I am, it seems, physically unable to win at Space Base. I barely managed a victory the first time I played it with my wife, but every other time since I’ve gotten SLAUGHTERED. That game hates me.
I don’t hate it, though!
4 Likes
I just spent most of the day playing Hostage Negotiator: Career.
Good grief, that was amazing! The story it tells lifts the game from merely good to breathtaking. I definitely buy into the theme, so it was a great purchase for me (The app looks terrible). I understand how it could be a complete turn-off for some people - just as Final Girl would be for me.
That goes to the top of my favorite solo games now - move over Nusfjord and Spirit Island.
4 Likes
My wife and I just broke out Mandala after nearly a year without playing. Not that we don’t like it, it just slipped through the cracks.
What a delightfully, deceptively tactical game. Tight decision space with enough randomness to introduce some chaos.
What a lovely time.
9 Likes
Squeezed in a quick game of Arkham Horror TCG today. I went back to The Gathering because for the first time I am playing 2 handed, using Nathaniel Cho and Daisy Walker.
Nathaniel is a beast! His event cards let him do more damage, or attack twice and do extra damage on the second attack, counterattack, etc. With his default 5 attack, +1 if you get his boxing gloves or another weapon, he is unlikely to miss. I was able to take out the Icy Ghoul easily, and even managed to drop the Ghoul Priest in just a couple of rounds, while hit with Frozen in Fear
Meanwhile, Daisy Hoovered up all the clues, clearing out the Attic and Cellar so they were part of the victory display.
To be fair, I am playing on Easy, so that is helping. The most annoying was Nathaniel’s inability to get rid of Frozen in Fear, drawing the tablet token every frickin’ time! And there’s only one of them in the Chaos Bag! Had it for most of the game!
Hope to play the next scenario before too long.
6 Likes
Played Treasure Island with friends again on TTS. Same mod with a mix of good and aggravating features, mostly how trying to put things on your minimap is an exercise in frustration.
In any case, same player was LJS as last time, but the player of Charlotte managed to find the treasure a few days before LJS even escaped! We each had looked at one of the 2nd - 4th clues to see if any were a bluff, and after we went ahead and compared notes to learn all were true. That let us know that the treasure was not along the north of the map and also not in lakes/rivers or buildings/ruins. We were confident the Bermuda Triangle clue was a bluff, as it really narrowed the possible search area.
So, the winning player decided to move and search a very thin strip of cliffside between a city and the ocean, and that’s exactly where the treasure was buried! Crazy/brilliant, because I am not sure I would ever have spent the time to look there. So congrats to Charlotte, who gets to be LJS next time we play.
4 Likes
Pacific Rails Inc - not my game. Had a bad impression when I saw the board, but it’s actually straightforward. Worker placement with limited spaces that follows a rule similar to Tzolkin, when you place or remove a worker, you take one of the two actions beside that worker.
All different ways to play the game, yet they all feed into the board, which is great because I love it when the focus of the game is on the central board. There is a personal tableau but it is your engine (a literal train engine). The route building where you’re trying to connect your rail network from the left and right to make a trans-continental line is fun and it’s because train lines are shared, but the player who borrows the lines will give the original track layer some points. Very interesting stuff.
The rulebook is one of the most awful that I saw. Missing rules that is not in the rulebook. Important rules that are put into brackets on another section of rules. As it is a Kickstarter, it MUST follow gutter-level Kickstarter standards: in which the morons hired an artist to make their rulebook pretty, but didn’t hire a rulebook writer or consultant to create/check it for them. But to cut the publisher/designer a slack, if they did hired someone to clean up their rulebook, they wont have enough money to put in deluxified components. Which are, of course, more important.
6 Likes
The last time I played was 2 handed with Nathaniel and Roland and it was one of the best experiences I’ve had with the game. Once we finish off Roll Player Adventures, I’m taking the table back to run through the most recent campaign.
2 Likes
Went over to the Oxford Meeples get-together in a village hall. A pleasant bunch, and I got sucked into Clash of Cultures (first edition).
It’s huge and it’s long and… Star Trek Ascendancy clearly owes a lot to it. Probably about four hours’ play for the four of us, though the early turns rattled past and it only really bogged down in the last 2-3 rounds. Not one I’ll ever buy but I’m very glad to have played it.
Then Tsuro, seven players, and no knockouts until the very last pass round the table. Never seen that happen before.
People were still playing, but I’ve had a hard week and came away.
11 Likes
Just finished my two-fisted learning game of The Loop. I won it, but it was a near thing. All three vortexes (vortices? or just vortex?) were down and I had a couple of time periods with three red cubes. I lucked out on the final turn and was able to fulfill the final victory condition. All this on the basic scenario and the easiest difficulty.
It was fantastic, though. Nice crunch, good tension, just enough randomness, it’s gonna be a great addition I think.
3 Likes
It is very rainy here today, and we are having a long weekend, so I suggested my daughters to play (rainy days solutions) as mum has to retake her studies after summer break. So I did a large puzzle (large in size, not number of pieces) with my 5 y.o. daughter, and my 9 y.o. suggested a game after, she was missing playing Raiders of the North Sea.
So we dusted the box and gave it a go. Had a really funny game, where I went for the valkirie strategy, and she went early for the big targets from the top. We had a blast of a game, and I barely won 64-60 because of livestock that I did not get rid of on trades in the long house, and being last allowed me to trade in a white worker the mill for an extra gold. At least now she is not focused on getting an all female crew like she did last time, which is fine if the cards come along, but if not it can take her away from the VPs.
4 Likes
In that photo, Clash of Cultures reminds me an awful lot of GW’s Mighty Empires from the 90s. That was pretty fun but I don’t recall playing it often.
1 Like
Work is still too long for sizable games but I managed to trial two new solo purchases late tonight.
First up was Railroad Ink: Lush Green Edition for my first proper game although without using any objective cards. Went pretty well I think but not sure if my final scoring was correct, especially with the errors for incomplete routes; if any of you are more familiar with the scoring and can decipher my shocking artwork, perhaps you can confirm or correct my result.
I followed this with a trial of the solo rules for Blitzkrieg! and a seemingly comfortable win for the Allies. Not quite sure about the logic rules of the AI bot and am sure that can be exploited, but it’s certainly a game I am liking strongly and hoping to try against another human player and test the Nippon expansion too. The shorter campaigns might make it even more cutthroat.
9 Likes
I won a seriously tense game of Maquis this morning, barely succeeding with a sole remaining worker at the end of day 13 (of 15). I was tasked with planting a mole at the Milice HQ and then destroying the building, and making sure I had planted enough explosives on an Axis train that would only be in town between turns 6-9.
I’m really pleased about getting the physical edition of the game. It’s not especially complex, but I’m finding it much easier to keep track of the patrol deck and the whole game just feels better for it. There are new one- and two-star missions included (Milice HQ being one example) in addition to the new 3-star ones, and I’m enjoying a lot of the challenges these new pairings present. I’m also expecting this little run of victories to come to a screeching halt soon enough!
7 Likes
Rain continues, so I played Forbidden Island this afternoon, and we won! I wasn’t very hopeful, aswe had the engineer and messenger, but we were lucky with the draft of tile cards, and left the island with at least half a dozen tiles still on, and only a couple of turns into the highest tier of flooding per turn (x5)
3 Likes
Games over this last week:
Super Big Boggle, this one continues to be one of my most played games. My wife’s favourite game so that explains a bit - we often crack it out with non-gamer guests as well. No massive words this week though.
Red7, I rather like this little game, have been playing it more recently as my wife has taken a shine to it. There’s a lot of luck in the cards you are dealt - but enough decisions in how you play your cards and the timing of stuff to keep people engaged.
Blood Bowl: Team Manager, three player game of this one with one new player and two of us who have played a bunch. Our new player had a bit of a learning game and didn’t quite grasp some things until later on, but did okay despite that with the Orcs. My Skaven just missed out on the win thanks to some unlucky contract draws compared to the Undead team who won. This is a terrific card game and really deserves a reprint or re-implementation. Though licensing stuff may make that a pain 
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A Feast for Odin, thrilled to get this one to the table (and for the second time this year already!). Neither of us secured another island board (which we regretted by the end) but followed pretty different strategies - he went heavy on raiding and pillaging, I went for a lot of emigration and boat building (with a nice dose of forging). We initially thought the scores were within 1 point of each other, but then realised I hadn’t scored my not insubstantial haul of point tokens from discarding cards. So he was like 135 or so to my 160ish at the end. Taking new boards is intimidating, with all those minus points but I hear it’s the way to go for people who are better at this game than us! We did have some leftovers by the end though, so I’ll probably make sure to grab one next game. Really enjoy this game, lot of heavy euros don’t do much for me but this one is definitely worth the complexity imo.
8 Likes
Yup. The key to this game is bonuses. It’s often worth it to spend more resources than it feels like you should on early bonuses because they pay out over and over. My wife and I have played this a ton two-player and we always both take two islands.
1 Like
You’ve tempted me so often with this, as I’ve always enjoyed Boggle; but then when I looked up SBB I felt like it seemed too big and open-ended. It’s already the case with the regular size game that a player might miss many good opportunities for words by not paying attention to a particular sequence of letters, so the Super Big board seems like it would exacerbate that issue substantially? I’m guessing that, not infrequently, players might find they had very few words in common at all. I’m still curious, but my gut reckons I’d prefer the regular game.
I like this too. I picked it up after reading Your Introduction to... Carl Chudyk! - Shut Up & Sit Down and it’s a great two-player game. I remember playing several games in a row with the same partner soon after I bought it, and every game we were both having those “Oh. Ohhhh!” moments, as we started to get a feel for it. It’s a game in which you are trying to plan ahead despite constant chaos; and while you usually can’t predict how a round will go, you can give yourself better odds through good play; and it’s so fast that it doesn’t matter when things don’t go well. It’s nifty.
(I don’t think I’d touch most of the optional/advanced rules with a barge pole, though.)
(Edit: This made me look back at Review: Innovation - Shut Up & Sit Down and once again curse the day they chose to stop publishing those glorious written reviews.)
2 Likes
Azul , ideal first game, we all know it. I was doing ok, but no bonuses at the end (for completed rows/columns/colours) hurt me.
Capital Lux , interesting card game. Play cards in four colours either to the table or in front of you. You want the most of a colour, but not more than the ones in the middle.
The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X 2. Won both, surprising me.
Ark Nova , another bash of this, this time at 4p. I like some of this game, but it just takes too long and you can get stuck looking for cards of the right type. I hear it gets faster the more you play, but I don’t think we’ll get to put that to the test. I found it a little exhausting. You would get a new card, and its got another set of icons to decipher.
Dixit , a bit lighter. Hadn’t played for ages, since we normally only have 3p, and Dixit isn’t as much fun at that player count. But with 4p, its fine (probably better with another person or two).
Noch Mal! , did badly again, still fun
4 Likes
Hmm I honestly haven’t really played enough Big Boggle to make a fair comparison, though I know I like that one too (not sure I’ve ever played plain old Boggle though). So much depends on the board though - I’ve had low scoring games where we get mostly the same words, I’ve had crazy rounds with barely any cross over, but usually it’s a balance. I suspect the timer is longer, which helps The searching becomes more important with the bigger board, and the escalating points for longer words means a couple of great words are worth the trouble to find. But you learn to keep an eye out for endings - ‘s’ ‘ed’ ‘ing’ etc.
As for Red7, we normally play with the drawing a card if you discard and keep score (though I’ve only just realised we haven’t been removing the scoring cards of the winner! Keen to see how that changes the game though) The special powers of the various odd cards are interesting (and help balance out the value of 1’s vs 7’s), but can slow things down, so it’s a trade-off.
2 Likes
Mostly correct, with the exception of the villages and the incomplete routes. You need a station in the villages for them to score, and you’ve missed a few incomplete routes (the ones leading into the middle square).
I hope you enjoyed it; the trails expansion is one of my favourites and the forest one is pretty chill too 
2 Likes