Solo game of Cascadia.
Used the “C” cards and scored 91! (That’s high for me).
2 Likes
After a long 2/3 week stretch I got some gaming in today. Started off with a first play of Scorpius Freighter. This was really interesting. A pick up and deliver game with the moving/routes airbrushed out and 3 shared rondels for players to navigate. This keeps the interaction up a bit but mainly makes it a shifting tactical space of annoyance and delight. Really enjoyed it, learn to play/teach first setup and it was all done in a about 1hr 45mins so a bit more knowing and it should play nice and fast. Seems in a similar time frame/weight/space to Calimala so should see a fair few more plays.
Next we played Rome & Roll. I enjoyed this game of it, maybe winning so brutally and quickly helped. Feeling smug about tight choices can fluff up the fun a bit. However I think it has some stuff going for it. The novelty and fun form factor of drawing buildings on the board plus the handiness of resources being tracked with dry wipe is quite efficient and kinda fun. The interlocking and shared space of the central map is quite good, I think my victory was sudden and strong as I got a good balance of triggering my own buildings plus using senators which are a bene you get for building next to opposition buildings. The others didn’t which was inefficient of them. Dice drafting adds in some grit to make you work hard and chucks all sorts of problems to work around. I like that for the inventiveness you need to show to get along in the game. I enjoyed it more than the first play so certainly will play again. Looking forward to mixing up the buildings a bit to see how much variety they put in to the feel of it.
Finally a couple of rounds of Quarriors saw out the session. First time using the corrupted quiddity expansion. It was fine in that it didn’t mess with the main fun of Quarriors but it ultimately didn’t add too much variety. As it’s in the big box I’d play with it again.
5 Likes
Ran away to the mountain cabin for a few days, and Set A Watch was delivered just before we pulled away. I’ve not done well, but losing has been great fun, and I’ve been able to play to the soundtrack of a roaring wood stove and wild animals, so the environment has been conducive to immersion.
Also got CoraQuest to the table with the kids for the first time. The liked the artwork and story, but after cutting their teeth on the D&D Adventure System Games they recognized that they mostly like dungeon crawlers. I’m guessing they’ll use the character creation tools from CoraQuest and use them with the Adventure System stuff.
Lastly, a lightning game of Jaipur with the Lovely Wife. This has long been a favorite, but we haven’t gotten to it in quite a while. I won on camels, which always feels like something of a hollow victory.
7 Likes
Played quite a few more games of Caper: Europe, both 2-player and solo (using a variant I designed). And, not to tell tall tales out of school, but… I think it might completely replace 7 Wonders: Duel for me. I still think 7WD is a deeper, more involved, and more strategic game, but Caper scratches a very similar itch, in a shorter time period, with less setup, a smaller table presence, fewer fiddly and annoying rules, and much better production values. I also like my solo variant for Caper a lot better than the solo mode for 7WD which, while quite good for being so simple, failed to capture a lot of the breadth and variety of the underlying game. I’ll keep Duel for now, but if Caper ever gets an expansion, I’m dumping it like a sack of potatoes.
Also played three solo games of Long Shot: The Dice Game. The solo mode is smooth and works shockingly well, and I’m inclined to call this the final point of the perfect roll-and-write triangle, alongside Welcome to the Moon and Railroad Ink. Welcome To is dense and strategic, Long Shot is silly and exciting, and Railorad Ink is spatial and meditative. All three are excellent, I don’t feel like I could call one “better” than the others, and I think if you owned those three, you might never need another roll-and-write ever again.
6 Likes
I love how Cora Quest was created. Cool story
3 Likes
We broke out Calico at the weekend. Delightfully easy to learn the rules and a very satisfying little puzzle. I could see it getting quite mean if you pay attention to what your opponents have on their boards…
I also played a solo game of Three Sisters over lunch yesterday. I’ve noticed that I usually go for the same combinations so I need to try something different next time. I never usually get anywhere with the apiary so perhaps a bee-focused garden.
10 Likes
Some games were played.
Magic Maze on Mars languished on my shelves for a while after a short initial foray got cut short when I bought it back… sometime. I felt in the mood to try the solo again. And was frustrated by the 10-second action switcheroo (the game has you actually play 2 handed but you can only switch between hands when your phone’s timer has 10/20/30 seconds… etc). Was also reminded that I do not like realtime games most of the time. It gets confusing real fast. I didn’t dislike the original but was put off by our friend explaining she used it at work as team communication exercise. Turns out the Mars version is… the same. I convinced my partner to give it a try at two players… it was okay. He said if his team was local and not distributed across the whole world he would bring it to some social event. So to the sell-pile it goes. Bought against my own better judgment because it said “Mars”.
Played the first board of Flippermania (I really like this better than Superskill Pinball lalalala which is just too long to write out or even remember the complete title of). Surprisingly, my partner found time for it yesterday afternoon when normally he would have had to work. It was a blast. Definitely looking forward to playing again and trying more boards.
Welcome To The Moon: How to improve upon a good roll & write experience? Play an even better Flip & Write. I was disappointed by the saminess of Welcome To after a few games and sold the box sometime in the last few months. I was never interested in the Vegas Casino version after the SUSD podcast (or was it a review) claimed it was just too complicated. But that didn’t keep me from wanting the space version. And finally this is the keeper. I have now played the first two boards against “Katherine” (easy mode bot) and I love it. I hope that the rules retention of the different boards holds, so I don’t have to learn everything all over again everytime I don’t play for a few weeks.
Roll & Writes get sold on quickly from my shelves if they don’t click immediately. But this one feels right. The only one that I have that’s better is Railroad Ink and that’s addictive.
Apropos, I finally got some of the Railroad Ink expansions (I freed them from a preorder waiting on Art Decko, meh) and got to play Clouds, Streetlights and a really weird game of Engineers. I must say they get a bit fiddly and my favorites remain Woods and Paths from my Lush Green box.
And finally, I played two-handed a learning game of Brew (preordered in September!) which some of you may remember from some SUSD preview sometime last summer? It’s a pretty quick… area majority/contract fulfillment game with dice “workers” and four ever so slightly asymmetric player powers. It’s played over four rounds during which players get to place 6 dice on action spaces, most of which are on the current rounds’ Forest cards. The dice get rolled at the start of each round and need to be placed on matching actions. Placing a die mostly gets you some resources which you can use to brew potions that let you manipulate the dice. There are also action spaces that let you claim creatures that give you either additional action spaces or modify your actions in some way. At the end of each round the Forest cards can be claimed by those with the dice majority on them. Points are counted at the end of the game and come from the Forests, Creatures you tamed and Potions you brewed.
It’s pretty light and feels relaxed but that goes for a rather tame two-handed game. It plays 2-4 players and I guess without learning/teaching should play in under an hour at 2 players. A very medium game: medium box, medium price (I paid 26€), medium length, medium amount of table space… has potential to be a keeper if only because the custom dice are pretty neat, my partner loves dice games and we have no other dice-worker placement games—I think.
3 Likes
Stephenson’s Rocket - went dead last 
Anno 1800 - interesting Euro where you can access other player’s tableau with trading, meaning you don’t need to build the whole shebang to go through the tech tree. I am not sure about this game. I’m leaning on “I enjoyed it, but not keen on playing it again” at the moment.
Senators - ultra cheesy game, but it rocks. I left the games club night with a realisation: whenever I play a Jim Felli game, I end up wanting to play a Rikki Tahta game instead.
5 Likes
So I’ve now played 2 games of Lost Ruins of Arnak on Board Game Arena…
Thankfully, it’s good! I was a little worried after having purchased the expansion before playing the game that I was just tossing good money after bad, but no! It is legitimately good.
And I am very, very bad at it. But that’s okay! It’s a little slower than I thought it would be, but gosh I can’t come up with a coherent strategy for it yet. I’m usually about midway up the Research Track (which seems to be the main way to score points) by the time the game ends, and my opponents are crunching through Temple Points somehow.
Hopefully I figure something out before long!
6 Likes
The only thing I remember from my one play (also on BGA) is “not enough tablet”
2 Likes
I tend to always go for the sites and monsters and artifacts while my wife goes up the research track, like I’m just going after her shooting the critters and picking up the stuff while she geeks out over wall carvings and such…
She usually wins, but I feel like that doesn’t invalidate my strategy since she wins at EVERYTHING anyway. 
4 Likes
Games night!
Started with Dual Gauge, took the win so it’s obviously excellent. Then St Peterburg fun light tableau builder. Seven Wonders Architects, I thought Sushi Go was a light drafting game. This is featherweight.
3 Likes
Played my new copies of the wallet versions of Sprawlopolis and Ugly Gryphon Inn.
I am… not yet any good at Sprawlopolis. First solo game I scored 30 against a target of 31, by sacrificing EVERYTHING to get a giant loop road and losing points all over the place.
Ugly Gryphon Inn is great. I eventually got 7 guests stable and in the Inn (I think) with something like 6 having left. Nice solo. Stupid goblins.
6 Likes
Played some Testament first up. It’s ok. I had fun, good puzzleyness to it. Maybe not that full step up in to greatness bit I’d certainly play again. Boss batller type coop with anime art, skill progressions and surprisingly not boobtacular.
Next up saw Pipeline hot the table. This games is great fun. Unless you’re @lalunaverde 
. Cash converting your oil around is something I still find fun. I enjoy the tricky balance of getting your momentum up and the scratchy start to the last years managing cash to make sure you can run your machines every turn. The upgrades are I think the weak part. I still play without making extra tracks unavailable. Partly as I don’t want to hear a particular person complain about if, but also I want more of them in the game as they can be a bit fun skewing incentives about the place. Really enjoyed this one.
Rounded off with 2 games of Heul Doch! Mau Mau second hand we even used the special powers! I like the powers, will use them again for sure. I think I particularly like how fast the game is.
3 Likes
Pipeline -
Jokings aside: I wasn’t that hot about it. Lacking in both common space and shared incentives, it was enough for me to ignore it now. The strategic planning is pretty good that it stops me from fully disliking it.
Heul Doch! Mau Mau
2 Likes
Quick game of Lost Cities with my wife this evening. Another win for me, 156 - 89. Though I do think we just had our collectively lowest scoring round in this game in round 3, where she won 15 - 3.
3 Likes
After logging nearly 70 plays of Hardback on BGA, 49 of those with the same friend, I think we need a break. Yesterday we lost against Penny Dreadful once again—we have managed to win about every other game recently. There is some luck involved in how the expensive cards come up but it requires strictly great deck building. Great coop. Still… we need another game to play.
I tried a quick solo of A Fest for Odin on BGA (yep it’s quick!) to see if this might be a thing for us. Having only ever played a few games a year or two back, I had a bit of a difficult time getting started but at least I didn’t finish with negative points 
Not sure if this is a good game for us. We previously played Tash Kalar but this became too confrontational to be played “on the side” all the time. I am open to suggestions for good async 2 player games that play “long”.
With my other regular BGA playing partner I’ve also graduated from Hardback, to a series of Castles of Burgundy and now we’re playing Lost Ruins of Arnak. She’s still learning, so its slow going but this is game 4 for me overall and I am enjoying every play of it a little more as I start understanding how it all comes together.
Also played board #3 of Welcome to the Moon and almost didn’t manage to fill the last ”box”.That’s the most tricksy one so far. I expect it to only get harder. I am not playing the campaign now, just adventuring through the different boards. It’s lovely and there are enough similarities and visual queues that I expect the specific rules for each scenario to stick. I may need a player aid for the missions though. My partner declared he wanted to participate when I start the campaign. But that will have to wait, we have several on-going campaign games…
Speaking of which. He also said he wasn’t interested in losing My City against me any more. So I played the next 5 games last night—two handed. Funny enough my right hand played his board and he won 5 of 5 games… I like polyominoes and I tend to not think too much about placement. And the less I look the better I play apparently, it’s not like I concentrated any on what right hand did. And that’s why my partner doesn’t play these with me. He has to think for a good while—bordering on AP—before placing a tile why my foot has already tapped out half a novel waiting and then he still loses. He can’t fathom how I do it and neither do I—seeing how I repeatedly failed at Planet Unknown. It makes him feel stupid when we both know he is everything but. I’ll finish this quickly I think. The game just hasn’t a lot of substance and I dislike having too many on-going campaigns.
4 Likes
I’m happy to play async AFFO if you want to try it.
I tried to play it solo but couldn’t get it to work
As far as other 2 player async - Great Western Trail scales well, but you’d both need alpha access. Shout if you’re interested.
T’zolkin might be worth a look?
2 Likes
It sounds like EVERYONE is playing this and NO ONE is liking it. But then tomorrow someone else has played it.
Marketing juggernaut? What’s the driver here?
1 Like
I certainly heard about the launch from more places than I usually hear about things. I suspect this is an attempt to sell to the mass market rather than to self-identified gamers.
3 Likes