Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[mistercrayon]

Played a first game of switch and signal and won pretty comfortably with the first set up (I think everythng is set up to be v smooth, including some how the initial dice rolls lol).

So here’s my hot take on the game. It does theoretically have a “quarterback” problem BUT the rub is the decision space is such that equal collaboration should more easily be be possible. There’s no good reason to dominate this game unless you’re an arse - the puzzle isn’t so complicated and tight (probably because of the dice creating a lot of randomness) that you need to realistically execute so many steps that it requires a singular vision across multiple turns. I think also the lack of individual powers really helps. In something like pandemic you have this artificial “everyone gets their own power” but really you need to use all of them synergistically which does favour a single person’s thought process (and that’s usually the quickest player) or using one guy as a duffer player to do the boring logistics. Here it can be a bit more tactical and short term and everyone’s contribution is as necessary as their cards allow in the ,moment.

[Sexagesimalian]

At Kublacon, myself and a few other players signed up for game thinking it was

Grand Prix

but it was actually

Grand Prix: A Sports Car Racing Game

Despite its age (1956) it was actually not bad. The graphics and components (including home made player “boards,”) were prototype-is, but it had charm. Think Formula De without the dice. The main strategy was about how to navigate gearing through corners. There were 4 classes of cards (C - F) with different stats on how many spaces you could move in each gear, how many gears you could downshift, and how many breaking maneuvers you could do to get extra downshifts for the curves. If you took a curve at too high of a gear (based on type of curve and class of car), you had to draw a card to see if you navigated safely, spun out, or had to go to the pits (when you got around the track back to pit row). Update the graphics and components, and one would think it was a contemporary game.

By chance, I started in pole and except through the first half of the first (of three) laps, I maintained it. My car was Class F; they have the lowest top speed but have the most forgiving downshifting and curve restrictions. I took a strategy that I would not chance curves unless I needed to catch up. I never did. Everyone who tried to challenge my position spun out in the curves as I forced them to take risks.

Because I was in front, I experienced little of the tactics of maneuvering around other cars. And because I had the most forgiving car, my decisions were not difficult: get into as high of a gear as possible and then slam down into the right gear for the curve. The final two laps were me getting distance on the curves and the bigger engines closing the gap on the straits. When the last challenger spun out mid-way through the last lap, I had the race in the bag.

Had I not started on the front row, and maintained that position, I don’t know if I would have liked the game as much. Another player also had a Class F, but was stuck several positions behind the leaders. But for what might be considered a “bait-and-switch” convention game, it was a pleasant experience,

[bort]

Wonderland’s War first play. This is a competitive area control bag building game, set in the world of Alice in Wonderland. There are three rounds, each round consisting of a tea party phase, and then a war phase. In the tea party phase, you move around the board collecting cards. Most cards allow you to place your tokens in an area, and also give other benefits, like increasing your leaders power, or getting another character to fight for you, or adding various chips to your bag. You can gain one of your four special abilities as well.

Once everyone has four cards, you place your leader in a region, and each battle takes place. You add up your influence to move up the attack track, and then simultaneously draw chips from your bag, further increasing your total. You can stop anytime you want after your first draw. What you don’t want is to draw madness chips, because they make you remove pieces from the battle. And if you have no more pieces, you’ve gone bust and you lose the battle.

If you’re not in a battle, you can try and pick a winner for a reward. Nice touch, keeps you interested if you’re not fighting. After a battle, you can forge a chip – there is a forge chip, but also forge icons on the battle track. When you forge, you place a chip on one of your four forge tracks, giving you a bonus. If you complete a forge track, you gain an extra chip.

There are so many chips in this game. You start with your faction starting chips, and two of your faction artifact chips, but you’ll soon get more. There are ally chips, each associated with one of five ally cards. At the start of the game, you select a set of ally cards to use (A, B, C or D), so each game is different.

There’s so much stuff for this game, setup takes a little while. I have the retail version only. There was a deluxe kickstarter edition with miniatures for the characters, instead of standees. And there was also an upgrade to the chip tokens, which looks very nice. They very briefly had the upgraded games available, no way to get them now (apart from second hand).

If you’ve played Quacks of Quedlinburg you’ll be familiar with the bag drawing. And if you thought Quacks was too luck based, well, you probably won’t like this either. I like Quacks, and I like this too. There are so many options to choose from, and you can’t do everything. Our game (4p) was very tight. Went a bit long, but it was a teaching game. Definitely keen to play again.

Pictures . Needed something a bit lighter after WW, and this was perfect. We’re enjoying the new cards and materials from the expansion (which is a bit overpriced…)

Break the Code

The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club X 3

Bravo!

[COMaestro]

Played Lords of Vegas with my wife and her brother yesterday, using the Up expansion.

Honestly, my wife should have won this. She was able to get almost the entire C block and had a huge casino pretty early on. But it was in purple, and it turned out that five of the nine purple cards were beneath the game over card in the deck, so they never came up.

So instead, the victory went to her brother, who had managed to steal a green casino from me, and my reorganization rolls never managed to get it back, which got him a good number of points. The game ended with my wife and I tied at 32, and him at 73.

[EnterTheWyvern]

Today started off with not 1 but 2 games of Cthulhu Wars! 3 player both times. First one Sleeper beat Black Goat and Yellow sign. Then to change things up The Crawling Chaos beat Black Goat and Yellow Sign. Still really like this, fast, strategic and tactical. Being so up in each others grills from the off just means you hit the juice from turn 2 onwards. Also special mention goes to killing @lalunaverde’s old one with too few dice for it to be anything other than funny.

Next we tried The Night Cage which was so poor it got put in the bin after we finished. No decisions of interest or consequence.

Lastly we got Hanabi out and our 3 hands saw scores of 20, 22 and 23. Utterly excellent fun still.

Excellent games day with good people. Which in many ways is the main point.

[raged_norm]

Tooky mum for a ride along the Great Western Trail. At the end she said she ‘could get the hang of it but it will be too long before we play it again’

Sadly too late for her

[bengeile]

Moderated a 6-player game of My Little Scythe, with players ranging from 5 to 11 years old. I may need to take a weeklong nap.

[Whistle_Pig]

Yesterday we played Warrior Knights, an out of print game of which our friend owns two copies, for some reason

I had been slightly dreading playing it since we decided last week to play one of his long games that we never usually play. Mostly because I find the theme of generic medieval battles to be extremely tedious. However, it turned out to be quite an interesting game, albeit probably better with more players.

We followed that up with Praise and Santorini while we waited for our takeaway to arrive. Praise is a Japanese game which seems specifically designed to make British people squirm! It’s a fairly simple social deduction type game where you have to compliment one of the other players. Everyone is given an ‘emotion’ card which dictates the style in which you must give your compliment, along with a card that either gives a fake (often quite weird) compliment or says “give an honest compliment!” The person who is being complimented then has to work out who is giving the real compliment. My husband (who used to live in Japan) says that it makes complete sense that this is a Japanese game because it reflects Japanese culture around compliments. Perhaps @Benkyo would find this less confusing than me! I think I’m filing this one under “games that would be fun to watch other people play”

[Benkyo]

Hmm, well, “flattery” (お世辞) is both a cultural norm and looked down on. It’s kind of weird. Like, people do it all the time, but it isn’t good to flatter or to be flattered? I suppose it makes sense to have a game about figuring out a genuine compliment…

[COMaestro]

Played three games today.

Started with Chinatown, with my wife and her brother. In a first for us, we had one of the blocks completely filled with tiles by the end of the third or fourth round. There’s usually a lot or two still open. Her brother won with $1.31 m, to my $1.23 m and my wife’s $1.21 m. Of course this winning streak of his cannot be allowed to stand, and we must destroy him!

Later, my wife and I played Lost Cities, where she continued her winning streak. It is funny as it used to be I won this and she won Unmatched, but lately we have swapped.

A bit after that we played two games of Kingdomino, where she won the first game and I won the second.

Then, after the kids went to bed, we brought Tyrants of the Underdark to the table for the first time. Took a little bit to get started as I had to rescan the rules and then convey them to her, but it really is a straightforward game once you get going.

I pulled off the win by a decent margin, mostly thanks to cards I purchased which just assassinated troops, which are VP at the end of the game, as well as a card which gavee VP for every two sites I controlled, and also getting total control of Menzoberranzan, which gave me 2 VP at the end of each of my turns while I had it. She did outscore me in controlled sites, total controlled sites, and inner circle cards, but it was not enough to make up the difference.

It is a really interesting game. You can start out ignoring each other a bit, but before too long you are at each other’s throats fighting over territory, and assassinating the other’s troops for points amd to secure your hold on sites. Lots of fun and I am glad we were finally able to try it.

[Bondy034]

Games last week:

Brass Birmingham, friend wanted to get his copy of this one to the table. It was fine. It’s not a game I find super exciting or engaging but it’s not bad. I made the mistake of keeping to myself too much, and also not developing enough early on. Our winner was well deserved as he was dominating most of the industry in Birmingham and the surrounds, I came in a distant third.

Above and Below, I’m always pleased to get this one to the table. This game was marred slightly by having to explain and re-explain some basic concepts to one of the players. Also we got a bunch of real weird explores early on that didn’t give goods at all, so was a bit weird but still enjoyable.

Thebes, it had been awhile for this one but it’s a lot of fun and super easy to grasp. I had a slow start with a couple of fairly unproductive digs, but managed some good finds in year 2. The big decider was none of our large exhibitions turning up before the end of the game, and me snapping up almost all the small ones. This game has a very unique feel - the time management/risk taking gameplay feels quite different to anything else I’ve played and works with the theme surprisingly well.

[RogerBW]

Last night:

Sentinels of the Multiverse testing next month’s challenge. Whuff! Two out of three heroes incapacitated, and Fanatic saved the day with her famed Tasmanian Devil impersonation (only with more sharp bits).

Also Just One (three-player you give two clues each, and we still managed one round with no clues at all) and Snow Tails, vicious and great fun – I suspect I may be buying this. (Racing games seem to have a high correlation with games I enjoy…)

[raged_norm]

Played some Power Grid last night. Australia Map. It certainly shakes things up a bit. Good fun, B tier map.

Followed by Dice Town. Meh

[lalunaverde]

Raged_norm Power Grid map tier list when?

[raged_norm]

Tongue in cheek, I haven played nearly enough maps to actually make a list.

[RossM]

Bought and played The Mind with mini Ross. They got it straight away, and there’s an interesting meta of non verbalage assembling already.

[COMaestro]

We played Raccoon Tycoon on Monday. My brother-in-law continues his winning streak, getting 57 points to my 55, with my wife bringing up the rear at 44. While she had the most buildings, I think she waited too long getting into the railroad/town game, which is where a majority of the points lie.

[lalunaverde]

Mansions of Madness - I haven’t played the other Lovecraftian games like Cthulhu Death May Die. But this is still my fave thematic game. Arkham Horror the Board Game and Eldritch Horror are too disconnected with the theme (wait, what do you mean we have to do another mission that is completely unrelated to the previous one!?). Elder Sign is too much of an abstract Yahtzee to feel thematic. MoM hits the spot.

Babylonia - 3 players. Setup, teach, play, and clean up all within an hour. Decisions are still interesting. However, I’m not sure if it’s weak compare to the other light games I play, or maybe it’s just my opponents’ inexperience. Still preferable over his titles like Samurai. But nothing against Stephenson’s Rocket or Tigris & Euphrates. I’m considering about culling it.

Moonrakers - negotiation game about fulfilling contracts and cutting the reward pie between players. Interesting ideas, but found it flawed. The value between credits and VPs are too skewed towards credits at early game, and skewed to VPs on late game. An avoidable flaw if the designers had a bit more imagination and not fall for the usual “engine first; VPs later” arc bullcrap. The game also incentivises players on getting reactors (which grants more actions) on early game, which led to obvious gameplay.

The game also made this egregious error where if the player(s) failed to achieve the contract, there’s zero game progression. Player sabotage will actually lengthen the game for little overall benefit. Absolute amateur hour.

I want to like it but a waste of time. Cosmic Encounter is not only better, but also faster than this.

Back to back games of Yelow & Yangtze and Tigris & Euphrates

Just One

[yashima]

@lalunaverde

Moonrakers - negotiation game about fulfilling contracts and cutting the reward pie between players. Interesting ideas, but found it flawed. The value between credits and VPs are too skewed towards credits at early game, and skewed to VPs on late game. An avoidable flaw if the designers had a bit more imagination and not fall for the usual “engine first; VPs later” arc bullcrap. The game also incentivises players on getting reactors (which grants more actions) on early game, which led to obvious gameplay.

I find myself not disagreeing. After playing a few solos and with my partner, I had little desire to bring this to the table either for the engine building or the negotiation (although to be fair in solo and 2 player that plays almost no role). My gaming opportunities have been too few since getting it, but other games have always had priority. I want to like it more the idea of how the card play works is kind of neat. For now I am hanging on to it as an aspiration. (Wouldn‘t recommend buying, but I would definitely bring it to the table if someone asked for it)

PS: Cosmic fell flat for my group when we tried. They needed more „guidance“ for negotation maybe Moonrakers can supply that.

[Chewy77]

My first game of The Mind ended with a “You are playing this way too quick, man”. Astounding simple game, loved it.