Well shoot. I just read up on these opinions to get the full download. Almost all of my games have been Lancashire and my one game of Birmingham didn’t feel very different. It felt smoother for the reasons I listed. Now I want Lancashire instead, as what people have uncovered shows it appeals more to my gaming tastes.
That said, and as I said, I don’t love either and this isn’t really a place I need to optimize. I’ll just have to hold out until the urge passes…
Buddy had a birthday party (7 of us total) in Toronto. Managed to play two rounds of Take 5/6 Nimmt, and then two rounds of Diamant (gosh it’s so pretty… kinda wish they had kept the “treasures” mechanic from Incan Gold, but that’s a minor gripe for a gorgeous upgrade in quality and art).
The nice part was that Adam, the guy who’s birthday it was, asked to play the games, and then wanted to play them again. It’s the little things, ya know?
One of these days I have to play Birmingham to see what is all about. I like Lancs quite a lot, but I need to try and find out if what the BGG ranks show is true or not.
My feeling is that if you like Lancashire then you’ll find Birmingham a bit soft.
Breweries made the ports more complicated with yet another exception rule, and all it does is promote solitaire play and it’s pretty obvious on how to place your Breweries.
- Shipyards gone. No loss, they felt like an appendix to the game and were basically there to make sure newbies never got high scores as they undervalued the early investment.
Yes. I prefer the Potteries in B’ham. You need a Brewery to pair it.
- Loss of the cotton market - again, no loss as it made the early game predictable and the volatility of the card flip was out of place with the rest of the game.
I found it weird, but that’s Wallace for you. B’ham replaced it with free beer on the outer regions.
Benkyo pretty much outlined why I prefer Lancashire. Another key difference for me is the addition of another industry: boxes. Which, again, pushes the game more toward solitaire efficiency game. It’s pretty smooth to play once you’ve mastered the system. It’s easy in B’ham to pick a strategy - any strategy except maybe Pottery - and win with your head down. After a couple of learning games of it trying to wrap my head around the rules (I’m the one who have to teach Brass in my group) and then, found it shallow? I was pissed off and sold it for OOP price.
Ishtar: Gardens of Babylon, a fairly inoffensive game of area control and resource collecting.
Living Forest, first play of the Kennerspiel winner. Fairly light game, with three ways to win: plant 12 trees, put out 12 fires, or collect 12 sacred flowers. You start with your own deck of cards and add to it as you go. There’s a bit of push your luck as you play cards, you can keep going until you get three certain symbols. If you have three, you must stop drawing, and you only get one action. Otherwise you get two actions. Actions are take cards, plant a tree, extinguish fires, or move around the main board and gain a bonus action when you stop.
It was pretty easy to learn and play, and the artwork is good. Our winner didn’t realise at first that he had 12 trees.
Mysterium at 3p, which probably isn’t the ideal number of players. I wanted to see how it shaped up after playing Rear Window. The setup is a bit convoluted, but at least with 3 you don’t use the clairvoyance tokens. I still like this game, the artwork is so much cooler than Rear Window. Everything went pretty well, we won easily.
Khôra: Rise of an Empire, first play. This is a light civilisation game, where all you do is move up and down various tracks. It’s a bit slow to start, takes a few turns to get things happening. There are only nine rounds. Each round you roll your two dice, then assign each die to an action tile (everyone has the same seven action tiles). Actions move up on tracks, give you money, allow you to play a card, collect resources. It was ok I guess, nothing too exciting.
Had a belated BBQ to celebrate my friend’s birthday on Saturday, so had a chance to play some stuff 5-player. I did badly in all of them.
Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest - Been waiting for a higher player count to try this and it didn’t disappoint. Really glad it got a new edition.
NMBR 9 - We wanted something a bit less “thinky” next and settled on this. Terrible idea, but still fun.
Asteroyds - Our annual (slightly drunk) game of this and just as enjoyable as usual. Though I did kind of get stuck in a corner, continually missing a gate and therefore coming in last.
Lalalalala… trying not to listen as it’s just going to be effort to sell Birm and swap them 
@Chewy77 FWIW - ratings inflation ran at around .05 per year from 2004 until 2020 or so - once you factor that in the two versions rank almost identically on BGG. Other sources I’ve read compare it to Agricola/Caverna - similar games, one is tighter with rougher edges and the other is more open and relaxed. We’ve never been able to resolve that debate (I’m all for Gric) and I don’t think the larger Brass conversation will ever be settled. It’s more of a taste question than a quality question.
I’m just trying to focus on all of Lancashire’s rough edges right now - Birkenhead, the Cotton Market, first turn development, bad 2p experience, and those last few turns that all too often have players discarding cards because the board is literally DONE. If I had a blank slate/empty shelf right now I’d still change my mind but Birmingham is already there and possession is nine tenths of some law.
Separate topic - Barenpark
I’ve had this for a few years. First game was around a 5/10, second game was a 3. I slated it for "future sell once the kids have finished with it.
Then I played it on BGA last week and on the table with the family this weekend and had a blast. Yeah, a part of me was curious all this time what Paul and Matt got out of it that I missed.
Key learnings:
Goals are a must. Never exclude them unless one of your players has an age in the single digits. They are as necessary as salt in cooking and provide a much-needed cross-purpose to the opening game. It’s a travesty that the rulebook sets these up as a future “option.”
It’s a 4-player game. They try to scale it for different player counts by removing tiles, but the large enclosures are a constant for all setups (I’ve been mulling on houserules to fix this). When the enclosures are gone, and the pandas are gone, and the toilets are gone, everything in the game starts to matter so much more. It’s got a bit of that roll and write vibe when your zoo falls apart and you have no one to blame but yourself. More players = more chances for the market state to change between turns.
There was a lot of cheering and groaning, pleading and bargaining going around the table. Post-game analysis. It was a good time.
Here is my very informed hot take on the Brass debate: games with beer are better than games without beer. Cheers! 
Right, I had winded up by last week revision, I had another go at Spirit Island solo last night, sort of an introductory game before trying it with Branch and Claw. I didn’t use any nation, and had two spirits, Rivers Surge in Daylight and Thunderspeaker. I think it is the first time I finish a game without having the blight card turning, the cleaning powers of rivers and its energy card, plus the ability to gather Dahan and make them grow in numbers (if slowly) were key to keep Thunderspeaker going in a rampage through the island.
I think so far it has been my favourite play of the game, given how well the two spirits synchronized. By the end, the resilient settlers were everywhere, but only at level explorer or town, so I won eliminating the last two cities with a mighty Tsunami, which I have to admit it felt good.
Looking forward to try it again with the expansion.
Better still if the beer is not made of cardboard.
Today I played a quick game of Marvel Champions, trying out Miles Morales Spider-Man against the usual Rhino setup. While I nearly lost, it was only in the penultimate round, as I had not been hurt once until then. That round I went ahead and took an attack for 4 damage, but with 2 encounter cards, Rhino got the Charge upgrade (+3 attack with overkill), and then got to attack again. Luckily I was able to defend with Agent 13, so Rhino’s 8 damage took her out and only dealt me 4 more, leaving me at 1 health.
With Rhino at just 5 health, and Confused, an Arachnobatics took him out for the win. I like Miles’ deck, though I must not be up to speed on his comic incarnation, as there are a lot of S.H.I.E.L.D. cards in there, which I would not have expected.
In any case, I intend to try out Spider-Gwen next, and then likely try the Sinister Motives campaign with the two of them.
Had a night of The Crew with our friends. We only had five missions left to go and I’m happy to say we knocked them out of the park (mostly) so we completed the game! 118 attempts overall (so an average of 2.4 per mission). Funny thing was I went to record the final date and the number of attempts and you know when we played our first game? July 26th, 2021. That’s right. We did the Crew in exactly 365 days. Next up, Crew 2: New Crew.
First “real” game since…
…that’s interesting. I find I regard Tabletop Simulator as “real” games while Yucata/BGA aren’t. Perhaps it’s the immersive environment, perhaps it’s having to get the rules right.
Anyway, since Stabcon at the start of the month. Got together with @Lordof1 to try out next month’s Sentinels of the Multiverse solo challenge. We won, but in a weird way that saw everyone else defeated and Wraith invulnerable to anything the bad guy could do, so it was a matter of wearing them down. Seriously tough fight up to that point.
I like Wraith.
(Not my image of Wraith, not my background either.)
Back from games night
For Sale still the king of fillers
Tinderblox more fun than it should be
Beyond the Sun slow game with three new players. All had a good time though.
Get on Board great fun, more thinky than your usual Roll/Flip and Write.
My partner seemed quite keen to try Wonderland‘s War—he likes the bag building thing—and so we played a duel.
The teach went quite well I think. I had only played half of an error-ridden 2-handed learning game before but I only had to look up a few details in the rulebook. This is a plus! And almost all the details we looked up resolved in the way we expected them to. (Sorry no example comes to mind).
There is a dedicated 2 player mode with different sides of the player board, reduced number of battles in the war phase and more cards per player in the tea party phase. Castles are slower to build—you need to win an area twice to build it. It all makes a lot of sense and I like that they put the thought into that.
There is no solo. I kind of appreciate that, too. It is brave to not get David Turzci to make one it may seem these days but I‘d rather not have something tacked on just because it is possible to make some kind of „bot AI“.
The game is a table hog. But I expect for a full 5 player game the board needs to be as big as it is. Or almost. I dislike cramped boards even more than table hogs But our table is 1m in width and we barely fit the board and the player boards.
The actual game played smoothly if longer than the 25min per player it says on the box. But it was a first game and my partner is never a fast player.
So the game is played in 3 rounds that have 2 phases: the Tea Party where you build up your arsenal (chips in bag mostly) from the cards that are placed on the table and the War where you play a number of battles by drawing chips from your bag until you quit or bust and the person who managed to accumulate the most „strength“ from their chips wins the battle. After 3 rounds the person with the most VP wins. VP can be gained from battles which is probably the largest chunk. It can be gained through some of the chips (which much like Quacks have multiple strength levels (2) per color and different abilities that can be reconfigured through a different set of cards for an entirely new game) and there are Quests and Wonderlandians and points for the castles you built.
The chips can interact in interesting and combo-tastic ways—which my partner managed to do and said he enjoyed!
I particularly like that the Quests can yield a nice number of VP. They each have an end-game bonus but also a „Feat“ that you need to fulfill during battle and either is 3 points but if you manage both you get an additional 3! You do not need to win battles to complete Feats and endgame conditions, so it may be a valid strategy to quest a lot? I don‘t know.
My partner started to become frustrated by the third round because I was in the lead. But with the huge board my lead looked a lot bigger than it was and in the end I got a few minus points for being a bit reckless with the „madness“ chips (a secondary push your luck element that feeds into how quickly you bust in a battle) and he ended up winning with 86 over 79 points.
He said he enjoyed this more than Quacks for what it is worth. But I am not sure he liked Quacks all that much (we do not have it ourselves we only play at friends‘). I would agree with him but I am also not the biggest fan of Quacks. I really like how the different elements of Wonderland‘s War come together to form a whole that is quick to grasp and fun to play. I haven‘t even got into Wonderlandian cards or the player boards and your character abilities and how you can upgrade your abilities and get some nice bonusses from the player board. It also really helps that this is a very good looking game with nice materials—I only have the retail version and it desperately wants me to build an insert.
I look forward to playing this more as 2 player and hopefully in a bigger group as well. Right now: 8/10
A lot of recent acquisitions getting played over the past few weeks, with one embarrassing exception:
Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition (x2.5): To quote Quinns’ review of Deep Sea Adventure, I ****ing hate this game. I didn’t expect it to surpass my all-time favorite game Marvel Champions, but I was still let down by how much worse it felt in every respect. It’s more fiddly, less tactically engaging, less successful in its modularity, and even less thematic. The final straw for me was playing Bunker, and finding his play style far less distinct than his counterpart in MC (specifically War Machine). And a three-hero minimum? Hard pass.
Marvel Champions (x20+): Played a lot of this to get the taste of SotM out of my mouth, and also to test the new Sp//dr and Spider-Ham heroes. A lot of people were down on these two pre-release because they aren’t the super-popular Spider characters, but I think they’re a lot of fun! Spider-Ham is more traditional, but still contains an interesting push-your-luck minigame via taking damage to gain counters, and Sp//dr is easily the most unique hero since Adam Warlock, with a paltry hand size but an ever-growing tableau of multi-use upgrades. They are quickly becoming two of my favorites, and I am eagerly anticipating the upcoming X-Men expansion.
Jetpack Joyride (x10): Picked this up with all deluxe/expansion content for just $20 while I was visiting Maine, and it’s a fun little polyomino puzzle! The multiplayer game is a real-time race to collect coins and finish objectives, but my copy came with a huge book of solo puzzles, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with them. It is shockingly faithful to the source material (which is a free-to-play mobile game, of all things), and has a great rules-to-depth ratio.
Judge Dredd: The Cursed Earth (x1): Snagged this at the same Maine store, mostly because I love The Lost Expedition. I’m not sure if this is as good as TLE, but I’ve also only played it once, so it might grow on me. It feels more distinct than I expected it to, because you have an actual opponent you’re trying to beat to the end, and the cards feel more punishing in a way that feels much tenser.
Food Chain Island (x10ish): My most recent Board Game of the Month delivery. I would describe it as the card game equivalent of a bag of chips, both for better and worse–moreish and addictive and tasty, but also insubstantial and forgettable. Every game I found myself thinking “That was fine, but I probably don’t need to ever play it again”… then playing it again.
ROVE + ROVE: Expansion Collection (x10ish): Now here’s something a little more interesting! The base game and expansion Kickstarter delivered to me last week, and I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit. The core system of using limited movement points and special abilities to fit into seemingly-unfair patterns reminds me a lot of the video game Into the Breach, and all the expansions add nice variety and complexity to the game with much additional rules.
Into the Breach (Advanced Edition) (x10ish): This isn’t technically a board game, but for those who have played it, you know it’s basically a board game. I might describe it as a cross between chess and Too Many Bones, of all things. There is no output randomness of any kind (except for the occasional chance of your buildings resisting destruction), and you maneuver your group of 3 mechs around an 8x8 grid, but the odds are so stacked against you, and your mechs are all so unique and interesting, that you feel like every successful encounter is a well-earned triumph. I came back to it because of the newly release Advanced Edition (just a free update with lots of new content), and it is still proper excellent!
Spirit Island (x0): This is the embarrassment. Just a few weeks ago, I received every expansion for this game–Jagged Earth, Branch and Claw, and Feather and Flame. I unboxed everything, shuffled all the cards into their respective decks, bagged the new components, fit everything into a single nested box (a la Tom’s Root storage solution)… and haven’t touched it since. It’s so intimidating now! Branch and Claw alone adds as many rules as the base game, and there is so much content that I find it hard to actually bring it to the table. I still really want to, though… just need to build up the courage.
It does get a little big with all of that. If I may suggest a course on how to proceed: use a familiar spirit or two and just add in the tokens from Branch & Claw. Those are
Do not use events until you have the hang of the tokens. These tokens except the beasts get removed when they did their thing (preventing a single invader action). There are few initial tokens on setup (a yellow on the city of each island part and a red one in the lowest numbered space that has nothing else in it). Tokens may get added through cards or abilities or new fear cards (or later events)
Now play your regular game of Spirit Island with familiar spirits and just a few new powers or fear cards may come up that use the tokens. If not: same game as before. If you want to make sure there is more interaction with tokens: the green guy from Branch & Claw (Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds) uses the green tokens a lot and the other one (Sharp Fangs behind Leaves) is closely associated with the Beast tokens. I‘d suggest using only one of these in a first game though I have played 2 spirit games with both of these but their synergy can be a bit tricky.
Once you have grasped how the tokens work add the events starting from the second round. Events usually explain themselves and are resolved right before fear cards would resolve.
Thanks! I’ll keep a note of this for my own inevitable purchase.
I think two out of the three games I’ve played have involved expanded sets where some amount of the content was stripped out as a courtesy to me but not going to great trouble over it – so no events or tokens, but we did have the power cards that had already been shuffled in.
