So it does, I’m sure that will wind me up from now on as well!
It’s an interesting game certainly. I’ve been hearing great things about Tournament at Avalon as a trick taking game with crazy powers. This doesn’t have powers but it’s nice not always just wanting to win tricks.
I just wrote an impolitely long post on Dune Imperium with my own thoughts on this. I think what makes the game great has nothing to do with deckbuilding or worker placement. They’re both just garnish in service to a greater master.
I’ve been puttering away at some Libertalia. Still trying to solve the Citadels / Libertalia / Mission: Red Planet equation as I clearly don’t need all three but can’t come to even axe one of them.
Learnings:
Libertalia works really well with any number of dummy decks, just shuffle and flip. Occasionally you need to make a decision but it’s usually pretty easy to tell what is in that bot’s best interest. Getting up to at least four players, human or otherwise, keeps things fully interesting for the real humans.
This game is volatile. There are 30 cards, you see 21 in a game, and play 18. Some hands are fascinating and delightful as you try to combo things together (while everyone else tries to solve the same puzzle - same cards, same treasures, enter the headgames!). But other hands fall flat as you draw 5 cards that are variations on the same power, or are just left with a handful of bad decisions.
At it’s best, this game is truly amazing. That is maybe 30-50% of the time. The rest of the time you are kind of waiting for the next deal. There’s benefit to the limitless variability the deck gives you. But I’m also yearning a bit for the tight interactions that Love Letter, Coup, or Red Planet force on you with a fixed but curated set of card powers.
I actually traded Libertalia for Mission Red Planet and I’m glad I did. Libertalia can be fun when you’re winning and AGONIZING when you’re losing - MRP never has that same “I have no chance to win” because of the ramped-up scoring over the three scoring phases that mean you can definitely come from behind even if it looks like the planet doesn’t have enough of your color on it.
Also, maybe this was just who I played with (and it’s definitely at least partially my fault), the teach on Libertalia was horrible, it never stuck, people would constantly forget to take their player card back when it was their turn to choose a treasure and I would have to remind them every time which isn’t fun for anyone… And this happened with multiple different groups! I knew I had to trade it away when I wanted to leave my own game partway through.
Just One
Sekigahara - 2 player block war game. Medium weight rules. But it is tense. I lost as the Tokugawa side when I foolishly charged ahead of the main column with just a couple of blocks to accompany my block general. The opposing player forced marched to bring in two columns and kill Tokugawa himself - thus ending the game. It was a bit of a reversal as I was winning on all fronts except for a silly incursion into Kyoto.
As usual with GMT, their standard box size is just nice.
Excellent game. Will play it again. I don’t think I can own it. I would rather play War of the Ring 2 or Napoleon’s Triumph, although they are more difficult to teach than Sekigahara. Summoner Wars 2 or Meltwater would be my preferred for medium weights.
Stephensons Rocket - this game have slowly climbed up on my rankings through the years. That if you ask me which 2 Knizias I will keep, I will keep this one and Tigers & Pots. And, now, I think I will choose SR if I have to choose between the two - just. I know. Shocking.
But SR have a more obscure decision-making and have stronger shared incentives (aka SICS!) than Tigers & Pots. The “coopetition” is pretty much everywhere in SR. You have two players cooperating in one train company to expand it yet they rabidly fight one another for its control.
Every decision is painful. And it feels like I am playing a Cube Rail or a Splotter or Container or The Estates with the level of opacity and the game comes in a light-medium/medium weight.
Table Curling - dexterity game of Curling except there’s no furious sweeping of the board which is what’s fun with Curling 
Does it bring ice??
Nope 
(10 chars)
What a rip-off!
To help me unwind after my flat tire misadventure, my wife suggested we play Lost Cities again. I went ahead and downloaded a scoring app just to ensure I was scoring correctly (and I have been). We played twice.
First game I started off strong with 103 points in the first round to my wife’s 30, though I got progressivelyworse from there. I won the second round as well by about 20 points, but lost the third by 40. Still, my early lead was enough to give me the win, 197 - 145.
Second game I had an even stronger start with 113, though my wife also stepped up her game, getting 90. We both had middling scores in the second round, though I lead by 12 points. The third round went pretty well for me, but my wife got negative points from red and didn’t score too well anywhere else so only got 20 for that round to my 67.
Final scores for the second game were 236 - 154. Really enjoying this game, as it goes quickly but there are a lot of moments where you are moaning on your turn because you don’t know if you should go ahead and play a card, cutting off anything lower than it or prohibiting you from getting another wager, or discard a card, but which one!?
My favourite thing about this game is that the “but… I don’t want to play ANY of these yet! AAAAAH” can frequently start on turn two.
Which reminds me – I hope I get to play Arboretum again sometime soon. Having to discard when all of these cards are crucial was a continually agonising (but in a good way?) feature of that game.
My wife has said a couple of times now that Lost Cities is giving her Arboretum vibes. I have to agree, it has the same agonizing decision space.
I had s two handed solo play of Oceans yesterday, as I had brought it along on Saturday night as back up for Firefly (in case they wanted something shorter) and I had not put it away. Having played it a lot on the app on my phone, I did really enjoy the the tactility of counting fish, if a bit not convinced about the Ocean box gaps (I think I can sort that out with glue between the different spaces, to avoid fish going “under” walls to the wrong compartment).
What I did not remember is how great are the Deep cards. The app has some, and most that came out were familiar, but others were great and new-ish to me, and still feels like the environment adapting to what is going on. I am glad to say that I finished the game with no extinctions, and 5 and 6 species on the table. But first player (left hand) got the gong by quite the margin. I cannot wait to have this played with a group again.
My expanded versions of Sprawlopolis and Tussie Mussie arrived the other day, so I played a few solo games of each. I did terribly at Sprawlopolis (all the more reason to play again) and was pleasantly surprised by the solo mode in Tussie Mussie.
Another game of Lost Cites tonight with my wife. Despite my best efforts, she won this one. I was up by about 30 in the first round, but after demolishing me in the second round 134 - 39, I just could not come back.
I think I had one of the worst/best hands possible starting the third round:
I mean, what do you do? Play something? Discard? It was horrible!
What you do is play the Green 7, then instantly pick up a handshake
I lost my first game against Concordia Solitaria on the Italia map.
185 to 175 points. I had hopes when I was counting my points that I was going to win but the bot pushed straight past me…. And deservedly so I think. If I had managed more than once to anticipate where they might build and get goods from the activated province… that might have changed things.
I haven‘t played a lot of Concordia games so I guess I am just doing badly.
My game started of nicely as I had two of the 3 cloth cities nearby and quickly build in both provinces. I soon managed to get a house in the third city as well. But I am not sure how valid of a strategy that is to get money from cloth to finance my expansionist urges.
The bot is pretty cool to handle. The expansion comes with a full set of cards. You use none from the base game. All the Solitaria cards have your action listed on top and directly below the action the bot takes in response. So you play a card and execute the bot action. The bot has 4 dice helping him make decisions like where to build mostly or what card to take. That‘s the whole of the random. When you take a build action you are immediately reminded that the bot is going to take a card. When you produce in a province the bot is getting VP. When you use the Mercator the bot gets to build and produce—and I never ever managed to guess where they might go.
The cards the bot starts with and the ones he claims are put on the table face up so you can use your Diplomat to copy them—but each card only once, then it gets turned face down. I wish those didn‘t count for points in the end but they do,
I really like that my play directly dictates what the bot does. And even the building algorithm is pretty easy to remember: the bot wants maximum expansion for themselves alone so after the die roll that determines what type of city he is looking for (there is once face for „S“ where he checks which his highest ranked specialist is: Miner, Farmer et al and he always builds on „S“ on a Tribune turn) the bot checks their legal moves (they still have colonists on the board and get the same number of move steps a player would), they look for the closest city in a new province that doesn‘t have houses ordered by alphabet (I think that‘s all the criteria).
So I guess a good player strategy has one try to expand into provinces where the bot has a specialist because that‘s likely where the next build comes.
There is also a 2 player + bot and a 2 player-team vs bot mode in the box that I haven‘t checked out yet. I think the team mode is the same as Concordia Venus.
Overall: lovely take on a solo mode that is not an automa and not a beat your own score for once. No multihanding required. If you like Concordia and enjoy soloing big games, I would absolutely recommend this. I think you need the smaller maps for this.
Does it work with Salsa?
it has rules for all the variants. but as i don’t have salsa…
My first game of Under Falling Skies, on the suggested-first-game easy difficulty. It’s a neat wee puzzle. I never came close to losing (I only suffered two damage, and those were in the final turn because I was playing big numbers on the triple-research space to finish the game), but I enjoyed the ebb and flow of figuring out what to play when/where in order to keep my progress moving whilst also dealing with the flying saucers; and I think the space-invaders theme comes through nicely. I’ll hopefully have a more challenging game tomorrow on a harder difficulty, as the base game definitely needs to be harder than that to have any kind of staying power. I suspect I’ll kick off the campaign pretty quickly.
