Today is Unpack Bardsung Day at my house. As soon as I saw the board, I knew I was going to love the game, but also that as soon as I found a way to not use the board, I would no longer be using the board. I’m off to the craft store to pick up a small-bits storage solution., And then am going to dive into the game this afternoon.
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This forum is amazing, and thanks to @Scribbs I now have Pulp Detective and the first expansion.
I’ve played Elder Sign for about a million hours on the phone app, and I’m good enough at it that I’ve beaten all the campaigns. Pulp Detective is similar (roll dice, match symbols, do what you can to store results for next time) but with the greatest Pulp magazine illustrations and text ever.
I mean, seriously, this is from their KS page and the images are on the cards:
It’s primarily a solo game, and on my first try I… lost by a lot. The difficulty level is quite high, and it’s definitely set up for you to fail a few turns, build up your resources, and only aim to win a crucial test one out of every three or more. Balancing the time you have left with how much you can afford to lose in order to gain equipment/rerolls is tricky, even for experienced Elder Sign players.
Anyway, I love the theme and artwork and I think it’ll get a lot easier once I learn the relative value of equipment, rerolls and the hero abilities (and then try the expansion to bring in sidekicks and double-crosses).
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Glad it has found a good home!
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I’ve been playing a lot of Railroad Ink (green), which I got for Christmas and has been a big hit with my family.
Usually my wife and I finish within a couple of points of each other, with me edging forests, her edging trails and vanilla dice only being split 50:50.
But tonight I got my first win using the trail dice, by a whopping margin of 111 points to 95 points. I don’t expect that to happen again any time soon!
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It took a force of will for me not to spend money on that, but I’m really keen to know whether you think it works, as I love the theme and I’ve always enjoyed Elder Sign. The comments I read on BGG made it sound like it didn’t work nearly as well as Elder Sign in practice, so I worried that if I got it then it would end up being a lovely set of cards that I didn’t actually want to play as a game (which wouldn’t be the first such instance, mind; hence the force of will).
We played a really weird game of The Search for Planet X yesterday. About halfway through our friend realised that he’d messed something up, and that everything he’d deduced was incorrect. Cue me asking if he wanted to stop the game there and him deciding to carry on with a forlorn sigh… On his next turn, he decides to take a stab at guessing the location of Planet X (and the objects on either side) based on the information from my confirmed theories on the board, and guesses correctly! Everyone else tries and fails to guess - I got the location but only one of the adjacent objects. 10 points to the correct guesser… and 22 to me for publishing all those theories 
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The Search for Planet X is won and lost on your theories
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Over at Slightly Less Local Game Group today…
- Shamans, which I really need to spend some time getting my head round a bit better, but it’ll certainly repay the work
- The Quacks of Quedlinburg, shiny 3d-printed bits and acrylic tokens and all, which I suspect spoiled the new player for standard cardboard Quacks just as someone else’s copy spoiled me. (New player, so no Herb Witches or Alchemists, but I did use the extra fortune cards that weren’t limited to those expansions.)
- Subastral, which I’d never heard of before; very light abstract set-collection game with some interesting quirks.
- Camel Up (second edition) – ew it’s a bit plastic isn’t it? I mean, yes, the pyramid actually works reliably now and that’s nice… but the camelmeeples are just unpleasant to the touch.
- Quest – first chance I’ve had to try this, and first impression was “you just took a combination of existing Resistance expansions, painted Avalon-style Arthuriana on it, and said ‘this is the canonical play mode’”. That’s not entirely fair but it felt much more like a minor variant of the game than like a whole new thing.
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As bit of what I had feared.
Any chance of retrofitting a 1st edition into the whatever new changes 2nd edition offers?
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I don’t know the gameplay inside out but yes, I would think so. You’d want five normal camels, two “mad” camels, a total of six 1-3 twice dice with five in camel colours and a grey one labelled half black and half white, and the rules here. There are still 5 pyramid ticket tiles, and a leg ends as it did before, so one of the dice goes unrolled each leg.
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I’ve been sick as a dog over the weekend and my partner afforded me some quiet time by taking the kid to her grandparents’ place. I spent the day resting and muddling my way through The Forests of Adrimon (Hexplore It).
It was my first time sitting down with this series since bouncing off Sands of Shurax pretty hard about a year ago. There was a lot to like but the complexity of that particular entry was overbearing. There was so much to manage and consider that I never once felt like I was engaging in an adventure. Thankfully, this isn’t the case with Forests of Adrimon. There’s still a lot to wrap my head around, especially at first, but I haven’t felt completely overwhelmed with the decision space, and the fun factor is way up as a result.
I haven’t been playing especially well, but I’m making tangible progress and surviving by the skin of my teeth. I almost lost outright when I took on a Sentinel squatting dangerously close to Adrimon’s citadel, who then dragged me toward and into to the capital’s centre hex every combat round. Ending my turn there would have forced the final confrontation waaaaaay before I was prepared, so luckily I had some spare movement to use after the fight or it was curtains for me right there.
Including the upcoming volume and taking Shurax out of the mix, Forests of Adrimon is actually the most complex out of the remaining three titles, so it might just turn out that I’ve got a whole series to look into after all.
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Played Chinatown yesterday with my wife and her brother. In a bit of a weird turn of events, for thos game we had the individual blocks most owned by just one person, with small businesses filling in the few gaps by the end of the game. I actually pulled off the win, though I had fully expected to lose. 1.3 m for me, 1.29 for her bro, and 1.26 for her. Really close game.
Even closer was our game of Lost Cities today. I was up after the first round by just 10 points. In the second round, we both did really well, but she did better amd closed the gap to a single point. In the third round, she outplayed me once again, bringing her score to 146 to my 145. Our closest game ever!
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Breezed through the Marvel Champions Red Skull campaign on expert with a 2-handed solo of Doctor Strange and Rocket Raccoon. Doctor Strange is ridiculously over-powered to the point it took a lot of the challenge out of the game. Doubt I’ll be using his deck much in the future!
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Played 18West yesterday. Was good to play a full game with correct rules. I’m more ambivalent about the opening auction. I think there’s room to grow with it though we were a bit wonky as a group do some items should probably have cost more. (looking at you Union Pacific)
The mergers of the minors is quite fun. Managing that was an interesting challenge and the train rush is odd. It zips by but there’s tons of money in the game so bankruptcy didn’t feel likely. However it did seem consequential for chances in the game. Typing this up I’m starting to think there’s more depth in this game than I had thought. I can’t articulate it but I’m starting to think about ways to push the rush to hit the players in the lead more. The protected shares prior to phase 6 could be more aggressive than I was initially considering.
Overall the game was fun and now I’m keen to play again. I want to see how aggressive I can be in an operational game which is at odds with my usual defensive play style. Thanks for being tekeli.li community, this has been a useful exercise.
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Got Bardsung to the table for the tutorial. I like it enough to spend time modifying the storage, so I’m currently printing out vaults to organize the bajillion cards in their respective stacks. Tokens are already in bead organizers, and most minis are in small-parts bins. Next I’ll figure something out for the large, X-large, and XX-Super-Chonky minis. The included trays are mostly a disappointment, but the player dashboard trays seem great, so that makes up for it a bit.
It’s also my first game with Forteller narration. I didn’t think I would care about that much, but after using it, I can definitely see the appeal.
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Played now three games of Get on Board (formerly Let’s make a bus route). It used to be a pure roll and write with a a shared board (each player had their own pen Color) but the shared board now has little sticks put on it with each colour (a little bit like TransAmerica). There’s still a pencil and paper aspect but it’s mostly just to mark things off - probably the cheapest way to do this without making the game susceptible to nudges.
Mostly our disappointment with the game is how much railroading there is. You have a route at the start which you’re probably meant to complete every time I think (it could be completing this route is a suboptimal points gathering technique - but they surely wouldn’t give the route if it’s a con?). Competing the route means 70-80% of the route is dictated and then your input after that is reliant on rolling with whatever punches you face. Mostly it’s not a choice that’s a choice of expression but a choice of firefighting - you do what you have to do so you don’t lose. Let me put it this way - in the whole of the last two games I feel like I only made 1 choice that felt “fun” in the 12 turns of each game.
Two things it has going for it:
- nice aesthetic
- cheap
We only played at 2 player so it might be better with more (where the need to weigh up negative points becomes more of an issue) but otherwise I’m not sure id recommend it that heartily.
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After playing A Feast for Odin on BGA (thanks @Captbnut for teaching me how to play better), I finally managed to get the game with the Norwegians expansion to my table. Somehow, the expansion had been too daunting when I only half understood the base game. But with 2.5 recent games on BGA I was brave enough to try.
It‘s a monstrous table hog even as a solo game.
Here‘s the start:
If I counted right, my best score yet: 112! The end. I even had leftover food because I really didn‘t know how to best get more points from that!
Norwegians definitely improves the game. And the best thing: after playing and figuring out which materials were not needed anymore if I keep Norwegians mixed in, everything left fit into the base-game box!
My favorite parts were the 5th column actions and that you start with 1 house. I was able to fill that up early and got some much needed extra production (that it had a second side I could have used… I didn‘t see that until after the game.
The raid die hated me again—except that one time that scored me the Crown.
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Pardon my bad memory, I played this game over a year ago, but what does the Norwegians expansion include?? Is that the land masses that you can expand to?? (Iceland, Greenland, etc…) I cannot recall if when I played it we were using it or not
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The Norwegians expansion‘s biggest change is that it has a new action board that is in three parts and changes sides by player count. The action board has a fifth column that you can use with 1 or 2 workers but only as your last action. For 1 and 2 player sides some action slots get merged so to make the board more contested. A lot of actions have been changed a bit… someone who knows the game better than me can surely say more about that.
It also introduces new tiles, new animals (pigs and horses), changes up a lot of actions (apparently it makes a broader variety of strategies valid) and it gives everyone a small starting house with some easily filled production. Mine had a stone and a 3x1 food thing that I was able to collect from the first round!
There are a couple more islands, a couple more grey items… and probably more that I forget.
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