Played some Race for the Galaxy with the 6 and 9 year old today.
They got the flow of the game. I’m impressed.
10 Likes
How do you play Hansa 2 player? It shows a min of 3 on the box, and while I found some 2 player rules on BGG, they were poorly received by most
2 Likes
Played 4 player Spirit Island. 2 new players and I’m still not completely down with it all. No adversary and no blight card so as easy as it gets.
We managed a win in Terror level 3 because we managed to really work together and got some cool combos by the end.
I’d be happy just reading the spirits and the cards out loud tbh!
8 Likes
Just a short afternoon of gaming yesterday. A very close game of Power Grid on the Germany map. All three of us ended the game powering 16 cities, and I won on the tie break by 2 money. Followed that up with Azul: Queen’s Garden. I think I prefer Calico, but there’s not much in it!
7 Likes
Bought Ark Nova at the UKGE, finally got it to the table twice yesterday, and now want to sell it. Cannot understand the hype behind this at all. Far too long, inelegant, no idea what other players zoos are like, just a massive disappointment.
15 Likes
My 10-year-old niece is visiting for about 3 weeks. The first week my Dad was also here. I played tourist with them at various local attractions during the day while my husband worked then we snuck in a few games some evenings.
So far we’ve played Reef, Kingdom Builder (twice), Nmbr 9 (twice), and Meeple Circus. She did the most giggling while playing Meeple Circus, but it is a fun dexterity stacking game so not surprised. She was the most interested in Reef by theme (building coral reefs), but she hasn’t wanted to play it again and did ask specifically to play Kingdom Builder again so of the two more strategy games that one is the winner so far.
We’ll see what else we have in the collection at her level over the next couple weeks I’m sure. The current problem is she keeps going in the game room, pointing at a random box, and asking to play “That one.” Her first selection this way was Gloomhaven, so we’ve had to say no quite often.
8 Likes
I met someone who works at Osprey Games at a barbecue last weekend (perhaps not too surprising because I live close to where they are based). As a result, I now have a copy of Odin’s Ravens on loan.
First impression is that it is a light, fun two player race game. Simple rules, with the depth coming from choosing whether to draw cards from your “move forward” pile or your “manipulate the board” pile at the end of your turn, and when to use said board manipulation cards.
I’m intrigued to see how it holds up to repeated plays, but I felt like I was being offered enough interesting choices throughout the game.
4 Likes
The revised 2p rules are part of the Britannia expansion, and you can find them in the files for that on BGG:
See also Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2) - #1903 by Phil
n.b. The original base game also has 2p rules using extra components. That version divides the board into 16 “provinces” (being the areas enclosed by roads, but with the four of those areas split into two provinces each using divider tokens), and then most actions by both players are required to be performed on a road which is adjacent to the province currently occupied by another special token. That token can be moved on your turn (at the start or at the end), but can only be moved 1-2 provinces from where it was before. Hence players are forced to play in relative proximity to one another.
My partner never wanted to try those rules, so I can’t really comment on them, but my impression is that the later rules were considered much better. We adopted the Britannica rules when those were released. Prior to that we simply used the regular 3+ player rules.
2 Likes
Yesterday my wife wanted a rematch at Ethnos after the shellacking I gave her the last time. We had Merfolk, Giants, Skeletons, Halflings, and Centaurs this time around. I was ahead after the first age, but she was within 10 points or so. Second age went her way entirely and she won a majority of the regions on top of deploying some sizeable bands, taking the win 101 - 96.
Later, we played Lords of Vegas with my wife and her brother. I had an early lead, but they both passed me by once I got into the 2-point threshold.
My wife irritated her brother when she merged her casino into his, making a size 5 one, just in time for it to pay out. He tried getting it back a couple of times, but never managed to. Similarly, she took over a size 2 casino of mine late game that I had just built and managed to reorganize into a 1 and 2 on the dice, so it was easy for her to take over, and my attempt to get it back also failed.
As you may have guessed, she won, by a pretty good margin, 66 - 36 - 36.
7 Likes
Scapegoat - introduced the game and it turns out to be simpler to learn than I expected. I was terrible at the rules because I couldn’t interenalise the concept that the game is trying to present. We did picked it up pretty quickly and understood what needs to be done. The subterfuge isn’t so straight forward, which is great… Scapegoat is more to my style nowadays as it is more deduction-deduction rather than social deduction. Yet the game still allows casual talking, shenanigans, and cajoling to each other. Which made the game more chilled and light-hearted, rather than intense (like Avalon, for example). So, I can’t wait to play more Scapegoat.
Legendary: Marvel - was expecting not to like any of the Legendary stuff, and didn’t liked it. So it’s all fine. Really not a fan of the rolling market, which is why I still enjoy El Dorado and Trains
6 Likes
I finally got around to learning and playing The Dead Eye today. I’m filing the estimated game time on the box (15 minutes) next to that of Space Hulk: Death Angel – under “Hilariously Inaccurate”. You can probably lose a single run in 15 minutes if it goes poorly; but an actual game consists of up to eight runs (in an attempt to succeed four times), and my only successful run (after my initial three failures) definitely took well over an hour on its own. I don’t think a success would usually take that long; but the notion of anyone grabbing this box off the shelf for a 15 minute game seems entirely ludicrous.
The game does provide three bags each with a marker card in which you can pack away (“pause”) a game-in-progress in between runs – which I utilised after several hours of learning and playing and finally getting that first success. That means I need to succeed at 3/4 of the remaining attempts to win my first game. This will not happen1 :)
As evidenced by the successful run, I’m beginning to get to grips with it. Judgement reserved until I have more plays under my belt. The 3D thing is cute, but I gave up trying to play like that. It’s a fairly abstract thing at this point, but I’m hoping that the theme will start to come through more once I’ve internalised the gameplay better.
I didn’t sleeve the cards initially, but there was already some visible wear on some card edges after a couple of hours, so I recommend doing that. The production is very nice otherwise, so that’s a bit unfortunate. The cardboard insert doesn’t quite account for sleeving, but I found I could still fit it all in the box without chucking the insert.
1 I rather expect things only get harder from here, and I’ve also just realised that one of the critical cards for my initial success (half of a particular combo I needed to counter a particular game-ender) will no longer exist in the deck. I hope there’s something equally useful in the new cards…
6 Likes
Went back to Jaws of the Lion to try the final (5th) intro scenario. I worked out where I’d been going wrong with this game!
It turns out that (alongside my Hatchet) I’d been playing the Demolitionist who is absolutely useless, instead of the Red Guard who is amazing! Now that I’ve got that advanced strategy sorted out, it’s much more balanced and fun.
It’s still extremely swingy: the enemy got an elemental Cold power the round after I’d just increased that element, pushing me into a poison trap, and by turn 3 both my heroes were on 2hp. When it goes against you it really goes big.
Then, on a retry, I killed everything and reached the final door. I kicked that in at the end of Hatchet’s move, saw the new room, and had lined up my big damage card for the attack. Hatchet promptly killed the Boss alone in one hit (with a little help from Favourite and a +2 on the deck).
But yes, Hatchet + Red Guard just feels much, much better than H + Demolitionist.
The rules are still… look, I know the intro scenarios in JotL are a big improvement on Gloomhaven in terms of teaching new players, but I still needed to take a few pages of notes to get it all down. There’s plenty to play in this box, and if anything it’s put me off getting Gloomhaven because I’m just not sure that “This, but LESS accessible” is a win.
Still, levelling up is fun, new cards and tough decisions on what goes in your hand of 10 are fun, and I’ll keep on with JotL for a bit yet.
6 Likes
Played Blood Rage
First time on the table. A second hand purchase in great condition. The cards are annoyingly small for a drafting game. Really enjoyed it with the big minis.
6 Likes
Try Inis, so you can be annoyed by the unnecessarily large cards in a drafting game!
6 Likes
adds Matt Lees style rant about non playing card sized cards
7 Likes
Terminator Genisys: Rise of the Resistance , this time with 4p, which I thought would be easier to pair up and win. Things seemed ok at first, we headed towards the waypoint tokens in search of supplies. There were three points at which new enemies would spawn, and two of them are with the waypoint tokens. At first the spawns aren’t bad, since there are only three dice values. But as you find tokens, the spawn point tiles get flipped, and now they activate on more numbers. So you get more and more spawns coming out, and they move and shoot straight away. We seemed to get stuck in a loop, someone would go down, another character would have to rescue them, then that character would go down etc. Just too many enemies to kill off. We called the game at about the four hour mark, possibly we could have persevered, and won, but it seemed unlikely. And this is the first mission!
Treasure Island , Long John Silvers treasure was found. LJS probably got unlucky, he played a card that referred to miniatures and thought it was only the pirate miniatures, not him. Gave us a vital clue. I had no idea where the treasure was.
So Clover
Mountain Goats
Scout
7 Likes
Just tried out Clank with my girlfriend. Despite a huge bag full of girlfriend nibbles, the dragon exclusively decided it liked the taste of @Lordof1 flesh and nearly killed me whilst she nipped out of the dungeon unscathed. I lost but only by a few points. A fun game!
8 Likes
Those kinds of horrendous turns of luck are the most hilarious
In retrospect only.
4 Likes
Played Ticket to Ride: San Francisco with my 9yo, and had a great time. We also have the Deutschland version, which she enjoys, but wears her out with the longer playtime.
7 Likes
Went along to a local boardgame meetup for the first time in… six years?
Played two games of High Society (which I bought right at the start of 2020 and so promptly couldn’t get the 3+ people together to get it out of the box). It’s very neat, with some vicious negative cards and the brilliant “person who spent the most gets eliminated” rule, so the big score in front of them may not count.
Then played Wingspan, because I hadn’t yet, and this way I get to play without buying it. It’s great. I’ve read all the criticisms and think about half of them are far too picky, the aspect of needing to keep an eye on your opponents’ boards both for the “once between your turns” actions and the shared stage goals keeps it nicely interactive.
Also saw a copy of Chaos in the Old World on the shelves, so that’s being done in future.
8 Likes