Tonight at Local Game Group: Letter Jam, at which I’ve got rubbish while I wasn’t looking but still had a good time, and Red Dragon Inn, clearly made for people other than me.
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Got Turing Machine this week. Haven’t played it with a group yet, just done a couple of the easy problems solo. And, if you like logic puzzles, this is probably something you’ll like. We play a bit of Breaking the Code, and really like it, and TM is that multiplied by 100.
It’s very clever. You choose a problem – there are 20 in the book, but the website can generate literally millions of problems. Each problem has from four to six criteria and verifier cards (depending on difficulty), which you use to test your guesses. Each problem has a three digit answer. You make a guess, and then test it against a criteria. So, your guess might be 532. A criteria card might test the middle digit against the value “4”. So in that case you would be asking the machine if 3 was less than 4.
To see what the answer to a question is, you take the punch cards for your guess,overlay them, and then place a verifier card behind it. There should be one empty space, and it will show either a cross or a tick. If it’s a tick, you’ve proved that the middle number is less than 4. So it could be 1,2, or 3. In a round, you can use up to three criteria cards. If you were in a group, then you would see if anyone had solved it correctly. You play another round where you make another guess and choose up to three criteria. The criteria cards are guaranteed to produce the solution. There are 48 criteria cards, and 95 verifier cards.
So, if you’re playing with others, it’s just a race to get the answer first. Or get the solution with the least number of moves. You’ll see what criteria other players are taking, but obviously not their guess, or their result. So, if you like math based deduction, you’ll probably like this
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I have Turing Machine preordered 
didn’t get to try in Essen but can’t wait to see how it plays. For me it will probably be purely a solo.
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My wife and I played Mansions of Madness tonight, making this one of our faster purchase-to-play ratios at about a week. We played the first scenario, which I played at our FLGS a couple of weeks ago, so while I knew the story beats, I was impressed with how different the map and various details were in our two player game versus the five player game. It also felt very clear when the app was telling us to stop dawdling!
We won the scenario, though Inwas just 1 Horror away from needing to take an Insane card. My wife rolled amazingly well, managing to avoid most bad stuff and do very well evading or in combat, while I had some pretty bad whiffs.
Most importantly, she thought it was fun, though found the back and forth between the app and the board a little annoying. We both agree it would probably work better if the app were fully voiced, instead of just the prologue and epilogue, but such is life, I suppose.
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This weekend we played two games of Eclipse: second dawn for the galaxy. One three player game and one with six. The latter included someone who’s previous “most complicated game” was Monopoly 
. The six player game was much better, with lots of alliances and space battles
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Well… what do they thunk?! 
They seemed to enjoy themselves 
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How long did it take?
The 6-player game took 4 hours, and the 3-player game took 3 hours.
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That’s why I got rid of it, it’s not TI4 but that’s still a bit long for me. Glad you enjoyed it
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Ah-HA! Gloomhaven: JotL scenario 4 has been vanquished!
Didn’t even exhaust a character, and while I bought some chain mail for my Demolitionist, it was never used since he was either far away from enemies when he went early, or everyone acted before he could get his turn when he was in danger of being attacked.
The big play of the game came when the last three enemies spawned. The Demolitionist used “The Big One” to attack all three for +3 Attack, but also had an additional +2 Attack from Windup, and then drew the 2x bonus card, which from all I could gather would be a total 10 Attack! Wiped out both Acolyte enemies easily and severely damaged the Stone Golem. Then, since I had used Crushing Weight for the second card, I got to move adjacent to the Golem and deal it 2 damage since it was near a wall, killing it and winning the scenario!
I also learned that I’ve been short-changing myself, as each coin token you get is worth 2 gold! Totally missed that!
Oh well, in any case the scenario is behind me and on to Scenario 5!
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A bit of a late log, but I played Cuphead Fast Rolling Dice Game over the weekend with a couple of my nephews. We (barely) knocked out the first boss, no thanks to me going way too hard in the first phase. The younger was keen to go onto the second boss, but we lost the elder and were otherwise getting short on time, so we packed it in as a bit of a learning game/teaser. We’ll see if we get to continue on. I think the younger nephew, keen as he was, is hungry for something… smarter.
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John Company 2e 2nd game, tried the 1758 scenario. Deregulation was voted in, and all three of us formed private firms in the 2nd turn, gambling everything on that first trade, and two of us failed the roll (not getting a single 1 or 2 with 4 and 5 dice respectively). Fortunately(?) the player who did pull off the trade had also tanked the company as chairman by deliberately putting the entire treasury into the Bengal presidency, which he controlled, and not setting aside any funds for military alliances or other trades (I may have encouraged this a little). That meant the company was short on income, and unprepared for the uprising and invasion that kicked the company out of Bengal and Delhi, respectively, destroying investor confidence and leading to the dissolution of the company. Basically, nearly everything that could go wrong did so in turn 2.
The prime minister was blamed for the fiasco (not me), and it came down to who had afforded the cushiest retirement in the previous decade (me).
Impulse was fun again at 3 players
The Great Zimbabwe was also good at 4.
Teaching basic strategy then embarking on a strategy that makes that basic strategy look bad
I felt a bit awkward on having advised the two new players during the teach that setting prices lower than 2 is generally a bad idea. I decided to try Anansi to worship, who enables you to pay 1 regardless, and ran away with the game. At the end, one of the players concluded they should have set their prices at 1, and even if that wasn’t true, I wasn’t really in a position to disagree, or to explain all the other things everyone did that were more significant in helping me win. Ah well, maybe overthinking it, it’s not like anyone accused me of misleading them.
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Tried the first scenario of the Sinister Motives campaign in Marvel Champions using Miles and Gwen. However, it had been a while, so to start with, I totally confused the symbols on the Environment card and a Side Scheme that came out for ones that made me draw extra encounter cards, rather than the one that adds threat at the beginning of the villain phase. So after two turns and realizing my mistake, I just restarted as everything was a mess.
In the second go, I did manage to take out Sandman’s first phase, however I had to pack the game away as my kids were getting home from school. However, I also realized then that I had again been playing incorrectly. I am so used to the Rhino Main Scheme that I forgot how the icons worked between starting threat and increasing threat. So instead of starting with any threat on the card, I was working on the assumption that threat was increasing by two per character, and that any acceleration icons was increasing it by an additional one per character. So right at the start, I was putting 6 threat on the main scheme at the beginning of each villain phase!
I really need to play more often and internalize all this stuff, or make a quick cheat sheet that I can reference when I do play. In any case, I will try the whole scenario again in the near future, and God willing, I will play it correctly.
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Fürstenfeld - another Friesse title and it’s pretty quick. You start with agrarian engine that you use to sell produce to breweries, then you move on to a better engine, in the real world, your town now resembles a service-economy. But you can only have 6 buildings on your personal board. The final move will be palaces and ornaments that will win you the game, but each of these fancy stuff kills off the engine because they dont produce anything.
Helios - wow. Another Euro. A few major bad things here. One of them is that players who are at the end of the turn order gets screwed with the end game scoring. Turn order is determined by who has the most mana and that player gets the starting player token. So if you’re sitting on the right of the starting player, get ready to lag behind by 20 points or so lmao!
I have a big list of games I would toss to the River Thames (figuratively. Please don’t pollute our rivers), this is definitely one of them.
Pax Pamir - tense 4 player game where the game is on knife edge with the 4 of us close together after the 3rd dominance check. Before the last dominance check, two players decided to keep the crown to themselves as part of the British team (and figure out which one of them will win). It became a silly 2 vs 2 arms race, until a winner and loser on the British faction was determined. The UK Loser was handed a dilemma: allow British dominance in which UK Winner will win OR balance the factions and Player C will win with most cylinders. An unenviable position. UK loser and Player D tried to prolong the game to change the game state, but UK Winner attained enough money to buy the last Dominance Check card and win.
I think this is my record on the number of allegiances I have made. Four, including the starting one.
Tammany Hall - it’s okay with 3 players. Bare minimum. Best with 4 or 5.
Heat - we get to play this more. I am leaning towards this over Flamme Rouge. I prefer the hand management here. It’s obvious you go on a higher gear on the straight bits, and lower gear on curvy ones. But sometimes you want to keep it at high gear if you got a terrible hand. Negotiating the corners is also crucial on player positions. I lost our latest game on the penultimate corner because I crashed due to bad play.
EDIT: allowing discards is great. Which card to discard and to keep because you can now look ahead a round or two.
Tempel des Schreckens
Hellas - another banger from Stefan Dorra. This is a highly interesting game.
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A first play of Evergreen (solo) and I earned the status of “Birch”, so that’s… good? The table advises me it’s just barely middle-of-the-pack.
This is a fun one; you can really feel some of the RR Ink sensibility spillover with the way your past decisions start to strangle you in the later game. The scoring mechanism is sufficiently thematic, so the (frequent) scoring breaks aren’t as laborious as they might otherwise be—with bonus points to the easily identifiable components.
My partner is gonna love this one, and I think so would my mom.
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Last night with @Kyuss and others:
- Sentinels of the Multiverse, three old hands and one newcomer, a very neatly managed takedown of Citizen Dawn. (I was playiing old favourite Wraith, who was feeling distinctly munchkinny.)
- Parade (my old white-box version), in which I came to realise that all that neat management had not been done by me…
- Azul, which I enjoyed a lot more this time than when I’ve played before; I think something clicked at last.
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I think you’ve previously expressed some thoughts around the first move being critical in a game. For me Azul is a game where you only really see how important that first move is after a few games. One time I was teaching it and normally with a teaching game you can bumble through to the end but with Azul I felt like you can’t really do that as your mistakes can easily be felt and reflected upon all game.
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Interesting! I didn’t notice that this time, but I did work on building up a grid from the start rather than just taking what would get quick singles.
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Had a nice manageable four for our first game night in the new place. Much easier to play games at the table than in our old place so it worked out great!
We started with Factory Fun, which delivered on the titular promise. A lot of bemoaning from all sides. My wife got a lot machines with extra supply vats, so although she was consistently riding the line of bankruptcy, her input-output points were so high that she easily won.
This is my factory. There’s a lot of wasted output at the top left, which were the last two machines I got. Unfortunately no way to fit either of them into the rat’s nest at the bottom to take over some of the work that my orange vat had been doing since the beginning.
Then we cleansed our palate with Sushi Go Party, using the menu from the original game. What a good time!
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