i backed the third one. couldn’t help it.
those roads though…
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This is the road to nowhere… 
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We had a quiet Friday Night Games yesterday (I think people were recovering from our Con in Napier)
Played an initial game of 7 Wonders Architects between 3, which is easy enough to play, not so much to win, at least not for me. We followed that with Ghost Blitz, in which I came a narrow second, followed by Ghost Blitz 2, which I won. I must admit that for a simple game, the logic deduction under pressure to be the first to pick either the odd item out, or the right item, ended up making my brain hurt.
So when a fourth person joined and Buildtz was proposed, I said, yes, I can do with a dexterity game now as a break. I won one of 4 games of Tetris Jenga Inversed, and then we played Cards Against Humanity. Which I must admit I won… Witty answers gave the win.
We closed with another game of 7 Wonder Architects between 4, at which I didn’t win despise being the first to finish the wonder… As I said, easy to play, but not easy to win, at least for me…
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Beautiful day here, so I played some games outside. I managed to get the colour+pattern double for all three of my Calico goals, plus a rainbow tile, so that was highly satisfying (70 points). Then I reminded myself how Ticket To Ride: London works, hoping to maybe convince my partner to try that when they got home. No luck there, but we played some Hive instead, so that was alright. The boys both wanted to get in on the activities, too.
Later in the day, Newton Poemoor won the Village Green of the Year competition with what I’m naming the Columns Of Consistency.
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what a lovely day of gaming you had😃 it sounds very relaxing
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Played a couple of games of 3000 scoundrels at 2 player. I’m not sure it’s a good two player game and might be better at more but it’s hard to see it.
The game has this weird rhythm where you can top out the bulk of your points really early in the game so for a large part of your time you just go through the motions.
The iconic feature of swapping cards and creating new cards is kind of fun but a bit fiddly and doesn’t feel that exciting. Perhaps it’s a bit too random.
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Through the Desert
Scout - on one of the rounds, I played a 6-card set and feel absolutely smug. 
Voodoo Prince aka Marshmallow Test - trick taking Knizia of trying to pull out of a round at the right time. Basically you don’t want to be last. It was a subpar experience at 3 players though
Cat in the Box
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Another game of Everdell with my wife, who wanted one more base game play before we start looking at expansions. Very few end game bonus cards came out, and neither of us got any of the special events. That said, my wife got much better combo cards in the long run than I did. I had almost passed to end my game play by the time she did her prepare for season going into autumn. So it should be no surprise that she won, 62 - 51.
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Yesterday we played Brass: Lancashire for the first time in a while. It was a very close run thing between my all in on cotton mills strategy and our friend’s shipyards.
Followed up with a couple of games of Tiny Towns. Much easier on the brain than Brass!
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So would I. I have had a copy of the game for a bit but I have yet to play. Watched some people play in Essen.
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You have the big box as well. The harvesters / gatherers… was there anything in there somewhere to tell you how many of those should be in the main deck? Because I think I mixed in all of them: the regular ones, the named ones and the blanks and I feel like that is not right but didn‘t see anything that I shouldn‘t have done that.
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Today I taught myself Rallyman GT and ran some solo single laps on the first of the suggested track layouts (slowest lap 3:03 after a loss of control; fastest lap 2:05, screaming over the line with no focus tokens remaining and rolling for 6th gear with two “!” results already rolled).
The rule book is a bit of a mixed bag – it’s really very good for the most part, yet still left a number of things unclear. Hilariously, one of the very first set-up instructions/recommendations is to start your first game with “the Asphalt tires” – which left me staring at two near-identical and completely unlabelled cards, one of which was presumably “Asphalt tires” and the other of which was… Not-Asphalt tires (“rain tires” it turns out – as “rain” and “asphalt” are apparently in the same category). The cards did each have a picture of the tire in question, and they both look very much like tires. As far as I can tell, the author of the manual expects all readers to know and visually distinguish the tread of an “Asphalt tire” at a glance! Later in the manual it explains the difference using copies of those pictures which are so tiny that it’s even harder to see any difference between them. There is finally some text describing the rest of the card, which makes it clear enough, and once you know you know, but I find it incredible that they didn’t come up with any kind of iconography for this – especially when there actually is an icon above the picture… an icon which genuinely is identical on every tire card, and has no use in the game. Absolutely bonkers.
While I found the process of planning and playing each turn quite enjoyable – and that best-time finish mentioned above was a little fist-pump moment – I’m not certain that this is something I’m going to be pulling out much for solo play. I can envisage this being good fun when coping with and reacting to other players; but when your only opponent is the track I think it may be too much effort setting up for not enough variety or reward. I do think I need to play some longer multi-lap games though – otherwise every lap is going to start out the same way, which is clearly less interesting.
Unfortunately there’s enough going on rules-wise that the multi-player teach is probably going to be a little harder than I’d like for a game of this type. It’s both simple and fiddly at the same time, and some of the thematic disconnects may cause some confusion. Nothing too dramatic, but I think it’s enough to limit the audience.
There’s a local gaming convention coming up this month, however, and I think that’s going to be a good opportunity to see this in its best light; so I’m planning to take it along and set it up and see if I can attract a bunch of enthusiasts!
Thanks, dice.
(And yes, I put one of the Coast dice on the wrong side of the track.)
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You will be unsurprised to learn that I’m working on an unofficial rulebook. 
I think the idea was to make the cards language-neutral, but the tread is the only thing distinguishing the tyre pictures and it can be hard to make out. For the TTS mod I added text in English and French.
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Could you then move onto updating the rulebook for Formula 1?
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Not sure I’ve ever played it, which would make it harder.
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I look forward to it : )
FYI another thing I struggled to confirm was which gear I was in for the purposes of establishing the loss-of-control outcome. In the above photo I started in 4th and tried to brake down to 1st and immediately lost control; and at this point I realised I had no idea which line I should be reading on the LOC table. I eventually decided that I should be reading off the 1st gear line, but I couldn’t find a clear statement of this anywhere.
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One of the reasons I fell out of love with it.
I purchased some sleeves and Sharpie-d (for there is no other brand) WET and DRY on the cards
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That’s correct - it was an early FAQ. If you LoC in a space with brake dice, you use the gear die that’s there, the speed you were braking to.
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This comes down to how you rearrange your dice in a loss of control. You have the ability to swap dice to some degree to manipulate exactly when the LoC occurs (ONLY when it occurs), allowing you to (potentially) lose control in a lower gear.
This is all to say that you lose control based on the gear you’d have been in when the LoC control happened (specifically, the third hazard).
[EDIT] Didn’t notice the multi-brake qualifier. Looks like Roger got it anyway.
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In this instance I was rolling dice one-at-a-time (well, space-by-space), and you only get to rearrange dice after a LoC if you had rolled them all at once.
The brakes certainly confused matters further, but I would actually have had the same question without them – when you’ve lost control and the die face isn’t displaying a gear number (because it’s showing a hazard sign) then did you change gears before losing control or not? I concluded “yes” mostly on the basis that if you roll a hazard but haven’t yet lost control then it’s necessary that the gear-change took place, so it was consistent to assume the same thing for loss-of-control; but it’s still the sort of thing which would be nice to have stated clearly.
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