We should play one together some time – the same thing happens to me. [twirls beard evilly]
5 Likes
And then following that game with The Fox Experiment. She seems to have a thing for animal themes. Also, I have not played Mariposas. Nobody whose table I visit has a copy, and it was always a bit too expensive for how much I want to play it 
3 Likes
I’m not sure im that convinced by the game but im glad it existed so I could learn about the butterflies. (Quite an inefficient learning mechanism!)
4 Likes
So yesterday I played—over 2 sessions—the introductory game of Mage Knight. Luckily, I knew most of the rules from the PBF, thanks @Benkyo for your patience teaching it Despite this, I made a few mistakes: like exploring in places where the scenario says the map ends because apparently I suck at whatever skill that is (geometry, pattern recognition, mapology?), I forgot I am not supposed to use my units during combat at night. I misinterpreted a spell to mean I could just move around 5 spaces. But 2 rounds later I realized that it was meant to use movement points for the actual movement, just each space only cost 1 movement. Oops. I also build my deck badly.
While I had focused too much on movement during the PBF, this time I had a deck full of ranged attacks and crystal generation and so I spent my very last turn sitting in the desert unable to do anything with the cards I had in hand because I had no way to move and nothing around me to fight or spend influence on. I am sure further games will lead to less „mis-„ and more „adventure“ And as I become more fluent with the rules I might just forget the horror that is the stack of rulebooks and flyers and reference cards.
Today, I don‘t have the time to set up a sprawl like this because we have a dinner event to go to that was post-poned from a year ago. So instead I taught myself the Guild of Merchant Explorers.
Let me try a short description: it is the Roll & Write solo mode for Kingdom Builder except someone really didn‘t want to use pens to write anything and so opted for „tiny tokens“ ( I lie it couldn‘t have been a r&w because the game partially resets between eras).
Let me explain some details
This is played on a personal map with 1-4 players. There are 4 different maps in the box. This could be easily extended to more maps. Maybe that is the reason for the big box? I played the Avenia map. With each map comes a matching set of 6 goal cards of which you use 3 random ones for a game.
The game is played over 4 eras during which you try to acquire the most coin (Merchant) by exploring your map (Explorers). Players play simultaneously. Each turn a card from the Exploration Deck is drawn and players execute the action. There are 5 standard explore cards and in each era one Era Card is added to the deck. The 5 standard actions are:
- explore 1 mountain space
- explore 2 desert spaces
- explore 2 wiese spaces (the greenish-beige landscape)
- explore 3 sea spaces in a straight line
- explore 2 adjacent spaces.
Exploration starts at your capital or any village you have built or any of your previously placed explorer cubes and needs to be adjacent.
You get to build a village when you fill up a contiguous set of the same landscape. Only villages get to stay between eras, all explorer cubes return home to the side of the board.
When an era card is drawn you get 2 Exploration cards, and choose one to execute immediately. This is where play begins to differ for each player. Each exploration card is unique. After the initial execution it gets placed beside your map in the slot for that era. In other eras when that card is drawn you get to execute that action again. These are actions that allow you to place up to 5 cubes in certain landscapes, in certain shapes or connect cities or find treasures or give you additional coins. In the fourth era there is no additional exploration card instead players can choose to execute any of the other 3 cards.
So coins are VP and how to get those is then the remaining question:
- placing a village gives more coins in later eras but you need them to start exploring the further reaches of the map.
- discovering treasures on certain tiles can give you an immediate bonus or an end-game bonus
- connecting 2 cities with trade routes gives you coins
- finding the exploration towers at the borders of the map gives a lot of points especially in the last round
- completing the goals for the map gives you coins.
My first game I scored 89 points against a target score of 90. On my second game I scored 180 points against the same target. On the first game I had missed the rule that the exploration card gets used in the original era as well.
The first few Era I turns seem a bit boring because the capital is always in the same spot so choices are very limited and I wonder why there aren‘t multiple spaces to start from for variance. Rustling Leaves does this so that each player gets a different start.
Over all it seems to be a good puzzle. After 2 games, I cannot speak to the longevity. But with 4 maps, 6 goals per map and a nice stack of exploration cards there has to be enough variety to last for a while.
Solo mode simply forces you to go for the goals quickly or miss out on 30 points. As soon as era cards are revealed from era II onwards goals start „vanishing“. To win you the solo you must still fulfill them and reach the target score which starts with 90 on Easy
Some random thoughts:
- Setup is pretty quick.
- Components are a bit on the fiddly side. Especially the coins. Will use poker chips next time Maybe overkill for a game like this but I have them so…
- Everything is pretty beige.
- Iconography is ok.
- Rulebook is so-so with how easy the rules are it should have been even quicker to learn (I am nitpicking—it‘s fine)
- Interactive this is not—unlike Kingdom Builder!
- Solo mode has no overhead neither rules nor execution-wise.
- Variety seems good—need to try the other maps
- I like the arc. In era I you barely get anywhere and by the end of era 4 you can reach across the map… this feels quite satisfying.
7 Likes
Two games deep before the inflatables party ended the ‘raged_norm’s household boy’s boardgame blitz’. We’re at one game each.
Quest for El Dorado - walloped home with a win, resulting in the poor kid sulking on the sofa for a bit.
Race for the Galaxy - got walloped. The kiddo had 32 points on 6 cost developments to my 33 in total
9 Likes
We got destroyed by Paint the Roses. We had what seemed an easy win last time we played which was slightly deflating so we tried the expert variant. Woah Nelly! This game is not easy
We switched back to the base setup to try and get into the game more. It’s so hard with so much information to extrapolate each turn. My wife was beginning to get a bit cross because she was playing multi dimensional chess in her head whilst I was essentially hitting things with a stick.
More players help share the deduction load, but it’s a good puzzle with two. Thanks again to @mistercrayon for introducing us to the game.
10 Likes
Went to visit @cornishlee, whose sudden forced house move has finally been resolved, and we played:
- The Bird Told Me To Do It – I know I’ve played this before but it seemed entirely alien to me. I’m sure there is some actual skill to playing, but I was only starting to appreciate this by the end of the game.
- Targi – for which I’m going to need to make an inlay, especially as I now have the expansion too.
- Piepmatz (not played before) – really good fun, I want a copy now.
8 Likes
Really good to see you.
I was convinced we’d played four games. At least now I know why I couldn’t remember the fourth!
6 Likes
Maybe we did and I didn’t take a picture!
5 Likes
You can use units for combat at night. You can’t use them in dungeons/tomb/monasteries. It’s a location restriction, not a night restriction, although dungeons and tombs also happen to use night rules.
3 Likes
Played our first game of Agents of Smersh: Epic Edition (the 2022 reprint). It’s quite an interesting game and a really nice example of what you can do if you look at a game and decide “X is what people have come to the game for, lets weed out the crap no one is here for and double down on the stuff people like”.
For those that don’t know agents of smersh is a game broadly in the same genre as Tales of Arabian Nights, in that it’s a game where you wander around a map and then you go to the start of a small story and you get shuttled to conclusion via small choice and a dice roll.
The thing that works the best for smersh is that it knows to keep the “game” part really light and decide that if the narrative is the focus adding too much rules overhead outside of that is impedes access to the narrative and story (especially if non “hardcore” players are playing).
I guess the problem is that the writing is pretty clunky and kind of demands a lot of the players to perform it at a good level to be worthwhile (you’re not getting challenge from the game itself, the experience is the critical part of fun). If the players deliver the story flat then there isn’t much meat left in the game to save it.
Additionally theres these normal encounters which are one paragraph efforts which are nice and breezy. There are also boss encounters which have maybe ten or fifteen paragraphs in a row and it can feel like a real slog. What I’m not sure though is if there’s a better solution? How do you upgrade the intensity of the normal encounters without introducing some bespoke rule set. It’s a tough choice!
I think it was a fun time but I’m not sure I want to do it again soon.
6 Likes
I’ve played the old edition; I found there was a weird tonal shift, in that it couldn’t quite decide whether it was being sixties spy-jinks or terribly serious with torture and stuff. Combine that with the usual narrative multiple-choice problem of “I just said I wanted to take the left door and now I’m assassinating a president” and I think we all felt quite lost.
4 Likes
The tone shifts are still there but at least on the first mission it’s a little bit evened out. It’s generally on the lighter side more often with a bit of death.
The choices you make have almost no bearing on the eventual result (which i guess is realistic). As an example I have high persuasion stat and I get an option in a mission which suggests I’ll use my persuasion and the paragraph opening is something like
Me: “can I persuade you not to do this”
Boss: “no, go and use your [beat up skill] to get some guy”.
It was kind of funny in a way.
4 Likes
My wife and I ran away from home for an hour or so for our mental health. We checked out the new gaming space that our FLGS opened next door and played a quick game of Kingdomino. I won 44 - 29, mostly thanks to a large lake with three crowns and a large forest with two crowns.
9 Likes
Yeah, I loved the idea of a coop Bond-type superspy version of Tales of the Arabian Nights but, well, Agents of SMERSH was not what I would have hoped from that description. I’d forgive it being wonky and random, since Tales is those things…but in my opinion the writing is just not great, the copyediting was dire (in the original edition at least - I passed on the reboot) and the link between the fiction and the skills that were helpful was so tenuous as to make it an unsatisfying crapshoot whether they’d ever even come into play.
5 Likes
Unobserved, the superposition of “played Cat in a Box” and “did not play Cat in a Box” remains unresolved…
8 Likes
We played this today as well. Fun, but kind of random. We enjoyed it (I think). We called our game early (we were waiting for another player to turn up), seems like it would take a while to play properly. Or maybe we’re just slow…
6 Likes
Does AOS have a non-arbitrary end? When I’ve played TOTAN we’ve always just called it when we’ve felt like ending it. The official “game” part isn’t really the point, so we never paid undue attention to rules about “when does the game end?” and “who ‘wins’?”.
4 Likes
Good with two, then? I really like the cards for this one.
3 Likes
Yes, when you get to the big Boss, who has his own counter. We were only about a third of the way there, and that was after 90-120 minutes (to be fair, we punched the game and just played). We did get to the henchman and fought her, that went on a bit, something like 8 encounters.
6 Likes