Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[following on from What Should I Play? (Help me decide)]

I finished my Baseball Highlights 2045 World Series. I’m happy to announce the United Kingdom team made a clean sweep of the other team (I never did give the solo opponent an identity…) The star of the game, for certain, was Rollie Quisenberry, whose Closer1 ability was able to shut down some key offensive plays by the other team late in the game, securing the lead in 2 of the four games of the series.

I’m not sure how I feel about soloing the game with all of the expansions mixed in. Many of the cards from the later expansions are extremely situational and, as a result, resulted in a very weak defense. The AI’s offense was formidable, admittedly, but I was able to pick up a number of powerful defense cards to counteract that – leading my team to be a solid mix of big defensive cards and a few big hitters to jump out into a lead early.

Next on my solo list, I think will be Clinic: Deluxe, but I’ll need a bit of time to grok the rules for that.


1 Closer: If ahead, cancel all Hits vs. any player

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I’ve been waiting to get together with @kyuss for BH2045 since before the pandemic… we always seem just to fail to arrange it, or we end up in a larger gathering and don’t want to play a 2-player game. (Yeah, I know it works with 4, but not 3.)

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Excavation Earth - glad I didn’t backed thebase game + expansion bundle for this one. I thought it’s a very good game with very good interaction, but I have like 20 or so other games in my collection that I would prefer to play, in general.

Rising Sun - this one is turning out to be my fave Eric Lang title so far. I need to play Ankh more, but the left-right binding problem is such a turn off in our plays of it. Blood Rage is very trashy fun but I’m not wowed by the card drafting - as SWVAG have commented on card drafting: very lazy. I preer Inis’ tighter card drafting more. RS understood how old German games works and add in some trashiness to make it very fun.

Iki - playing this without @EnterTheWyvern felt like cheating :flushed: :flushed: :flushed: :flushed: Played with the fishy strategy, and had my shop burn down only one. End up second. Great fun.

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Could you elaborate on this? Because I do not quite understand what this refers to? Is it the god merger thing? I have only played a learning game at this point -.- reasons…

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It’s the fancy term for “sitting on the left of the newbie will give you significant advantage”. This can be seen in old school games, in general, too where the gameplay forces you to preventing any kind of openings for the succeeding player to exploit (e.g. Samurai). Some people find that fun

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Surprisingly effective in Modern Art - I can often win if I go just after a player who’s worse than me.

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I’m not angry, but I am disappointed.

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Finished up my first game of Beyond the Sun. Not really sure I knew what I was doing but came second. I think what happened was I understood some bits of the game and just hammered them until they were dead and it conveniently dragged a lot of points out.

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Played games

  • Spirits of the Forest — my freshly arrived Kickstarter. Played against my partner. He lost by a mile. Without any of the new modules this is a very light game (I knew what I was getting, we played this at SPIEL way back). But it is also very pretty. I ordered the “wood edition” and I do not remember if that had to include the collectors box. The whole thing is base game, expansion, collectors box. Everything of course fits into the very very pretty and useful base game box. But the other two boxes are so pretty, too… what a conundrum. Look forward to try the solo mode and the expansions
  • Played 2 solo games of Planet Unknown. Finally read the rules for the event deck. Lol. It’s always 20 cards and you choose the difficulty. Ah well… makes it much easier. I played with the Oasis corporation both times on a standard planet—Oasis gets bonusses from planetary ice and most of the other planets do not have that. Lovely game. The box is a bit large but it is not empty… I don’t know if it gets really good with more players, the solo is so satisfying that I don’t care at all. This is the tetris (polyominoes) game to rule all tetris games.
  • BGA On-going: I am on my second game of A Fest for Odin against my friend and while I won the first one by a few points (I did not get a terrible score for once), I doubt I’ll get it this time. Second game is going much faster. With no book-keeping this is such a quick game. I wish the board was less intimidating… it is so hard to convince people to give it a try.
  • BGA On-going: GWT is in beta now. We started a game without reading the rules. It’s going… … somewhere … in circles. (I did watch a How To Play but that just isn’t enough). A well, my friend is experimental, so it’s fine.
  • BGA On-going: second game of Lost Ruins of Arnak with my other friend. This seems really well suited for async play. And I love it. And I agree with @Acacia that it is very much about dragging out the round for as long as possible. I am getting better at that with every game. Buy an artifact here, advance on the research track there. Get a bonus from defeating a guardian, use a totem… there are so many options but not too many to lose track of them. I am so glad I also bought a cardboard copy—the expansion is also quite nice. I like the different leaders and who your focus shifts depending on which one you play. I tried 2 so far and they were both quite unique.

Picture of the Spirits of the Forest box:

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Last night: Sentinels of the Multiverse, second go at this month’s challenge, jointly with @Lordof1. Reminded me all over again why I love this game.

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Great fun! I’m very tempted to try to find time to do your monthly challenges online. Will be a change from almost-monthly Pandemic Legacy!

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I’ve binned the bottom tray from planet unknown as I think this helps with the tightness of the game in the box.

I’ve played it exclusively 2 player and there’s a tiny amount of competitiveness but I would say it’s 90 percent concentrate on your own stuff game.

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Last night I had my first in-person gaming session, outside of my home, since the pandemic started. My word it felt great to play with folk who weren’t my direct family. :slight_smile:

Played and for the first time ever, won*, a game of Burgle Bros.. Such a lovely game, so tense and stressful. It took us forever but we finally managed to get the loot from all 3 safes and get to the roof.
*I’ve a tiny, tiny, sneaking suspicion that we may have gotten a minor rule wrong… but hey, I won’t check if you won’t!

It was late and we were really tired but were all on a high from the collective victory, and so for some reason we tried a 3player game of Fort. It collapsed after a few rounds due to tiredness, maybe not the best choice to teach/learn late at night, but I’d definitely be happy to start with it next time as I was just getting into it when we hit the wall of yawning and had to stop and go home…

Hurray for in person gaming, with real, fleshy humans in glorious 3D. Oh how I’ve missed you so…

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I love GWT so happy to run through it with you

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Galaxy Trucker teaching game, but I took 4 rough road cards and managed to be the only loser - on the last flight, faulty connections were the thing I focused on in building (triple only to triple connectors), so I kind of forgot about unionisation and ended up with 12(?) cabins. Bad luck (reroll misses) and meteoric inversion punished that error, so at the end of the flight I had to pay out 36 credits for the lost crew! A hilarious comedy of errors for all involved, and very satisfying to have one player put it straight on his priority buy list and declare that playing new games with me was always dangerous for that reason.

Pax Pamir 2e, so good not having to teach this! 3-player game that started with each of us supporting a different faction. The afghan armies I put out were surprisingly followed by a string of afghan patriots, so one player bought in, later followed by the other orchestrating a couple of betrayals to do the same. Just generally, so many betrayals in this game, it was great.

Mage Knight. First outing for this in a very long time. I taught but did not play in a 4-player reconnaissance game. Actually just so good to see this on the table, even if was just supervising!

The Great Zimbabwe. Another teaching game. I am beginning to get the hang of it, but it’s one of those games I suspect only really begins to show its true colours once everyone is up to speed…

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4 player game of Teotihuacan this evening with 4 modules from Late Preclassic Period, all except the player powers. So orange temple, seasons special rules and new board locations for both the decorations and pyramid building. We also had the Shadows of Xitle techs and starting tiles mixed in plus the promo bundle. This chunk of new content gave us much more to ponder on and so the game went long. Like over 3 hours long. Partly extended I think by learning new rules and a gap since last play. That being said the modules all added things in to open the game up in terms of strategies and specialisations. I think there’s many ways to play now and that is a good thing for the longevity of this game I’d guess. The extra options did increase my score quite considerably. The tech was non obvious this game and the timing, sequencing and balancing was amped for all the best bits of Teo so I’m a happy mesoamerican just now.

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Everdell: Bellfaire has now been broken in (just on its own, without Pearlbrook and without the player powers).

So we had a couple of new events and the market, which has an interesting wrinkle: You can go and get resources, for free (except for your worker), but in doing so, you’re giving your opponent the opportunity to obtain victory points and resources of their own.
So there’s some strategy there too.

On its own, it doesn’t change the game nearly as much as Pearlbrook did, but it can easily be added to other expansions to add new wrinkles and new strategies. It’s excellent, Everdell’s batting .100 so far!

Spirecrest is gonna be next!

The game, for the record, ended in a 65-65 draw!

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Mottainai four times with a new player. So good to have someone really get into it and want to play back to back games!

Innovation, on hearing this is by the same designer, he agreed to check it out, and played this twice too. Both games went on his buy list, which was just so satisfying, and a nice contrast to the painful experience I recently had teaching Innovation to someone who really hated it.

The Crew about ten times with three new-to-boardgames peeps. Two Japanese and a Vietnamese, so the lack of text was perfect. They were all intrigued by the cooperative nature, and it was fun seeing them puzzle out the basics. The last game they asked for a harder mission, so we skipped to mission 9: “but how is it possible to win with a 1?” It took four tries to nail it, but we got there.

High society with the same group, also went down very well.

Earlier, one of them was looking over the other games I brought, like Oath, Mage Knight, Tigris & Euphrates, Pax Pamir 2e, the Great Zimbabwe, etc., and I got evasive telling her I’m not confident teaching any of them in Japanese. Hard to strike a balance between encouraging interest and knowing that while the progression from Game of Life to Azul/The Crew/High Society is easy, there’s a gulf between them and the more involved fare. Something to look forward to, hopefully. She definitely picked things up faster than her friends.

And that wrapped up my Golden week holiday gaming. There’s another day of it tomorrow, but H is already well over her tolerance threshold for solo kid wrangling over the extended weekend. And K just vomited all over the place.

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Just played a couple of games of Bellfaire with the player powers. My wife bounced off it a bit because she likes things to be fair and equitable, so asymmetry is less her bag, but it was interesting. Like she says, it’s not “ewwww, never again, how dare you”, more of a “interesting and different but not necessary”.

I think we’re always gonna play with the market and the new events and locations though, since they combine so easily with the base game and the expansions.

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My first Tringcon for a while. The organisers were wearing masks, and the people I was playing with, but basically nobody else, which even with a relatively small crowd rattling about in a large village hall (with the windows closed) left me rather uncomfortable. Still.

Sentinels of the Multiverse (DE) with two new players, so I ran through the Blade introductory game and I think they came away liking it.

Circus Imperium, the late-1980s FASA chariot-racing game; I used to play this a lot, and it gradually came back to me. Truly clumsy rules, and a manual that did it no favours, but we managed to have a good time even so. I’d be tempted to steal the cornering mechanic at the very least…

Red Cathedal, OK all you Euro purists look away now. I hated it. It’s that exact level of athematic design where the nominal theme has nothing to do with the gameplay, but it distracts you from what you actually have to do. I was trailing for most of the game, and than triggered game end genuinely by accident.

And then I won.

So I was able to say to the game’s owner (a friend of long standing) “I would rather chew off a foot than play this again”. (Pause.) “I didn’t say my foot.”

And finally Lemminge, a lovely example of a simple game that grows emergent complexity depending on who’s playing it.

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