Have just played our recently acquired second hand version of Ra. Have only played a not properly coded version on triqqy before.
It’s really good and so clever. Lots of push/ pull and tight decisions on when to push your luck and when to hang back. From an initial play each set of scoring seems really well balanced.
Anyone in on Gamefound has got a great game coming their way.
Hall of the Mountain King - a very unique game so I don’t have much thoughts about this. It has some interesting stuff so I’m keen on playing it again
Alice’s Garden - another solitaire tetris game.
Carnegie - literally heavy Puerto Rico. Active player selects an action and everyone else follows. Very fun heavy management game because the player interaction is superb but without the pettiness, if you’re someone who isn’t hot about that sort of thing. 4 players - all new - finished within 1.5 hours. When was the last time a heavy Euro finished within that time? Euros nowadays have the audacity to ask for 2-3 hours of our time and pull off such BS gameplay. The game never had a moment of boringness as everyone is taking a turn every turn. The flow in Carnegie is one of the smoothest I’ve seen. But the fast flow wasn’t done by hollowing out gameplay by making your decisions so braindead obvious or limited. They done it by making you do something while it’s other players turn. This game is one of the best I have seen this year. Strategic choices are so wide open and front-loaded. So you can be creative in this game on however way you want.
There is concern about left-right binding like in Puerto Rico. The R&D + Construction combo would mean that the player who chose R&D will open the Construction action to the next player and the R&D player will be last during the Construction action. Need more plays to confirm this.
Little Town - still great
Sushi Go
Just One
Azul: Queen’s Gardens - the new Azul. It’s okay.
Gaia Project - introduced Gaia to 2 players. One of them have played Terra before and it was one of his faves. I went for the range techs to reach the planets better. I played as the faction that allows you to do a switcheroo of your fortress with any of your mines, and so I took the tech that upgrades Tier 3 buildings to have 4 power, instead of 3. I manage to create 3 federations in the end, 2 of them within the round that gives 5 pts to federations.
My gaming sessions have been limited as usual at this time of year but those sessions have been spent playing just one game: Five Parsecs from Home (Third Edition). I say playing, but I have also spent several hours preparing for the sessions and thinking about the campaign, characters and story behind the game.
Five Parsecs… describes itself as a “solo adventure wargame” set in a sci-fi universe where you create a crew of 4-6 characters to progress through a campaign of battles, small-scale skirmishes where your crew has to complete a certain objective. Between each battle, the campaign and the crew develop: gaining experience and loot, dealing with any consequences and injuries from the combat, plus experiencing random character or events. The crew can gain (and lose) crew members, patrons and rivals, go on quests (a series of battles with a linked objective) and even find themselves caught up in planetary invasions and have to fight their way to safety and travel to a new planet to continue the campaign.
The character generation for the crew and out-of-battle events are determined by rolling on many percentile/d100 tables which provide for a pretty wide range of options and produce good opportunites for developing the story of your crew and campaign - and indeed I have spent more time involved in this game in fleshing out the overall narrative and focusing on the pre- and post-battle events than running the actual skirmishes themselves. When it comes to the tabletop battles themselves, the ruleset and character statistics are pretty light, certainly compared to a Warhammer/40K style wargame, and the scale keeps battles relatively quick too with a crew of 4 to 6 taking on up to maybe 10 opponents. Anyone with experience of such wargames or more complex miniatures-heavy boardgames probably won’t find much new among the battle rules - except maybe the Reactions test to determine character initiative - although the mindset of playing both sides of each skirmish I found naturally led to me taking tactical decisions favouring my crew over the opponents, even with the rulebook’s guidance for the enemy AI and battlefield terrain setup. As my main focus and reward from the game so far has been the story that the early campaign turns has produced, the tactical nuance of the battles has been less of a issue for me: I have had combat casualties although no fatalities yet but I know they will come.
The game just comes as a single rule book so you are expected to provide your own dice - six d6 and two d10 (for percentile charts) will suffice - as well as your own battlefield setting, whether that be using minis, pawns, maps, grids, mock buildings and scenery or just sketches on graph paper to follow the action. In my early turns I found printing some grid maps and paper pawns was sufficient although I have invested in a few official Starfinder flip mats and pawn sets to give a better visual effect for future battles. Sure, back in my teens when playing Warhammer/40K I had a good range of figures and diorama props to use but will not be investing that far these days, especially as I’ll only be playing it solo and my time is limited as it is. However looking at some of the YouTube playthroughs of the game that use 3d models and battlefields do look pretty special.
If/when I get time to play and plan more, I may write up more details of my campaign in its own thread here although I need to see how the next few weeks pan out with work first. It has certainly been very rewarding and involving so far trying the system out - with a greater storytelling aspect and elements of character development that I wasn’t expecting to find or enjoy as much.
Anyone interested in this game but not this theme may find the sister titles more appealing - the fantasy theme of Five Leagues from the Borderlands and the post-apocalyptic setting of Five Klicks from the Zone - but the space setting works best for me (although during my plays I am wondering how it might work in a superhero theme too …)
My wife and I played Ghost Stories today, baack to easy difficulty. We actually won! Incarnation was Death’s Army, which requires a curse die roll at the start of each turn, and 5 black pips to exorcise. We were able to use the yellow monk’s enfeeblement charm and the circle of protection to make it so we only needed 3, and I had a couple of black tao tokens, and as the green monk with reroll abilities, it was pretty much in the bag, but I went ahead and used my yin/yang token to roll at the herbalist shop for two more tokens and rolled a black, so it was a definite win when I exorcised him. Ended up rolling two whites, which are wild, so only needed one token for the win.
We did really good. I got down to 2 Qi, but my board kept filling up, while my wife, as the blue monk that can do their action twice, kept defeating ghosts that gave her an extra Qi. We also seemed to get really lucky with the 10 ghost cards that were removed from the game for the 2 player count, as we lost a number of difficult haunters and tormentors.
Afterwards, we played a quick game of Kingdomino, which I won due to a bunch of forest tiles, which netted me 25 points on their own.
Definitely better at 4. At least IMO
Planet Unknown , first play. KS, just came in. It’s a huge box, and you think it’s going to be a heavy game, but it isn’t at all. You spin a lazy susan of various pieces, and then choose a piece to add to your planet board. Depending on the piece, you’ll move on various tracks and get bonuses. At the end of the game you get points for completing rows and columns, as well as any objective cards you’ve won. Pretty close game, scores were 46, 43, 38.
Narcos: The Board Game , first play. One vs many game, based on the tv series. One player is the Patron (aka Pablo Escobar), and the other players are the four factions trying to find him (DEA, local police etc). The Patron player chooses their hideout, and generally doesn’t move again. Each turn they will play one of their sicarios onto the board, to create labs on the farm spaces, or control a city. At the end of a season, they get points for any sicarios still alive.
There are two ways for the Patron to win – either get to the end of a glory track, or complete three objective cards. The good guys have to find Patron twice. I played Pablo, and things generally didn’t go well. Every time I played a sicario, I had to place within a certain range from the hideout, so I was discovered pretty quickly. The more valuable a sicario is in points, the lower their range. Once discovered, you can move a number of locations away, but have to pay for each step. I was found out again pretty quickly, and that was the game – they did say it was a lucky guess. Each of the other factions have two hunters, and maybe some one use cards. So in a season, Patron will have four turns, and each of the four factions has a turn each.
Break the Code , finally got a win (well, I shared the win with another player).
Bravo , first play. This is a sequel to Encore (aka Noch Mal!). Same coloured and numbered dice, but now there is a special dice. The special dice allow various things, like bombing a 2 X 2 square anywhere on the board, or adding to a bonus for completing rows and columns. The special dice use isn’t unlimited, you have to hit certain icons on the board. Different enough to the original game. I thought I had done ok with 29 points, but the winner got 106, just smashed it.
I invited my family over for dinner and birthday games, and we had a lovely time with a bunch of lightweight things:
The last three were all first plays for me, as well as them. We ran out of time, so only got through a couple of rounds of Detective Club. but I definitely want to play it some more. The first round was an entertaining bust, when I was inadvertently too quiet when revealing the subject and my mother immediately asked me to repeat what I’d said, causing the rest of us to laugh helplessly before we pushed on with the round towards the inevitable unanimous vote that mum was the player who hadn’t known the subject in advance : )
Having a player pretending that they’re in the know and needing to bluff their way through reminded me a little of Spyfall, except without Spyfall’s crazy requirement of the odd-player-out needing to memorise a huge collection of possible locations in order to have any hope.
Everything went down pretty well, but Telestrations generated so much laughter that it has to get my pick as the most fun of the night.
Hopefully next year I’ll get everyone around earlier in the day and have time to add something a bit heavier into the mix.
We’ve played some fabled fruit. It’s pretty hectic and enjoyable.
We broke out Great Western Trail yesterday for the first time in a while. My engineer-with-a-smattering-of-cowboys gave me the win over my wife’s everything-but-mostly-artisans strategy, 154-148.
Gonna play again today. Gonna be great!
We lost power due to a massive thunderstorm that hammered southern Ontario yesterday. The house is (almost stunningly) fine… no damage as far as we can tell other than a few lost branches and a bit of damage to an already damaged section of fence.
All in all, we were stunningly lucky.
But, no power for 7 hours (lost about half the fridge due to an abundance of caution… cream, milk, eggs, that kinda stuff), so Andy and I played some games!
We started by playing a quick game of Gravwell 2nd Edition. Gosh, what a fun little race game! Not ideal with 2, but still very clever with a lot of back-and-forth and the “Mining” phase to draw your movement cards is really neat. We played with just the emergency stop cards (none of the other powers), and Andy managed to escape on the 4th turn. Very satisfying!
After that I set up Dark Souls the Card Game, enough for her to confirm that yes, she would like to play the game sometime soon, but then the power came back on and we put things on hold so I could run a Star Trek Adventures session (we play online with friends remotely, so we needed the Wifi back). The heroes are exploring a derelict vessel that is basically one giant room (2500m diameter and 40m thick) filled with a jungle that is maintained by a slightly-insane computer. They have just started heading inwards towards the computer core: half of the team has started to hallucinate (although they don’t know that yet, tee hee) due to exposure of airborne stuff, and a team of Ferenghi “salvagers” has just arrived to help make things more complicated.
This Saturday is Andy’s 40th birthday, so all effort this week is going towards making a small gathering as memorable as possible: 3 kinds of braised sausages (one in sauerkraut, one in pepper-onion-stock, and one in beer) with pretzel buns, along with strawberry shortcake (technically I’m making 2 or 3 kinds of pound cake, fresh strawberries in strawberry sauce, and a mountain of whipped cream), and then others are bringing sides, drinks, and other desserts.
I doubt we’ll have the chance to play games, but I might pull out Wavelength if anyone asks… such a good group game (there will be 10 of us if everyone can make it).
Well, we played our second game! She destroyed me 186-108. Just could NOT get anything going, I’m actually happy I broke 100.
What a fantastic game.
Forgot, we also played Ghosts of Christmas , a game I had high hopes for. It’s a trick taking game, which I love. But the twist is that you play cards into the past, present, or future, and winning an earlier trick sets the suit for the next. So, if I win the trick for the past, then the next era (the present) is played as if I played the first card and set the suit. And the same for the future trick. I had high hopes for this game, and it was ok, I guess. We played the easy variant, without the bidding. Usually, each player must predict how many tricks they will win. And obviously this is a major part of the game.
Yesterday we played Pendragon: the fall of Roman Britain, which is the first of GMT’s COIN series that I have encountered. My mind is boggled 
I can’t say I enjoyed it as such, because we spent a lot of time referencing the rules and working out what we were doing wrong, and there seemed to be an exceptionally long time between turns. However, I think I could really like it once we know what we’re doing! I suggested that we leave it out to play again as two players over the next week so that we have some chance of consolidating our understanding of the rules…
Yesterday tried out Tanwantinsuyu for the first time. I bought this after listening to David Turczi on his episode of the Ludology podcast. He was so interesting and eloquent about game design. However this one was a turkey. Too heavy for how many interacting layers of random seemed to boil down to luck of the draw. The board was hard to read so the luck elements mainly seemed to make turns drag on as people needed to recalibrate while studying a dense sea of interlocking symbols. Also has a turns timer which really annoys me. It’s nearly impossible to get a rough idea of turns remaining so you should probably rush it. Bah, straight to the sell pile.
Next up was something much better, Titan which was lugged over by @lalunaverde. I’m slightly concerned the box weighs as much as he does. So the novelty 3d board was really fun but also the game was interesting. The route building and managing your cubes with your pipe spend was awesome. The thing around managing your cube spaces I particularly like as it’s really grinding on the brain plotting out some sensible turns without giving up much. The blocking in this managed to be fun as opposed to accidental. Would definitely like to play this again as long as Mr Verde can still carry the box.
If my experience of COIN games is representative, you aren’t seeing them at their best at two players. I found Fire in the Lake to be too long for what it offered, and I didn’t like something I find difficult to describe, but troop movement seemed too fluid, both for the armies and the insurgents. Some people told me I should try Pendragon for a different experience …
I found Pendragon to be more difficult to learn than Falling Sky. Good luck
Taught my son Unmatched with a King Arthur vs Bigfoot setup. We played without using the boost mechanic, which nerfs Arthur pretty badly. His Jackalope took out Merlin almost immediately, and then he chased Arthur around the board, chipping away at his health before whomping him twice in one turn with a tree trunk. He’s very excited to make the T-Rex fight Robin Hood.
Even with the Boost mechanic, Arthur is pretty nerfed, especially against Bigfoot with the equivalent of like 5 Feints, which cancel Arthur’s Boosts.
Lot of solo gaming over the past few weeks. Which isn’t a departure from the norm, but the variety of games I played is. Usually, my time is exclusively devoted to Marvel Champions, but I’ve been branching out recently and trying new things.
Great Western Trail (6-10 games): I picked this up after watching Tom’s praise of the solo mode, hoping for a smooth bridge into heavier Euros. It’s quite good! Each game, I found a new mechanic justifying its existence, where previously I would think it was a bit bloated. And everything ties back really neatly into your deck of cows, which anchors the game and keeps it from feeling overwhelming. That said, I don’t know if I’ll be coming back to it soon; I won’t say there isn’t immense replay value, but within each main “path” (cowboys, builders, and trainfolk), the variety mostly comes from the smaller tactical decisions, rather than the broad arc of the game. The AI also soured the experience for me, at least a little bit. It’s easy to run and feels competitive (I’ve only won one game, and it was on Easy difficulty, but it rarely felt unfair), but the speed at which they complete laps to Kansas City means the game is over a little faster than I would like. Our scores always ended up around the 80s or 90s, which is a lot less than the scores I see reported in a normal 2-player game.
Welcome to the Moon (3-ish): Still a great game! And still the best solo X-and-write I’ve played,filling the exact perfect niche I want from this kind of experience. It completely replaces *Welcome To… s a solo game, but I think the original will hold on as the game I play with my family whenever they visit. Luckily, you can fit both games into the WttM box, which is yet another fantastic display of generosity from the game.
Breakaway Football (4 plays): I love the core systems of this game. Every down, the offense chooses a play from its hand (there are no player decks, so what you have available isn’t random), the defense chooses a play after seeing the offense’s formation, then the plays are revealed and resolved. It’s quite simple and repetitive, but it’s also immensely satisfying, and fills the exact role of “Madden but a board game” that I wanted, with enough decision space to be a rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the AI was a bit of a letdown. It’s a clever system, all things considered, but it’s way too easy; in all four games, I ended up winning by three or more touchdowns. There are some ways to increase the difficulty, and I should try them out, because I love everything else about this game.
Dune: Imperium (1 game): I finally tried this with the Rise of Ix expansion, and was slightly overwhelmed. I never really utilized the new Tech tiles, and ended up winning over the two AI by three and four points respectively. In fairness, though, I think the first problem came about because I wasn’t paying attention to the sideboard, and the second problem came about because the AI deck just gave me a ton of lucky turns. I like the Tech in theory, and the Shipping track is a welcome improvement over the original spaces, so I’m itching to return to this one.
Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (2 games): I was surprisingly hot on this game when I first played it, but each new play is diminishing returns. The arc of the game just feels so scripted, especially in the solo game; you spend the first two or so rounds building up your green and blue cards, then spend the last two or so rounds producing and taking actions to bop up the terraforming track. The looseness of the card play has also come around to bite me; I initially loved how easygoing and open it was compared to something like Race for the Galaxy, but after repeat plays, it just feels a bit flabby. You end each game with 10+ cards, none of which you want to play, so in the last turns you just dump them for money. This one I’m not keen to return to, at least not until the Kickstarter expansion arrives (which looks like it will revive the solo mode something fierce).
Endangered (12+ plays): One of these games was actually not solo, and it confirmed my initial impressions. This is an absolutely delightful game, but not a great solo game, at least for me. Thematically, it’s almost distressingly spot-on; it’s a rare breed of co-op game where you don’t really win, but instead just barely avoid losing until you can convince a bunch of international jerks that these animals are dying, damn you! It feels very true to life in that way; you don’t have that Pandemic moment of wiping out a disease, or that Marvel Champions moment of incredible feats of strength. These animals will die, and they will go extinct, and your only way to help in any substantial way is to beg powers far above you to pitch in and save them before that inevitable breaking point. In our game (which we did win!), my wife and I were tasked with saving the sea otters, and my wife physically winced every time a cute little otter meeple was removed from the board. As a solo game, though? It doesn’t quite feel substantial enough. I love a good puzzle in my solo games, and there wasn’t enough decision space to feel entirely satisfying for me. There’s a little too much randomness to feel in complete control, and there isn’t enough planning to encourage the chin-stroking planning I enjoy in other solo games. Still, as a game to play with my wife or family, this is up there with the all-time greats.
Ark Nova (3 plays): Man, I love this game. If Race for the Galaxy is an obstacle course (competitive, focused and demanding), and Ares Expedition is a sand pit (open, breezy, and occasionally pointless), then this game is an entire playground. There are so many systems at play here, with the action-card river, the tile-laying enclosures, the engine-building card play, and so on, that it’s hard not to feel engaged and excited at every turn. All three games I played were completely different from one another, but none felt as constricting as RftG, and none felt as meandering as AE. Also, mercifully, it’s a game that’s heavy with rules and decisions, but isn’t fiddly; you only have one resource that’s constantly being shuffled around, which means you get to focus on the fun parts of the game rather than the admin. I could write a whole essay about why this game is so right for me, but I can sum it up by saying it’s a game that doesn’t care about being a competition. If you come into it ready to play around and have fun for a few hours, you’ll probably have a good time; if you approach the table with an intent to win and an aversion to luck, your experience will suffer for it.
Marvel Champions (lots of plays): I have been playing other games, but Champions is still my one true board game love. I mostly played with the newly-released Nova and Ironheart heroes, and they’re yet more fantastic additions to the lineup of heroes, even if their pre-cons don’t always play to their strengths. I am fairly confident that I have played MC more times than every other game in my collection combined, probably more than 2,000 games at this point. It’s just so quick and breezy and moreish, but also so crunchy and varied and deep, that I find myself playing it over and over and over again. Just since Ironheart and Nova came out on Friday, I’ve played more than a dozen games, and will likely play a dozen more before the weekend rolls around. What a game!
Some games over the last week:
Ohanami, this continues to be a great game to pull out before everyone arrives for gamenights. Although it is perhaps the closest game in my collection to have me worried about running out of scoring sheets for it! Wish they’d included more. Will probably have my wife laminate the last one when we get there.
Orleans, well I was hoping this one would be good by how highly esteemed it seems to be, despite being an ‘older’ (at least in BG reckoning) title. It was heaps of fun! Those events can be brutal, and you are constantly in competition which is not normally what I expect from a euro but here it works great. And the bag-building is streaks ahead of Quacks (and I like Quacks a lot). Am keen to play it at other counts and with returning players to see how it develops. Though I’m a bit suspicious it might not shine at 2, due to not everything scaling well. But yeah, look past how it looks and it’s a lot of fun.
Hadrian’s Wall, a solo game of this with a decent score despite some terrible luck on the early invasions. I keep meaning to branch out and try different things but the pressure often drives me back into playing similiarly to how I usually play.
Fleet: the Dice Game, a two player game of this, and the first one I’ve lost! To a new player to boot! There were only a couple of points in it, and he managed his win without any attention to King Crab, which I’d always assumed was a must. I’ve also recently picked up the mini expansion for this one so look forward to trying that out soon also.
Fantasy Realms x2, tried out the two player game variant at the back of the manual and it works super well! You definitely feel more in control, when in the regular game you might just get dealt a good starting hand and then lean into that - here it felt more ‘earnt’.
Paladins of the West Kingdom, this game was exceptional - it’s so open but you need to have a plan and also be able to pivot when required. I won off of meeting all 3 of the King’s decree cards and having having higher stats. In our post game autopsy I mused whether my superior result was linked to specialising on 4 actions on the right hand side of the player boards, where my opponent did only 3. It did run long, even with 2 so I’d be hesitant to consider a full 4 unless everyone knew what they were doing. It never felt slow though. Definitely a lot of crunchy decisions and requires a mix of strategy and being able to adapt when your plans are frustrated. A new fave for sure.
Bananagrams, played this with my wife and managed to sneak in a win after feeling quite behind for most of it, which always feels good. Though I wonder if the game would be improved by giving some kind of benefit whenever you can call for new tiles? Eh the simplicity is part of why the game is popular, I suppose, even if it’s not always ‘fair’.
Azul: Summer Pavilion, first game of this was with 2 and wow, it was a lot of fun! Definitely an improvement on the first game for me. And though it does have more rules than the first, kind of, I think they make more sense - especially the scoring, which was my least favourite part of the original. Not getting rid of the original just yet, but I may not get it to the table much if my feelings remain the same. So its days may be numbered.
Photosynthesis, two player game of this which was delightful - though some of my trees are starting to show some wear/slipping, which is not ideal…