Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[bruitist]

Got to have two gaming sessions this week! First up was mostly 3-player with my friend and his partner last Sunday. I did badly.

Dead & Breakfast - This used to be my game, but I decided to get rid of it and my friend took it. It’s decent, but not that exciting a game. I messed up on connecting vines and lost.

Irish Gauge - I don’t think I’m good at this sort of game at all. I think everything I did just resulted in everyone else getting more money.

Brian Boru - Really enjoyed this. I focused on marriage and dealing with vikings, but sadly just got pipped to the post on marrying the princess of Denmark, which cost me the win.

Azul - A shocking performance here. Managed to end two rounds with a load of tiles on the floor, totalling a loss of 24 points overall. But I still ended up only 10 points behind the winner.

Roam - Finished off with this at two players. Played with the artefacts and they definitely improve the game.

Then today a different friend came over and I got to try out some new stuff.

Backgammon - Started with this as it’s one of her favourites. I’ve played a couple of times ages ago and didn’t remember the rules. I was appropriately terrible at it.

The Dragon Prince: Battlecharged - Definitely similar to Unmatched, but different enough to be worth it (and not just because I like the show). I’d be interested to try out different combinations of characters to see how they play together. It was close, but I won this one.

Ashes Reborn - My first chance to play this since the overhaul (and my first time playing it in ages) and I still like the game a lot. First game was Victoria Glassfire (me) against Lulu Firststone (just using their preconstructed decks). Then our second game was Jericho, Reborn (me) vs Astrea.

I won both, but the games were close enough that I didn’t feel like I stomped my way to victory by knowing the game better. Hopefully I’ll get to play more soon.

Marvel Villainous - My first time playing either Villainous game. Unfortunately, I misunderstood how the fate cards worked and thought anything with a character symbol was targeted. This resulted in me with a load of heroes in my domain while my friend had none. This left me barely able to do anything while she easily progressed to victory.

[COMaestro]

Had another go at Tyrants of the Underdark last night. My wife did much better this time and ended up winning the game 99-87. It’s possible she had more points, as we forgot she had taken full control of the centermost site, which gives 3 VP at the end of each of her turns, so while we did give her some VP, it’s possible she should have had more. I was just having problems drawing the cards I needed, and it took quite a while before some cards came up in the market that would allow us to promote, so we weren’t able to thin our decks out until pretty late, and even then I only managed to promote 4 cards and my wife just 1.

Fun game. Might try out different half decks next time we play.

[raged_norm]

During a sit down at UKGE I played

Star Cartel, decent set collection game where selling good increases the value of the goods. Too many can crash the market though.

Fafnir, curious. Needs more plays to fully grok. You need to get the majority of a colour out to score but also need to hold it back to score. Playing to 40 is too long though.

Trains A whole bag of OK deckbuilding. Straight onto the sell pile, but wouldn’t say no to a game.

Kingdom Builder, now this was waaaaay more fun than I expected.

Town 66, brain melting tile shedding game. Build a town but each row and column cannot contain the same colour or shape. Least left in hand wins, you start with four tiles (giving more options) but can discard a tile each turn, reducing your options but putting you in a stronger position to win. Last player standing with the least tiles in hand wins.

I regret not buying this at the Oink stand. If anyone needs another game to hit the small discount at the Oink stand tomorrow I’ll happily send you money to get this to me.

[lalunaverde]

@raged_norm

If anyone needs another game to hit the small discount at the Oink stand tomorrow I’ll happily send you money to get this to me.

Dammit you got me. PM me your contact to meet up

[raged_norm]

I’m not going to be at UKGE tomorrow.

It will have to be a postal one!

[acharlie1377]

Played my first two games of Spirit Island, both solo with a single spirit. It’s a heavy one, but I played everything right (for the most part), and the question on my mind is… is the default difficulty supposed to be this easy? My first game, I played as Ocean’s Hungry Grasp with the suggested power progression, and I beat the colonizers pretty soundly. But, I was just two turns away from losing, so I chalked the win up to luck and the benefit of a fixed upgrade path. Then, I played as Lightning’s Swift Strike, and won before I even reached the level III cards.

From Mark Bigney’s comments in the SVWAG podcast, it seems like the starting difficulty is designed to be almost trivial, so I’m definitely going to give this one some more plays. I just think it’s weird to start players off with a first game that is inherently devoid of close calls and potential losses. I’m pretty sure I like this game, but it’s so hard to tell when all the interlocking systems feel like bloat that you don’t need to interact with to succeed.

[Benkyo]

Yeah, I had a similar first impression.

[bort]

@acharlie1377

it seems like the starting difficulty is designed to be almost trivial,

I have 7 plays of SI, and lost them all. Solo, multiple groups. I guess we’re just stupid. We have a similar win rate at Ghost Stories, but at least that is supposed to be hard.

[malkav11]

There’s already loads to get to grips with in Spirit Island before you start complicating things with nations, scenarios, special blighted island cards, etc. And they’re a lot of what drives the actual difficulty.

[yashima]

I found that most people I introduced the game to struggled with the number of things to keep track of even when I handle the load of managing the island. They still need to be able to anticipate how everything develops over the next 2-3 rounds. This plus the individual cards each doing something different and having spirit powers to deal with is often enough to warrant playing a couple of games in standard mode. Wrapping their head around how defense works, how to protect the island from blight and what powers to choose is usually enough to keep them busy for a game.

And while I can teach this to my friends and I myself was lucky enough to get taught this at SPIEL some years ago, I imagine having to learn the rules on your own to be a bit more difficult. There are so many it is quite likely that rules mistakes make the game either harder or easier. Even getting taught, for the longest time I did not know that explorers in neighboring regions do not cause explorers… explorers only appear next to the coast, cities or towns. And even after many many games I sometimes get the targeting rules for the cards and powers wrong.

I think it is fine to have a first game not overwhelm people with difficulty especially one that has such rules complexity and as many moving parts as SI does.

That said: a single spirit with the new +1 blight rule and no events may end up borderline trivial depending on how invader cards and powers come up. I‘ve had games I won in 4 rounds. Which is fine but admittedly a bit boring. My favorite way to play solo is with 2 spirits, events & tokens (from Branch & Claw) and a level 1 nation (Brandenburg Prussia or Sweden mostly). I mostly choose spirits of moderate or higher difficulty.

[Phil]

My only interaction with Spirit Island was being taught the game at a convention when (I think) it was brand new; but I had no idea what I was getting into when I agreed to try it, and I was absolutely not in the frame of mind to learn a game with that many complex moving parts. I think I may even have commented along the lines of “as long as it’s not too complex” before agreeing to sit down, but I can’t recall for sure. At any rate, it rapidly became apparent to me that this was not something I should have gotten involved with at that point in time, and I think my eyes pretty much glazed over while I waited for an opportunity to extricate myself from the situation. Not a good experience. But so many people love the game (not least here) that I’ve long been questioning whether I might actually enjoy the game under better circumstances.

[RogerBW]

I’ve played three games of Spirit Island, all with people who knew it better than me, and all of them were just barely victorious.

[COMaestro]

Played another game of Tyrants of the Underdark, this time with 3 players. Game seems even more vicious at the increased player count. This time around I had really good card combos in my draws, and was able to get control of all five site tokens at various points of the game, just never at the same time. Managed to have total contol of a few of them as well periodically.

As such, along with some cards that scored VP during my turns, I was able to rack up 30 points of VP before the end of the game. While I was outscored in nearly every other category, it was not by enough to overcome this amount. I won with 108, our friend had 85, and my wife had 83.

[Whistle_Pig]

Played at UKGE so far:

Fort: Not at it’s best with 2 players, but I still love the theme.

Hansa Teutonica x2: Both times played on the Britannia map. I need to play with the original board again to see which I prefer, but I like the way that the Britannia map sets everyone up to scrap over Wales and Scotland

Azul: Queen’s Garden: reminds me a lot of Calico

Papayoo: a silly trick-taking game

Hive x4: this might become our new go-to “waiting for other people at conventions” game. I think I’ll suggest taking it on holiday with us next month since we’ll need something to occupy us during the inevitable airport delays!

Senshi: This is our current “waiting 10 minutes for other people to finish a game” game.

Pax Pamir 2E: a very close game that went down to a tie breaker. Still one of my favourites

The Great Zimbabwe: I do enjoy having a Splotter game that you can feasibly introduce to someone without having them prepare beforehand!

Mariposas: I did badly despite getting a lot of butterflies home, because I didn’t manage to complete any of the round-end goals

Ecosystem: Nice, quick drafting game with pretty cards.

Kittin: Got this in the last maths trade. It’s a very light and quick real-time dexterity game. Much over-exaggerated offence at other players completing their cat stacks fastest

The Crew: we were all getting rather tired at this point so we only played a few missions. I still think it’s a really good game - my husband isn’t so sure!

We were joined for a few games by @lalunaverde, who I can confirm is a real-life person and not just text on the internet. We lost a player to the bring and buy halfway through our game of Pax Pamir - there seemed to be a lot of bring and buy related shenanigans this year - and lalunaverde subbed in for him. He also spared me from having to explain The Great Zimbabwe, since my brain was mush from teaching Pax Pamir and Hansa Teutonica!

[Benkyo]

Carnegie. My first game. Took too long, and I won by a fairly large margin against experienced players without really understanding why. Kind of confirmed for me that even a good (modern) Euro is still just a (modern) Euro, and there are other games I’d rather be playing.

Innovation x2. Great fun as always.

[Captbnut]

@Whistle_Pig

Hansa Teutonica x2: Both times played on the Britannia map. I need to play with the original board again to see which I prefer, but I like the way that the Britannia map sets everyone up to scrap over Wales and Scotland

I love how Hansa Teutonica is so easy to reset and go again; every game I play I always want to play again instantly.

Personally I wasn’t over fussed on the Britannia map (apart from it features a lot of places that mean a lot to me); I found the extra rules grit didn’t pay off in enhanced game play.

[Phil]

At Wellycon for the afternoon/evening today. I played:

High Society. Silly fun as usual.

Geometric Art. Just a few rounds, as people wanted to play something different.

The King Is Dead. Half the table was gunning hard for a French invasion right from the outset, which made for a bizarre yet interesting game. This squabble between the two halves meant that everyone was burning cards very fast. In the end it was clear that preventing the invasion from happening was impossible, and the only thing to do was to try to even out one’s influence in preparation for the inevitable. The invasion took place with only half the regions accounted for, and went to the tie-breaker to determine the winner. Not how I’d want most games of TKID to go, but I found it very interesting how effectively the players in question were able to enforce that outcome (although, ironically, they lost the game).

Planet Unknown. Nice and simple once you get going, but quite a lot of components and moderately complex teaching faff for this one. Looks more complicated than it is. I enjoyed it, and would happily play again. Very little downtime, as all players are playing on every turn.

Tikal. Delighted to play this one again. I won by a single point (although it was one of those very friendly re-learning sessions with everyone pointing out helpful options to everyone else). I think the scores were 138, 137, 125. Things were extremely close until the last 2-3 scoring rounds when the player who had gone heavily after the treasure set-collection strategy (at the cost of claiming pyramids) started to drop behind as their main source of points was overtaken by the increasing pyramid values. I only had two pairs of treasures, but ended up owning a series of very valuable pyramids along the top edge of the map which wound up being all but inaccessible to the other players. The third player was still more-than-doubling my treasure score, but was losing on pyramid value, and I just got my nose ahead in the final round.

Jaipur. A wind-down game before leaving, which went to me in consecutive rounds. The first round was a near thing that I believe I won only by grabbing camels to claim the camel bonus in the final turn. The second round was more decisive – I’d grabbed lots of valuable early tokens (without bonuses), but still managed to get lots of bonus tokens as the round progressed, and finished with a lead of ~20 points (to my surprise).

[Captbnut]

My wife and I have had a hungover first play of a couple of light games by a couple of big names I picked up in the most recent Maths Trade.

Polynesia by Peer Sylvester is My First Brass Birmingham. A bit of coopetition (not much with 2 players), a very cool action point mechanic, family weight gameplay (simpler than Ticket to Ride imo), vibrant art and colour scheme and a really strong theme. It’s alright, gives a good Moana vibe. Could see it being played with kid visitors and parents.

La Isla by Stefan Feld on the other hand appears to be a stone cold banger. Multi use cards, set collection, resource management, a rudimentary stock market, simultaneous action selection and a tesellating modular board. By the time we’d had a couple of turns we were agonising about what to do. I was a bit down on this after the trade because I’d given up quite a lot of monetary value, but I can’t wait to play this again.

[Tika]

I feel like La Isla is so underrated! I think it does what the popular Bruges tries to do, but is much better.

[bruitist]

Impromptu get together with a couple of friends last night to play some games.

Oriflamme - A couple of games of this as a) it’s quick, and b) I initially forgot to teach the stacking rule, but it’s not that important, as shown by us still not using it in the 2nd game.

Definitely going to start grabbing this more often as a filler game. Might eventually actually use some of Ablaze cards as well. (Both versions are now in the Ablaze box, as the original box is stupid.)

A War of Whispers - Most satisfying game of this so far. Definitely getting the hang of what actions are good to get depending on how you want things to go. Also grabbing more cards when I could, which I hadn’t done before.

The Estates - I did well out of my two opponents fighting over buildings, allowing me to gain lots of money and embezzle lots of it, before using permits to end the game quickly.

Off the Rails - Something my friend bought at UKGE a few years ago that we’d never got around to playing. Once we got past the overcomplicated setup and bad manual, it was all right. Seems to expect you to be more mean than the game needs you to be. Also not as wild and crazy as the theme suggests it should be.

6 nimmt! - Great as always. I slipped into 2nd in the last round - knocked off the winning spot by 1 point.