Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Boardgames
5531

Games Night for the first time in a few weeks (was going to our D&D campaign instead). We had a game of Architects of the West Kingdom. It wasn’t my copy (I was missing my metal coins badly), and the owner of the game is my DM in the D&D campaign, and he didn’t go very well, I was 3rd, and the only one trying to complicate things for the guy who got away with the win: he got a ridiculous score at high 40s against 24, my 23 and the low teens of the owner.

We moved on to No Thanks for a couple of rounds, where I got stuck with a 30 midway as I ran out of chips, and could never recover on the first one, but managed to win on the second round.

We finished the night with two rounds of silly fun with Telestrations. we had two rogue agents in a game of 8, with also the guy to my right not being able to draw to save his life. The best one of the night was how a Submarine went to “Santa taking a dump in a lake”. I can see this becoming a good birthday present for a friend of mine in a couple of weeks, they will love this silliness.

7 Likes
5532

I’m solidly now in the “Trick of the Rails is really damn good” camp after our game. Only TIchu, Haggis, and Turn the Tide can rival it

German Railways aka PreuBische Ostbahn - ridiculous. Hard to calculate the companies and their potential. The income system is one of the most interesting player interaction I’ve seen. The randomness of the player turn order is interesting that it gives players below the income track to have more turns in a round. But rather than being a catch-up mechanism, the game then becomes a game of manipulating the incentive structure. High income players will ally with low income players for the number of turn actions. The latter ally with the former for the bigger cash influx.

Agree with Wyvern that the auction is very hard to calculate (which is great). It is as dense as Chicago Express and others of this genre. Cube Rails so far would have been my logical end if I didn’t end up playing 18xx (and that might still happen)

This and Irish Gauge is where probability randomness is actually a plus, rather than a detriment. There’s the often mentioned problem of output randomness where it is arbitrary, and most go for input randomness. But they often ignore that input randomness often has a tendency to be nonsense and arbitrary as well, which leads to scrpted plays, rather than letting players do something creative.

EDIT: thinking more about it. I think 3 players MIGHT be more swingy with the randomness than 4 or 5 players. In theory, the larger player count would dilute the bag with more tokens

4 Likes
5533

Exploratory Games Night with Local Game Group – i.e. we went looking for another pub because the old one’s now having a noisy quiz on Monday nights. And we found one. So it would have been rude not to play some games…

Ganz Schön Clever, which none of us had played for a while but still good fun.

Forbidden Island, never a favourite but it worked out pretty well this time.

Red 7, still in love with this game.

8 Likes
5534

The pub we go to has started cashing up early and suggested we leave about 1 hour before we normally would! We don’t drink an awful lot (all but two or three drive so only have one beer and maybe some lime and sodas or something) so we didn’t feel able to say we’re still going. We can’t start earlier because several of us have childcare responsibilities. Most annoying. If it happens this week as well, we’ll be in the market for a new pub too!

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5535

I think this is a point that sings to me. I have long been annoyed with this article of faith in games design chat that input randomness is good and output randomness is bad. Coming from a background in miniatures wargames where almost all randomness is output randomness I think the skills around interpreting probabilities, prioritising and focussing on sequencing around those are forgotten and maligned. I think in this case the no guarantee on actions leads to these interesting alliances that you were mentioning, which is a different success of output randomness to those associated with miniature wargames

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5536

Exactly - like Memoir 44, for example. The result of the attacks can be random but you have you think about concentration of fire and sequencing of fire to manage that randomness.

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5537

My wife and I played another game of Tyrants of the Underdark a couple of days ago. This time we changed it up a bit by using the Drow and Demon half-decks, instead of Drow and Dragon. The Demon deck involves a lot of devouring cards that are in your hand, and the Insane Outcast cards that get put in opponents’ decks (for the most part) and are worth -1 each at the end of the game.

She dominated the area control portion, but I had managed to have Total Control over a couple of the site tokens throughout the game, and took out more troops, which gave me the win, 76 - 63.

4 Likes
5538

My wife is experiencing some severe back pain currently and yesterday evening was a particularly bad episode, so I decided to work from home the rest of the week to help out with little things. You know, like getting out of bed and the like…

Today was MUCH better, though (muscle relaxant, sick day to rest and, I kid you not, spending the night in the recliner, which she’s doing again tonight, did wonders) and, since I have no commute (unless you count climbing the stairs) as opposed to my normal 90-minute one, we decided to play some games:

Started off with a game of Tzolk’in, which she won, 50-42. A weird game, most of the neutral workers landed on the resource/corn wheels, so those were much harder to get. Made every move count, it was exciting, but this one always is.

After dinner, wanted something lighter, so we broke out an old favourite, Patchwork, for a best-of-three series. She again won in straight games, 13-11 and 12-10.

Finished it off with another best-of-three series, this time in Mandala, another favourite. I won the first one 65-48, she came back to win the second 53-42. Third game was tight as hell, but she eventually won it, 58-55.

What a fun-filled afternoon/evening.

11 Likes
5539

Some games from the past week:

Regicide, game of this with my wife and we have another win under our belts! Great fun, though we always struggle with table-talk (well I say we…)

Cascadia, taught this to my wife, she beat me on habitat points but I managed a big salmon run that gave me the edge on the animal scoring. She enjoyed it though probably won’t be part of our regular rotation of couples games.

Orleans, to kick off a big day of gaming on Saturday, I played a couple of games with a friend. Second play of this one for both of us, we both did better, though I still won it in the end, largely off of lots of travelling and wool making.

Age of Steam, my friend was keen to get this to the table, so we played it with the 2 player rules in the deluxe edition. It was decent - I’d certainly play it over an 18xx any day of the week. The two player game is super tight though! We both spent the first half of the game scrabbling to keep ourselves afloat, though it opened up a bit more by the end. I’m not quite sure on the strategy, seemed a bit opaque from our one game, though I still won - probably because the two player variant is quite different to the solo and multiplayer games, but yeah I’d play it again, I am even a little curious to try it with more players, which given my friend’s enthusiasm for the game will likely happen.

Five Crowns, these next three were played at a local gaming meetup. This one was okay. Not a lot of strategy and a decent chunk of luck but it was fine.

Raiders of Scythia, played this one with a new buddy from NZ who knows the designer and has done playtesting stuff for them (jealous :frowning:!) Anyway he happened to bring this one and we both liked the idea of playing a game without having to teach it. It was super close, like came down to tie-breaker close. And we pursued very different strategies during the game. Terrific fun, though so engaging I missed out on dinner - eh, would do again.

PARKS, I’d not played this one before but it was pretty good. Definite Tokaido vibes, though I actually think this might be a stronger game than that one. Still not enough to swing me to the ‘buy it’ camp, but I would like to try it on BGA now it’s there. Especially since we played with the max playercount (though it moved around pretty fast even with lots of players) which I’m always a little suspicious of. Also I misread my secret goal, which, if I’d managed it would have left me tied with the winner :frowning:, ah well, lessons learned for next time.

15 Likes
5540

We played Tikal (now played 6 of my Maths Trade acquisitions from April)

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Lots of interaction. Set collection, area control and route building. Clever action mechanism.

Tikal isn’t instantly as good as El Grande or Hansa Teutonica, but it fits in the same space of being quick to teach and crunchy to play in 60-90 minutes. The turns are quite long and the board is quite dynamic so it’s tricky to plan too far ahead. I think it could induce a lot of AP, but I thought it was excellent

Also played a quick round of So Clover. I think the cleverness of this means it’s a bit slow to be a party game and in the couple of plays I’ve had it hasn’t created ‘moments’ or lots of laughter, but it’s good.

9 Likes
5541

Long Shot: the Dice Game - roll and move! It’s pretty fun with very good but simple system of manipulating the probabilities. It also has a subtle way of introducing alliances in the same manner of Cube Rail games (unfortunately, the subtilty wasn’t picked up by the others). Need to play more to see how interesting the manipulation/alliance is.

It’s a Wonderful World - card drafting game that is fun to play, at least. I can see why people like it. It’s not only the choice of which card to draft and hate-draft, but also how are you gonna use that card? To play it on your tableau or scrap it for its resource.

The asymmetric factions does the usual thing of herding you on a specific strategy, rather than letting you play openly (I’m thinking of Cthulhu Wars with the latter).

Quest for El Dorado - a Danish club member returned from his holidays with a Nordic edition of this. I always liked Vincent Dutrait’s style. The cards are also better as they are larger (Standard US size).

Whistle Mountain - really liked Whistle Stop, so I’m not surprised that this one’s good as well. The emerging gameplay is interesting as always, and players have great control over the pacing of the game…

Scout

Babylonia - tense 4 player. 2 players were hoovering up cities, which screwed over my strategy of creating a massive network to score the cities in a massive way. But tbf, if they let me get away with that, that’ll be fatal

7 Likes
5542

Had a spot of mid-week gaming

Terminator Genisys: Rise of the Resistance first play. Sounds like this game had a bit of a troubled past, released on KS twice but didn’t fund either time. So eventually they just released it. I thought the idea of KS was to find out if a game could be made, and if it didn’t fund, that meant it wasn’t a good idea. Anyway, it was released and I bought it. This is a Terminator themed game, which seems like an IP that could do well in board gaming. It’s a co-op battle against Skynet, made of seven missions. On your turn, you roll your four dice, then allocate them to actions. One of them is move, and you move according to the dice value. Does that make it a roll and move game? Other actions are rest, attack, interact. We tackled the first mission, had to pick up supplies. We played at 2p, and made a possibly bad move by deciding to split up. The way enemies come out is a bit different. Each player has a queue of bad guys, and after your turn you roll for reinforcements, bringing out new bad guys. Enemies have your colour base, and after reinforcements all the enemies of your colour move, and then attack if they are able. We may have gotten a bit unlucky with bad guys, they swarmed me a bit, so I went down. So my friend had to get to me to rescue me, which meant also taking on a bunch of bad guys. Soon, he went down, and it was game over. Probably took us longer to set it up, but we had (brief) fun. Hopefully will get a 4p game this weekend.

Hadara , hadn’t played this for ages, but we picked it up easily enough.

Archer: Once You Go Blackmail… , a quick filler to finish us off.

5 Likes
5543

I’ve half promised myself that if I get the job I interviewed for I’m getting this and selling my other copy. Provided my wife doesn’t quit her job without one to go to.

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5544

You make me realise that with Its a wonderful world the hate draft can still have some utility which is kind of cool.

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5545

We played our fourth game of Guild of Merchant Explorers. The game is about as Solo as you can get (with the token competitive do this first for 10 points or 5 if you’re second or later) but when the puzzle is so gnawingly fun it’s hard to resist.

What I really dig is that you have this almost 45 minute legacy campaign where small bits of decisions in round one create ripple effects for round 3 or 4 - because the game does a 95% wipe of your choices it leaves room for flexibility while maintaining spotlights on the decision points you’d made earlier. Even the stand out element of the game, individualised superpowers that you choose, reflect this same design - the cool power you choose for now might be a proper lynchpin of a long strategy or merely a wasteful albatross later. It’s really fun.

I think it’s kind of a shame that the components are a bit duff, even though it tries to create a “bigger” roll and write it’s still a bit too small and fiddly to do everything comfortably and the game’s choice of coins is a bit rubbish (for a game where you collect a lot of 2/3/4 coins the coin choice of seemingly similar numbers of 1/5/10/50 feels like a big miss.

2 Likes
5546

My local gaming friend came over and we found an hour to play a game of Planet Unknown. It was her first game and my worst game ever. She won with 58 over my measly and embarrassing score of 41. But we had fun and she enjoyed the puzzle quite a bit :slight_smile: It‘s a very good 1 hour game. Having so little time for games right now this was a luxury and took my mind off all the other stuff that‘s going on.

5 Likes
5547

I promise I won’t make a habit of this but I wanted to capture my “first” marble run using the new set I picked up. For posterity, you see.

I can’t seem to embed the (<2MB) version I made, hopefully this link works.

10 Likes
5548

Yesterday my wife and I played Ethnos with the Dwarves, Minotaurs, Orcs, Trolls, and Merfolk. She just could not get good combinations of cards and I obliterated her, 119 - 52. It was relatively close after the first age, but everything just fell into place for me in the second.

A little later, I played Marvel Champions, trying out Black Panther for the first time against my usual standard Rhino villain. I ended up losing due to an ill-timed Advance card, which makes the villain scheme, right after he had already schemed, and I drew a 2-boost card which added 3 threat when I could only take 1 more on the main scheme. I fudged it just to finish out the game, pretending that there were no boost icons on the card I drew, and was able to defeat Rhino the next hero phase.

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5549

Played a few games on BGA yesterday. Unfortunately 5 people showed up for Gaia Project, which would have been tricky, so instead we played Carcassonne, Century: Spice Road, and Hardback. I haven’t played Carcassonne for years, and it turns out I’m still bad at it :laughing:

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5550

My partner and I played three games of Hive tonight (we won one game each, and then I took the decider) followed by one of the most ridiculous games of Hansa Teutonica we’ve ever had, in which I cleared my entire board (which really shouldn’t ever happen). It did cost me points to do that; but when I realised it was actually possible I couldn’t resist (and the end result was a bit of a foregone conclusion by then, so maximising my score seemed less enticing). I can’t really claim much credit for the achievement, as she pretty much allowed me to do it – being focused on what was ultimately a doomed strategy, and not paying enough attention to what I was doing until it was much too late. Even so – it’s quite a fun thing to have done : )

9 Likes