Another game of Railroad Ink (green). My wife got her first win using the forest dice, crushing me 91 points to 72 points.
A mad game with lots of dead end stations and almost no T junctions. I did not adapt to it well!
3 Likes
So after spending most of the day trying to escape the underworldā¦ and being returned to it by a variety of opponents, receiving snarky comments from Hypnos every time I walked out of the bloody poolā¦ sometime late I got back to the game of Dune:Imp I had put up on my table earlier.
After setup, I realized I was in the same conundrum as my recent game of Architects: awaiting the expansion, I had not played the game in a while and now I would have to deal with 4 sets of rules:
- base game
- base game AI
- expansion
- expansion AI
So I played Hades all day instead.
But but butā¦ I wouldnāt be posting here, if I didnāt eventually play it, right? I decided I could at least try to somehow muddle through. I was too curious about the new āstuffā.
But it was such a muddling that I cannot truly give a good accounting of it. However, I sleeved all the cards immediately after the gameāI only sleeve games now when I expect the game to need it.
So I have seen
- some of the new cards: nice! (You can now infiltrate locations that already have another agent with certain cards)
- the new tech tiles: easily grokked, very helpful. I had one that gave me a fighty cube every round for my garrison and one that allowed me to discard a card and draw a new one once per round. I think there are 18 different techs all in all.
- the new action spaces: Landsrad has been reduced to 3 actions that make sense and spice trade has been dropped in favor of āInterstellar Freightā plus 2 new spaces for buying techs and battleshipsāall very very good changes in my unqualified opinion!
- Battleships (I think dreadnoughts in English) are a neat addition for the fighty part, you get 1 round of control of a location if you win a fight with one. Also it counts for 3 cubes and it goes back in your garrison after returning from whatever activity it was on!
I hope I can soon play a more ācompetentā game and give a better overview of what is here. My first impression is very good, I am just slightly miffed that this is what the game could have been right from the start. This is less an expansion but a fixing of some issues on a game that was already very good. The game didnāt need fixing before they fixed it, if that makes any sense.
5 Likes
Some games over the last week and a bit:
Patchwork & Cascadia & Splendor, played some games with mum for the first time in awhile . Twas good fun, Cascadia was particularly close, with like 2 points in it at the end!
Fleet:TDG Solo game of this one, it works well, it does feel quite different and restrictive compared to the multiplayer game though, for better or worse. Compared to Three Sisters and Hadrians Wall (both of which I really enjoy), this is probably the easiest to teach without being any less fun.
Hadrianās Wall x6 In the course of one week had 5 solo games of this one and one two player teaching game with a friend. Itās a nightmare to teach but I feel like Iām starting to grasp it decently - I seem to hit low 70ās on normal difficulty thesedays. I toyed around with playing through the solo campaign but the restrictions it imposes made it a real struggle for me to hit 70, so I abandoned that one. Hoping for another game with the same friend sometime soonish (maybe we can even grab a third and not have to fuss with the neutral deck, though that will mean teaching it to someone else how to playā¦) He enjoyed it but found it predictably hard to grasp everything thatās going on and rather solitary. I definitely think Fleet and Three Sisters do a better job of easing you into the sea of choices, but Hadrianās Wall is so satisfying I can overlook that.
Fugitive, and a couple of games of this with a friend - I managed to win back to back games as the marshall and the fugitive, which was cool - Iām typically a very bad fugitive even if I do alright as the marshall. The mind games here are where much of the game resides - guessing and secondguessing what the other person knows, what cards theyāre working with, whether that big sprint is a desperate or deceptive one. Both games came down to the manhunt, as they often seem to. Great little 2 player game that feels very different to most other 2 player card games.
4 Likes
Inspired by @yashima 's playthrough of Dune: Imperium, I decided to play it again solo, just with the base game. I was pretty cool on the game after my first few plays, but I have to admit: this session was pretty awesome! On the final round, I was situated to pick up the final two points to win if I could just grab any amount of spice, then visit some spaces to gain troops and deploy them, and my initial hand did not let me do any of that. It took a sequence of very lucky card draws to get there, and even then I only won by a single spice, because the final scoring went to tiebreakers.
This game might be great! I wouldnāt say my initial impressions were wrong, though, so much as misguided; this is not a game that grants you a ton of freedom (despite the factions and the deckbuilding), and the game is largely determined by the combats (I think 6 out of my 10 points were from combat). But the game isnāt trying to be a wide-open sandbox, and itās folly to expect it to be. The game isnāt about deciding what you want to do, itās about deciding when you want to do it and how, when the cards are against you and the resources are extremely tight. In fact, in a weird way, I think the game does a good job conveying the theme of the book, because itās all about plans within plans within plans; you need focus, but you also need flexibility, a backup in case your backup fails.
I had never planned on buying the expansion, but this game has put it right back on my list. The technologies sound fun, and I do think the upper strip of the board could use a makeover, because those spaces go almost completely unused in my solo games.
6 Likes
I had left Dune Imperium on the table last night and so it was already setup and I played another roundāthis time with fewer errors.
My deck building was terrible but for some weird reason I was so rich I didnāt know what to do with the all the money. I keep playing on easy and so I won. This time it felt a bit more real, as I didnāt screw the bots out of VP by getting unearned cards or messing up the third worker availability.
Interestingly, I usually win against the bots by getting all 4 faction tokens which is a total of 8 of the 10 VP needed (but maybe that is also because I keep playing Tessia Verniusāone of the new charactersāwho is specialized in pushing factions). The other three came from won conflict cards this time.
I tried to get enough water to be able to use one of the new cards to gain VP but I didnāt have any cards that made water and getting it on the board remains difficult unless you have a ton of spice, which by the time I had the water ā VP card I had spent on other fun things.
5 Likes
I taught and played Corto with my partner this afternoon, our first opportunity to play together in quite a long time. Iām happy to report we spent our time on a good one! I won, with us both at 25 points, breaking the tie thanks to a few unused influence tokens to her none.
I didnāt know much about the game beyond a couple solid-but-not-remarkable reviews from Vasel and Marco, whereby the most notable compliments were about its uniqueness. Iām not so sure that rings quite as true 8 years later, especially after a bit of a Renaissance in duel-adjacent options like Air, Land & Sea (and other recent tugs-of-war), and prominent Chess- and Go-likes (shades of Great Plains here, without the permanence), but it sure still felt fresh. Whatās funny is that itās toying with elements which have explicitly busted for us in the past.
This isnāt strictly a 2P game, but it feels like one thatās very comfortable in that space, and it seems to know how to swing. Both of us had a few really amazing turns with catastrophic consequences for the other, and not only were we grinning through our bepalmed faces for their ingenuity, but we never felt completely out of the game as a result. Thereās a ton of agency in the tiny ruleset, and a surprising depth of choice in the card play, and it all flew by in about 40 minutes.
Vasel in particular kept leaning on the good-not-great cliche in his review, but you could tell he was pretty enthused about it at the time. If I had to guess itās because he had fun with it; This is a fun game! Itās smart, feisty and quick. I wouldnāt classify it as a filler, really. I feel like 40 minutes is about right for this one, with room on either side for the occasional beatdown or war of attrition.
I know itās a first impression but itās made a splash after a bit of a long huntāwe have a laundry list of excellent failures. Iām guessing itās wildly out of print, and the box is absurd for the game within, but if anyone finds a copy cheap I think itās well worth a poke.
[Subjective tastes and all that, but I think itās gorgeous. I do have some nostalgia/love for the art, though.]
4 Likes
After about a month (during which Iāve played very little of anything), tonight I resumed my Under Falling Skies campaign. Having ended chapter 2 with my very first victory, I started chapter 3 with another (somewhat to my surprise, it must be said). It was a curious mission in a few ways, not least of which was that that I succeeded without ever attacking the enemy ships!
Then came Mission 2, and oh gosh was this one painful. The special rules for this mission were absolutely horrible and put my A.P. into full effect (the first die placement of each turn had some lasting negative effects, so every turn started with a horribly painful decision which invariably took ages to decide). In conjunction with the game getting generally more complex over the course of the campaign due to additional features and variations, this one was an extreme brain-burner, and it took hours for me to lose twice (once badly, and then again by a heart-breakingly small margin after a very long game in which my plan essentially worked ā but I then failed to recognise that I was going to need a better robot to finish, and left myself in a no-win situation : (
Iād played a couple of rounds of Calico beforehand, which had seemed refreshingly simple by comparison.
So that puts me at 2 wins from 10 missions, with only the final chapter remaining.
At present Iām not sure whether this is going to stay in my collection longer term. Those last two attempts were simply more time and effort than I ever want the game to entail. But then I am (persisting in) playing at a difficulty level which is clearly too high, which makes it hard to assess things properly; and I donāt have any other game like this one; and most of the time Iāve enjoyed it more. I suspect Iāll hang on to it to play the occasional random mission selected from the campaign elements, but if I ever play another campaign, itās definitely going to be on an easier difficulty level ā and I think Iād say the same thing even if Iād been winning.
5 Likes
Had our friends over for a pre-Easter lunch and managed to play another chapter of our Betrayal Legacy game. Heroes managed a win, but it helped that the traitor managed to die one turn into the Haunt. Still had to deal with monsters and such, so she wasnāt out of the running. I died when trying to use a healing item (naturally), but all the other heroes survived. It was a fun game, but took way too long, partly due to having to care for our children, but partially due to the rules of this haunt.
4 Likes
For the first time in many years we had (whisper it) a bad game of Memoir 44. The Escape Via The Coastal Road gives the British/South African forces two exit points at the corners of their own side of the board with which to score medals. I played Their Finest Hourā¦ to sheepishly move 4 units along the road to safety - immediately going from 4-2 down to a 6-4 victory. It was a real wet fart of a finish, completely absent any drama whatsoever. Although I suppose it is thematically appropriate as Their Finest Hour refers to a speech made after the Dunkirk evacuations.
Luckily, we scrapped our return leg and tried Dug In At Sidi Omar instead. A far more satisfying pew pew tank-heavy affair. It looked bleak for the British, but a sequence of lucky āstiff upper lipā rolls sneaked a 6-5 victory. Good stuff.
Also played our first game of Inhuman Conditions, the 5-minute definitely-not-Blade-Runner role-playing game. It really is a lot of fun. My partner was a human Internal Affairs agent who immediately embodied a hard-boiled persona. The theatre of the handshake at the end is a lovely touch.
8 Likes
My partner and I have been playing D&D 5e. Just the two of us for now, me as DM and her running 3 of the pre-gen characters for the āMines of Phandelverā starter campaign. Basically this is both of us re-learning the gameā¦ we played a few sessions of D&D 3e years and years ago, but Andy recently got a new shiny set of dice (theyāre a mineral that looks a little like jade but with more blackā¦ very pretty, and heavy!) and has been listening to a lot of actual-play podcasts and so tentatively asked to try out the new rules.
Only too happy to oblige I sent out a frantic call to my circle of friends and within an hour had been loaned two Starter Sets and an Essentials Set, plus buckets of nice extras (cards, reference books, dry erase iniative trackers, etc, etc). We have now played two sessions (she has arrived at Phandalin, a town my brain just refuses to pronounce correctlyā¦ itās supposed to be āFan-duh-linā, and I keep seeing āFan-dra-inā for some reason), and I kinda like the new rules so far.
The change to Lockpicking is interesting. Of course, the last time I DMād a game of D&D was 1e, when Lockpicking and Trap Disarm were percentage-based skills.
Anyway, weāre having enough fun that we invited a few friends to join us on alternating Saturdays. Alternating because the other Saturdays are already full with a Star Trek Adventure campaign Iām running with a different group of friends! Andy is worried that running two different games and two different campaigns with two different groups of friends will be too much workā¦ and hey, she might be rightā¦ but Iām willing to try.
10 Likes
Under Falling Skies.
Operation āIntentional Mistakeā has arrived at its inevitable conclusion, with a campaign score of -6, and the Earth succumbing to the alien threat.
I say āinevitableā, but I again came achingly close to a victory in chapter 4, as Iād done in several of the earlier failed missions. (If Iād rolled the attack number I wanted in the penultimate turn, I think I had a guaranteed victory on the final turn.) With a little extra luck here and there, things might have been quite different. It was pretty hard work, though.
All packed away now, and I have so many other games waiting that I suspect itāll be quite a while before this one sees the table again, but it was quite a fun experience for the most part (despite my fairly dire performance)ā¦ just a little more of a brain burner than I would have preferred; so after a dozen campaign games, and about the same number again pre-campaign, I am well and truly done for now!
Maybe some day Iāll revisit it to see the bits that didnāt crop up during this campaignā¦
3 Likes
(Dune: Imperium) I already took way too much airtime in this thread spouting how much and why I like this game. Suffice to say, I agree 
2 Likes
A few things going on here:
After @Yashimaās purchase I have been digging into Race for the Galaxy with the full Arc 1 deck, via the app. First it was to test balance and now itās just because I really like it. Prestige gets better and better the more I play with it - itās basically liquid VP that you can keep for points, and possibly āinterest,ā or reinvest in the game for more cards or other action bonuses. And the deck as a whole works really well, it doesnāt feel diluted. Very specific strategies like Advanced Logistics, may not hit. But pursuing one of the major archetypes offers no problems and the subvariants within those archetypes have taken on a lot of texture.
Also played my first game of No Thanks with my family, on Easter. I liked it. They struggled with it. My Mom kept asking āis this a math game?ā My Dad was silent and dour in the corner until halfway through the game he said, āI canāt figure out how Iām supposed to get a positive score.ā So we sorted that for him. I think by the end of the round everyone but my Mom was interested (Iām eager to play again), but we moved on.
Anomia. We had to set the ground rule that the goal isnāt to āwin,ā per se. And pausing for 30 seconds before flipping your card to come up with an answer to every other card may be a good way to āwinā but thatās not what the game is about. Then we had an amazing time. Highlight was my mother trying to name an Olympic Athlete, pounding the card with her fingers, shouting āSNOWBOARDER! SNOWBOARDER! SNOWBOARDER!ā
We did leave the game with a confounding question. My Dad won with a final card āEuropean Country.ā He said āEngland.ā We gave him the card but I challenged him that England is no longer a country, the UK is the country and Wales, Scotland, N.Ireland, and England are regions or constituent members or some such.
So we turned to the internet and wtf can someone British explain this to me. Basically, this is what we learned:
- The UK comprises N.Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England
- Great Britain comprises only Wales, Scotland, and England
- England is a country
- UK is a country
- Wales and Scotland may be countries, depending on who you ask
- N.Ireland, Wales, and Scotland all have their own parliaments, looking something like the US where each State has a government, partially subject to the central government
- England does not have its own parliament, so London parliament is both the state/region/country parliament for England, and the greater parliament for the UK.
Anyway, the details make it sound similar to us in that we have States and then the United States (which would make sense as we built most of our ideas on British and French government). But anywayā¦
What do you all say? Is England a country?
6 Likes
Ok.
FIFA Defines England as a country
Eurovision defines United Kingdom as a country
Pointless defines a country as āa sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own rightā
So England isnāt a country.
Although Ted Lasso disagrees.
5 Likes
Or to put it another way, ācountryā is not used consistently or formally.
I think in most places itās regarded as cognate with having its own currency, airline, UN seat, etc., but in sporting contests it tends to get extended in order to increase the number of entrants.
Remember that the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish parliaments are of relatively recent vintage.
6 Likes
I would have disqualified it on the basis that England has rejected the identity of European country, via Brexit.
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If weāre doing that, then Scotland and Northern Ireland are still European countries, but Wales isnāt.
And, uh, looking at this map I just checked, London is too ā¦
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Iām always confused by that. āEuropeā is more than the EU. But being out of the EU leads a lot of people to say you arenāt in āEuropeā any more. Surely EU is a subset of Europe proper, right?
Like, Norway and Switzerland are European countries. Those Balkans too?
3 Likes
This is verging into political minefields. Trying to be polite: a loud subsection of the people who voted for the UK to leave the EU were also supporting a separation of the UK from a vague idea of āEuropean cultureā (largely defined as āthings we donāt likeā). Others were hoping for something like the Norwegian deal.
4 Likes
There is also a lovely debate about what a continent isā¦ because however you define it, Europe probably isnāt one. Itās just a nice way of lumping a group of people together as ādifferent,ā but different from who exactly is left up to discussion.
Most of the time āPeople we donāt likeā is about as specific as it gets.
4 Likes