Played Blood Rage on BGA tonight with @Whistle_Pig and our other halves. Really enjoyed it, very good implementation as well. Somehow I won (every time I win an alpha game I always think that the scoring has glitched). I managed to get some nice upgrades that made my actions cheaper and got a bunch of quests that I didn’t have to do a lot to complete. Also maxed out all 3 tracks which helped.
If I can find a physical copy I’d be very tempted to buy it
7 Likes
There is Blood Rage on BGA? I must have missed that. nice. only ever played on TTS. But I’ve been too lazy to TTS at my desk when I cam BGA from the couch.
3 Likes
It’s another alpha game. Much simpler than TTS
Not sure how it would work async with the card drafting (although you can turn that off). If 3 people want to try it would give it a go
3 Likes
National holiday (of increasingly questionable nature) today, so had some folks over for boardgames, one who is quite new to games:
Timeline, lost two games of this back to back. So many of my cards fell in ‘somewhere in the 1800s’ which made it tough. Fun trivia game though.
Ohanami, a couple of games of this, went over really well, especially with our newbie.
The Quest for El Dorado, have consolidated my opinion that this is a great ‘first’ deckbuilder. As well as just a stellar game in general. We were all within a turn of El Dorado by the end, including the player who culled the heck out of his deck and ended with fewer cards than he started!
Cascadia, it’s great, was tense and fun right to the end. A classic for me.
Love Letter
The Fox in the Forest, lost in 3 hands (at the smaller point goal, granted), but was more balanced than my games vs my wife!
Summoner Wars, Jungle Elves vs Breakers - losing control of a couple of my buffed up units was brutal. Managing the tempo of the Jungle Elves is really interesting, but not sure I did a great job (though my first game with them, so you know, ok considering that).
Railroad Ink Challenge: Green, scored nearly as many points of forest as from my network! That plus some early goals gave me a solid lead with this one.
Hey That’s My Fish, started with a bunch of penguins in a valuable middle and we ended up splitting the board roughly in half. Unfortunately his was the more profitable half. Clever little game that plays super fast.
4 Likes
What I like about it is the goal is really clear as well. get from here to there
3 Likes
Blood Rage has been released as Beta today apparently
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Takes longer to set up than to play! 
3 Likes
I made a fairly brazen run into the dungeon using a Thief this morning in Mini Rogue. I made a pretty good run of it too, until I acted in bad faith against another adventurer who turned out to be a shade. I won the fight, but then promptly fell down a pit to my death, just next to Og’s Remains. I could have played even riskier (and with a little more flavour) had I remembered the stance card/rule, allowing for more crits (hits and misses).
I’m all set for another attempt using the Priestess, but we’ll see if my daughter feels like sleeping in this morning…
[EDIT] Got the game in.
I took my Priestess into the dungeon using the defensive stance for a little toughness at the expense of being able to critical-hit. You can change this turn by turn, but I’ve been enjoying committing to the choice for a run as a sort of “build”. Anyway, another fun run full of flavour!
I started out early with a choice to either brave an ugly trap with a pitfall, or take on a cursed chalice. It was too early on to risk losing a whole floor, and the rewards for dumping the item were pretty darn good, so I grabbed the rotten chalice and grabbed a purple die. I carried this curse to my grave. This was a combat-and-rest heavy run because the dungeon was riddled with pitfall traps and cave worms, so if I failed too much, I’d be at the final room hurt and totally unprepared. Thankfully I drew a bunch of campsite and NPC cards as well, so I had lots of opportunity to stay healthy and stocked with food.
I finally succumbed to a pitfall, on the final area of the third floor. This saved me from a boss encounter, but also meant I lost two whole areas to try and ditch this damned curse, and I was pretty banged up. I almost bit the dust against another ghost, but squeaked through and earned my third adventure die for the trouble. Here I was, though, up against Og and badly hurt. I managed to take out his first form, but caught no luck from his attack die. I basically got four swipes against him, and I actually got him on death’s door, but my final battle cry would have been a suicide attack had I fully utilized my ability and I opted to risk one last blow, while he sat at 2HP.
…next time.
2 Likes
Picked up Chronicles of Crime: 2400 on a whim, and enjoyed the process of the first case quite a bit. I can see how the experience could be drastically different, depending on your digital tools. Our combination of an iPad and a Pixel worked smoothly.
1 Like
Just got off of Vampire the Masquerade: Vendetta on TTS with my friends. There were four of us. I was the Ventrue against the Brujah, Tremere, and Gangrel and I won with 28 points, with 2nd place, the Gangrel, having 22. My first win of this game, I believe. Still like it a lot, even if some clans are harder to win with than others.
3 Likes
I played two-handers of Unmatched (Big Foot pummelled Robin Rood) and Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter (Nikolai Dante bested Sláine) in preparation for introducing one or both of them to a friend (or maybe two) whom I hadn’t seen in a while, and then we met up in person the next day.
We ended up being three, but one thought they would be unavoidably detained for part of the game, so I went with a three-player team-based Unmatched game, with myself running one pair of heroes, and the other pair being operated by one or both of my friends as circumstances dictated.
On my side were Robin Hood & outlaws, and Jekyll/Hyde. Opposing them were Big Foot & the Jakalope, and Holmes & Watson.
I didn’t time it, but it was a loooooong game. My feeling is that Unmatched is best played in a quick and breezy manner, but A.P. caused some of the turns to really drag for such a light game, so I’m not sure it showed the game in its best light. Worse, the player who expected to be absent for part of the game turned out to be able to stay for the whole thing, so I kinda wished we’d gone with Helter Skelter instead. Never mind.
Despite Robin’s band of merry bandits causing some mayhem, he was the first to be defeated. Hyde managed to take out Bigfoot in the second-to-last turn with a brutal “Forever Hyde” assault (discarding my Jekyll cards for extra damage); but in the end it was the Jakalope sidekick along with Holmes and Watson who stood tall, with the Jakalope doing the final damage to avenge its fallen pal.
This all took so long that we couldn’t consider anything other than something quick to end the night, so we finished up with two games of High Society which neither friend had played before, and that was a great way to finish. The first game was a learner, and the second game was hilarious — all three x2 cards plus the -5 card wound up shuffled to the bottom of the deck, and when everything else had come and gone we all had exactly the same status! Only two of the x2 cards could be bought, and the -5 might not even appear, and we all wanted one of the former and definitely not the latter (which did show its face, the rotter).
I wound up knowing that I couldn’t win unless I bid on what we knew to be the final card, but almost certain to end up poorest if I did bid. I took my chances, and was duly cast out of the group with an unacceptably-meagre 18,000 francs to my name.
3 Likes
Hostage Negotiator, four plays before I won. Three plays before I realised I read a rule incorrectly. I thought you had to try to rescue all the hostages before you could kill the terrorist. Oops.
2 Likes
This rule is taken direct from the FBI handbook. It’s called “Hostage, Schmostage”
6 Likes
FBI Special Agent Johnson: Figure we take out the terrorists. Lose twenty, twenty-five percent of the hostages, tops.
FBI Agent Johnson: I can live with that.
10 Likes
Kiddo decided to wake up before 6 this morning (on the heels of a late, rambunctious night). Thankfully she was pretty happy playing with her toys so we had a quick game of Can’t Stop. I won, but needed to make an absurd series of pushes at the end that definitely woke me up. Had I let the dice go to my partner she would have pretty easily taken the game on her turn, so I was already sweating. Such a fun game.
3 Likes
Pandemic: Iberia - Still my fave non-legacy Pandemic game. This poor guy wanted to join the table telling me he’s pretty good after I tell him how difficult Iberia is. I set it at standard difficulty as it is already challenging at that level. We lost, but it was fun. Poor guy finally realised it.
Welcome Back to the Dungeon
Back to the Future: Dice Through Time - imagine Pandemic but with dice rolling to see what actions you can do. That should be enough to tell you if you’ll like that or not.
3 Likes
Jeez, I completely forgot to log my game of Extreme Junk Art: Pitchcar Edition feat. Pink Cadillac Candycar and the Mighty Corkscrew of Death.
Sadly, I didn’t snap a shot, but this is a great co-op game with real teeth. We had some truly bizarre obstacles on the track, but they were no match for the Pink Cadillac once it got rolling. After a few gnarly rebounds off the guardrails, she finally found her mark and sent everything toppling down, to much fanfare.
I don’t know what it says that this was every bit as compelling as my other dex games. 
6 Likes
Played a game called Strand Unter. There’s a delightful premise - build sand castles on a beach where a tide may eventually knock out all the sandcastles.
It’s kind of good and thrilling but also has a fair few edge cases and side rules which make it more fiddly than the initial joy of chucking small shells into a beach bucket might imply.
It’s got that kind of mechanism where everyone decides what they want but if they choose the same it’s a consolation prizes all round. The problem is there seem to be about five different consolation prizes that occur in two distinct categories. It feels like a game where rules are created because undesirable outcomes kept happening especially in a family game.
1 Like
Had a great game of Village tonight with my wife (using both expansions obvs). My gold goal was to have two family members on island churches, which is NOT EASY if you can’t bring two family members in one sailing trip. Luckily, the Quartermaster was one of the starting cards in the Inn, so I was able to pick him up (and the Helmsman to make my sailing faster).
We were both competing on sailing (she actually took one of the island churches I wanted, but I had enough time to adjust). In fact we were both competing on everything, to the point where the final scores (after her Cutpurse card gave her the final 6) were exactly equal. We actually had to go down to the second and final tiebreaker, which means she won by dint of having one more family member alive than me at the end of the game. What a ride!
7 Likes
Three games of Mini Rogue to report, once last night and then twice this morning:
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Dungeon with Crusader. Had a pretty good run going and was one area from Og when a giant extra-dimensional daughtermonster appeared out of nowhere to wipe my hero—and the entire dungeon!—off the great plane of dining.
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Tried a Crusader redux and got squashed by floor 2
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New run with the Witch in a trap-laden run. Took on the cursed chalice three times, and had to carry it into the fight vs. Og. Thankfully my dice were on fire all game and I finally logged a win on the dungeon side.
2 Likes