It’s superb! Well, for my wife it is - It’s not the sort of thing I’d normally enjoy, but I got caught up in her joy of the game!
Oh! In the version I have they are labelled too!
3 Likes
… tell me more about this solo system
Edit: I had no idea I was scrolled up the page and just responded to a message from December. Ah well. Still… x-wing TMG solo system?
2 Likes
Another solo of Imperium: Classics. Since the boxes were still sitting there, I decided that I needed another attempt at beating the bot. So I switched roles. This time I played as the Macedonians against the Celts. Having just refreshed the rules, setup was fast enough.
If you know the rules, the bot plays really nicely. It usually gets 4 action cards to play and the Celts get a lot of unrest which really makes it quick and easy as every Unrest they draw just loses them an action. I think I messed up in the early turns a few times when the table said to “break through” for something and instead I “acquired” the card for the bot. This meant they got an extra Unrest and so over the game lost a couple of actions. My main gripe after figuring out the rules is that the lookup tables are in the rulebook and that each page fits 3 tables. Each nation gets 2 tables: one for civilized one for barbarian state. Why didn’t they put these on reference sheets/cards. I really need to print some.
This time I won with 92 to 60 points. The Macedonians play a lot easier. They just need to acquire lands. And more lands. And then more lands. When I had built up my empire, I went for Glory. Every Nation I have played has a Glory card that allows you to abandon 3 lands to draw a Fame card: those give big victory points and sometimes really great effects as well. I played the card 3 times in quick succession and then developed my last 2 cards.
The main strategy that I keep trying is deck milling. Go through my deck fast to end the game before the bot acquires his valuable development cards. At least against the bot it seems like the best and only option: except yesterday I lost badly with that play. I cannot be sure there weren’t rules mistakes in either play though: it’s that kind of game.
Btw I feel like all bots and automas push tempo hard. It’s probably the only viable strategy for an automatic player. This is one of the main reasons I dislike bots and automas. I often perfer games with a fixed length. I try to push tempo in games that allow for it because I feel that in those games it is required to do so to play well and win but I have a preference for not having to do this.
2 Likes
Search for Fly Casual. I have it on my phone, though it is rather intensive and drains my battery pretty quickly. Great representation of the tabletop game.
2 Likes
I was just revisiting the solo rules yesterday They are linked here. The AI takes a bit to wrap your head around, but once you’ve got it, it sticks, especially if you use the rules to set up a specific scenario. It reminds me quite a bit of playing Chess against myself
I’ll echo @COMaestro and suggest Fly Casual for virtual play. It has absolutely helped keep me sane over the last two years.
If you go the Fly Casual route, I’d recommend downloading version 1.8.10 vs 2.0, since it will give you more ships to play with. Newer versions are incorporating the new 2.5 rules from AMG, and the creator of the program scaled way back on the available ships as the bugs get worked out. Any of the 1.8.xx updates run super-smooth, though.
2 Likes
After a long hiatus we had another post-work pub-based games night. One of my colleagues asked me to bring and teach Tiny Towns to see if it would be suitable to play with her children. We played with 6 people, and it works just as well as at lower player counts 
We had a wide range of scores from -3 to 25!
After that we played Detective Club , where my complete lack of a poker face led to my downfall, and everyone else learned that my husband’s brain works orthogonally to everyone else’s…
We finished off with a couple of rounds of Tsuro, which is always popular at these events.
9 Likes
La Citta been keen on another game of this as I have mixed feelings. And finished the game with mixed feelings. The “mini-Antiquity” vibe works well as your cities compete with other cities for education, health, and culture, and try to get their citizens to migrate to your cities - more citizens, more buildings occupied. Not only they are your engine, but they are your final VPs as well. So you can’t just rely on natural growth for engine/points. Very abstracted demonstration of both brain drain and immigration.
But which service to compete for that round makes a difference. There are 4 demand cards from the deck of demand cards. 1 is revealed to all, but the 3 are face-down and can be peeked at with an action card, provided that it is available on the public card shop. The majority demand will be the service to compete for that round. Now, the random and hidden demand cards is fine, but the card shop is where La Citta seems to fail to me. The card shop remains stagnant because alternative to picking a card from the shop, you can use one of the 3 personal cards you always have. This means that the shop tend to stay the same.
I thought about house-ruling it where either players can use a personal card to peek at 1 demand card, or the player must discard one card from the shop if they use a personal card, to keep the card shop fresh, but the owner wants to stick with the rules.
Peeking at cards is a big thing in the game and without it, the game becomes very lacking. Even if it’s someone else peeking at them, that gives you enough information to deduce correctly (or deduce incorrectly) on what the demands are.
This makes me reluctant on playing this again in the future. The lack of agency once you have a stale card shop is a big turn off to an otherwise brilliant game.
The Crew 2
War of the Ring 2 - played as Sauron. What is about to be a blitz through Rohan was stopped by Gandalf the White who showed up at Fangorn and killed Saruman, and the Isengard army was defeated twice at Edoras, severely depleting two armies. The remnants retreated to Helms Deep, and Rohan stands defiant. Minas Tirith survived the siege with another nutty dice rolls from the Free Peoples and wiped out the besieging army. The only consolation is that the Woodland Realms fell to the Easterlings. It was a disaster play that night for me.
Res Arcana + Lux Tenebrae + Perlae Imperii - not sure if it’s the two expansions or what could be the composition of cards, but the game felt longer now. I still really enjoy Res Arcana as your straight up efficiency Euro game. The initial drafting of 8 cards has the strategic choices of Seasons, which is still one of my fave “use your resources efficiently” card tableaus. I don’t mind keeping both for now
6 Likes
In shocking board gaming news:
Game That Is Literally A Big Handful Of Dice Turns Out To Be More Fun When The Dice Are Real.
I think push-your-luck dice games must be some of the least well-suited to virtual play.
7 Likes
I have had to fish a cow or chicken (or tank!) out of a scotch ale more times than I’d care to admit.
2 Likes
Yeah, I built an illicit private Zombie Dice mod for TTS (SJGames and Games Workshop are the two companies with blanket bans) when I was doing the A-Z challenge, and it was way less fun even than playing left hand against right.
Monday night at Local Games Club, Just One while we were waiting for people, then more Sentinels DE hurrah. (Ra, Tempest, First Appearance Wraith vs Akash’Bhuta.)
3 Likes
Played Lost Cities with my wife last night and got properly trounced. Okay, that’s not 100% true, as the final scores were just 11 points apart. I had won the first round, but she did great in the second round and managed to get ahead by a little over 30 points overall. Then in the third round I started pushing into blue with two wagers, despite only having the 5 in hand. Eventually I had to play the 5 as nothing else was coming out. My wife then proceeds to play the 6-10. -45 points right there. Vicious play! Amazingly, I still outscored her that round thanks to a lot of white cards, but not enough to make up the difference I needed. Good game.
Later I played a few games of Escape the Aliens in Outer Space on TTS with friends again. Well, our first game we tried a web-based version someone posted on BGG, which worked well, but has not yet implemented the character role powers. We also played on a map called “frenzy” which is ridiculously small and looked like certain doom for the human players. We had an odd number of players, and even though the game put the odd player on the human team, humans lost pretty quickly.
We went back to TTS so we could use the roles and played on a map called Machiavelli. I was an alien and managed to get a human just two turns into the game. Someone had been the Psychologist, who starts in the Alien zone. On a wild hunch, after moving away, I backtracked and got lucky, as he would have been in 1 of 3 different hexes, and I just happened to pick the right one. The other human died a turn later, so very quick game. Aliens win.
We set up and played again, and once again I was an alien. This time went much better for the humans. To start with, I ate one of the aliens (the same player as the last game) on turn three. Then it appeared the two humans were going in the same direction, with me and the other alien player right on their heels. Well, one of them felt like he was going to get killed, so instead used a Mutagen item, which turned him into an alien, making it 3 on 1. After a few moves, however, we realized we really didn’t know where the remaining human was, as the moves into consecutive safe zones just weren’t making sense with what we knew of his movements.
As we started puzzling it out, we realized he was probably right by the alien start hex, making for one of the escape pods not too far from it. Luckily, I was in close enough proximity to reach him before he could get there, and after a little bit of dancing around, I caught him. Another alien win!
While we are having fun with the game, we’re seeing what appears to be a fatal flaw: there is no reason for the aliens NOT to reveal themselves right away. By attacking a space in the first few moves, you identify yourself to the other aliens, so they don’t accidentally eat you, and then you can coordinate your moves to hunt down the humans. There is nothing in the rules against doing this, and nothing at all to discourage this behavior. The only potential downside is if there is a soldier, or someone gets an item that lets them attack, but each method only allows one attack per game, so even then it’s not a terrible risk.
Still, if you are playing as a human, it’s a huge thrill if you manage to escape, or even come close to it. The difficulty of doing so makes it feel like a real achievement.
6 Likes
I played a first solo of Lost Ruins of Arnak. Apparently, I am way less stressed all of a sudden and that means I get out the big games! Second day in a row.
I put the bot on easy-mode (all green tiles) and won as the Falconer with 65 over 47 points. I had a great 5th round that went on and on and on… the bot plays smooth enough. After the first two rounds I didn’t even have to look up any of the actions anymore.
Now I have Arnak and Dune Imperium. Too bad I was so stressed out I just had to buy games. I really like both. I couldn’t even say, if I favored one over the other right this moment. They deserve the comparison and yet are quite different. I am looking forward very much to receiving the Dune expansion which is due any moment now.
5 Likes
Games!
For appetizers: a round of Sprawlopolis 11 (with Loopy Lanes, Park Hopping—nope, and Master Planned), followed by Sagani (I don’t think I ever want to play this multiplayer but as a solo I love it).
And then for the main course: Planet Unknown. Beware I have waited for this for a while but it’s just as good as I remember it. I love polyominoes and this one has all the shapes and a few extra.
Players are a corporation that wants to transform a planet which they do by placing polyominoes. Most of the points come from scoring completed rows and columns on the planet. The second biggest source of scores are the tracks on your corporation board.
All the tiles are placed in stacks on a lazy susan and the person whose turn it is gets to choose one wedge and place one or two tiles from the corresponding 2 stacks. Everyone else has to pick at least one tile from their assigned wedge. In solo mode you just go through wedges one by one.
(Setup for 1 player—plays up to 6)
Whenever you place a tile on your planet you must place adjacent and then get to advance the tracks corresponding to the two resources shown on the tile. There are 5 tracks on your corporation board (civ, water, greenery, rover and science) and a sixth resource energy that has no track itself.
Each track contains a number of points and other bonusses that allow for some nice combos. The game ends when a player cannot place a tile.
(Ready for scoring)
There are six asymmetric planets and corporations and there’s a standard planet and corporation on the backside. I used the asymmetric side. Both are fine.
I enjoyed my first loss (by 1 point) quite a lot. Need to play somemore. But also need to watch Kingsman2 some more.
10 Likes
Airecon day 1:
Started off with Mariposas, where I made the usual mistake of letting the end of round objectives tempt my butterflies too far away to get many back for final scoring.
Followed that up with some quick games: Senshi, Cartographers, and So Clover. The latter is published by the same people as Just One and is another cooperative word-guessing game involving dry-wipe markers. In this one everyone gets 4 cards, with a different word on each edge, dealt into a 2x2 grid. You then have to come up with a word for each side of the grid that links the two words. The cards are then removed from your grid, shuffled in with a fifth card, and given to the other players who have to try and reconstruct the original grid. It’s definitely harder than Just One, but it’s quite a nice challenge and good fun.
After lunch we played The Ruhr, which was described to me as “very thematic” so I guess I now know what it’s like to be a coal merchant in 18th century Germany 
I came dead last, having been blocked from executing a plan early on in the game and not having a good backup, but I’d definitely play again to try and not make the same mistake!
In the evening it was mostly light games: Just One, Stick 'em, and Detective Club.
9 Likes
Went on a day outing with a bunch of lovely people, during which same games were played. While waiting for the ferry to a small nearby island, four of us played a game of Martian Dice. Following some nice walks around the island, we regrouped for lunch and played a couple of games of Ultimate Werewolf with eight players, and a couple of games of No Thanks with seven. And then later in the evening, back on the mainland, myself and one of the others had a game of Arboretum (a refresher for me and a learning game for her, so naturally she crushed me by 23 points to 11 after blocking me from scoring all but one of my paths!)
It was a lovely day, and nice to share some games in a larger group, and revisit some games I haven’t played for a while.
7 Likes
My husband and I played a new game last night, Now or Never. It’s the third in a series that we’ve liked (Above and Below / Near and Far were the other two). We’ve also got Sleeping Gods by the same designer/artist which has some things in common with this trilogy, but isn’t considered part of the series because it’s not set in the same fictional land.
Now or Never can be played stand alone or in a story campaign with each player taking on a unique character and reading passages specific to that character from a book when performing certain actions (mostly “searching” locations on the main board). It recommends you play at least once in stand alone before jumping into story, but my husband refuses to follow those kind of recommendations so we jumped right into the campaign. We played very different strategies, focusing on different actions and different parts of the game. He did more fighting monsters and building up his town with buildings and rescued villagers. I did more searching, playing quest cards, and only eventually caught up on buildings and never got close on villagers. By the end of round 2 of the 6 round game, I was sure he was kicking my butt and my strategy had no chance of catching up. Somewhere around late round 4 or early 5, I wasn’t so sure. Final score was 149 to 147, my win. Such a tight game for that high of a score and for such different strategies!
8 Likes
Games! 3 player afternoon
Bonfire, still a bit solo for me but at the better end of Feld games
Dual Gauge, whoah. This is fabulous. Played the Portugal map which I gather is the simplest. Really interesting in how is flips many cube rails conventions on their heads. Did OK, would play again but at £50 for the game I’m not buying it
Northern Pacific. Another excellent game, bit meh with three as it becomes one against the other. Want to try with 4+
Don Quixote, old school bingo caller style game. It’s OK
The Last Spike, another old school shared incentive game. Much better than Acquire. Another on the ‘play with more players pile’.
Great games, good company.
6 Likes
My non gamer parents are visiting this weekend. We played a lot of trick takers as a family so we introduced them to The Crew. It took a few hands to get the coop nature of the game across and I think we melted their brains, but we completed 6 missions.
Went for easier tonight and played Doodle Dash, which our kids joined us for. This is a fast paced, party drawing game that was on the podcast a few episodes ago. It’s less gamery than Pictomania and less chaotic (for good and bad) than Telestrations. It’s really silly, lots of fun and I’d really recommend it. I think there’s a space for all 3 of those games in your collection though.
7 Likes
Reporting from a big weekend of games last week with some friends from Discord.
We played a 6 player game of Cosmic Encounter. First or second play for most of us. Really chaotic, a complete load of BS that didn’t hit for everyone. I’m desperate to play it again.
Followed by Kemet: Blood and Sand. Again, new to most of the group. This dragged a bit with the teach from the awful rulebook. It got a bit bash the leader at the end. Still enjoyed it, but my search for a fighty game continues. Will definitely keep this around though.
After some food we played The Resistance. Only had 6 (someone dropped out in the morning). This needs 7+ and was a bit of a wash.
Finished with party games. Doodle Dash, So Clover, Times Up and Lama Dice. I love a party game and these we all fantastic.
Sunday morning started with some Crokinole over coffee while we waited for people to wake up.
Five player Tournament at Avalon. This was a banger. Trick taking with powers. It’s as bonkers as Cosmic. Can’t wait to play it again.
5 player Through the Desert. This didn’t land. I want to love this, it’s a grail game for many. Will be selling my copy.
A couple of rounds of For Sale. A two part, party level auction game. Like a stripped down Biblios. One of our guests had been in the US just before and they gave this to us a present. It’s really good.
A bit more Lama Dice. It’s daft, it’s not much of a game, but it’s really fun.
To finish we split. I played Gentes. A euro with some contract fulfilment. I enjoyed it, but I own a lot of 90 minute mid weight euros. My wife played Beyond the Sun, which I’m getting back in to, Coloretto, which is pure push your luck and Railroad Ink.
Cracking weekend, lots of fun. It’s taken a week to recover!
9 Likes
Another 2-player session today. Got some unplayed stuff played and second plays of a couple of others.
Walking in Burano - Nice simple start, but fun. I do enjoy that at some point someone asked themselves “who should we have as a resident who scores for chimneys?” and answered it with “Santa”.
A War of Whispers - I don’t think this really works with two. Really want to try it again with more people. Maybe I can work out how to actually strategise.
The King Is Dead - A similar setup to AWoW, but a very different game. Works much better at two. A very close game: we had to go to the final tie-breaker to work out the winner.
Atheneum: Mystic Library - A game about magic books where you’re doing barely anything related to magic or books. Works well at 2, but would be more interesting with more players, as the action selection would be a bit more involved.
Codex Naturalis - A bit like Splendor, but with an added spatial dimension. I got lucky with a private goal that fit well with one of the public goals.
8 Likes