Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Boardgames
4951

I had a couple of solo games of Tales of Arabian Nights on Friday and Saturday night. Loved it, it built two amazing stories for Ali Baba on Friday and Sindbad on Saturday. Friday night my adventurer got his heart broken twice before ending married in Damascus and having visited the Sepulcher of Salomon among other great adventures, and Sindbad sailed half the world, Settled in Alexandria with a loving wife, visited the Undersea Kingdom and the House Spirits, and released a Djinni that made him Sultan that gave me enough fortune to return to Baghdad and fulfil his story.

Just looking at the sheer amount of combinations, I am so glad I got it. I loved Choose your own adventure books, and the Lone Wolf series, and this really allows me to do that again, for longer perhaps. I have to say thanks to Quinns, it was one of his oldest reviews that put me in the trail of this game, and I am glad I got it, second hand and in very good condition (just a bit of sun fade on one of the sides of the lid, components are tip top).

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4952

Yeah, I’m not sure this has aged well. I prefer Blue Lagoon to this

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4953

The beginning of the Tales of the Arabian Nights review is definitely one of my favourites. A mere 40 seconds to get you thoroughly hooked. I don’t know if that’s a record or not, but it’s a great opening either way.

It sounds like you’ve got a pretty good memory for what happened in your games (or maybe you already did exactly what I’m about to suggest) so YMMV, but for me…

I consider the spinning of the random Arabian Nights events into a coherent written narrative to be a crucial unwritten rule of the game. We house-ruled it after three turns of our first game, when we realised we already had to think hard to remember what had taken place, and it was all going to turn into an unmemorable blur. The initial aim was simply to make a log of the events, but it was almost immediately clear that connecting the events into an ongoing story was so much more fun.

If you have two players it’s going to slow things down a little. If you have at least three, then one can handle the books and matrices for the current player, while the previous player is writing their journal – and hopefully filling in additional bits of flavour to better tie that encounter into the overall tale. (I think the game starts getting pretty long at 4+, so I reckon 3 is a good number.)

The crazed narrative you generate is the best thing about this game, so having a way to keep those stories really appeals to me. Moreover, I found the acts of documenting and elaborating on the encounters and the character’s motivations for the decisions made, and considering how each encounter tied into previous events, really enhanced the stories, making the whole experience even better. It’s a really fun way to actually remember what’s been happening, and consequently make the events make some kind of sense in an overarching narrative. Anytime you can derive someone’s motivation from the previous events in the story, it’s brilliant.

Really enthusiastic players might then edit their journal into a more cohesive tale after the game was over, but you can end up with a pretty enjoyable retrospective of the game with only what you manage to write on the fly. Players can either take their stories with them, or just keep them all in the box to laugh about again on a future games night.

(I believe I’d posted much the same thing on the old SUSD forum, and in both cases it was edited together from comments I’d made at various times at the SUSD site. So if you feel like you’ve read this before, you probably have : )

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4954

Thanks so much, that is something that I have done before with video games (Total War and Crusader Kings come to mind) where I would write a chronicle as I was playing the game through the games years.

I had not seen your comment about the game before, so thanks for sharing, you don’t need to apologize, at least not to me :slight_smile:

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4955

I have only played this at 2 player. Also, only played it the one time. However, I thought it worked great at two player because of how it let you focus on just the one opponent, instead of a few. Squeezing out every point you can to jump ahead felt so manipulative and just awesome.

In my case, we both realized after a couple of turns that we shared the same most favored empire (blue). As the game went on, we also figured out each others negative scoring empires. Yellow was his negative, but my second, while brown was my negative but turned out to be his second. We were both hitting the others negatives pretty hard, so he ended up switching brown in second with one of his lower scoring empires, green or red, I think.

I realized I could use yellow to take cities from blue, as blue zeroed out between us since we both had it in the same position. However, yellow would get me points and cost him points. So, I did it, and I won by 7 points. I don’t know, it somehow just felt like a last minute backstab, and felt so thematic to the game. If we had had more players, I have no idea if it would have worked out the same way. I still want to try it with more, but I did like the duel feel of 2 player.

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4956

Revisiting that Arabian Nights review also reminded me of this comment:

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4957

Played Lost Cities with my wife again. No explosive scores thisntime around, but I won every round, just by a smaller margin each time, and just by 1 point in the third. Final scores were 162 - 106.

Later we broke out Concordia using the Italia map. We had no regions which produced food by prefecting, so it felt pretty scare most of the game. As such, it took a while before I even had brick or food cities in any quantity, even though the Mason was my first purchased card.

Without realizing it, I rushed the end of the game, building my final three cities, when I had been setting up to build four, not realizing how few houses I had remaining. My wife needed another turn or two to get up to speed, as while she had five of her colonists out, compared to my three, she had been low on funds and still had five houses left to build, and was only holding her Tribune card for her last turn. As such, she was only in 7 of the 11 regions to score for Saturnivs.

I won, 129 - 110.

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4958

Airecon day 2:

  • Pax Pamir 2E: a low scoring game (7 points for the winner) that ended abruptly when two dominance check cards came out in the same turn.
  • Himalaya: Yaktastic pickup and delivery/programming game.
  • A couple of rounds of Cryptid. The first game ended after someone guessed the right spot after 10 minutes, so we played another.
  • Import/Export: if anyone has tips for explaining the whole multi-use card thing (see also Glory to Rome and Mottainai) without melting people’s brains I’d be very happy to hear them! I really like the game but hate teaching it…
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4959

I don’t know if it’s a teaching tip, really, but I found that spelling out explicitly and slowly the only ways cards can move between different states, in a way that makes it sounds really limiting, kind of helps. So, the only way to build is to use an artisan or craftsman to do this, or the only way a card can become a work is from your hand, by doing this. It helps when people realise there are various one-way flows, and a card that becomes X will remain X forever, etc.

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4960

Also good is to stack the deck beforehand to set up a real smooth example. I do this with Mottainai. “Player One plays this Monk, which allows them to hire a helper. Now Player Two plays a Potter, which lets them collect a material. But first, they do Player One’s action, which means they can hire this Potter from the floor before they use their Potter, and now they have two Potter actions.” Etc etc

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4961

Played a game of Planet Unknown with my partner—surprised me, because he recently declared he hated polyominoes. And initially the decision space overwhelmed him but after a few turns it seems he found his groove and the AP—while not quite vanishing—was much reduced. There are so many factors going into choosing a wedge and a tile that it actually helps narrow down what you want to take for a turn. Mostly which tracks you want to move, where you want to place them, how close you can place a possible asteroid impact and can you use water or energy efficiently.

This is barely interactive (he did take the tile that would have fit my board perfectly one time) but I just like the whole process of filling up the planet with polyominoes and moving up the tracks while collecting life pods and asteroids with your rover/s.

Definitely lives up to my expectations :slight_smile: I like polyominoes and I was looking for a favorite one for a while. I feel that this may be it. The tracks are also well-done and the asymmetric planets and corporations just add a lot to replayability—also the trays from the insert suggest that more content is possibly in the making. There is a lot more space for cards especially. Also plays in around an hour and setup/tear down is quick. Definitely a plus or two.

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4962

An oldie but a goodie. Played a 2 player game of Survive: Escape from Atlantis! today with kiddo, using 2 colours each. His usual tactic of gleefully destroying my boats and swimmers and then presenting a puppey-eyed plea for forgiveness whenever I had a similar opportunity, fell on deaf ears on this occassion. However, this made it all the more enjoyable for him when we counted up the scores to find that he’d still beaten me 31-28. Cue 9 year old joyously dancing right to my face… :laughing:

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4963

So, still quite hooked on Tales of the Arabian Nights, I had another go with Ma’alouf. Quite the traveller he turned out to be.

Started around Samarkand with him, where he got imprisoned by an evil Vizier, until he tricked the jailer and escaped. Managed to discover a family fortune, and off he went again. Discovered many treasures, even some giant diamonds that made him fabulous rich, had a few runs with Eefreits and Mermen of all suits, until he discovered a statue in North Europe that sent him to the city of Brass.

There he learned to master the Q’ran copying the scriptures form the walls, and in a massive storm through the Sahara, he got sent to the Dusk Kingdom, where he learned the ways of magic from spying on a congregation of Eefreits. After that, somewhere in Persia he found a black magical statue of a Horse that allowed him to fly to any destination in the map.

Eventually got married and made a Vizier in Damascus, but never recovered his fabulous riches o became a scholar to allow him the upgrade to Sultan, and ended up out of turns just a Princely rich Vizier with two children, one a future prodigy (according to the dice).

Anyway, had a lot of fun with this one. Seems like with this game the possibilities are endless.

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4964

Airecon games!

Lots of Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition. Really enjoying this for both solo and multiplayer. Fought the Baron, the Moonfall Event (in Atlantis!), Akash’Bhuta and Citizen Dawn. This breaks a rule of coop games: so far the heroes have won every game I’ve played. No hero has been incapacitated. And yet, except for some of the Blade games, it’s always felt as though it was going down to the wire…

Sakura Arms new L99 edition. This is going to take study I think; we were struggling a bit with the iconography.

A Touch of Evil, bashing the vampire. Great fun as always.

Lemminge, always silly fun.

Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn, first time I’ve played this since I got the upgrade kit. Really wanting to get back into it.

Realm of Sand, an odd little thing but good fun.

The Quacks of Quedlinburg, with resin bits of course.

Tobago, with the Volcano, my goodness that changes things! Much more complicated now; I can see deciding to play without it, particularly with people who don’t already know the game.

Automobiles, still a fine bagbuilder, always felt as if it didn’t really get the attention it deserved.

Pirate 21, “blackjack with special card powers”. Silly fun.

Roll to the Top!, slow and steady gets you beaten.

Senators, another game that’s not as well known as it should be.

Damask, to be published by our own @MarkSP – thanks for the Sunday morning demo! I’m very probably in when this launches.

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4965

A good gaming sunday:

Tsuro Our go to “let’s play until everyone arrives” game. nice, quick and easy tile laying game which still needs some thinking. I didn’t win obviously…

Ca$h’n’Guns We discussed the need of good pictures of party games for our meetup group. I brought my “most intriguing on a photo” game. You can argue about the quality of the pics, but the game was fun. Even managed to stay alive, through the game, didn’t help.

Tempel des Schreckens Maybe the calmest social deduction game. I like how quick it plays. Managed to get a guardian to go for my cards since I claimed the final bomb. Luckily the player who actually had the bomb had the treasure in the next round while I had the key.

Jungle Speed Quick and nice game.

Calico Played it for the first time, liked it a lot. Reminds me a lot of Azul.

Rail Pass It’s ridiculous how much I love this silly game, But real time cooperative dexterity game is such a fun niche in board gaming. Choo Choo baby!

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4966

Scout - OOOHHH YEAH. New Oink game and this is a very fun shedding card game. One of my faves of this year, no doubt.

Imperial 2030 - China dominated significantly in this game as every other powers balanced each other, and China was left mostly untouched as there are 3 out of 6 players (which includes myself) who are reluctant on damaging its position. I unwisely gambled big on Russia that exploded outwards rapidly, but the game was closing too fast for Russia to advance further. While one of the players took control of China from me and raked up shares, which won him the game. It sounds unwise to do that move, but I thought I want to give it a try.

Go Nuts for Donuts - set collecting card game like Sushi Go, but relies on second guessing other people on the public drafting, instead of the rather solitaire-ish drafting. Players all choose which of the cards available they want to take secretly and at the same time. And the players who chose the same donut won’t have it and it goes to the discard. I prefer this one to Sushi Go because of this. Very similar to Crossing, which SUSD reviewed aeons ago.

Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers and Carcassonne: Amazonas - yep. It plays like Carcassonne. I don’t think they replace my copy of the base game, especially when I have the first 2 expansions as well.

Glux - simple abstract game, but wasn’t as compelling as I thought. Blokus is still my fave 2 and 4 player abstract game

Elfenroads - so we tried all the modes: Elfenlands, Elfengold, and Elfensea. This is typical “travelling salesman: the board game” from Alan Moon and it’s fun. The rules are slightly heavier here in Elfenroads. I still enjoy playing Ticket to Ride, especially the wilder variants of it like Rails and Sails or whatever, but I really prefer this one. The requirement to create routes are not static and are determined by players. So, if your elf wants to travel on a forest route, players can determine the mode of transportation required to move through. Which you then play that transport card to proceed. If a route doesn’t have a transport assigned, you cannot use any of your cards to move through.

This is significant. There’s strong incentives for people to start working together by assigning transports on routes, and good luck if you’re going solo. Elfengold adds in auctions which adds tension on which transport type can be picked up. But the problem here is that alliances and the breaking of alliances tend to happen by coincidence. Player B and I moved north because we have dragon tiles which are perfect for mountain routes. Then, we split ways because I have unicorn cards for the desert routes.

Still glad to play it. Airlines Europe is still my fave Alan Moon route building as it combines this and area majority.

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4967

More Lost Cities. Another W in my column. :slight_smile:

Tempted to get some kind of token that says “World’s Greatest Explorer” for us to give to the winner…

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4968

Loot of Lima , first play. This is a competitive deduction game. You are trying to find 2 buried treasures on the island, out of 24 possible locations. The locations are split between beaches, forests, and mountains. Each player has their own map where they can add tokens. Obviously, you are looking for tokens not held by yourself or other players. There are three dice, each with directions (ie N, SW etc) and a terrain type (beach, forest, mountain). On your turn, you roll three dice and select two of them, and then ask another player about that range. If your dice show the same terrain, then you are asking about that terrain, otherwise, it’s all terrain. So, I might ask someone “How many beaches do you have between N and E”. Once you think you know where each of the treasures are, you can check to see if you’ve won. Half of the challenge in these types of games is figuring out how to record information from everyones guesses. I really had no clue about the treasures, but I won because both of the other players tried and failed. I did a Bradbury, basically. Need to play again.

Cthulhu:Death May Die . We had to destroy campsites with fire. I was rolling badly for tentacles, I was well over half way on my sanity track, and we still had two campsites to destroy. And we were fighting Cthulhu, who is a bugger for sanity. So I figured I was dead. Cthulhu came out, but we still had another campsite to kill. So I ended up in a space with four cultists, Cthulhu (who we couldn’t damage), and his mate Starspawn. Thanks to toughness, I managed to survive, but things still looked grim. Somehow we got the last campsite, and it was game on. Cthulhu moved out of my space, which was great, because I had markmen. I was almost to the end of the sanity track, so lots of bonus dice, and the marksmen bonus, and yet another bonus dice from being on an insanity threshold. And finally I got some good rolls, killed Cthulhu for that stage.

We all got some good hits in, two of us died, and then the last player pulled out the win. It was amazing! Didn’t get to throw my molotov cocktails, which was disappointing. We had masses of cultists, but we all had toughness, so they couldn’t hurt us.

Picture Perfect . Our second game. I’m really not too sure about this game. It’s a cool idea, no doubt about that. It’s fun I guess. But when you have to steal or exchange envelopes with other players, I can’t see any point to choosing one envelope over another. There’s no tension there. My biggest problem seems to be my memory, particularly when you get to the last envelopes, and your board is full. I can’t remember why I put character A in their position, for example. Maybe I’m expecting more from the game.

Noch Mal! , I really am terrible at this game. I think the winner had 34 points, and I had 6.

The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X 3.

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4969

Thanks for a fun Airecon Roger! You’ve rekindled my love for Sentinels of the Multiverse although I’ll remind you that many of the games we’ve played have been against Baron Blade, who’s very much the tutorial boss. My personal favourite game of Sentinels this weekend was our 5-player versus Akash-B’huta (or however it is spelled) which really went down to the wire.

I was trying to think of my favourite game we played and am still unsure as genuinely I enjoyed all of them.

I always like Quacks even though the resin pieces have now ruined normal Quacks for me.

Tobago took on a whole extra level of complexity with the volcano which I’m not entirely sure it needs but is probably interesting for more seasoned veterans than me.

Touch of Evil was schlocky fun as ever although perhaps it feels a little samey after awhile. Maybe I need to try a new villain in that one.

I really enjoyed Sandy Build build, I think it was called, the one with polyominoes in the desert, although I can see it’s a little flawed in that it just doesn’t quite have the beauty and satisfaction of some other similar games.

Senators was over rather too quickly for me although I doubt I would have fared any better if it wasn’t (four war cards in nine card draws I think?).

Automobiles surprised me by feeling much more fun in reality than it has on Yucata. I think maybe I’m more influenced by aesthetics than I care to admit but I really enjoyed it.

Speaking of aesthetics, I really find them distracting in Sakura Arms as they’re really not to my taste. Conversely, the otherwise similar Ashes: rise of the Phonisthingy I can imagine getting very into and I very much want to try it more.

A few roll and writes, in particular Gans schon clever, in which I wasn’t but I enjoyed anyway, and Race to the Top about which I could say the same.

And I’m never talking about Pirate 21 again.

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4970

Yup - my non-Blade games have been Akash’Bhuta and Citizen Dawn with you, and Akash’Bhuta last week, all of which had serious “OK we may well lose this” feelings but ended with no heroes incapacitated. (And Moonfall Blade was a bit tougher than the regular one, mostly with the possible early game end - I think we got to 11 or 12 out of 15? Mad Bomber Blade looks harder again.)

I blame Vicky, whose resin pieces ruined normal Quacks for me.

The forum game here was against the Headless Horseman, and that was good fun too. I’m still looking for the expansions at a decent price; I hear rumours of a reprint so I’m not paying a premium now.

Yeah, that and Lemminge are games for which the majority of my recent plays have been on yucata, and it’s lovely to remember (for Automobiles) and discover (for Lemminge) the joy of the physical pieces. (You could turn Automobiles into a custom card game, but I like the cubes.)

I find the heavy line style quite busy and visually distracting; I didn’t really notice this playing on TTS.

Moral victory.

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