Lost Cities again. I’m glad I picked this up, it’s a crackin’ little game. Was not looking good for me as my wife was up by close to 50 points after the first two rounds, but a killer third round with most of the white cards gave me 167 points for that round(!) and the win, 288 - 187.
2 Likes
Just played two rounds of Marvel Champions, both using Star-Lord against Rhino. I lost the first game not too far into the game due to a couple of unlucky draws with Advance, which makes the villain Scheme. With only 7 Threat needed to lose the game, and drawing 2 boost icons each time, I lost very quickly. Since I was just playing mostly to learn Star-Lord’s deck, I kept playing, pretending I had only drawn a 1 boost card on the second Advance. I was able to clear out some threat and then defeat Rhino a few turns later.
I went ahead and set up again. Things were getting hairy as the game went on, as Star-Lord’s nemesis, Mister Knife, came into play, and worse the extra side-scheme while Rhino was still in his first phase. Though he was only at 3 HP, he had a Tough card. Luckily I had Yondu with a Laser Blaster out, as well as Beta Ray Bill, and Big Boy. Using all available attacks, I took out Mister Knife.
Rhino’s attack would have taken me out, but I used Big Boy to avoid the damage, which also put me in Alter-ego form and let me draw two cards. Sandman came out when revealing the encounter cards, and one of the encounter cards from Star-lords nemesis deck, which made me discard a card at random, added a threat to the main scheme and hit me for a damage.
Thankfully, Star-Lord seems built for big turns. I used an Element Gun to hit Rhino for 3, removing his Tough status with the piercing effect and moving him on to his second form, with 15 HP. I put out Target Practice, which can be discarded when an ally with a weapon attacks to add +2, and then played Blaze of Glory, which adds +2 to ATK and THW for all Guardian characters, which all my allies are when Star-Lord is in Hero form. Attacked with Yondu for a total of 6 damage, then played a card to ready him and attacked again. From there I had options, but went with Sliding Shot to do 7 damage, ending the game.
Star-Lord is quite a bit of fun, but like a lot of heroes on Rhino, when going solo it’s a bit easy to lose out due to the main scheme. I never really got to play with the Air Supremacy cards, as when I had them, none of my characters were Aerial, but they were handy when activating my Element Gun or paying for other cards. I’ve noticed in my other plays of this game that I often don’t get Allies out, as they are expensive and I’d often rather put out upgrades or support cards, or play events which do damage or clear threat. Star-Lord’s hero ability was great for letting me get out allies though, discounting the cost by 3 at the cost of an extra encounter card to deal with in the Villain phase, so I was able to enjoy their use this time around.
2 Likes
Yeah, “one hero vs Rhino” always has that issue with a bad Advance draw being a game-finisher. I’ve found it’s totally solved if you can play two heroes at once vs Rhino instead. The (14 instead of 7?) threat maximum then gets much more realistic.
I haven’t tried Star-Lord yet! The “borrowing now but trouble later” mechanic sounds totally comedy.
2 Likes
Yeah, I figured two handing Rhino would really help with that, I just like trying out new decks completely solo so I can focus on those properties, though there are obviously cards that work better when there is another hero in the mix.
With the right hand, Star-Lord can be incredibly powerful! He has a card that readies him and lets him draw a card in return for taking a face down encounter card. His natural ability lets him play a card for 3 less resources, also for a face down encounter card. Then he has Sliding shot which does 5 damage, +2 for each face down encounter card, so a full one can do 13 damage, plus 2 for Star-Lord’s standard attack 4 times (assuming you get all 3 of the ready cards) for 21 damage total. Factor in any Allies, or the 3 damage the Element Guns can cause with just 1 resource and exhausting and you can obliterate just about anything.
Even just one of the ready cards will guarantee you two face down encounter cards (one for it and one for Star-Lord’s ability), so Sliding Shot can easily net you 9 damage.
That said, if don’t wipe the floor with the opposition, you are going to have an interesting Villain phase! 
1 Like
Finished a first round of Spirit Island.
What can I say? I’ve NEVER liked the solo/co-op, you vs the world and the world is stacked against you kinda roguelike die and start over genre. I bounced off of Pandemic and every copycat since.
I like it.
I won handily with the River god, and by “handily” I mean with lots of cheating (unintentional, I assure you. The first half of the game was fast and loose with the “one land” principle and I was pushing everyone in reach). I’ve set up the game with the Earth god and am immediately drawn in by just how differently I need to approach this puzzle.
By some convergence of the stars, I also just got and tried out the Burgle Bros app and…I like that too.
Welcome to the genre.
12 Likes
Azul
The Crew 2
So Clover
Masters Gallery/Modern Art: the Card Game - kept the speculation bit of Modern Art the board game but removed the auction. This made it more focus on the group-think aspect of the game and made decisions a bit easier to do. However, there is merit and risks between specialising and diversity. The neat extra rule where you can play an extra card PER artist you have in front of you means that you can easily add 3 more cards on your tableau if you have at least 1 card from all top 3 artists.
Boonlake - I first thought “ah great another Euro game…” But I end up enjoying Boonlake. There is a shared space on the board where players can build stuff and plant cows on pastures, and positioning does have some effect. The piggybacking is fun as well - which reminds me of Puerto Rico, but the mechanism is more similar to Twilight Imperium. If one player chose an action then everyone will do the follow up action (including the active player).
It’s fine. It’s not my kind of Euro. The card draw led me to one path over the other and the card draws have given me easy points, as the cards I’ve picked up fits well with my engine. Fun, but I don’t see the need to play it again. Puerto Rico and the pure card game, Race for the Galaxy, would be my choice.
Tempel des Schreckens
Pandemic Hot Zone - North America - base game Pandemic condensed into a 30 minute filler game. Awesome!
4 Likes
Just got destroyed at Martian Dice
25-6 not in my favour
3 Likes
Two plays of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space last night on TTS. This time we played with the roles and items (though the mod uses the 1st edition item rules). I was human in both plays.
First game was on the Galilei map. The other human was eaten on turn 3, after making a rather obvious mistake of going to the only possible “safe” sector that was in reach from his previous moves. I lasted 13 turns, and probably could have gone a bit more, but I had drawn an Attack item card and when I thought I knew where one of the aliens was, I went for the attack, but he wasn’t there. He ate me right afterward. Aliens win.
Second game was on the Fermi map, which is really small with only a few dangerous sectors which make you draw cards. It seems like certain death for the humans, as they have to cross one of two dangerous sectors just to move towards the escape pods, and both lead right towards the alien starting zone. In a stroke of luck, one alien accidentally ate the other, who was pulling off a human impression too accurately. That gave the humans some breathing room. It also meant that while the alien ate his friend at one of the two sectors that need to be crossed, I was in the other one.
I was able to fake out the alien using a Sedatives card, which makes it so you don’t draw a card when entering a dangerous sector. Since there was only one dangerous sector I could reach and only two other safe sectors, he still could have gotten me if he’d called my bluff, but he went and attacked the dangerous sector. This let me move into that same sector on my turn safely, as players must move and end their turn in a new space.
Sadly, I outsmarted myself, as while an escape pod was just three spaces away, I moved back to the center to get to a different pod, expecting the alien to attack toward the other pod. He didn’t though. Meanwhile, the other human had yet to draw a card for entering a dangerous sector. The alien moved to attack further up the map. Since we were playing with roles, he surmised this player had the role which lets them not draw a card the first time they enter a dangerous sector. While he was right about that, he was wrong about that player’s location.
Finally, that player did draw a card, reporting himself to be just ahead of where the alien last attacked. Meanwhile, I used MY special ability to name two locations with noise, the same place the other human stated, and the dangerous sector that the alien had previously attacked in an effort to get me. I was actually at the space on the other side of the map, just a couple spaces away from the pod I was going for. Well, as luck would have it, the alien was within range of my space and just took a chance that one or both of us were lying, so he got me. However, he was too far away to reach the other human before he could get to an escape pod. He drew a green pod card, meaning no malfunction, and escaped, winning the game!
I’m finding this game to be a lot of fun. I’ve owned it for years, but have never managed to get it to the table. While I was expecting the Fermi map to be pretty miserable for the humans, it turned out to be great fun, though it helped a lot that one of the aliens died really early.
6 Likes
Another play of Lost Cities. I won the first round by about 45 points, which got squeezed down to about 30 after the second round. Then I got a wager in red, as well as the 2 and 4-10 cards, for 82 points in that column alone! While my wife did decent, the cards she needed just weren’t coming out for her, which gave me a comfortable win, 184 - 85.
3 Likes
Under Falling Skies, threat level 3, final turn:
With the humans only 2/3 of the way up the research track (upper left edge), the alien mothership about to descend to the threshold of doom (upper right edge) meaning no more turns, and all of the alien fighter ships about to destroy my city (lower right edge), I was absolutely certain that I’d lost this game – but I hadn’t actually counted exactly how far short I was. Then I rolled those numbers, and for just a moment I thought I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat… but alas… this left me one research point short (and that middle ship being only one space away from lowering the mothership was dooming me in any case, so extra sixes wouldn’t have helped).
A dramatic finish, in any case!
8 Likes
I then played about another 4 games with that same set-up and lost all of them – but it always felt close. I’m ready to concede at this difficulty as far as regular Roswell goes, but I need to play more with the other two cities. I’ve only played with robot dice one time, and they may well give me the extra edge I need to succeed.
1 Like
Another 3 games, this time in Washington, and finally a win at threat level 3. In theory one is supposed to randomly select the ‘hard’ tiles when setting the difficulty, but I’d been playing the same sequence every time, determined to win it. On my third game I chose randomly and got a different (perhaps kinder) set-up, and also flipped the city to its ‘damaged’ side to get the slightly improved ability. My robots did sterling work, and unlike the two games prior I managed not to have any turns where I couldn’t use any of the dice I’d played because I’d failed to provide any power : ) The city was on the brink of falling, but at last I prevailed.
6 Likes
Some games over the past week:
Suburbia, I went into green buildings in a fairly big way this game, which is not normally how I play. But it went well. My opponents first game of this one and I think it won him over by being easy to grasp and yet super satisfying to play.
Calico, a two player game of this one, I won but not by heaps, off the virtue of having a few more buttons. I do like Cascadia more but I still really enjoy this one, especially at 2.
ORC, another appearance of a two player 10-15 minute classic. Was very even right up until he revealed a hand of tons of well scoring cards at the end 
Metro X, this game was determined by transfers, as I’ve found it often is. A lot of the strategy seems to be in setting yourself up for high scoring transfers early on. Our winner clearly deserved his win though - he did pretty well at filling stations and completing lines too.
51st State: Master Set, three player game of this - always a load of fun. I think it’s now officially joined my top 5 games of all time, perfect 10’s on BGG. And without a single expansion (though I would love to get my hands on some of the extra faction boards - I’m hoping there might be some leftovers to snatch up after the current Gamefound campaign fulfills (eventually)). In the end the New York player won this, though it was pretty tight - determined largely by him rushing the end game in round 3, and me having set myself up for 4 rounds . I do love the variable game length here though - keeps it super interesting and everyone watching each other to try and predict when people will hit 25.
Welcome To, tight game of this, only 2 points in it at the end. I initially considered going for pools (which I seldom do) but got dealt some decent park combos so fell back on my old strategy of parks and plenty of 6 size, fully upgraded estates. My opponent pushed for lots of small estates but only ended up hitting one of the building goals to my 2, which determined the winner.
Bargain Quest, been a little while since I’ve played this one. It was good fun - I performed pretty poorly in the first few rounds and got a number of heroes killed, which even an expert dispatch of the Unspeakable One couldn’t even out. The advanced 2 player rules are a must, but are slightly clunkier than just playing normally with more than 2. My biggest frustration continues to be how similar the backs of all the decks are… Especially with the Black Market expansion active. Which probably says something about how solid I find the game to be, while also being a bit goofy and lighthearted.
Imperial Settlers: Empires of the North, played the banking faction and wow - they’re super weird but very interesting to play. My opponent went with the penguin clan and managed a pretty sprawling array of cards. The game was determined in the end by points for resources and predictably I had a tonne of gold hanging around at the end which cinched it. I do wish there were a few more island cards in the base game, as I don’t have a lot of interest in adding new factions at this point but would kill for another 10-20 islands for variety and for longer games.
9 Likes
I finished my game of Tales from the Loop late this evening, grabbing victory on the last possible round, and even then only thanks to a very key item that guaranteed my success on the final two (of four) checks required. This might not have been such a nailbiter, but I had only revealed this win condition with two days left, and each kid (I was playing two) only got one shot per day—pass or fail! This was on top of some spectacularly lucky rolling on my part, surely the universe’s way of balancing out the catastrophic day I had last week, and a very long run with a zippy little robot under my control.
This game has a hell of an arc, but it’s got its share of problems. I’m going to need a thorough reread of the manual and go find some consensus on a few fuzzier elements that will really need to end up in a formal FAQ. My game ended with something of an inconsequential but nevertheless bothersome plot hole and I’m still unsure if this might have been due to an error on my part, errata on the plot cards, or simply dumb luck with how my quest unfolded.
In any event, I’m more than willing to make the extra effort to get things squared up because my goodness was that a heck of an evening solo gaming. My session went wildly long as I trudged through but it feels like I can still expect a pretty meaty session once things are moving well.
Lots to like here, I’ll be thinking about this quite a bit while I anticipate the next opportunity to bring it out.
2 Likes
Been playing some solo citta stato. I keep forgetting the rules but I think I’m getting it slowly.
3 Likes
I took a break from Under Falling Skies to play some Sprawlopolis this evening. But I included the Wrecktar expansion so that I’d still have a city in peril from an alien threat : ) Wrecktar kept wanting to make an appearance really early… you play that card as soon as it’s revealed and it replaces the most recent card you’d played, and in my first two games it was revealed after I’d played one card. The second time I decided that was silly and shuffled up the deck. When I looked, Wrecktar was on top again. It took another shuffle to get it to go away for a bit : )
After that I gave the Beaches expansion a whirl for the first time as well. I think the game’s greatest strength is undoubtedly the random variation/mixture of goals every time you play, and these little expansions all add their own additional wrinkles to the mix; so while they don’t shake things up dramatically, I’m happy that I have them.
My Sprawlopoling went generally poorly – I think I won 2 games out of 6!
5 Likes
On Thursday night, I felt like playing another round of Petrichor. It‘s been beckoning from across the room… this time I wanted to include some of the modules and expansions.
So I set up a game and learned the rules for Honeybees and Cows (Flowers are just tiles) and by the time I was done with all that 2 hours had passed and it was late and I decided to play on Friday.
- Honeybees add pollen that you can collect and use to place your drops on tiles and includes some tiles need germinated pollen to sprout. You can do a honeybee action as your 2nd action by just discarding any card (no voting though) so this is quite attractive to give you more flexibility for the cost of 1 card—normally second actions cost 2 cards.
- Cows is more complex, it introduces Cow tokens and new action cards (Grazing) that are used like normal action cards but will always manipulate the harvest dice. Cows either shit and fart leaving fertilizer on the ground and methane in the air aka clouds and then move. Alternatively, you can take all methane from a cloud you control and move the cow to that location. Methane can be spent to improve rain actions or instead of spending cards in some instances. At the end of a round the amount of methane in the clouds determines how the climate meter changes and whoever has the most methane in their personal storage gets to take a climate action. Additionally, some new tiles are climate sensitive and will only grow or sprout in certain climates.
These 2 expansions add not only complexity but flexibility to the game and I hope that I have internalized these well enough so I don‘t have to relearn them next time because I think the game is even better with these two. The cow and bee token make the small 2 player board (I played 2 handed) even busier than before and the additional tokens (pollen and fertilizer) make that effect even worse.
The Collector‘s edition has a ton of small additional modules—each of the promo tiles comes with it‘s own set of rules and there are also player powers, and weather prediction and extreme weather events.
So Friday my migraine kept me from playing but today I felt better and played my game. Here‘s an image pre-Harvest after round 2:
So there was a harvest in round 2 and 4 (4 is always). Cows make it more likely that harvests occur earlier in the game. Left-hand (blue) did very well on the first harvest snagging tons of points from the passion fruit (front center) and sneaking into the wheat and date palm tiles (upper right) with their “rain power”. Right-hand (red) lagged behind but scored the wheat token. They were miffed because the apples never managed to get germinated by the bee…
But in the end right-hand (red) won because they had bot the most honey and the most wheat which each score 10 points. Game went 77 to 72 points.
This is just so different from many other games I play, I could happily play 2 handed against myself. I am completely unable to formulate longterm strategies while playing this way. The game seems a bit opaque to me which is not bad.
The addition of bees and cows gives me more options every turn and so I will include them from now on.
The only thing that I find a bit difficult is that the tile distribution has to be just so to make it playable. The rulebook tells you how that works out. But with 2 players and just 7 tiles there isn’t much room to include the special tiles. This is the kind of game though I could not spontaneously spring on unsuspecting friends. Although I believe I could teach the basic version without any modules without looking at the rulebook now.
8 Likes
Spent the whole week at my wife’s family’s farm with the whole family, which was an utter thrill. We’d brought a ton of games: Great Western Trails (brother-in-law’s been wanting to try that one out for a while), Terraforming Mars, Tzolk’in, Bunny Kingdom, Patchwork, The Fuzzies, Carcassonne (our nephew and one of our nieces love that one), Quacks of Quedlinburg (mother-in-law’s favourite), Full House, Bärenpark and Chromino.
We played exactly ONE of those: My wife and I played three games of Patchwork just before leaving (I won that series 2-1).
Instead, we played a ton of games of Wizard, always a fun time, a card game called 4 Of Spades, at least here, and a round of Telestrations where my father-in-law drew the Teletubbies as some kind of octopus threesome.
Much, much fun was had.
6 Likes
Had a combo video/board game night at a friend’s who was hosting a visiting friend. On the board game side we played Obscurio, which was very fun, although it turned out the traitor was the person who was doing the best at getting the right answer, and the rest of us were just absolutely awful at it.
Later we played Bohnanza, in which the visiting friend wanted to see what would happen if he was insanely generous. Should be no surprise that he didn’t do too well but everyone had fun! And there was rare bean drama as there ever is.
4 Likes
Exactly my experience with the game. I need to find an easy mode to play. It is so beautiful.
3 Likes