Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

After being reminded about how much I enjoy Millenium Blades, I played it again today! Great fun, possibly far too many cards to do anything other than get a headache. The only thing I’d do differently is possibly always just play the pre-release variant. 3 deck building phases, with each giving 12 extra cards (plus a whole bunch more bought and traded) is a lot.

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Just reporting a couple of games yesterday played with the children. First 3 rounds of Flipology with the little one, where she is more interested in getting kittens and doggies and koalas and cute animals than anything else.

Then we had a game of Love Letter where I was teaching the little one on my lap against my eldest. She kicked our ass big time to start with, and we managed to level up towards the end, but she won the last round plus got a Spy, so no doubts she was happy for the rest of the morning.

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IT’S SO BEIGE AND BEAUTIFUL

Seriously, I remember “Fun Month” on SU&SD which was filled with colorful, well produced games that all got a “weeeellllllll…” and then a raving beige month. I look at my shelf and see Troyes, El Grande, Hansa Teutonica, Orleans, Burgundy OG, GWT 1e, and, to a certain extent, Grand Austria Hotel, just struck by how strong these Beige Boys are.

On Orleans in particular - in the past I passed on Altiplano. Seemed nice but halfway through I just felt like I was grinding gears, turning a crank that usually didn’t have the pieces I was looking for. Orleans started much stronger in that I felt like I was building something and picking up speed. Later game I still felt like I was grinding gears and frequently taking a “consolation turn” doing something that I could do rather than something that I wanted to do.

I suspect this may be an issue of competence rather than design…

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I love Orleans. it’s a master game. Altiplano won’t scratch the itch of it.

The big issue with Orleans (for me and I why I parted with it) is that it’s such a bother to set up. I hated putting all those squares out and it took just a little bit too long to squeeze into an evening after dinner in our house.

Still:

Wall fart.

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I got in some Halloween games—despite a big fat migraine oO
Also: no kids coming for the candy I bought. Luckily, I didn’t buy a lot and only stuff we will eat (although I had a piece and it was better in my memory).

  • I started with a round of Everdell + Bellfaire + Mistwood playing the bats vs the big spider and her minions. I won that round. It is a bit more involved as a solo mode. I like it but I think I have to reread the rules one more time. (This is also a possible third player in a 2 player game)
  • Then I played Spirit Island with the “Rituals of Terror” (see in the image) scenario and Shadow Flickers Like Flame and Grinning Trickster and also set myself a rule that I could only draft cards with the orange element (both spirits use that). It led to some weird card choices and the scenario is wild: You do not gain fear cards normally. But to get them and advance the terror level, a ritual can be enacted which needs 6 (3x2 players) Dahan in one land and you have to sacrifice 3 presence. Then you resolve all the gained fear cards at once. And then push all the Dahan to neighboring lands. Wild. Thematically fitting today.
  • Then I decided I had to play Railroad Ink Challenge with the Eldritch Rituals and it went quite badly. Never played with this special die before. Scored just over 70 points.
  • Finally, I got out Sub Terra in hopes of escaping the horror caves… but I didn’t. The exit was the last tile and I ran out of battery for my lights when there were still at least 10 tiles in the stack. The horrors had already got my leader. Need to play again to figure out a better strategy. I quite enjoyed the process but I could already see the loss coming 2/3s through the game. Ah well… next time I’ll surely escape (probably not, I’ve got a good loss percentage on this one)
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On Saturday we played Chinatown. My brother-in-law more or less ran away with it, getting $1.36m to my $1.2m and my wife’s $1.18m. He got two complete 5 tile businesses when my wife got one 6 tile. I managed to catch up a bit in the later rounds, but could not overcome that lead.

Then yesterday, my wife and I played Ethnos and she just demolished me, 129 - 89. She made good use of Centaurs and Wizards, and also pulled off more Troll tokens in both Ages we played, which just killed me. Also had Halflings and Merfolk.

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On Sunday (my last Sunday fully off until Xmas… yay working at a game store…) our “co-op” friends came up from St. Catherines to visit. Which means… Oathsworn!

I was worried that I like the game because of how expensive it is. But having completed Chapter 2 (and using the Boss Rules properly this time!), it was still a very satisfying experience. There is a lot of unnecessary “fiddle,” and a lot of the pieces are built to look impressive rather than to be really functional… but still. The story parts are well written (not great, but very competent) and the combat is tense and makes you feel both powerful and yet at risk.

The hero models are a point of contention… I don’t like how the arms keep falling off. Too loose. Thankfully, I have lots of time before we will get to play again, in which time I hope to magnetize at least the main arms.

After that we ate, and after that we played a game of Colt Express in which I got my teeth absolutely kicked in. Belle is the best bandit by a wide margin in large player games, but I have never gotten Tuco to work (as in I have never used his Bandit Power… a crying shame). Doc is probably my favourite… that one extra card is just consistently good, even if I’m full of lead (which I frequently am).

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Was hoping to get Mansions of Madness to the table, but since it was later I instead opted for Horrified to play something Halloween-y. Set up a standard three monster game, chosen randomly, and got Woflman, Invisible Man, and Frankenstein and the Bride. Inwas the Archaeologist, my wife was the Investigator, and her brother was the Courier.

Things started a little rough, with the Wolfman taking out the Courier really early, raising the Terror level to 1. However, despite getting attacked and losing items here and there, we did pretty good after that. I got a few locations for the Invisible Man, we had about half the ingredients for the Wolfman’s cure, and Frankenstein was getting pretty close to Humanity.

We lost a couple of villagers, but then finished the cure and eliminated the Wolfman in the same turn. We got two more locations for the Invisible Man and got those crazy lovebirds together, but the Monster deck was getting very thin.

And that was our downfall. We needed one item from the Institute to finish the Invisible Man’s requirements, but all of them had been used or discarded. When the discards got shuffled back into the bag, we only had a few turns remaining. Unfortunately we never drew another Institute tile, and we lost when the deck ran out.

Close game, just some bad luck lost it for us.

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The Invisible Man is a dick

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Stuff from the weekend.

7 Wonders Architects - Still fun

Let’s Make a Bus Route - First time on the London side, feels more open but still soon crowds up. Still my favourite Roll and Write

Quest for El Dorado: The Golden Temples - It’s different to regular Quest, I can see the criss-crossing having more interaction ultimately. Won this as my Mum made a tactical error and moved her explorers off a route that would have blocked me.

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I’ve banned Trolls from 2p games. They tend to make huge swings like that when it is zero sum.

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My wife and I just played our first game in our new condo! (If you don’t count cribbage which I don’t.)

We played Targi, which I really appreciate for its very straightforward turns that lead to really hard decisions. I started out getting a ton of resources and coins, but she was getting all the good tribe cards (and getting coins for free every time she went to the caravan), and by the end I was struggling to keep things going and she was raking it in. She completed her tableau in the last round and I had one space left, but I actually didn’t lose by too much, 41-34.

Next week we’ll be unpacked and cleaned up enough to have a game night.

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Sacrilege!

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Listen. I know it’s got a BGG page. I know it’s got an actual board. But it’s just not part of The Hobby™️. It’s too pure for that.

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Played Turncoats at lunchtime. 3 player, it’s bloody opaque. Love it though., not sure the other two players did though.

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Noria - it’s been a while so I forgot setup and some actions. It’s still pretty swell.

Go - played Go with a 3 Dan, and received some enlightenment. That is always good. Big improvement on succeeding plays

Fae/Clans

Tiny Towns - boring at high player count. I remember not being pleased at low player count as well.

6 Nimmt!

Obsession + Upstairs, Downstairs expansion - I have finally played this. This game is something I was interested in playing, rather than buying. Obsession is very cute and has a quaint theme. I was enjoying myself being thematically immersed at the start, but it got seriously boring by mid-game and I wasn’t having fun at that point. Lacking of any kind of personality, it is a soulless game once you scratch the surface. A small box card game of 6 Nimmt that preceded it has more charm.

Gloomhaven - played the scenario where we all start with 3 curses (aka misses), we kept missing! We won though, so it’s all good

Azul - I always play with the advanced board. Once I played it, I can’t go back to the basic one.

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Back to the boardgame café (Thirsty Meeples in Oxford) for the first time since December 2019.

  • Dice Hospital: ER – Emergency Roll – just close enough to DH to produce some false friends (e.g. there are blood bags, but they’re used differently). More interaction than standard roll & write, but I did feel that we’d basically seen most of the game.
  • Sub Terra – I feel I ought to like it, coop with unique player powers and tile-based mapping both being very much in my comfort zone, but there are lots of little niggles. I think most of all I get annoyed by the way victory is clearly much more a matter of spreading out just the right amount than it is about your actual decisions wihle exploring.
  • Timeline, British History and Music & Cinema. I think we may finally have burned out on this.
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Depends on the price. You can use a bunch of the components from 1E in 2E and while they reprinted that content in a pair of expansions for 2E, I gather those can be hard to find. But yes, don’t confuse the two.

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Games in the pub yesterday evening:

Zombie Dice: close to the bare minimum required to be a game, but it passed the time while we waited for more people to show up.

The Resistance: as in every social deduction game I was immediately pegged as a spy… even though I was completely innocent.

Mariposas: played with three first-time players. Everyone managed to get at least one butterfly back but they all agreed that it was very easy to go too far north!

Detective Club: I think this has definitely replaced Mysterium for me. It’s similar enough but much less faff

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Mariposas got such a mad theme. The idea there’s a creature that wants to get from A to C but it only gets there spiritually by dying before it gets to B but having babies in the meantime to take the baton.

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