Today at Slightly Less Local Boardgame Group:
How did Homeland go?
Very well. I was the mole, but got successfully accused; a Loyal Agent won with a huge pile of Rep. Everyone seem to have had a good time.
I have thoughts on this that largely overlap with @Benkyo. Alien Artifacts without Orb is a perfect, svelte deck. Due to its shufflability and overall quality, it’s my most frequently played style but not necessarily my favorite.
Orb itself is amazing, in my unusual opinion. But it plays best at higher player counts… which also makes it take a long time… which is hard for a game like Race… so net net it rarely gets played despite how much I enjoy it. It’s an odd duck in the end.
Xeno Invasion is my second favorite bolt on. 100% with Benkyo that this deck should be played WITH the module, as there are too many cards that specifically integrate with the module’s mechanics. It plays best at higher player counts, as at that end of the spectrum one or two people can still try to play produce-consume. Generally, and at lower player counts, you are forced to go Military. It’s fun and interesting, but due to the way it corrals you into, and rewards you for, a specific engine, it ends up being an “alternative” take on RFTG rather than a standard mode. I need it regularly, but after a few rounds I end up hungry for standard Race again.
Here’s where I really diverge, though - Base + GS + RvI is my least favorite way to play. That + Brink of War is my favorite, though you need to be digital or have a card shuffler to make it feasible. The full Arc 1 exactly doubles the original deck, and BoW pulls in multiple “alternate takes” of key cards from the base game. E.g., the base game has a 6-development that awards you for running a blue engine. GS and RvI dilute the deck, making it harder to find it when you need it. BoW introduces a second one, different take so it provides some variety, but it also brings the odds of getting the right 6-dev for your engine back into balance. This is true for a big portion of the BoW cards. So I find the final result to have the variety of the expansions but the dependability of the base game.
I also prefer Prestige to Goals, as I find they can similarly offer little incentives for deviating from your planned course, adding some tension to what used to be routine decisions. Sometimes you get a runaway winner, but in my experience it is rare.
Takeaway: Alien Artifacts is great and super practical if you are playing IRL. Xeno is the mouth freshener that provides a superb “alternate universe” take on Race, but isn’t necessary and will never become the primary game mode. Brink of War - give it a try. You may never come back. Get a card shuffler.
I have played 2-player games of this where it made sense to go to -1 military first, in order to not be on the receiving end of the worst of the invasion, to have a better shot at defence, and to get 2 VP instead of 1 VP on a successful defence.
Even the player with the military lead is more likely to run into those “current military +X” invasions, so +xeno defence can be more handy than pushing military strength.
So no, I don’t agree that you are forced to go military. As long as you are ahead on points, both players getting overrun by the xeno twice is just another way to end the game early and win.
(I also want to note that I also like the Orb - on re-reading, I didn’t realise my dry mechanical assessment above might imply otherwise)
These are the moves I’ve tried to pull off but always end up ground into dust!
I had the pleasure of @lalunaverde’s company and a third player yesterday and we started off with a game of 1830. Was really nice to play this most influential title of the series. Thoroughly enjoyed it too! Made some silly beginner route mistakes and managed to again fall in to my pattern of overly managing my own stuff and not maximising revenue with cross investing so while I came out best on the train rush it’s all for nought as I was too far behind at that stage anyway. Possibly could have done some stuff next turn to maximise my position but the bankruptcy showed the correct result.
As this game was a fairly sprightly 4 hours we had time to try Tokyo Metro’s Osaka Metro expansion. First play was a bit disappointing. It’s really quite different so a second play may open it up a bit but I’m not sure yet. It seemed to lack some of the punch and interaction of the base set of action space cards and quite often I had workers who felt pretty boring/pointless. I won by a lot and it felt pretty easy without the cut and thrust that should have pulled me back seen without the expansion. Will try again hoping I’m wrong but more keen to try the base game actions on the new map.
Lastly we played Tindahan that @lalunaverde brought round. I thoroughly enjoyed it! Winning handily helped probably but I liked the clever timing aspects. A real good chunk of tempo considerations interacted with the best bits of trick taking sequencing and being cognisant of what others were doing and probable hand make ups of opponents so I’d give it a top tier trick taking rating. For me Anansi and Stick ‘Em are up there and this could join them with a few more plays.
Yeah. Same thoughts with Osaka Metro
Good game of 1830 and Tindahan. I bought the right shares that give the best payouts, even if someone else owns them, and sold them at the right time. Gave me the money to buy more shares, which gave me more money to buy more shares.
Although I have made a big mistake on buying into one company. Fortunately, I manage to get away with that mistake.
Had another go at Curse of the Rougarou scenario for Arkham Horror TCG and failed yet again. Honestly, I did worse this time, despite having a better start. I was able to advance the act on the second round, but was never able to engage the rougarou. While Daisy was off gathering clues, Nathaniel kept getting engaged by monsters. And despite his high fight value, there were still times where I’d draw a nasty token from the chaos bag, missing, so he’d end up getting attacked. There are also a number of encounters that do damage if you fail a test, by the amount you fail by, which is what ultimately took out Nathaniel. Daisy resigned the next turn, having no chance at all of killing the beast.
So just a combination of bad token draw and bad order of encounter cards really did me in here.
Had our usual Crew crew over to play a different trick taking game: my newly-acquired Cat in the Box (deluxe edition). This is a game where the cards have no suit until observed - only when you play a card do you declare what suit it is and place one of your markers on the board to indicate that.
But of course, only one copy of each card (suit and rank combination) is in the deck, right? So if all the 3s have been played and you have a 3 in your hand, you’re not going to be able to play that without causing a PARADOX!!! Which is bad and you don’t want it to happen.
Another way to cause a paradox is if you early on claimed to be out of, say, green cards (so that you could trump a green trick), but then the end of the round is nearing, and the cards you have in your hand are only still in the deck for green cards. You done goofed.
So what are you trying to do while avoiding a paradox? At the start of a round you bid a number of tricks, and at the end of a round (either all the tricks are played or someone causes a paradox and ends the round immediately) you get one point for each trick, PLUS — if and only if you made your bid —points for your largest area on the card-marking grid. So big incentives to try and make a big area there.
But if you cause a paradox, you don’t get anything but shame. In fact, you lose a point for every trick you won.
Our verdict? Very fun twist on trick taking. If you bid high and make it you’re in for big points, but most likely you’re going to have to go out in a suit pretty early in order to trump a trick, setting yourself up for a rocky path later in the round. If you’ve got a hand of low cards, you probably won’t get more than 1 trick, but if you bid that and make it you can get a big area from all your 2s and 3s and 4s for big points. A lot of different paths to take, and a lot of decisions on the cards to play because of the carrot and stick structure of the incentives.
Damn I want my copy of Cat in the Box to arrive
Last night played Star Wars: Rebellion as a 4 player team game. It was odd, it was basically in an attempt to head hunt me to switch job. So one person wasn’t so engaged in the game but the other not so much of a gamer struggled to stay involved deeply.
Reminded me that the game is quite interesting, first blush the Empire are more straight forward to play. In some ways I’d be interested to play enough to see how the Rebels can win. Presumably there must be something in there but I haven’t seen it yet. Problem is so far it’s not quite engaging enough to really want to play it enough to know properly what the Rebels can do.
Oh wow… I don’t know whether I could get that to the table, but I really want it.
I want to play Rebellion again now. Well, maybe after I’m fully recovered from Covid.
My experience with it seems to be that whichever side I’m not has the easiest path to victory! Playing as the Rebels is about fulfilling missions that push the time and notoriety (I don’t think that’s what the other marker is called) markers together and eating into the Empire player’s time. Also small strikes that tie down a leader.
I think its one of, if not the most thematic games I’ve played - if the Rebel player does the stuff that Luke, Han and Leia would do in a film then they’re probably doing well. I’ve no idea how it would hold up if you weren’t totally invested in the Universe though.
Cool way to be head hunted!
I’ve played Hero Realms once, and it shows how much theme affects me - I enjoy Star Realms, and Hero Realms is very nearly the same mechanics, but dressing it in generic-fantasy rather than generic-sci-fi removes almost all the fun for me.
Interestingly, I picked up Hero Realms mostly for the solo/co-op content (which I still haven’t explored because the rulebooks are… not great)
We decided that Hero Realms was good but we did not love it as much as we loved Star Realms. I have Cthulhu realms but have only ever played it on the App.
Just tried out Ghost Spider against the basic Rhino villain in Marvel Champions.
It started out well, as I got him down to 1 HP by the second turn. However, I felt like I just ran into a wall shortly after that as I kept getting hammered by the encounter deck. I hit him again to get him to his second form, which brought out a side scheme which makes you draw an extra encounter card each villain phase, and immediately I got Confused by one of those encounter cards the next phase. I wanted to Thwart to get rid of the Confusion, but it seemed more prudent to take out a minion I was engaged with instead.
Then another side scheme came out which prevented me from removing threat from the main scheme, so that became top priority. Thanks to a couple of cards that let me heal and ready my hero, I was able to get rid of the Confused status and get rid of that side scheme, but the main scheme was now dangerously close to losing.
I finally got her dad in play, who can hold event cards as if they were in your hand, but then I immediately drew the Obligation card, which took him out of play. Rhino kept attacking me, Sandman came into play, I was forced to discard the one upgrade I had managed to get out. I was never able to finish off taking out the other side scheme, so I was getting hit by encounter cards twice each villain phase, and it was just overwhelming. Finally a card gave Rhino a second attack on me which I couldn’t defend because I had been forced to defend the first attack, so I died.
Ghost Spider can be very strong, as the beginning of the game showed, but her best cards require her to perform a basic action, and her ability which lets her ready herself requires a Response or Interrupt event card to be played, which I had at the beginning, but then I could not get one to save my life.
In any event, I’m going to go ahead and play two handed Miles Morales and Ghost Spider and start the Sinister Motives campaign. Should be fun!
Not heaps of games over the last couple of weeks but there were some:
Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age x6 (!), these games were all with my wife, who was on a bit of a kick of this one. It’s fun, good mix of fun decisions and dice rolling. I do think there are better roll and write games thesedays but this one is still tactile and fun and easy to grasp.
The Fox in the Forest, my wife won this one, but I definitely put up more of a fight than I used to be able to 
.
Fleet: The Dice Game x2, two solo games of this with one good score and one pretty bad one.
Space Marine Adventures: Labyrinth of the Necrons, a buddy brought this one over for us to have a crack at. It was okay, we did really badly though and ran out of time before anyone had escaped. There are definitely better co-op dungeon crawls but it wasn’t awful. And pretty short playtime too.
IS:Empires of the North, a two player game of this (which is probably my favourite player count for this game), Ulaf clan vs Nanurjuk clan. It was close, but I took a little too long to figure out/remember how the Nanurjuk work (I think I’ve played them once), which hurt my engine building. Ulaf remains probably the strongest clan for beginners I’d say - it’s pretty easy to figure them out and do well with them. The Mackinnon clan are still my personal fave though. I think the Heidel remain unplayed in my copy so far, so I’ll probably grab them next time. It’s a fun little engine building card game. I do kinda wish there was an expansion just of extra islands to add though, as you tend to get through them pretty quick, and I’m fairly uninterested in the new factions - so many interesting northern cultures they could have implemented and they went back to the 4 from Imperial Settlers?! Weird decision but whatever. I’m pretty happy with the base game anyway (sans the island issue).
