Best way to play Lords of Waterdeep, in my opinion!
2 Likes
Played the first two scenarios of Quirky Circuits.
It has not changed my opinion of co-op games.
2 Likes
You love them?
Theyâre essentially solo puzzles with some rule to prevent it being immediately solvable.
Thus they do nothing for me.
3 Likes
Played some Marvel Champions (Spider-Man and Doctor Strange against Kang). Thought âWow, that was really difficultâ and then realised Iâd done several things wrong: at one stage your Nemesis minions come into play, but only the minions and not the rest of their decks, and you only put a Kangâs Dominion into play if the 2nd-stage scheme gets enough to activate. One of mine did (Spider-Man was on 1 health and then an âAdvanceâ card put the scheme right over the top on threat) but I put two of the Dominion cards out.
So it was a little more difficult than it should have been. I won, but barely! (I wasnât keeping the threat down, and a huge Tyrannosaur was about to bite my face off, Spider-Man managed to get in with a swinging web kick just before it all went horribly wrong).
Great mechanics in the Kang deck, really love how they made his powers feel linked to time manipulation (the designers are A+ at getting small differences in âgo here, do thatâ to fit in theme for each hero and villain and feel like you donât get them with anyone else).
4 Likes
I love playing with both expansions on Steam, but obviously the PC is doing all the upkeep, so you are probably right.
1 Like
Foundations of Rome - Mike Walker is right. This is better than Big City. Light game and fun. It does the typical adjacency rules youâd expect from your run-of-the-mill city building game, but I think it really works here because you can change the building by upgrading it. So that 1 VP per population that youâve built wonât last forever as the residential building next to it would be upgraded into something else
The entire deck (and so, the entire map) is cut into 3 Eras, so the game ends when all of the map is claimed. I didnât expected how it would play with the pacing of the game. How fast you want to drag the game forward is up to you.
Yep. I really like it. Iâm glad I didnât bought it though. It was the end of the night so we didnât put the monuments expansion. Keen on playing it again
Burger Up - a game about making burgers and fulfilling orders. It would have been boring but the theme was cute and the domino ingredients is something I havenât seen before.
Dinner in Paris - okay game. You build restaurants and put up tables and achieve objectives. I wasnât bored, but I would probably refuse to join a game of this if placed on the table again
Glory to Rome - Great game. I think itâs because I have played Mottainai and Import/Export before that playing GTR is much easier for me to internalise and to teach
Race for the Galaxy + GS + RvI - someone manage to get both the Imperium AND Rebel take-over cards, so he pretty much took over the galaxy. Well, only the eligible cards. Manage to prevent him from stealing mine as I upâd my military
Wildlife Safari - Iâve been thinking nonsense. This game is a great exercise on timing
.Jump Drive - mini Race for the Galaxy. I was thinking initially: âWhy should I play this when I can play RFTG?â A valid question, but this is streamline done in a nice way that mid-way of the game, I was enjoying this a lot. Maybe I can just add this to the RFTG box and treat it as a blitz variant of RFTG? Itâs totally not like The City, even if it follows City formula of put cards facedown and reveal at the same time, and then score.
Poison - Knizia card game. Iâm getting rid of this and get the edition with just the cards. Itâs not that good to justify the big cauldrons, even if they are nice.
7 Likes
Two games of Azul with my wife today. Itâs been a while, as the game has been barricaded behind other games, but I felt like digging it out. My wife won the first game and I won the second.
3 Likes
Wife is still home-bound as we wait for her scan results and then the treatment plan weâll cook up with her physio, so we played a few vames of Everdell and Pandemic. Space and positioning issues (namely a smaller table that must be put to her side) prevent us from playing with any expansions, but we had a great time.
I won 2 games of Everdell (Iâm starting to learn how powerful the Dungeon is) and lost 4 (all close except one, where I got walloped by 15 points, which neither of us saw coming).
We narrowly lost our first game of Pandemic and decisively won our second, only needing to remove one more cube to clear out the board (we always keep playing after finding all 4 cures to see if we can do it).
Great time. Today and yesterday were pretty much pain-free. 
9 Likes
Some games over the last couple of weeks:
Fantastic Factories, we had a fun round of this one. I lost by a hair - the best kind of loss 
Machi Koro, I sold my copy of this long ago but a friend (whoâd never played it with me) bought a copy. Itâs not horrible but it did confirm I made the right call in selling it - thereâs just not many interesting decisions to make, for my tastes at least.
Azul: Summer Pavilion x2, two back to back 2 player games of this. I won both, though the second was a lot closer than the first. I have decided to move the original Azul on though - canât imagine wanting to play the original over this version - theyâre similar but Summer Pavilion is, at least for me, a straight up improvement on the original.
Fleet: The Dice Game x2, I still havenât gotten this to the table enough to introduce the Dicey Waters expansion with anyone. Maybe next time. I am worried about running out of sheets though - this may be the first game where that is a real issue. I have played it a bunch since getting it, its easy to grasp and yet feels interesting and dynamic each time. We did play with the goal cards this time though - theyâre nice, not super impactful but give you another thing to consider in the back of your mind while playing.
Bananagrams, quite close game of this with my wife - she claimed winner but on closer inspection she had a number of non-words in her display, so my finish 15 seconds later wouldâve been the actual win 
Carcassonne x2, two games back to back. Still no expansions (though Iâd love a bag and some +50/100 scoring chits) I won the first one by a fair chunk with a fairly ridiculous score (like 150+, not even sure how that happened, but it didâŚ) the second was much closer. Though both were quite vicious.
Age of Steam, my friend organised some friends and scheduled a 4 player game of this, and while train games arenât really my thing, I was curious enough after our 2 player game to give it a whirl. Itâs a lot better with more players - the 2 player game is definitely a variant and it works, but itâs much more interesting with 4. Scores were relatively close, I came in second, which given the crowd contained some hardcore 18xxers, I felt pretty good about. I still donât love the game but Iâd take it over one of the âshares and trainsâ games I associate with train games anyday. And the deluxe version does look rather nice!
10 Likes
Played a game of The Red Cathedral today with my wife, another game we have not played in a while. And today, I realized we had been screwing up the scoring when a section of the cathedral is tied - winner is the person with the most sections, and if still tied, the person with the most decorations. We had been calling it a draw and not scoring it. Oops.
As such, I won todayâs game by a significant margin, winning four of the five towers. Final score was 45 - 30.
4 Likes
We took out Calico yesterday evening after a LONG time of it being just on the shelf. Wish weâd done that sooner, itâs a delightful game. Plenty of crunch, even without the optional objectives (we always play in âfamily modeâ. Got destroyed in the first game, but won the next two. Before that, Iâd won two games of Patchwork.
Yesterday was a good gaming day for me I guess!
5 Likes
I played two rounds of Orchard, which apparently won a Print-nâ-Play solo award or something?
It was fine. Cheap, which is critical, and the pieces are nice (although I have⌠thoughts⌠about the dice⌠but they work, whatever). And you can play multiplayer with one deck per player (although it is obviously a tacked-on mode⌠but hey, it works).
It was⌠fine? Like, aggressively fine? My first playthrough I scored very badly (19, where anything less than 25 is abysmal), and my second game was better but not great (32, which is still subpar).
I donât know when Iâll play it again. If it were bigger, it would immediately go on my âGive Awayâ pile, but being so tiny⌠I may hold onto it to try one more time? I dunno. Not my kinda single player game. But if you are looking for a neat semi-random pattern-matching game⌠might be worth a look?
3 Likes
I had this and gave it away. Wasnât awful, but doesnât excite. Managed about 6 games before it hit purge but that was in a lockdown.
2 Likes
Weâve played our first couple of games of Oriflamme. Really quick game where you build a collective tableau and then use card powers to mess with other players. Think this is going to be a hit on holiday, although the 3-5 player count is a bit odd.
Then we played A War of Whispers. It was really clever again, but it showed itsâ fragility by the ridiculous situation where two players had the same 5 influence markers and I had the same as another player. I think the odds on that are something like 1 in 90000. Itâs a nice area control game where you donât control a faction on the board, you want each of the 5 factions to do different levels of well. âTheyâ won 34, 34 to 31, 31.
5 Likes
More Everdell tonight! I won the first one 62-52, my wife the second 65-53. Gonna have to break that tie tomorrow, I think.
In more good news, a quick test has shown that Spirecrest DOES in fact fit on the smaller table we have to use currently, and my wifeâs in basically zero pain as long as she stays in her arm-chair. And even out of it, sheâs okay, just unstable (good thing we got her a walker). So when we both feel like it/up to it, weâll be able to try that out.
5 Likes
We use a variant where each player secretly draws their first influence marker from the same set of markers, to ensure that canât happen 
Edit: variant 2 here
3 Likes
Thanks, will check that out.
Despite it being very unlikely Iâve had two games when at least two players had their markers in the same order.
1 Like
Do you find that people make use of the ability to switch allegiances much?
Very similar to my feelings. The combination of the dice and the overlapping cards was annoyingly fiddly, and the game itself not really good enough to compensate for that, so Iâm not sure Iâll play it again. As you say, it was âfineâ â but I have other small games that are less fiddly and more interesting.
1 Like