Alchemists, our second game. Went fairly smoothly. I managed the win, but it was pretty close. I thought I had blown it, was ready to publish a theory in the last round but forgot I had no money – oops. The game encourages you to publish theories or lose reputation. My theories were debunked, but I hedged successfully and didn’t lose reputation points. One of our players couldn’t get his head around hedging. Very simply, if you are sure about a theory, you should use a starred seal (for three or five victory points). But if you are unsure about a colour, then you can use a seal of that colour, and you aren’t penalised if you’re wrong. No points, but you don’t lose any. And after it’s proven wrong, you can publish again, with better information.
Shelfie Stacker, a filler dice placement, themed around placing board games onto your shelf. Very meta. Each round you choose a special ability card, that determines the turn order. You take a delivery box of dice, and try to place them onto your shelf, with placement rules, like a column has to have ascending dice in the same colour. The characters allow you to do various things, like increasing or decreasing a dice, or move dice around. Good fun.
Renature, first play. It’s dominoes, but with area control. The tiles have various animals on them, and you need to match a animal to place that tile. After placing, you can place one of your plants, which come in four types. You get immediate points for other plants (including other players) in your area… A plant scores for any other plants of it’s size or smaller. And when an area is closed off (all surrounding tiles are covered) then you add up all your plants to see who gets points. The rules are pretty easy to learn. One of the simple rules I mucked up was that an area is scored at the end of the game, even if it’s not closed off. Didn’t realise it until one player was adding plants to a big area that was never going to be closed. Played quite quick, you only have 18 tiles, so 18 turns.
Century: Golem Edition, we seemed to get a bit stuck here. None of the market cards were being taken, because none of them were particularly useful. So we would play our cards out, rest, then repeat. I managed the win.
Fantasy Realms, hadn’t played this for a while.
