That’s the phrase I was looking for. Thanks!
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I have not had the chance to get into the cards themselves yet, so I am not 100% certain about the cards you are referring to. I thought the named cards were Legendary ones, which are kept out of the main deck in two separate piles, one for critters and one for constructions. Then if using them, each player gets one from each stack dealt to them at the beginning on the game, which does not count towards the hand limit.
I see nothing about the blanks in the rulebook, though remember seeing something about them. Maybe it was on the contents sheet, or just the KS page. Not certain.
Considering the seasonal Farm cards, which replace the base ones already in the deck, I would lean towards replacement instead of addition in regards to the blank cards. I have nothing else in the rules to back that up, though. Mostly, I think you just don’t want to throw the card distribution off too much, as it is already hard to come across certain cards in such a big deck.
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I have kept those separate. If there is anything that version needs is a better description about how to organise the cards. I am pretty sure they might be from one of the expansions, but I still have not read those through fully yet.
EDIT:
I had a quick look on the BGG Forum, this seems to explain it well
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Some 2p gaming yesterday
Village Rails, first play. This is a competitive game of laying rail tracks. Your play area is a four by three grid, so you will play 12 cards in total, and seven lines. Every turn you must play a track card. There are always seven track cards to choose from. The one farthest away from the deck is free, but if you choose any other you have to place a coin on each card up to it. On the other side of the track card is a trip, which is a condition you can put on a line for extra points. For example, you may score points for having all straight tracks. There are always four trip cards to choose from, and the farthest one is free, just like the track cards. But it will cost you three pounds to play a trip card. Playing a trip card is optional. You score a line when it’s completed, meaning a track runs from a border piece to an edge of your tableau. When you complete a line, you play one of your terminus cards, which give you money for having certain features on the line, like barns, or particular terrain types. There are five different terrain types. Even if you have none of the required features, you still get three pounds, so you can get enough to play a trip card. I guess this game doesn’t do anything too amazing, but it’s pretty good fun. It’s published by Osprey Games, so it’s available on book depository with free shipping.
The Battle at Kemble’s Cascade. This is a pretty unique game that is based on a shoot em video game, like Galaxian, 1942, and no doubt hundreds more. The bad guys are placed in rows, at 2p the rows are three cards wide, and cards show up to two enemies or obstacles. After your turn the rows scroll down, so the bottom row disappears, and a new row is added. If you’re on the bottom row when it scrolls off, you are automatically moved up, which could be a bad thing. You also gain threat, which based on enemies shooting at you. As you move, you lose threat, which eventually costs you energy (if you run out you explode). There are all the things you expect from a shooter, like powerups, shopping for better gear, and of course a big nasty boss at the end. You can upgrade your weapons and equipment as well. It’s good fun!
Slide Quest, we wanted something quick and easy. This is a dexterity game, where you have to guide the knight through the maps. There are four levers, each one tilting the game board in a direction. We played 2p, so had two levers each. Levels can have traps to avoid, or guards you have to drop into the traps, or dynamite which kills you if you knock it over. Or all of the above. Lots of fun.
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Today is “officially” Canadian Thanksgiving.
For our European friends: a day where we celebrate both the intentional and accidental genocide our settlers inflicted on the Indigenous peoples by consuming vast quantities of food.
Since a handful of my friends are on… difficult… terms with our parents (I include myself among that number), we often host or attend a meal with people we love that we’re not related to. In this case my friend Adam in Toronto (you know… Adam… from Toronto… sorry, a tiny bit of Canadian humour… Canadians travelling abroad are often asked “if we know (Person X) in (Canadian City)”) invited a bunch of us over for a big lunch of Moroccan chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, veg, pasta with cheese sauce, stuffing, asparagus, apple pie, chocolate cake, and vanilla ice cream.
And he asked me to bring games… so I did!
We played Mysterium Park first, which bewildered me. Not because the game is complicated (it’s not), but because Adam wanted to be the ghost and then just… couldn’t… quite… grasp how the game worked? I think he’s played Mysterium before and so had some expectations that the game would be different, and therefore the changes threw him for a loop.
We lost. Badly: we had 1 turn to try and guess all the Locations, and we didn’t get one right (including one player guessing the Witness, relocating, and still getting the wrong location).
I may trade him my copy of Mysterium for his copy of Mysterium Park. It’s just legit better, faster, cleaner, and makes more sense, so his confusion confuses me. Ah well! Different strokes for different folks and all that.
After that we played a game of Sushi Go Party which, despite me knowing the rules backwards and forwards, got off to a rocky start but smoothed out by the end of the first round. Everyone but my partner had fun: Andy has a thing where she really hates putting effort into something and it not paying off at all (so, for example, collecting a few Maki and then not getting any points, or playing a wasabi and never seeing another Nigiri card). Realizing that I would only be playing with Andy for the near future anyway, I gave it to one of the other couples there as a housewarming gift (they just bought a condo in Toronto, which means they’re filthy rich because housing in Toronto is expensive like you would not believe).
Wanted to play another game, but ran out of time and had to return home. Ah well. We’ll have another game day at some point.
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Another game of Everdell, this one using the components of the Complete Collection, and trying out Bellfaire. Also, my brother-in-law joined us.
Bellfaire is a pretty simple expansion, adding another basic event where you can take it after building a card of each type for 4 points, the Garland Achievements, which give bonus points at endgame to the player with the most and second-most something (in our game, it was purple cards), and then the Market. The Market is the most complex piece, involving four tokens, one for each resource type, which start in the Gain area of the Market. When you place a worker there, you choose one of the tiles, get the resources and card draws shown, then move it to the Trade area. A player can then place a worker and return those goods to the supply and discard the shown number of cards to gain 3 points and 2 of any resources, then move the tile back to the Gain area. There are also some new Forest and Special Event cards to shuffle into those decks.
I was not feeling too confident as we played, as every season, I was the first to prepare for the next season. But I did manage to get some good combos late in the game, like a free Ever Tree by using the Cemetery, and then using it again (since I had an Undertaker) tonget a Clock Tower so that I could claim a special event the next turn, which gave me back one of my workers. Also got two pairs of Harvesters and Gatherers.
My brother-in-law has not played as much, so kinda rushed filling in his city, so only managed 54 points. My wife had a lot of bonuses with her own Ever Tree, a Palace, a Castle, and a King, but only managed one event, so wound up with 72 points. I managed to squeeze ahead of that for the win with 75.
Next up: Spirecrest!
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We played a game of Everdell using the base game components only, with my 6 yo joining my better half on one team, my 10 yo and then myself in a game of three sides. After a short teach (that’s something I like about this game) we got going. Besides a couple of times where I had to remind them that they could place down critters if they had the building without paying the cost of the card, it went quite well. Team mum and daughter won at 28 points, I was second at 26, and my eldest was third at 25. We were all quite constrained by pebbles, so the buildings became really tricky to pay for, specially when mines took a while to appear.
What I really liked was how my better half went: “Hmmm… I like this game”. She may have a new game to beat me at other than Splendor…
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On Saturday night I got pulled into a game of Findorff - not at all my usual sort of thing, but a lot more thematic than it appeared, and I even placed 3/5. It certainly helps that in spite of its intimidating appearance it plays quite quickly.
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I finally got to play one of my new acquisitions… Stellarion. I lost on the last „voyage“. I think I like this one better than Aerion which I sold. I only realized this time that these are just modern versions of the elaborate patience games I used to play when I was younger—I used to have a book of different solo card games and I still have that special deck of small cards used for those.
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Kind of tempted by Findorf! I like that it has the supply/demand type thing from power grid.
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That’s brown. Wow.
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Where does the board end and the table begin?
I like the look of it – it looks very clean and readable, and I find maps appealing.
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My wife and I ended up playing Everdell with the Spirecrest expansion last night. Unquestionably, I had had better luck overall than she did.
So Spirecrest adds an exploration trail, which you progress along right after you Prepare for Season. It also adds a seasonal weather element that affects everyone in that season, randomly selected from three catds for each season. When the first person Prepares for Season, they will reveal the next weather card and they will start being affected by that one, leaving the old one behind. For instance, our winter card made it so that we could not play on forest locations. When I Prepared for Season, I revealed the spring weather card, which prevented me from playing cards from the Meadow.
The exploration bit adds map tiles and destination cards. The map tiles show some combination of resources and cards, and then a point value. When you Prepare for Season, you take one of these tiles and place it to the right of any tiles you already have. At the end of the game, you can go from left to right, paying the resources and discarding cards to gain the points shown, until you get to the end or you cannot pay, and have to stop.
You also draw three destination cards, which have varying effects. There are big critters, which replace one of your workers but give it a special ability, extra endgame points, ongoing effects, locations where players can deploy a worker, and immediate, oneztime effects. The topmost card you can take for free, the next costs one resource or discard a card, and the third costs two resources/discards or one of each. You only get to take one and the other two are placed on the bottom of the deck, meaning the next player along will not see those cards.
So, that’s the extent of the expansion. Now, I got lucky because I had better options from my destination cards than my wife did. The last ones weren’t the best, but I had two big critters by the end of the game, and the cards that came out in the meadow (and a 3 card extension that my wife got) chained very well for me, which allowed me to get a 9 point special event right before the end of the game.
As such, I won 78 - 53. I liked the additions. The weather always threw a bit of a wrench into things, and getting the map pieces and destination cards was a nice bonus.
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It was described as “the most power grid like game I know that isn’t power grid” (but I have never played PG so I couldn’t say).
The map part of the board is barely relevant - the rail lines are progress tracks only, almost all the structure discs that go on those spaces are purely decorative, and if you run out of places to put houses you just put them anywhere.
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Every time I see your scores I think I am doing something wrong, I barely ever have gone over 40, with my average being 30 ish… Then again, I have mostly played between 3 or 4…
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Made by 2F-Spiele. I had a try with their other stuff like Free Ride and Black Friday and it’s all very green and very beige 
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My second solo attempt, first win. So. Many. Bits.
Not really a solo game, probably won’t play it this way again. Looking forward to my first real game of JoCo this weekend, with people who have played before(!!)
Depicted: the bot controlled the entire financial side of the company and had a huge stake in its success. I controlled all the armies, and although they had to go where the bot said, I could deploy them to loot India for my own gain, while my governors and commanders hired more armies to ratchet up costs to drive the company to financial ruin.
The directors and Parliament were blamed for the company’s failure, and I managed to get more cushy retirements than the bot, so a win for me.
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It is hard to say without watching you play a game. I don’t think player count matters that much in regards to the scores, as no one can rush the end game in this. It just makes the exclusive spaces a bit harder to get to.
The one mistake I could see that would definitely impact your score is the purple prosperity cards. You are scoring them at the end of the game, not right when you play them, right?
Otherwise, just try to get a purple card or two in play and do your best to focus on the things for which they give you bonus points. Try to get a few events, basic or special. Make the most of the card combos you can manage.
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I think I am not the best at managing combos, don’t take it as a criticism to you, but to myself.
The last few games I have played the market was very limited on pebbles, and that limited options very quickly. Also I noticed on two out of those three games I was very limited by how many critters I was getting against buildings, and the building cards disappearing from the meadow really quickly. That definitely was putting a damper on the possible avenues to score high.
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So for 2 days, or 2 and a half I felt like shit. Today, the fever is down and I was well enough to think about games I could play while in bed and while Stellarion yesterday was fine, playing Terraforming Mars on the app 3 times wasn‘t enough either. So… thanks to @EnterTheWyvern who asked @RogerBW to get him a copy of Horizons of Spirit Island from Spiel and Roger who insisted that they would still have copies Thursday afternoon—so much stuff was sold out around 10:30 I had not even bothered to look—I got my copy of Horizons of Spirit Island.
And I love it. It‘s awesome because… it‘s travel-Spirit Island: small compact box (unlike my horrifying untransportable wooden mega box that seems to weigh a ton) and because it has a 1 piece board I can actually set it up with a way smaller footprint than normal Spirit Island. So I kicked out my partner to set up a game on his half of the bed:
(Uhm he had moved out because covid…)
It is not exactly mega comfortable and I had to lie down every few rounds to take a break but it worked, as opposed to the normal game. Sure it lacks all the complicated parts but it does better at transporting the feeling of Spirit Island than the app.
One could easily add a few markers and cards from the big game to this and add other spirits if one wanted to take this to a friends house. (The other side of the board has a 3 player island—Target has obviously recognized that 4 player Spirit Island is an endeavor best left to the fever dreams of certain SI nerds)
I can‘t say a lot about the Spirits yet as I have only tried these two. The left is „Sunbright Whirlwind“ who gets to push around invaders a lot which is neat but not helpful killing stuff sometimes. And „Eyes Watching from Trees“ who gets to defend but also doesn‘t kill stuff that is not attacking right now… so I had one pesky city left over in a corner of the map and it took me a whole turn and getting lucky on a new major power to remove it (Talons Of Lightning is a classic game finisher I think).
So yay to playing Spirit Island—everywhere.
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