Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[Bondy034]

Though there’s been some disruptions recently, I’ve still managed to get some games in the last couple of weeks:

Air, Land and Sea: Critters at War x2, this one is great fun - easy to grasp but with a bunch of interesting decisions. It’s sometimes the case in card games that you just get dealt a weak hand and have to live with it - I love that this forces you to reckon with that as a game mechanic - ‘how weak is my hand, really?’

Villagers, I’ve only had one game of this so far, and I spent most of it paranoid I was getting rules wrong (as far as I can tell, we played it fine though, as it turns out). But I’m keen to get it to the table again soon. It’s quite clever despite being fundamentally quite simple. And the presentation is terrific.

Pax Pamir 2e, my friend was hunting a copy of this for yonks and finally found one for a decent price so we gave it a try 2 player. It was super interesting from start to finish but two things became very quickly apparent - 1. It would really benefit from more than 2 players and more experience with it’s systems (our game ended up being mostly his Britain vs my Russia with no shifting allegiances.) 2. Neither of us were sure how fun the game is. Interesting 100%, fun as a game - we weren’t completely sold after our game but are both keen to give it some more tries hopefully with more than 2 players.

Skull, broke this out with a crowd before a dinner party, it went over pretty well but it was a weird game - multiple people knocked out before we had a winner! Apart from this game I recall people being knocked out like once or twice since I’ve had it and the attrition made the game feel a bit weird toward the end. Still fun though.

Anomia, this was our follow up to Skull, this one went over great and the scores were fairly balanced at the end. My wife won though, she’s pretty good at this game.

Saboteur, a friend brought over his copy of this game which we played before dinner and then finished up a bit after. I don’t love it, honestly. There’s more ‘take-that’ than I’d like and the hidden roles didn’t seem particularly easy to hide as it’s fairly obvious who you are from how you place. I tied for the win, but yeah, not my fave, though not awful.

[Benkyo]

I think PP2e two player requires two people who know exactly what they are doing. One mistake and it’s all over. 3+ players is much less brittle, perhaps more “fun” for you.

[Chewy77]

I must admit the only time I played with Ocean’s Hungry Grasp I struggled big time, but if I remember well its companion spirit was Nightmare guy, which probably is not the best dance partner. I really like how well done the wave/tide mechanism was, where every couple of turns you could get really powerful strikes (dragging invaders to the sea if I remember well). Combined with good timing from the other spirit, it could be deadly.

[raged_norm]

@Deviates

fallen down another Marvel Champions-like rabbit hole and I’m not sure my wallet (or girlfriend) is pleased about it.

Remember, there’s no actual ‘need’ to own everything in a system like this, just a strong desire to!

[EnterTheWyvern]

Played the 18OE France, Belgium and Spain, Portugal scenario yesterday with @lalunaverde and another. The game we so tight we had to play to the end to find a winner, which was a shame as it meant we didn’t finish until midnight when I promotiy turned in to a pumpkin.

I like a lot about this one, the building of track is fast paced so each turn can be interesting for that, most cities stay at 1 station space and almost none go to 3 so the blocking is consequential. The train rush is more gentle than I’d like in a scenario but I imagine would be about right in the big game.

Downsides are there’s a ton of chrome so parsing the rules from an inelegant rulebook was challenging. This slowed us down heavily at points. Maybe a second play would be better for that. Also the sheer amount of track building is fun to start but I ended up with 3 companies so coordinating their upgrades to assist the late company was brain mushing when I was all tired at the end

Plotting out what to do with your combination of minors and private felt strategic, I had a plan from the end of the opening auction and pretty much did that with tactical tweaks. First time that’s happened to me so might be learning a bit. Held my own against 2 players much more experienced than me so that also might show some stuff is sinking in. I’m still a bit slow on early trains I think, but did manage the switch to permanents well in this game. All in all good fun with good company and we ran good companies so not a bad Sunday.

[RogerBW]

@raged_norm

Remember, there’s no actual ‘need’ to own everything in a system like this, just a strong desire to!

So many of the things I like are very much minority interests that it was something of a relief to realise that the urge to have a complete set of something is standard enough to be a marketing tool.

[lalunaverde]

There were only 2 tables, both are Euro games I went for Viticulture which is theoretically faster to play. But the owner doesn’t want to play Viti with 6 players as her first game, so 2 players saved my bacon and asked if I can teach Tikal instead of 6 player Viticulture. Thank goodness.

3 player Tikal with the auction variant is as good as I remember, except the arbitrary drawing from the artefact tiles. If you get the right draw, hooray! If you get it wrong, you have to spend 3 action pts to swap with the right one with another player. How did K&K found this interesting? I don’t know.

Still, the logistical challenge and the strategic placing of tiles and camps is fab.

7 Wonders with Leaders and Armada - first time playing Armada outside of a demo. Nice take with the navy power which allows competition with everyone on the table.

18OE - interesting run-good-companies game. I like the zoning rights. It restricts companies on building tracks within that area only until you merge with another company that has a different zoning rights. It reminds me of 1862: East Anglia where you want a diverse set for merging. Agree with Wyvern about the tight tokening. Only ONE station per city, then 2 for the big cities. Ouch.

However, I feel that the short scenarios didn’t put the game to its full potential. The travel zones would be great with more than just 2 zones that we play with. This makes merging even more interesting. Can imagine a beast of a company that can build from Paris all the way to Constantinople. And the lack of diverse zones means that regionals have the significant upper hand. But that’s the downside of playing with a short scenario in order to gain the benefit of a shorter duration. I enjoyed it. The grandness of the scale of 18OE is fun in itself.

[malkav11]

I don’t know about that. Nightmare pushes a lot of stuff around, which can easily translate into pushing those things into the ocean to be devoured. Usually that’s Nightmare’s weakness is it’s all push, no remove. Ocean supplies that end of the equation handily.

[Chewy77]

I could be wrong, it could have been another spirit, then…

[VictorViper]

I got a chance to play a few rounds of Super Fantasy Brawl with my partner last night, but sadly not a full game. Here’s a grim fact: I haven’t logged a complete game with another player since March 16th.

On the upside, I got to see enough to fall in love and, in an unexpected turn of events, my partner really seems pretty enchanted by it too. It’s incredibly easy to table and teach, with a fabulously sparse turn structure that lets you put your full attention where it counts: on the cards and positioning.

We’re going to try to keep the game out and available for a little while since it’s pretty quick to play. My partner isn’t typically into direct combat games, and the fun she was having was palpable, so I’m going to make sure we get some time in to get comfy with it!

Oh, and I mean, it’s basically Overwatch the boardgame? Yeah, I’m sold pretty hard.

[COMaestro]

Just had a punishing game of Ghost Stories. I was the red monk who can move anywhere and my wife was the green monk that can re-roll dice. Very first card drawn was a black ghost that immediately haunted the tile in front of it. Next card locked the use of Tao tokens. A few turns later, both of our powers were locked, though we were able to use tokens again. Haunters kept appearing on opposite sides of the board, fircing us to deal with them instead of getting our powers back, and even when I tried, I could not roll the single color needed to take them out.

Eventually a Tormentor came out and soon haunted the tile in front of it, though we had already unhaunted two tiles thanks to my wife’s use of her Yin-Yang token. After defeating two ghosts in one play, I had to roll the curse die twice, and haunted another tile. The Tormentor finished us off by rolling another haunt, giving us three haunted tiles.

I do not really see a way we could have played much better this game. The deck just felt stacked against us, and we had some really unlucky rolls with the curse die.

[yashima]

I‘ve been dabbling in solo/two handed play of my recent arrivals.

• Maglev Metro seems quite simple at first but left hand did way better than right hand who completely messed up their little transport engine. This teaches me to be very careful when playing this with my partner. The trickiness is very much on the player board. I think I like it. I don‘t have anything quite like it. Reminds me of „Auf Achse“ in a „I‘ve last played this more than 30 years ago so no idea really“ way.

• Skull Canyon Ski Fest: an enjoyable somewhat thematic romp through yeti infested mountains. I think this is going to fulfill what I want it to: have an easy accessible game with a winter/snow theme to put in front of people who just want to play a game on the side of a conversation. It has that Ticket to Ride mechanic with collecting cards of a color to spend on doing something. Here you have 2 dimensional cards with colors and skiing styles and you don‘t get permanent routes to claim you just ski them down—if you are the first you can put down a marker that you did this. But someone else can later do it better and „steal“ your route.
  

  

• Viscounts of the West Kingdom with 2 new expansions. I had to teach myself the game again as I had forgotten so many rules. Basically a rondel where each spot gives you a few different options on the main actions (trade for resources, build buildings for bonus and action modifiers, transcribe manuscripts for bonusses and VP or „castle“ your meeples for bonusses and points) that are determined by how many of the symbols your little 3 card „engine“ provides. While you are rondelling you get to buy cards to make your deck a little more powerful.
  

  

Each player board has a bot side and the bot has their own cards which are pretty quick to handle. As each player board gives the bot a different focus that gives it some variety. Though in my experience the bot focusses heavily on just one thing and rarely gets to do anything else to the detriment of its score.

So the new expansions. One provides treasure chests that slot into the newly replaced cardboard playerboards (not sure if they are better than the flimsy paper ones as they tend to not lie flat here due to humidity but they now have holes for the West Kingdom’s virtue/sin markers so they won‘t slide around accidentally). The treasure chests allow you to modify your engine a little bit to better streamline what you want to do. This is nice and gives some good options though the chests are a bit difficult to come by. There is now also the possibility to recruit more heroes to your deck through a new type of interaction. There is more in the expansion… small stuff though
The other expansion—no idea which is which—introduces a new card type the purple Outsiders. These are acquired either through new card interactions or the King‘s Orders which you need to pass through your engine to get at the outsider. There is also a secondary „reject“ an outsider option that gives some nices bonusses but almost always gives you an additional negative modifier. (Unless you‘ve specialized in being bad…)

Both expansions are rather small. I would say the chests provide an improvement to the core game play. The rest of it all is fluff for the completionists like me who want to have the whole trilogy.

Playing this game again after a year, it wants to be a quick game and turns really are quick. But looking at the bigger picture it feels slow. Your deck evolves so slowly. It takes 3 turns (normally) for a card to generate a bonus on leaving your engine. It is difficult to get rid of your starting cards (discarding before card acquisition after having built the building is the best way to mill through your deck I think). And there are a lot of small decisions that will build up to even make turns slow for someone who is prone to AP. I like it but it is also a bit fiddly with the bot and I wish I could get to play this with my partner—but I did and I think he may give it another go but no more than a couple games.

I like the WK trilogy overall and now that it seems to be complete with all the expansions, the Tome Saga and the collector‘s boxes I would love to play a series of these games. Would I buy it all again?

• Definitely Architects because I can get it to the table though I don‘t really feel the expansions did much to improve a good base game?
• If it weren‘t for its place in the trilogy I think I would pass on Paladins—as much as I like it, it is a beast even in solo play. Getting it to the table in a group setting—my partner won‘t play—over all my other good games? Probably not.
• Personally, this one is my favorite to play—despite everything I said about it feeling a bit slow. But there is so much going on and I would love to play it enough to either figure out how well it all fits or break it in the process.

All three have solo modes btw. And while these are not bad solo modes in some ways they are all a bit fiddly. I tend to have to start over games with the bot due to some errors I make. There are always some questions coming up because the bot in Viscounts concentrates so much on one thing that it tends to get close to the edge cases and in a relearning game I don‘t want to deal with edge cases.

[raged_norm]

Back from boardgame night. Aside from the family having to hole up at my mum’s halfway home (youngest is ill, possibly heatstroke, again) I phad fun and played

Love Letter, meh. It’s alright.

Great Western Trail, smashed it. 104-68-72.

Went heavy on engineers to shunt the train. Great games with loads going on but it still feels a little bit solitaire to me. There’s little bits of interaction, but nothing too offensive. I’m unsure if I like it enough to want keep it in my personal collection.

[pillbox]

This is a week overdue, but I had taken a Friday off work to spend time at a local convention the weekend before this past, so last week was a bit of a blur as I caught back up on some key projects.

On Friday, I went in the afternoon with just my eldest child (nearly 5 years). I had no delusions of playing anything but kids’ games, so we set about doing just that. Also at the convention was my niece, whose parents volunteer (and were founding members). That afternoon, we played Click Clack Lumberjack (Tok Tok Woodman, Tac Tac Jack, etc) a few times; my daughter’s strategy of “nothing matters except grubs” backfired a number of times on her as I easily won with 1 or 2 points those first games. Candyland came out next, then ICECOOL2 (with simplified rules that essentially just gives us an excuse to flick cute penguins around), then Loopin’ Chewie (simplified rules, a.k.a. there’s no win/loss condition, we’re just bouncing Chewbacca around). My niece joined us for Candyland and Loopin’ Chewie, but despite being 7 years old has a shorter attention span than my daughter.

We returned Saturday morning with the entire family: me, my partner, oldest (4.5), middle (3), youngest (7 months). We tried to divide the kids between us, but the 3 year old is easily distractible and would always want to play whatever her older sister was. More Loopin’ Chewie, Candyland, Hi-Ho Cherry-O, and Click Clack Lumberjack. I also got out Zendo, mostly for the toy factor, though my oldest did request we play “the real game”, so I set up one of the easy rule cards and using a simplified game loop (build, learn if it works or not, then guess the rule). She did surprisingly well for a not-quite-five-year-old.

We returned home for lunch, so that the 3yo could nap. I returned with the oldest and my partner caught up with us a bit later with the post-nap 3yo along with the baby. We all went back again Sunday morning and got up to more of the same. Additional games included Rhino Hero, First Orchard, and Robot Turtles. We returned to Click Clack Lumberjack, this time with my niece joining us as well; my daughter finally figured out the winning strategy and won handily with 4 points to my 1 point and my niece’s -10 points – proud parent moment where she not only figured out how to win, but did so with skill, and then acted a gracious winner despite out-playing even me.

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While walking around in my few spare moments, I did see an 8-player game of Sidereal Confluence in-progress (which looked intense) and a 6-player game of Eclipse Second Dawn for the Galaxy, among many other things. I saw Return to Dark Tower setup with a group of people sitting around it… not sure if it was a game in-progress or just a decorative centerpiece.

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It was a fun 3 days even though there weren’t any “grown-up games” on my table. My oldest is becoming quite a gamer (we’re not sure the middle child is going to be a gamer, except maybe the charades type). The youngest spent most of the time drooling, smiling, and getting extra cuddles from her aunt (instead of just mom and dad).

[malkav11]

I think even if you’re playing Return to Dark Tower it also qualifies as a decorative centerpiece.

[yashima]

Two friends plan to come over tomorrow to play my favorite game with me In preparation, I played 2 single spirit solos of Spirit Island to figure out if I could go for Finder of Paths Unseen in a multiplayer with 2 inexperienced SI players. I used no antagonist, one of them has never played before so I don‘t think we‘ll use one tomorrow.

I think I made a couple of small mistakes in the first game but Finder is just so very powerful if you get the opening moves right. I use the „additional card play“ growth and reveal the Stone and then immediately isolate the village that is already on the board because if I can just manage to avoid a single explore that way, I catch the break that leads to the win. I love the way Finder‘s „paths“ are set up for so many choices and with 6 cards in their starting deck and the ability to choose between so many growth options I can usually go for 3 or 4 turns before having to reclaim.

Finder is one of those spirits that have such useful innate powers that I keep playing cards just so I can isolate and push invaders around with very little regard to the actual card powers sometimes. It would really work very well with Ocean‘s Hungry Grasp I think…

The second game gave me a first. I didn‘t win through an action of my own or ravaging… but the event actually destroyed the last invaders and flipped my Island card at the same time

[EnterTheWyvern]

3 player games this evening saw me win 3 games. Which is unusual these days.

2 games of 90s second edition avalon hill Robo Rally was ruined by being on the charmless, soulless grey second edition according to Quinns from SUSD. In reality it was really good fun, despite being only 3 of us there was racing, mayhem and miscalculations aplenty. Someone even pushed someone else off the board following a mistake of facing left vs right. Stone cold classic. Would be interested to try the third edition but not enough to buy one when I have this otherwise excellent version.

Lastly our third game was a hand of Seasons. I like how much game you pack in to a comparatively short play time. The opening draft is strategic, then all the tactical sequencing, dice drafting and token balancing keeps the game worth playing through. Add in all the colourful art and chunky dice and you’re left with a winner of a game. I had no familiars and had a nice combo of a card that gave me 3 crystals each round but limited my element pool to 6. Then the card that each round let me transmute 3 identical elements coupled with the Purse of Io to gain bonus crystals each transmute so I didn’t need to store up elements. Also drew the card that allowed me to pay for low VP cards at 5 crystals and it all snow balled nicely. I won 197-144-99.

[lalunaverde]

Played Traders of Genoa aka Genoa. An old school game from 2001 and it is full-on negotiation. Now, the values in Genoa have a certain range, but they can be blurry, which is good. Way simpler than Sidereal Confluence, but not as stupidly rigid as Chinatown. However, I might think that Bohnanza still holds the title for being the best light-weight trading game. But I need more plays of Genoa. I will keep it for now. Very good potential.

Squaring Circleville - a quintessential story of how American city planners sold their soul to the Devil. It is based on a real-life town that is very circle-y, but decided to reform their town slowly to a grid-based one, thereby stripping themselves of any personality

Oh yeah. The game. It’s good fun. I will defo play again, because it’s the type of game that works with me. Published by Spielworxx. It has area majority with long term planning and good elements of combo-making. What’s not to like? I cannot call it a top game, but I’ll give it a few more plays and I might make up my mind.

High Society - yep. The ceiling is just too low for me. It’s a question of when to avoid bidding on the auctions where people are aggressive. As your cash cash money is very limited, it’s easy to get aggressive when some people have exhausted their purse. Indeed, bargains were had! Q.E. is more fragile but eh, I prefer the freedom of stretching the limits of the players

Castles of Burgundy: the Card Game a nice translation to a card game if you like the board game. I don’t like it. Choices are so limited that it’s easy to parse the board state. I was eating my food while it wasn’t my turn - that’s how much I didn’t care (or rather, how irrelevant) what the other players are doing.

Age of Industry - hmmmm… interesting game with New England 3 players. I might end up preferring it now over both Brasses. But need more plays. Way simpler ruleset. The map is crowded - I have never seen so much overbuilding! The market is shallow. The market is as deep as Brass Lancashire, so nasty overbuilding on opponent mines/steelworks can be done easily.

More importantly, AoI seems to focus less on system mastery (there is a degree of it, sure) as your number of actions aren’t fixed anymore. Only some actions will tell you to discard a card. Loans are a free action and every £5 is a VP. There’s no income. You only get money through loans and by flipping buildings. Which means that any money you spent on buildings, you’d better flip these fast to get the money (+ margin) right away and then reinvest it and so on.

Due to this and the tighter map, mutual flipping of tiles in New England map is a regular occurrence. Solo selling of goods still occurs, but it’s fine.

Will have to play it more to see what I feel wih the other maps and with more plays

Just One

Bites - glad to play this again. A stock holding game dressed in a cutesy ants-themed game

[Chewy77]

Oh, I was putting the rebellion icons (fist) under the towns/cities; I like your system, it is a lot easier not to miss them that way

[yashima]

It actually happened! I got to play a 3 player Spirit Island game.
Oh I had forgotten the additional „chaos“.
My friends picked their spirits more or less randomly from a stack where I had removed all the low and very high complexity spirits (I had already reserved Finder for myself) and so we ended up with

• Grinning Trickster Stirs up Trouble
• Shifting Memory of Ages
• Finder of Paths Unseen

It was such great fun. I had not remembered but they had both played before. There were a couple of rules misunderstandings. The two being:

• Why is defense and invader damage so hard to explain? Dahan do not defend. They only strike back after the invaders have damaged them AND the land! Just pulling enough Dahan in a land does not prevent „Matsch“ (aka mud aka blight) from appearing.
• The elements you generate are not „used“ up, they can be used to power both innate powers and those cards that have additional actions when you have certain elements.

Grinning Trickster is not one of my favorites, too chaotic and you never know what you‘re going to get.
Once again nobody thought to clean up a little blight—me managed to twice in the game and came close to flipping the Island card.

Shifting Memory is great especially when they play up their role as a supporting character—I had trouble reaching the land I wanted to isolate on the first round and Shifting Memory has a card that allows one spirit to have more reach on a power!
Also handing out elements now and then and flipping fear cards so you know what‘s coming… what is not to love about this one? And then they have so much energy and can get major powers without forgetting cards?

In a 3 player I noticed that Finders powers while great were very hard to place. I had several turns during which I could isolate 3 lands and it was definitely almost impossible to anticipate which lands would be useful. One—most of the time, two… sure but a third one was most often next to useless. I got great cards and even major powers that fit perfectly with Finder‘s playstyle.

I had mixed 1 Stage 2 card with the Stage 3 and so we had an unintentional round less than we should have before those cards came up and it looked real bad for a moment but then a few major powers cleaned out our „moloch city“ (the place where Finder had stored all the invaders, blight and other tokens they didn‘t like elsewhere). And from there suddenly we had generated so much fear that we could get to Fear Level 2 and then we were down to 1 city and it was over.

PS: events definitely take a while to resolve and make the game longer. Absolutely. But we got very helpful events most of the time this round so no complaints on that.