the cut out shapes to block off areas of the map you know the treasure is not located in), you couldn’t move it unless you used a flip button that was provided, removed the item, and then flipped the board back. Very weird and incredibly annoying.
The other annoying thing is that while the mod did have the rulebook available, using it did something to fling a bunch of objects all over the place, necessitating a reload of the game state.
Otherwise, though, it worked okay. Started at 9, took us 30 minutes to figure out how to work it, then we played until midnight. LJS won, because when the time came to place his miniature, instead of putting it in one of the two towers that were in an area that we knew the treasure could not be located in, one player who knew the LJS player best thought that would be the sneaky kind of thing he would plan for, so instead wanted to let fate decide, spawned a d8 and rolled, putting LJS in the north-most tower. Which, of course, ended up being about two miles (an inch or so) from the treasure.
We got things pretty thinned out, and I knew more or less the two regions the treasure had to be within when the game ended. My mini-map was ridiculous at the end of the game, though, as I had 7 of the 11 districts marked off as not containing the treasure, between my own knowledge (playing as Charlotte), a treasure, and a couple of LJS’s clues, one of which had the pirates view the hints given to their neighboring players.
Good fun and we will likely play again next week.
Yesterday I played Blood on the Clocktower via Discord, with the aid of this website:
It was quite fun, but I think that’s as close as I want to get to playing a real-life game! Team evil won, mostly due to our inability to get enough votes to execute anyone. I also misunderstood my role (the butler) as meaning I had to vote the same way as my master, rather than I only had the option to vote if they did 
My work has gone back to having people remote if possible. With a total of just two employees in my department, we are trading off weeks, and I am remote this week.
So, in between work, I set up Marvel Champions, and tried Gamora vs Rhino. Sure, Rhino is like easy mode, but I have not played at all in a while, and have never used Gamora before.
It was an outright slaughter. Gamora’s pre-made deck makes great use of her ability (After playing an Attack event, remove 1 Threat from a Scheme/After playing a Thwart event, deal 1 damage to an enemy, limit once per turn each), with lots of events for each, some of which would remove threat or do damage, opposite of the main effect, and upgrades that help obtain more. I took three or four attacks from Rhino and he schemed a couple of times, then he was defeated.
So I reset and tried out Rocket. This did not go nearly as well. A lot of Rocket’s cards only affect minions, and while he does have cards that will bring a minion into play in return for removing threat, I did not feel like I got in a good enough position to make use of those cards. And overall it felt like he did not have enough threat mitigation, but it is possible that I spent those cards when threat was not an issue.
In any case, the main scheme was 1 threat short of a loss when I needed to pack it up, so I just hit him as hard as I could, which was enough to defeat his first version, but I likely would have lost in a turn or two due to threat or damage. So Rocket does not appear to be very good in a one-on-one, but he looks like he might be gangbusters against villains with lots of minions, like Ultron, though he might need some support to keep up with the threat, and maybe an extra card or two for some healing.
Good fun, and I look forward to trying out the other Guardians.
Yeah, the way they use “vote” in the rules to mean specifically “cast a vote for execution”, because abstaining and voting against are rolled together, is just a little bit weird and I think it confuses people.
I got one for the out of context thread: “Trees are overrated! And irritating!”
This one courtesy Dr Reiner Knizia. We started playing My City.
We got as far as the second game which ended with me winning via tie breaker.
Just got destroyed at Beyond the Sun. I just couldn’t get anything going at all whereas my wife just flew through the tech tree and achievements.
Only took 45 minutes though!