You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.
I like some of the “hidden traitor” games that are on the sillier side (specifically Fake Artist Goes to New York and Spyfall), and I do think that Mafia de Cuba is very good, but yeah, normally social deduction games just aren’t for me any more.
I own a few social deduction/ hidden traitor games and keep trying them as they are such staples. I definitely prefer ones where you are doing something as a game together so you have information to use to work out who might be the traitor(s) rather than the pure social ones like Resistance. The only one I’ve found that really works for me is Saboteur.
Last weekend was my local game group meetup. I tried Ark Nova for the first time. It was OK. I can see why people have been comparing it to Terraforming Mars, and if you hate TM I don’t think this is different enough you will like it. If you like TM this might be different enough you will like it a little more if the changes are in a way you prefer or less if not. I like TM ok but not a ton and probably like AN a little less. I doubt we will add AN to our collection as we are all in on TM since my husband LOVES it.
I also played Quest for El Dorado and Ticket to Ride on a map I’d never played before (US West). I love El Dorado and had fun with it as expected. It’s a deck builder race game for anyone who has never played it. I generally think TtR is ok, but this map was a little more crunchy and I enjoyed it a bit more than I expected.
Other than that meetup, I haven’t been playing games much. My husband and I are working on painting and slowly moving various rooms of our new house. Hopefully we will soon have a much nicer game room setup and then not too long after that get fully moved and be able to play more games again.
I foolishly bought Ark Nova, even knowing I wouldn’t like it, on the strength of the zoo theme in my house, the thought of a new solo experience, and the thought that it looked like it might fix the Terraforming Mars model.
I don’t particularly need any of those.
I haven’t played yet, but since that impulse I’ve only heard disappointments. We’ll see. Should have a fine resale market if it comes to that.
Edit: and I just found out that due to shipping box damage, UPS insurance refunded the cost of the game. Free is a pretty good entry point for trying out a game!
Another two solo runs of Solar Storm, this time on the middle difficulty (“hard” – 4 wild cards) – with a loss and then a win.
I was very close to the end of the damage deck again in these games. That deck has 24 cards, so that seems like the intended ballpark number of turns for a game. It’s not a hard limit – when all of the damage cards have been drawn your ship suffers a hull breach, and you start losing the undrawn cards from the other (resource) deck instead of taking damage (discarding 1, 2, or 3 cards based on a die roll), from which point it’s only game-over if the resource deck is expended.
This time I acted out some radio chatter between my three astronauts as they moved around the ship and communicated what was happening to one another. That helped :)
I’m still feeling the same at this stage. I focused more on the special abilities of the eight outer rooms in these games, and how they would interact, and the puzzle felt more interesting.
(Unlike Pandemic, the special abilities aren’t character abilities, but rather locational abilities; but you can only use a room’s ability if it is undamaged (or fully-repaired); and you can also only divert power in an undamaged room (a thing you must do once for each room, but it’s more expensive than other actions). There are some nice dynamics between rushing to divert power from rooms which have yet to suffer any damage vs repairing damaged rooms with more powerful abilities so you can take advantage of those, as well as the ‘usual’ (Pandemic-esque) dilemma of whether to risk The Badness accruing to dangerous levels elsewhere while you try to achieve something helpful where you are now, and options for mitigating that.
I still think that every game of this will inevitably feel much of a muchness – I’m not sure if even the randomised layout of the cards really makes much different in practice (although there’s an alternative set of rooms in the mini-expansion which would provide a bit of variety) – but as a tactical puzzle it seems pretty fair.
I should probably also get out my copy of Forbidden Island (which I’ve not played in ages) and see how I feel about that by comparison.
45 mins per game this time (not including set-up and tear-down).
Two games with the kids today
Seven Wonders: Architects - lost to the six year old. High scores though 39-52-56
Get on Board - came first, 52-49-49
A few new games played yesterday
ScandalOh!, first play (not my copy). I knew this was the newest game from the designers of Awkward Guests, which we enjoyed. I probably would have backed it, but my mate did instead. On BGG it’s listed as a reimplementation of Awkward Guests, which I wasn’t aware of. AG was your classic whodunnit mystery. ScandalOh! (yeah, I don’t love the name either) is about trying to find the scandal, which celebrity is involved, and what newspaper will cover the story. Your player board shows the possible stories, contacts, and newspapers, all with their own icons. You exchange cards the same way you did in AG, and each card can confirm or exclude an icon, so you mark them off as you go. I was a bit confused to be honest. I had a go at solving it, after someone had already done it, and got two out of three things correct. I just picked the things that had the most hits. Not sure about this one.
Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, first play of the new edition. I used to own the original Libertalia. This is the same, with more characters and a different reputation system for ties. Also has a solo mode, if you’re into that. It’s pretty easy to learn – there are three voyages, each consisting of a number of days. For each day, you play one of your cards and then activate them. Cards are placed by rank, and their day time ability is triggered from low to high rank. Then, in reverse order, you do any dusk abilities, and also take one of the loot tokens on that day. Loot tokens are chests, maps, barrels, relics, sabers, amulets, and hooks. What they do depends on which side of the board you are using. There are also loot tiles so you can mix things up even more. On the normal (calm) side of the board, all the loot is beneficial, apart from relics, which cost you money. I kind of miss the old games art, which was darker and a lot more piratey.
Break the Cube X 2, first play. We play (and love) Break the Code, so this seemed like something we would like. It’s still breaking a code, but this time the “code” is an arrangement of blocks in various colours. You all set your blocks behind your screen, and each player is trying to guess the arrangement of the player to their left. On you turn, you can ask a number from one to nine (it’s a 3 X 3 grid), and the answer is the colour you see from above that number. So, you might have a red block and a yellow one on top of it – you would answer “yellow”. The other question you can ask is a letter, and the answer is what colours are seen if looking from the side of the structure. This could be up to three colours. But everyone has to answer this, including you, so you’re giving information to the player trying to guess your blocks. Finally, the third question you can ask is to ask a player if you have their code correct. It’s a fun game, reminded me a little of Zendo. We played two quick games.
Roam, first play. A simple area control game. You have a grid of six tiles, and you start with three cards. Each card has a pattern, so you place that pattern on the grid, take any money you’ve covered, and if all the places are taken on that card, you get to keep it, so you’ve got that new pattern to play in the future.
Planet Unknown
Fantasy Realms
Some games over the last week:
Fantastic Factories, always a tight game here, in the end I won due to a good combo of goods and point value buildings. Scales well, lots of fun, easy to grasp. It’s a winner.
Samurai, another game that was super tight. We played with three and, as expected, each of us won majority in one type of figure, and then I won the tie-breaker by one. One of our players expressed his distaste for games with hidden trackable info upon the teach, which this does have, but I’ve not felt that to be a big issue in any of my games, including this one. Maybe I just don’t tend to play with folks with amazing memories so guesstimating is par for the course.
The Fox in the Forest, a win against my wife! A rare treat. Her tutoring is paying off it would seem…
Regicide, we were taken out by the third king, which felt like a fair effort (we really lacked spades in the back half of the game, which hurt us a lot).
Roll Through the Ages:The Bronze Age x2, my wife insisted on multiple plays of this one. It’s still pretty fun. Not my favourite roll and write by any stretch, but holds up as a fairly breezy dice game.
I just assumed that was a Friedemann Friese game until I looked it up.
I didn’t realise until now how thoroughly he’d occupied that particular alliteration in my mind. What if another 25 designers have the same idea?
Designer #26: “Oh darn. Um. Xanthic xerography?”
By the prolific designer Xander Xavier.
Been consistently playing lots of Tigers and Pots on BGA. It’s just the best, and I need a physical copy of it in a painful way.
Have actually had opportunities to get games to an actual table for a change. Taught my partner Everdell then lost to her. She really enjoyed the combo and resource aspects, so I’m looking at introducing her to some other worker placement games.
She’s also turned out to be a massive talent at The Quest for El Dorado and Cubitos. The woman can’t be beaten even when my stepdaughter and I do everything we can to bottleneck her. She really likes the deck/bag/pool-building, so I’m going to see if Orleans clicks with her so I can actually play again someone for once.
Enjoyed some JotL together. She dug it well enough, but much prefers competition unless the co-op is mystery/puzzle-solving. Probably going to move through the rest of the campaign solo. She’s been enjoying things with more complexity so I introduced her to Root, which she loved because she can both be an army of cats AND ruthlessly come after everyone, and does she ever enjoy the conflict. I’m thinking something like Kemet or Undaunted might be enjoyable for her, but the themes might not be as gripping.
Got a couple games of Rap Gods in. Always a fun set of stories that come out of it.
Had a fun solo games day yesterday finally winning a game of Maquis (think it was my 14th game of it). Beat my previous record in Three Sisters with 95 points. Still exploring strategies and I’m pretty sure the ceiling is wayyyy higher. Capped it off with a win in Root as the lizard cult against clockwork cats and birds.
My Nerdz Day purchases finally came in, so I think we’re going to give both Royal Visit & Paris, LA Cité de la Lumiere shots tonight.
A reprint has been confirmed apart from we don’t know which publisher
This made me audibly squeal.
The six year old is really getting the hang of this boardgame thing. Big Big City, 2 players. He lost to me but the game has some presence at the end.
We were supposed to have some friends over for brunch, but my partner was lacking the energy… they came over later in the day for a much shorter visit, but I managed to sneak in a few low-energy games we all enjoyed.
Crossing, which remains one of the nicest, most clever little games with the dumbest name ever. With 4 players it’s more low key (definitely better with 5-6), but it was still a neat little point-and-take game. I’m continually stunned that it doesn’t seem to still be in print. Played twice, and I won the first and came last the second time.
Diamant/Incan Gold, which was lovely. I really wish they made Diamant available in North America because gosh is it ever pretty. I also wish it included the Treasure mechanic from the original, but I’m happy to give that up for just how beautiful it is. Won the first game, came in last the second.
No Thanks!, which was really nice. Won the first… and came in last the second.
It was nice! I kinda wish we could’ve played something a little meatier, but hey, Andy didn’t think she could handle people at all, so this was a win in many ways.
My wife and I are spending the long week-end (and the end of my leave, I’m going back to work on Tuesday and I DON’T WANNA!!! 
)
Internet is BARELY a thing here, so we brought a few games. So far, we’ve played:
Click Clack Lumberjack. This is exactly the kind of silly fun I was hoping for. It’s ridiculous and childish and gleeful. Wouldn’t have paid more than $10 for it, but good news, I didn’t! This could wind up being a hit with more people/children.
Patchwork. A classic, still one of our absolute favourites. We played a best-2-out-of-3 series, which I won 2-1.
Rococo Deluxe. Our second game, which I won again. Closer scores this time, though. Starting to see more of the strategies involved. I stand by everything I said after our first game, it’s wonderful and we’re having a blast, but in a vacuum, it’s a good deal too expensive for what it is.
We’ll see what the evening and tomorrow bring. We also have The Game, Everdell and Great Western Trail.
Update: We have now played Great Western Trail. Still absurdly good. Game was insanely tight, it finished 103-101 for me.
Innovation 2-player: I had a strong start achieving in the medieval, classical, and renaissance eras, only for my opponent to catapult all the way to the romance era, after which I was mostly playing catch-up. Ended with some crazy last-ditch information-era shenanigans that didn’t prevent him from hoovering up all the other achievements.
Glory to Rome teaching game with 5 players: first time playing at this count, and it was as chaotic as expected. The winner got all the stone for a very impressive slew of high-value buildings.
Race for the galaxy teaching game with 4 players: novelty trading extravaganza. Maybe the first time I’ve had a free trade network and consumer markets working at full capacity for a truly sickening amount of points.
High Society teaching game with 4 players: the high scorer was the loser, which is always entertaining.
The Crew teaching game with 5 players: fun times as another new crew stumbled through the learning process. The “must win a trick with a 1” mission was our biggest hurdle, and there was much rejoicing when we finally cleared it.
I love it when you have games that go off the rails like this. Largely because the game lets you run it for a couple of rounds before ending.
My wife’s older brother visited yesterday, so we showed him Quacks of Quedlinburg. Just played with set 1, as it is pretty simple. Went over well, but I kept forgetting to do rat tails after the card draw for a couple of turns. We were all just ready to start drawing chips. Had to mulligan a couple of things, but overall it flowed smoothly.
I came in last, my wife just ahead of me, her visiting older brother ahead of her, with her younger brother (the one who usually plays with us) as the winner with 51 points.
This evening at Local Game Group:
