Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

COMaestro · 9 July 2022 04:43

Not one, but two games of Mr. Jack with my wife tonight! First time playing it, despite it being in my collection for a couple of years now.

First game ended in the second round, as I, the Jack player, moved Miss Stealthy off the board and won.

Second game saw me as Jack again, and funny enough it was Miss Stealthy again. I made the mistake of trying to keep a large suspect pool, and stayed visible for way too long. By the time I got invisible, it was the fifth round and my wife captured Miss Stealthy with the only other invisible character, having drawn his alibi card the previous round so she knew who Jack was without a doubt.

Fun game, a little tricky on the first plays as you internalize each character’s ability and really take note of how far a person can move when manholes enter the picture. Hope we play more soon.

Simfers · 9 July 2022 04:50

We have Mr. Jack New York, it’s a delight. Wasn’t too keen on it at first, which was disappointing for my wife, who loved it, but I came around on it.

COMaestro · 9 July 2022 06:22

I hear the New York version is better balanced, but just starting to play it, I cannot really speak for any imbalance in the original so far.

COMaestro · 10 July 2022 02:14

Played Orleans with my wife and her brother. We used the Beneficial Deeds board from the expansion for the first time, which is a marked improvement over the original, IMO.

I won with 157, mostly through being ahead on the farmer track for most of the game, getting coins and costing my wife one for most turns. Also got some goods from the Deeds board. My wife was in second with 136, and her brother in third with 107.

bort · 10 July 2022 02:21

Pulsar 2849 , first play. This is a competitive dice placement game. Each round (of eight) you will take two dice, then take actions with those dice. Taking dice is interesting. There are two tracks, initiative and engineering. Initiative determines turn order, and engineering gives you engineering cubes, which are used in a few different ways. Taking lower dice moves you up on either track, and higher dice move you down. Higher dice are better, you can move your ship around the universe more, and take better tiles. There’s a couple of ways to get points – flying around discovering systems, placing gyrodynes around pulsars, using transmitters. There’s also a selection of technologies, with new ones coming out each round. We really enjoyed the game, you have to think carefully about what dice you take and how that will affect the tracks. I fell behind on the engineering track, never got any cubes from it. In the end we were trounced by the player who had a few pulsars, so that seems like a strong strategy. Hmmm, maybe that’s why it’s called Pulsar 2849. Can’t wait for the next game.

Rear Window , our second game, and it went a bit better for us (we won). I think I still like Mysterium more, even with it’s longer setup.

The Crew X 2. Failed twice…Maybe it was just because we hadn’t played for a while, but I was finding it really tough. The mission had nine task cards, with three of them having to be done in order.

Paint the Roses , another try at this. On the surface we should love this. Its deduction, and its co-op. We spent most of our time marking the deduction sheets, and then the game still came down to a 50/50 (which we lost). Felt a bit unsatisfying.

Brian Boru: High King of Ireland

COMaestro · 11 July 2022 12:36

Played two games of Ticket to Ride: London with my wife yesterday. I won the first by a small margin, and she won the second by a significant margin. We followed up with a game of Lost Cities, which she won by 99 points. I just kept getting screwed by placing wagers on expeditions I had a few cards for in hand, and either never drawing or only drawing one more card for, hitting me with a big negative at the end of the round.

pillbox · 11 July 2022 14:39

Not this past weekend, but the weekend prior, my partner, R surprised me with a game night. She arranged for our older kids to spend the night with her parents, leaving us with just the ~5 month-old. And she had invited some of my friends over. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons, only one friend was able to come, but 3 players is absolutely one of my favorite player-counts, so I did not mind at all.

We had setup and played a couple of turns of Ticket to Ride: Europe – 15th Anniversary when our guest, B, arrived. He had never played the European TTR map (but a veteran of the North America map), and opted to reset the game rather than get something else out. For the majority of the game, we, all three of us, focused our attention on Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula; later in the game we all begrudgingly tunneled our way into central and southern Europe. For having never played the map before, B surprised us all, himself included, with a score of 149 to my 121 and R’s 113.

Then, as is usual with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, we got to chatting about life. As something that, perhaps, we could do while we catch up, I got out my new copy of The Mind. The teach was quick with surprisingly few questions. We, however, did not fare well with some bad deals. We made it through level 4 in two different games before deciding to wrap things up and maybe get one light offering more thing to the table.

I got Kabuto Sumo to the table for the first time (other than two-handed solo plays to learn the game). It was late so I opted to not explain the full game, and instead introduced the Junior League – that was a mistake. The Junior League game draaaaags. We called it after about 30 minutes with no one closer than anyone else to winning. Lesson learned: just play the full game.

Acacia · 11 July 2022 18:13

Just pulled down a 62 in Agricola. I think that’s my high score. I think it’s a little bit ridiculous.

This is only the second time in 15 years I’ve “finished” my farm, meaning big stone house, full family, at least one of everything, and no empty spots. It should have felt good but it was almost MORE stressful when I saw my trajectory and now had to get there even though winning was no longer in doubt. Like stepping up to the line in bowling with two strikes.

Anyway, good times (was with the new A-D decks).

Also Cabo which is a fine time but I always want to be playing Silver. Cabo has too many empty turns and can too easily become a passive round where someone else draws better cards, calls Cabo, and that’s that.

COMaestro · 11 July 2022 19:47

Sounds like the plans for my birthday, where 6 invitees with 4 more or less confirmed became 1 attendee due to reasons, and we ended up cancelling it anyway due to our older kiddo getting sick.

Number1TheLarch · 12 July 2022 21:16

Last Sunday was a year to the day. I played 7 games of Crokinole, I won 1, lost 5, drew 1. I went 0-1-1 against a 4 year old. I lost 3 games to my 71 year old mother who I increasingly feel is hustling me. A few weeks ago she beat everyone at Ticket to Ride Europe while repeatedly saying “I’m not sure I understand this game” but also saying “Have you added my bonus points for the longest route?”. I’m on to you, old woman.

lalunaverde · 14 July 2022 15:44

Cryo interested due to SVWAG review. It was super meh. The decisions aren’t opaque enough to be interested on playing more.

Shobu - excited with this abstract game, expected a sleeper hit, but turns out to be a nothing burger. I would rather just play anything from the GIPF series, or Tak, or a classic abstract like Chess or Go

Billabong - It’s hard to find an abstract that really works well with more than 2. Still a great game and always satisfying when you’re making your kangaroos jump far.

Botswana / Wildlife Safari - a good ending to a Cryo night of disappointment. Still a clever game

Portobello Market - okay. Finally get to play this more and more. This is a highly interesting game of shared incentives. Simple rules and you can help or screw up your friends. Exactly what the doctor recommended.

Crokinole!!! - I can forgive the guy who brought it for caking his board with that dusty thing, as he is the one who brings such a big board.

Voyage of Marco Polo - As I continue to veer more and more towards 18xx and Cube Rails, Marco Polo is still a great Euro. The trade-off of a high die or a low die is fun. The game-breaking characters is fun. The game-breaking combo engine is fun. But as I try to limit my mid to heavy games to 40, I don’t think this is the kind of game I want to keep. The Agents of Venice is pretty good. Not much rules overhead and the game gives you more tools to advance yourself.

Splendour Marvel - yeah it’s just Splendour with a Marvel theme. The end game condition was increased to 16 though. It’s fine.

Telestrations - still fun and we got some Picassos and Rebrandts on the table

SteveB_uk · 14 July 2022 18:25

Oh, I’m disappointed! It looks so good I just kinda want to have it sitting out on a table.

I’ve been meaning to move house for about a year now, and once I do, Crokinole is the present I’m buying myself.

lalunaverde · 14 July 2022 18:31

If you enjoy checkers, then sure. Shobu is that cramped abstract of limited space to move around, and you’re planning how to negotiate that and use that feature against your opponent

This stands in constract with the abstracts that I like. Abstracts that are open enough to play however you like

Phil · 14 July 2022 21:24

On a whim I bought some Air Deck 3 playing cards a while back. I definitely see the appeal for the absolute-bare-minimum traveller; however they’re quite difficult to shuffle, so for that reason alone I’d never opt to use them in any situation where a regular deck of cards is an option.

Being waterproof, though, they did enable me to play a game of Regicide while having a long soak in the hot tub yesterday to ward off the chill from the cold I have at the moment.

It was kinda awkward in practice (I may want some kind of floating tray in future), but it worked :‍)

COMaestro · 15 July 2022 06:09

Got Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion to the table tonight to continue my campaign with scenario 4. Got pretty trounced. Things were going well at first, but then more enemies spawned and better combat cards for them started coming up, forcing me to lose cards in order to not exhaust, which of course gets me closer to exhaustion!

Lost the scenario, so will need to play it again at some point. Which will just make it more likely I will get 10 plays in for my 2022 challenge!

InkyBloc · 16 July 2022 01:28

Had our first game of A Feast for Odin ft. The Norwegians in a while. I always like to go for whatever island equals the number I roll for turn order, so I was locked into Wexford on the other side of B. I made a big robe the turn before and grabbed it as soon as it flipped, filling it up for all the bonuses with the good stuff I’d accumulated. It’s nice having a horse bonus! You can turn it into a long green and long red, so I was bumping lots of those on my homeboard and houses.

Phil · 16 July 2022 02:37

Those last few sentences sound like such gobbledygook when you don’t know the game :‍)

InkyBloc · 16 July 2022 03:52

I write for the in crowd. If you’ve never turned your whale meat into a shirt I want nothing to do with ya.

Phil · 16 July 2022 14:14

I had a solo game of Cthulhu: Death May Die tonight, which necessitated refreshing my memory of the details of how to play.

The pre-game activity alone took ages on this occasion – I’d decided to venture on to the second scenario, and remembered that there was one set of 8 cards in each scenario which needed sleeving (they get combined with another 8 cards for the chosen Big Bad, and those 16 cards get shuffled frequently), and to date I’d only opened the first scenario. By the time I’d figured out which card sleeves I’d used last time and found a pack I decided I didn’t want to repeat this again in future, so I went through all five remaining scenarios (plus the second elder god) to sleeve those 48 cards, punch out and bag tokens, and figure out how to still get everything back into their scenario boxes. Then it was a slow-ish trip through the rule book, and finally setting up the scenario and finding again what a table hog this thing is – the scenario 2 map is rather sprawling compared to #1, and there are several large surrounding components. I was thankful I was using our bigger dining table this time.

I know that last time I was playing this, and had fully internalised the rules (at least temporarily) and gotten familiar with the only scenario I’d tried (and playing more than one game while it was set up), I was getting through the games reasonably quickly; but tonight’s game took me somewhere between 3-4 hours though, much like my very first game (vs the 1.5-2 hours that the box suggests, which I think is actually reasonable if you know what you’re doing) .

If I’m in for this kind of time expenditure every time I need to refresh my memory about this game, it’s really too much… so on the one hand I think perhaps I need to get enough games under my belt in short order that it’s all going to stick in my head better in future. On the other hand I feel strongly at this point that I’d enjoy the game a heck of a lot more with other players – but that’s still mightily hard to organise, which isn’t conducive to me remembering the rules well enough to ensure a relatively efficient game whenever I finally get to do that (which would likely involve teaching it to people).

In the end, the game isn’t very complex; but somehow it’s still a lot. There were a couple of occasions where events and cards chained together and caused so many things to happen during a single phase of that turn that I lost track of which phase it had even been, and which of the two characters I’d been playing at the time.

I do like the game; but I need to figure out whether I like it enough to put the effort into making it less of a hassle to enjoy.

I thought I was going to win tonight’s game, but my monster brawler went insane, and then final-stage Cthulhu rolled hits on every single die when counter-attacking my remaining character, who couldn’t withstand (or avoid) that much damage. I still like the way the game’s design funnels you into a dramatic climax – win or lose, something crazy is probably taking place.

yashima · 16 July 2022 14:19

Maybe we need a thread for the best game jargon

So… we have played 2 games of Marvel Dice Throne 1 vs 1 and I have played a 2 handed learning game:

Thor vs Loki—my left hand won as Loki, it was close though
Black Widow vs Captain Marvel—which I won by a good margin as Captain Marvel
Black Panther vs Scarlet Witch—I won by with 1 HP left

Which means the only characters I have not seen in action are Dr Strange and Spider-Man Miles Morales.

The very short version is that this is a type of battle-Yatzee!

Every character gets unique dice but they are also the same, just different symbols and numbers from 1-6. 1-3 are the same symbol, 4 and 5 and 6 are unique and 6 is worth the most and needed for your 5 dice ultimate (so far I have only managed to trigger this on Loki once). The symbols are just fluff, the numbers would be enough to play the game.

You get the usual 3 rolls to optimize the result and then hope one of the abilities on your character board matches.

Like Unmatched every character also has their own deck of cards. Although there are (unlike Unmatched?) overlaps in certain standard cards that most characters have. Cards can either upgrade abilities, mess with dice results (your own or your opponent‘s) or status effects. Each character also has a number of status effects they can use on themselves or others. Some of the effects are positive, some negative.

Abilities that deal damage are attacks and the attacked player can (sometimes) roll their defensive ability against those. In my experience the „defensive“ ability is less about defense and more about a reaction. There is very little damage mitigation for most characters I have seen. Mostly you would want to try to manipulate the dice in a way that your opponent cannot trigger an ability. Overall the strategy seems to be to spend very little time on „building up“ more on hitting as hard as possible.

The characters feel unique enough. The abilities and the status effects seem to be responsible for that. For example Loki has an effect that completely blocks an ability for a turn. Thor can throw around the hammer, Scarlet Witch has one that lets her manipulate her dice directly or force another player to use one of her dice on their roll.

The first player to reduce the other to 0 Hitpoints (from 50) wins. There is a team play 2vs2 and I think a 3 player mode.

It takes about 30 minutes to play—less if the luck rolls that way. It‘s an easy teach and doesn‘t require a lot of deep strategy. Cards come to your hand slowly and the dice manipulation is sparse enough that it doesn‘t happen every turn.

The production is nicely done with a tray per character, quick set up and tear down, the dice and cards are good. There are a couple of promo cards in the Kickstarter (2 per character plus randomizer cards)

The weight is about the same as Splendor (my other Marvel themed game), the luck is a bit less than yatzee due to the cards and status effects that allow you to manipulate the dice.

For a dueling game it went surprisingly well even though my partner lost twice now. The Marvel theme may be helping. As it lacks the spatial element of Unmatched and has dice, the chances are much higher that it will see play again. The dice are also less prone to AP than the spatial movement. I‘d rate it a 7.5 which will probably go to a 7 over time. I mean it‘s yatzee. If it wasn‘t for the thematic feel of the characters I‘d not be interested. This is a game I backed for my partner who likes dice and comics.