Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[yashima]

My first game since vacation. Having a long week-end (Monday is a holiday here) helped get me move my mind away from work and renovation stuff enough that I felt like getting out Spirit Island.

I played a 2 Spirit Solo with Stone‘s Unyielding Whatever and Downpour Drenches Everything Everywhere (or so). It took me 2 attempts and 9 rounds on #2 to win against Level 1 Brandenburg.

Attempt #1: after three rounds I noticed I had forgotten the event cards. So we had dinner and I reset the game. At least after having had a few turns I kind of knew what I was getting into with Stone which I had played only 1 time before.

Attempt #2:
Mistakes were made:

• I played Thunderspeaker so much that whatever spirits I play I am overprotective of the Dahan—and they are useful when you defend. But Stone prefers not defending and just crushing invaders to pieces with their second power… so that got in the way. Luckily, Dahan seem quite nomadic especially especially during Downpour season.
• I never managed to get enough Mountains on the board for it to make a difference—Stone has several abilities that interact with mountains but 4 mountain tokens in 4 different regions… didn‘t do anything. Beasts removed more invaders than the mountains damaged.
• I usually try to clean up part of the island enough so invaders cannot appear. Downpour has several isolate powers right from the start but I just could not manage to prevent exploration except for 1 time!
• On turn #4 or 5 Downpour didn‘t have enough energy to play their second card. That was embarrassing
• Overall, I played Downpour badly. I was too busy getting to know Stone and grokking how they deal with blight.

What was ok:

• I am afraid of Blighted Islands. Every single time the card flips I feel like I have already lost. Today I avoided that easily because Stone can pay energy to take blight from the box instead of the card!
• Stone gets energy production up easily and also additional powers so I went for some major powers early. Stupidly, however, I chose one that was a) expensive and b) would only be useful once I had the terror level up to 2.
• An early event that cost me a lot gave both spirits a freely chosen permanent element! Yay!
• The fear cards didn‘t fizzle for the most part which is a good sign that I was playing around the right difficulty level for my current ability.

What was nice:

• The Spirit Island game arc can end with several turns „mopping up“ the leftovers: when you know you‘ve won but still have to go through several turns to get rid of that last city. Today, I looked at the board in the turtle phase of a rather harrowing turn 8 and thought: there are 3 cities left, if I do not remove those next turn, things will escalate beyond control, so I saved up a bit of energy on Downpour and next turn went for a fireworks of major powers with both spirits and the game ended with a bang I would have needed to survive another turn to get the last fear card as well.

Edit: This changing of gears for the last turn seems important. If you overlook that you could win on a turn, you may end up getting in trouble. But I do things on that last turn that I would not do earlier in the game: getting major powers and discarding stuff randomly. Spending all my energy. Moving invaders to certain lands where they might become dangerous later—if there was a later. Stuff like that.

What was a bit… meh:

• I made one big blunder misreading Stone‘s blight prevention ability but I was able to retcon it the next turn without having an effect on the general outcome (I moved the presence I had placed the turn before so it would have all worked out)
• I must assume that I made more mistakes like that.

Overall, it was good to play but I wish my friend was available to play more often My brain is too busy with other things for me to play well with 2 spirits these days. Single spirit games lack all the synergies (not much of that today though…) and so I really avoid those.

Final board state:

[Marx]

Played two games with a buddy today.

First was a second attempt at Deep Space D-6 Armada to determine if it should stay in the collection. It was… okay? It was okay. Thoroughly mediocre, which is a dang shame because they put a fair bit of thought into the design and aesthetics of the game.

I really wanted to like the game, but by the end (around the 90min mark) we were basically just fighting fleets on our own because it was taking too long to actually be engaged in what the other player was doing. The options to assist each other are… silly… the Beacons are too random, and gosh does it take a long time to get to the theoretical 4 icons needed to reveal the final boss.

I will not be keeping it in my collection, despite it being fine. I don’t have room or time for fine in my collection any more.

Then I FINALLY managed to get Beyond the Sun on the table, and that was pure joy. Gosh every move feels meaningful, every decision is fast and elegant, and the final score was a tight 55 - 54. Terry went really hard for colonies (having 6 by the end of the game) while I leaned into churning out Tech as fast as I could. The ended the game with a Warlord achievement and I couldn’t find a way to develop a Level 4 tech…

Really, really neat, plus I love that there isn’t really a heavy military aspect. It’s all implied conflict, rather than actual fights, and that’s a nice change of pace. It’s staying in the collection for sure.

D&D session starts in 30 minutes, and I’m looking forward to that a lot too. DMing is a lot of work but it’s satisfying when it goes well, and the group of friends we’re playing with have been a lot of fun so far. This will be our second session… let’s see if they continue driving us straight off the rails!

[bort]

Wonderlands War , our second play. I have to say, this is shaping up as my favourite game this year. It looks good on the table (and I don’t have the deluxe), isn’t too hard to learn, and keeps you engaged, even if you’re not in a battle. You could argue that it’s luck based, and that’s fair enough. The things I don’t like about it is that it’s a table hog, and a bit of a pig to set up/teardown. A good insert would probably help there. I really wish I’d backed it at KS, not so much for the deluxe minis (standees are fine, and I’m not a painter), but would love the premium chips.

Cryptid , we seem to struggle a bit with this. Last time we played my mate figured it out in a couple of turns, so I figured he knew what he was doing. But we all struggled a bit, mainly with the deduction sheets that I downloaded from bgg. We started to figure it out, and I managed the win. We’ve only played it a couple of times, so we try and play and help each other a bit to learn.

Pictures , still using the expansion. Some of the new cards are really hard to identify. But we still had a good time.

Istanbul , hadn’t played this for quite a while. Still a pretty good Euro efficiency puzzle. I thought I was doing ok, grabbed the red mosque tile (that allows you to reroll or change a die to a 4), and then used the tea room to make enough money for expanding my wheelbarrow. That seemed to be going well, so I did it a few times. Thinking back, I think it might have cost me too many actions to do it, although I did get a gem for it. The other players were doing fine with their smaller capacity. I could see the finish line (had three gems, was about to get my last mosque tile, and then buy my last gem), but another player finished well before me.

[Simfers]

Didn’t play much this week-end, owing to general fatigue and fantastic weather that really lent itself more to yardwork (also, we got a Switch and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe a couple of weeks ago and have been working our way through it), but we did manage to squeeze in a quick three-game series of Everdell (no expansions due to the aforementioned fatigue).

It ended 2-1 in my darling wife’s favour, but each game was close and competitive, being decided by less than 10 points each time (the first game I won by a single measly point).

It remains one of our absolute favourites. There’s a glorious marriage of theme and mechanics that manages to be utterly engaging while being absolutely chill.

[Chewy77]

Long weekend here thanks to Queen Lizzy II official birthday, so I played a couple of games (yay!). Saturday morning played Architects otWK with my OH, and she was not very convinced to start with. We were quite even until she got a lucky hit with the Crane card just before the last Black Market recycle. She did not know what was the card allowing her to do, so I told her she could build another card or on the Cathedral. Initially she thought she did not have enough to build another card, but she did, activated the black market, set me up with debt and too far behind to catch up. She beat me fair and square 43 - 35. I hope this doesn’t become another Splendor that she beats me up at all the time.

Then Sunday morning the girls wanted a play of Cluedo, so I obliged (I have to help the little one a bit, or a lot). No one won because I tricked my eldest daughter always asking like I didn’t have the dagger and she thought we didn’t have it, but then I asked for candelabra instead of candlestick (even though I used the prop) and “she didn’t have it”. So I went for it, and I was wrong too. So no fun for anybody. Which sums up Cluedo quite well.

[Whistle_Pig]

Yesterday we wandered around the trade halls at UKGE doing some demos. I didn’t manage to get a go at either Decorum or Yak, which are the ones I was actually trying to see, but we tried a few others:

Wonder Book: pitched as “Gloomhaven for kids”, in that it’s a cooperative adventure game about fighting monsters. The board is a pop-up book containing a big tree, which is very pretty. We didn’t play much because it was very much a kids game with the feel of a choose your own adventure book, which isn’t really what I’m interested in.

Magnificent Bar Stars: another game along the lines of Funemployed where everyone has to convince one player why their card best fits whatever criterion the judge has selected. I’ll admit I internally sighed and thought “not another one” as the game was being explained, but it did seem like a fun version of the basic game type. You have to construct a drink to tempt a particular customer into your bar, and you can play modifiers onto the other players’ drinks/bars to make them less attractive. We ended up trying to convince a gorilla who just wanted to be human to drink in our bars. I was ahead with a goldfish bowl of the best champagne until my husband added a rotting cabbage modifier to my drink . Not even my addition of really tiny chairs and a “no gorillas” sign to his bar could make up for that!

Flip, Switch, and Roll: a quick filler game that involves using card powers to manipulate 3 dice to get the number you want. There wasn’t much else to it but it seemed fun

TacTiki: a 2-player abstract where you have to get your totems to your opponent’s side of the board using limited movement and fighting. The different pieces have different strengths that are revealed when you fight, so it’s partially a memory game. It seemed okay but I would definitely rather play Hive.

Tatsu: Backgammon + dragons. Really, really dull roll and move. Apparently has won awards but I have no idea why. Perhaps good if you wanted to try and get an avid backgammon player into modern board games?

Copan: Dying City: Heavy Euro, multiplayer solitaire set in a Mayan city in decline. Looks a lot like Teotihuacan but I think I prefer this. Resources become more scarce as you take more, eventually closing off areas of the board by triggering cataclysmic events. Seems to be a lot about working out good combos to get lots of points. I’d definitely play again but probably wouldn’t buy it because we already have Teotihuacan and Tzolk’in!

I think I’ll keep an eye out for Magnificent Bar Stars and Flip, Switch, and Roll since they were both the designer’s first game and seemed pretty good.

[Assussanni]

Railroad Ink (Green) continues to provide great entertainment for me and my wife. We played three games in the past week, which saw my wife complete her first error-free game! I made five errors and lost by exactly five points in that one. The other games had existing trends continue, as she beat me with the Trail dice by 104 points to 103, while I beat her with the Forest dice 118 points to 113.

We’ve also played some more Marvel Champions, where we are one scenario away from completing the Mad Titan’s Shadow campaign, and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, where we’re probably just over half way through our second campaign, using the two characters we didn’t pick the first time.

[yashima]

Sometime this week, quite surprisingly and without any warning it was shipping, my On Mars: Alien Invasion Kickstarter expansion arrived. Even more surprising, my partner who has been loath to play any boardgames and especially complex ones in recent months, agreed to play one of the cooperative chapters of this (4 Chapter Mini Campaign aka 4 new play modes–1 v 2-4, 2-4 coop modes one moderate and one difficult and another solo mode with configurable difficulty). So we played the “Blackout” mode in which Alien saboteurs try to vandalize and then destroy buildings in your colony. This is the moderate difficulty mode.

This needs very few materials from the expansion box and the ones you need could be easily simulated. So how does it work?

Just set up a normal On Mars game but replace the exploration tokens with the set from the expansion (those focus on allowing bonus build actions), do not use the tracking cubes for the building types and do not count any victory points as this is cooperative. Take the 10 “vandalize” tokens from the expansion and the 6 vandalize cards (1 for each building type except shelters and the alien to reshuffle). Play normally, except after every player turn draw a vandalize card and put a vandalize token on one of the buildings of this type. There is a small graph how you chose the building. Also Aliens very much prefer to “blackout” buildings if they can–for this a player has to put a worker from their living quarters atop a vandalize token to signal that this building is now blacked out. If ever there are 5 blacked out buildings, the players lose. Players also lose if they trigger the normal end of game without this being the last goal they need to complete.

The players win if they complete a number of missions or personal goals that is determined by player number. In our case at 2 players that was 6. So with a total of 3 missions and 6 personal goals there is some choice here.

Buildings can be repaired from being vandalized by being upgraded and both vandalized and blacked out buildings can be repaired one step when completing a mission or personal goal. Here we made our big mistake we repaired a couple of blacked-out buildings with upgrades, so our “win” comes with a few caveats. We just called it “getting to know the aliens”-mode.

I had not played in over a year so I had to relearn most of the rules which was still quite some undertaking but not as bad as learning the game originally. Some of it stuck.

This mode is quite simple to “add” to the game and indeed it takes away everything you need to remember about victory points which lessens the load of the strategic planning considerably. It is also really nice to figure out who takes which tech in order to optimize leveling up tech through using someone else’s tech or who tries to go for which blue prints to “save” tiles from being vandalized.

It also showed me that if someone decides to “hoard” resources from the warehouse and blue prints without building stuff, colony growth can be significantly hampered. My partner, cleaned out both warehouse and blue prints before he ever started building anything and upgrade buildings are the only way to “cheaply” repair compromised buildings and protect them from further trouble. Because he had all the resources, I couldn’t build and because he was busy hoarding he didn’t build and so the colony stayed on Level 1 forever and no new resources and blue prints were coming…

Vandalized or blacked-out buildings also do not count for purposes fo resource generation…

In any case, I really enjoyed the back and forth between orbit and ground and I totally did not miss the competitive aspect–especially if this means I find someone to play with me I have not yet checked out any of the rules for the other modes… the solo mode is called “Monolith” and the other coop mode has something to do with vaccinations I am sure… there are 3 wood syringe tokens in the box

[RogerBW]

Last night at Local Games Group (which is going to need a new venue, because that pub is now doing loud quizzes on Monday nights)…

I introduced Rush ‘n’ Crush: some icon confusion and I’m definitely going to have to write my own rules for this but I think a good time was had. I finished in the traditional manner by crossing the line and slamming into a wall just before I would have exploded anyway.

Then The Crew, in which the huge variation in difficulty continues to frustrate me.

[Captbnut]

Played a first game of Taj Mahal. I believe this is one option for the 3rd game in the Knizia auction trilogy (I have Modern Art and Ra).

It’s a really cool system, you bid by playing lots of mini hands of baby poker. You get points from set collection and from getting routes on the board.

Mine came from a Maths Trade so I reckon it’s a 90s production. The colour palette is awful and I imagine nigh on impossible for someone with a colour deficiency to play.

Another hit though, really enjoyed it and not just because I won!

[COMaestro]

My parents are visiting us right now, so we introduced them to Kingdomino and played a couple of games of that. My wife won the first game with 42 points, with my mom 1 point behind her at 41. I had 36 and my dad 35. For the second game, despite thinking he didn’t have a chance, my dad won with 42, tied with my wife but had the largest contiguous terrain for the tie breaker. My mom was third with 34, and I had a terrible game and only got 27.

Then, last night, my wife and I had a quick game of Lost Cities and I finally broke my losing streak. The first two rounds were pretty close, and I was winning 63 - 54, but exploded in the third round (and my wife did well, too) to finish the game 253 - 140.

Then today during my lunch break, I pulled out Under Falling Skies and played New York at threat level 1. I just barely eked out a win, hitting the top of the research track just before the mothership hit the game over space, and was also one damage away from the base being destroyed. It had been a while since I played, so I had to recheck the rules a couple of times, but it was nice getting it back to the table.

[SteveB_uk]

@COMaestro

to finish the game 253 - 140.

That is an outrageous Lost Cities score!

[COMaestro]

Outrageously awesome!

[lalunaverde]

Rising Sun - 5 players. Played as the Koi clan, which exclusively consists of super cool archer ladies.

Dos Rios - another awesome game from Franz-Benno Delonge. As the title says: there are two rivers and players can setup their cowboys and earn income on them if the hexes are irrigated by those rivers. Shared incentives and screwage comes in when you can build dams to redirect the flow of one of the rivers. Great fun.

Ra - we played with the frankenstein Ra copy where he uses bits from Priest of Ra and the Ra Geekbits. Still great.

Tempel des Schreckens 2x - these two games are more colourful and blurry as members of the majority team are lying as well and are mistaken as part of the minority team.

Durian - another Oink game and it’s similar to Illusions where you can make a call if the game state is “wrong”. In Durian’s case, it’s when the number of fruits on the common area exceeds the number of fruits on everyone’s cards. Say, Player A has 3 bananas, B has 1, C has 0. If the bananas on the common area exceeds 4, then you’ll make the call by ringing an actual bell.

However! You cannot see the card that you have in front of you a la Hanabi

Tense game with bluffing and BSing. One of the players said it’s “organised bullying” because the table prods you to do one thing - either pick a card and add it to the common pile, or ring the bell. But the card in front of you paralyses you with worry.

[mistercrayon]

Durian is pretty good fun. It also plays decently with two.

[bort]

@Captbnut

Played a first game of Taj Mahal . I believe this is one option for the 3rd game in the Knizia auction trilogy (I have Modern Art and Ra ).

I thought Medici was the third in the Knizia auction trilogy? Taj Mahal is still an awesome game of course.

[Captbnut]

That’s what I mean, I’ve heard High Society mentioned as well.

[raged_norm]

Yup, the fifth one in the trilogy.

Like Mostly Harmless being the fifth book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy.

[lalunaverde]

I’ll be playing Here I Stand tomorrow with a full house of 6 players. I’m big-chin Habsburg who controls the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, against France, England, Papacy, Protestants, and the Ottomans. Looks like my only friend is the Papacy…

Wish me luck

[modfan77]

Four of us got together and played Sub Terra and Summit (co-op mode) at a friends place last night. We got destroyed in both games but still had a blast. In particular on Summit we were doing amazingly well on the hike up, almost to the point of being cocky about our chances… but of course coming back down was a hell trip! 2 exploration co-op games, No survivors, lots of fun!