Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[COMaestro]

My wife and I played Everdell on Thursday, using the New leaf expansion (as we had not sorted it out from our previous game). Not as ridiculously high scoring as our last time playing, but still rather high. I won, 95 - 68.

I think Newleaf may require more than two players to work best, as the deck gets about an inch taller with all the new cards, and having more players will help get through more of it. As it was, I think we only saw about a third of the cards.

Still fun, though, and I enjoy the dynamics the new cards bring to the game.

[Captbnut]

Played Gloomhaven today, finally started our campaign. Realised we’ve been playing a damage rule (the ability to discard a card) wrong all the way through a campaign of JOTL. And we had the level wrong. Barely scraped a victory with me exhausted well before the end.

It’ll be good to play this both properly and at the right difficulty level whilst we find our feet.

Then 5 player Cosmic Encounter with one of our eldest’s friends. An hour including the teach with the bonkers red alien powers. Those 4 all won, I lost!

So I’ve had a rubbish day with my performance but have enjoyed gaming with the all family for the first time since holiday.

[RogerBW]

Went to one of the Oxford groups’ quarterly big game days, and ended up playing Xia. Phew! I think I have internalised the rules better now, in advance of next weekend’s session at home.

[yashima]

My big Post-Spiel game night suffered a few cancelations so we were „only“ 8 people and opted for playing just one table.

• Started with 5 player Scout before everyone arrived. My first game of this I had a bit of trouble in the first couple of rounds getting the tempo right. But in later rounds I caught up a little by finishing first twice in a row Lovely. There were talks about luck being involved…

• Then a 6 player game of Planet Unknown with two people teaming up and me just teaching and coaching. (It was obvious this was going into dinner prep time). I seem to underestimate the complexity of this game. It was very well received though by everyone at the table. But it was definitely a bit much for the one person at the table who isn‘t as deeply into games as the rest of us. It was good I wasn‘t playing myself so I could help out and explain several rules (rover movement, water and energy terrain) a few times. 6 players really empty out the depots… and Civ makes a lot of sense to push early because with so many more choices for cards there is surly something good to help out.
  

  

• A few questions of Top Ten showed us that the game becomes much harder with 8 people. But still great fun.

• Finally after dinner a 6 player game of Factory Funner. Shows that with the practice I have from solos I am good enough at puzzling out and valuing machines… the „realtime“ picking of machines worked well enough. We actually ran out of some types of pipes. I won with the points I got from connecting inputs to other machines. Mine is the semi-chaotic factory on the yellow player board. My partner gave up 2 turns before the end. His is the green board next to mine. It has a good play time. Just like Planet Unknown simultaneous play was much appreciated.

Sadly, after two big games everyone was a bit too tired and so we called it a night. There were a lot more games that drew interest from Maglev Metro and Paint the Roses to Libertalia… but can‘t have them all on the table I hope the next big game night won‘t take as long. Shows I have enough games to easily have 6 people playing. Even 7 would have worked. 8 trends toward people pairing up or party games though or splitting the table. But nobody seemed keen on that today. Which is fine: I have to teach fewer games.

PS: none of these were from this year‘s SPIEL. But at least they were all new to my collection since last Post-Spiel night a year ago

[InkyBloc]

Not to rain on your Factory Fun parade but I think you’ve got a loop in the top left corner, which (in the original at least) is not allowed! I think for the sake of fairness you may have to have a rematch…

[yashima]

You are right. Ouch. I always thought it was only the direct loop forbidden. I think this one came up in a later turn and I might have worked around that maybe. But I am probably not the only one with a loop as I had not realized this rule.

[lalunaverde]

Switch & Signal - good fun co-op. Not sure if there’s longevity here.

Skull King - SK was perhaps my first modern trick-taker. Coming back to it after playing more and more trick-taking/shedding/climbing games made me noticed an improvement on how I play SK. Nice. Still crap, though, compared to other trick takers.

Kites - the new guy said that it was hard. The table easily beat the game even with the advanced cards. A bit boring. 1 star (out of 5). P.S. I should tell him about Escape: Curse of the Temple - any other suggestions would be nice. I get a blank when I ask my brain to make a list of real-time coops.

Another sesh of Gloomhaven

Treasures of Nakbe - a reprint of an old Knizia game. Very lame though. The alliances are preset, which isn’t interesting. . Also I am noticing that I am NOT a fan of Knizia’s dice games at all. The exception seems to be Into the Blue and Excape/Rapido. Non-Knizia dice games like Liar’s Dice is also awesome, but I would rather suggest Skull first because it’s quicker

Maskmen - it’s official. This is now my favourite Oink game (after Modern Art)

Startups - we played a good multi-round as the library is nearly closing. Still a great game.

[Brattyjedi]

Monthly board game group meetup today and I played so many games!

Castles of Burgundy - 4 players. 2 new, 1 hadn’t played in along time, and me teaching. I won with about 20 points over second but everyone had fun. The two new players had their c. 9 month old baby with them so also the distraction of passing her back-and-forth depending on whose turn it was. She was adorable and babbling away most of the game.

7 Wonders - 6 players in a rare-for-me base game only set up. I did a little science and a little commerce/money points engine. Not enough in the base game to really make commerce pay off I think and I ended up middle of the pack.

Downforce - racing and betting game that we played twice. I did terribly both games but had fun.

Welcome To… - I had this left in my game travel back from the last game day I went to so we got it out and played the Christmas lights board. I was teaching a bunch of new players so again no surprise I won. Everyone enjoyed it.

Town Builder: Coevorden - one of my favorite small box card games. Features multi-use cards that are unbuilt building foundations, materials being used to build buildings, or completed buildings worth points and possibly with abilities depending on their orientation in front of you. There was one new player, two people who had played once each, and me so not surprising I won this one.

Azul - two player game and I had possibly my highest score ever at 103.

Point Salad - played two games of this light and quick card game, both at two player, and we each won one.

Arboretum - final two player quick card game of the night. I won 23-9 thanks to scoring a near perfect run of one species of trees on my end and blocking my friend from scoring what should have been her highest scoring set.

[InkyBloc]

@lalunaverde

any other suggestions would be nice. I get a blank when I ask my brain to make a list of real-time coops.

FUSE is nice and quick. Usually our game of choice when we’re waiting for other people to arrive to a game night because even if they come in the middle you know the game will be over in ten minutes max.

[bort]

@lalunaverde

Switch & Signal - good fun co-op. Not sure if there’s longevity here.

Hey, we played this as well! Not sure if I’d want to play it every week, but I reckon it’s got some replayability - every game is going to play out differently.

[bort]

Vagrantsong, our second game. Went a bit faster than our first game. Although we thought you only had 6 rounds to complete the objective, and we figured we were toast. But the round counter just starts over apparently. We all lost a skill or two (when your health reaches zero, you lose a skill and have to pay at the end to bring it back – or draw a particular item from the bag).

Bamboleo, who doesn’t love this? Balance various objects, then take them off without all the others falling. Couldn’t be simpler.

Turing Machine X 2. Stuffed up the first game, just made a silly mistake (maybe I misaligned the verifier card and got the wrong result) . Second game wasn’t much better, needed some help from the winner to see my mistake. A stupid mistake. Sometimes you can’t see how useful a criteria test will be, but they all have their use for the problem (at least on easy level). Still fun.

Switch & Signal, such a cool co-op puzzle. Move the trains around to collect goods and deliver them. You’ll have to change the switches and signals on the board to let the trains through, and obviously avoid collisions. And we won, fairly easily.

Bandido, pretty simple game, you play cards to close off tunnels so the Bandido can’t escape. The longer the game goes on, the less chance you have to win it seems. Not sure how much strategy there is, but it’s fun.

The Key: Murder at the Oakdale Club, haven’t played any of The Key games for ages, went with this one because it’s the hardest. We had three games, was last on all three, just couldn’t put the information together.

[bruitist]

@lalunaverde

any other suggestions would be nice. I get a blank when I ask my brain to make a list of real-time coops.

Magic Maze is a good option.

[bort]

@lalunaverde

a list of real-time coops

Project ELITE

[lalunaverde]

I have played this before and it’s cool.

Havent tried the other suggestions yet.

[Benkyo]

Space Alert is my favourite, but not simple to teach, as you seem to be after.

[Bondy034]

Games over the last week:

Cockroach Poker Royal x5, it’d been awhile since this one hit the table - and got a bunch of plays in quick succession - everyone really liked it. I lost one of the games and barely escaped losing the other two, but everyone had a blast. Even got to try the royals and special cards. The royals are good, the special cards are a bit less good, I’ll probably omit them in future.

Oceans, got this to the table this week with a day of gaming with a buddy. It’s great fun, definitely lives up to the Evolution Climate pedigree. Our game had a real lack of foragers, and was quite bitey back and forth. In the end I won by a slender lead off the back of my leviathan and shark cleaners, which felt satisfying.

Verdant, played with 2 this time - works much better than at higher playercounts. Next time the goals are going in. Still not sure I like it as much as Cascadia, but on further play - who knows?

Hanamikoji, one game each of this one, and single round games at that.

Flesh and Blood, here’s a game I definitely would’ve steered clear of, but my friend loves TCG’s and he picked up two starter decks at a game store and wanted to try them out. Pretty lackluster for me - felt clunky and not particularly engaging. Wouldn’t want to play again.

Babylonia, I forgot how much I liked this game - simple rules but with more engaging decisions than in games twice as complex. I won by a decent chunk thanks to nabbing 2 ziggurats and dominating the central area.

Carcassonne x2, introduced a newish gaming friend to this classic - they did okay for a first couple of games, though made some fairly common rookie moves (tying up workers in ill considered areas, letting me piggyback of some of their areas). I’m not sure how much they enjoyed it, I don’t think it was quite the success that Catan was, last week, but they did find it interesting.

Takenoko, this one they enjoyed a lot, though I did have to keep pointing out how the irrigation channels worked, there are some not so intuitive aspects to the game so I get that. While it wasn’t super close, they did well for a first go at it for sure.

[Captbnut]

In a separate thread @InkyBloc @yashima and I engaged in a very tense game of Paint the Roses on BGA.

We won, with the smallest possible margin. It’s a very good implementation and I’m happy to send alpha invites to anyone who wants to try it. However, I don’t think it’s great async - we did a lot of working around, but would do real time with a voice chat in an instant.

I love PTR at the moment. I like the co-op nature because solving puzzles like these in teams really appeals to me. I think it’s quick, approachable and difficult (another one when we’ve played a rule wrong irl and made it harder for ourselves). I was genuinely buzzing in the last couple of turns.

One thing I’m not sure of is that each time I’ve won its involved a 50:50 guess that would lose the game if wrong. I’d love to know if it was played perfectly (not by me) then you could make perfect deductions, from what things weren’t placed and where they weren’t placed.

[yashima]

I think the game is balanced around having to make guesses because just from the obvious clues from the cubes on the tile you do not get enough information to guess enough cards to escape the Queen unless by chance you luck out on generating lots of clues for the other cards when placing a tile (we had one or two such placements I think). But there is more information than just the cubes: why did the player pick that spot and not that. Why did they take this tile and not the other. Or in @InkyBloc‘s final card: was there ever a pink rose available in the greenhouse in the past turns? Was the block of the 2 spades on purpose (it was, even though it was different from what I thought).

When placing a tile there are several considerations:

• how many cubes for my own card will this generate and will it make it clear what I hold.
• are there other equivalent placements? If yes, I choose a different tile that will make my placement better than other options. So people get additional information from that?
• can I make a placement that will rule out a lot of options for everyone‘s cards?
• can I make my placement rule out whatever is left of one of the other cards.

I often overlook anything but the first consideration at the start of the game. But as the game goes on, the options dwindle and the other stuff becomes more and more important.

I like that this game really depends on this additional information that is not represented by cubes etc. In Cryptid sometimes people guess early by their gut feeling but in theory you can wait to get perfect information. Here: not so much most of the time. The Queen is too fast to wait for that.

I agree it is a very tense game—as I said in our thread at the end of my gamenight the locals deemed the idea of it too thinky to give it a go.

One thing I like about this game is the changing nature of the deductions with cards guessed discarded and new ones coming into play all the time. It puts a lot of pressure on solving the individual card. The puzzle is no less satisfying because you have to solve it quickly. But because it changes there is not the problem many other deduction games like Planet X or Alchemists have that mistakes you make will often only reveal themselves at the end of the game and it is hard to recover from a mistake you don‘t know you made. If you make a mistake in your notes in either of these latter games… you will likely keep making that mistake until the very end.

I am really curious about Turing Machine now (still waiting for my preorder—it is not available yet here).

Also @Captbnut if you ever play with the expansion do let us know how that is

[Marx]

@lalunaverde

Escape: Curse of the Temple - any other suggestions would be nice.

My favourites have been mentioned, but to add my voice to the chorus:

1. Magic Maze (simple, frantic… the only catch is the “no talking” rule simply breaks some people)
2. Space Alert (far and away a personal favourite, but also the most complicated… but the manual alone is worth the price of admission)
3. Escape Zombie City (mostly a reskin of Escape Curse of the Temple, but a good reskin with some neat interesting mechanics. The zombies moving around the map is a neat twist… I like ECotT better, but I don’t mind having both)
4. Zombie '15 (almost impossible to find locally, but if you can find it, a really good, fast, frantic real-time co-op. 15 minute games, bogged down somewhat by the 15 minutes of setup most scenarios require. But really good… my favourite game involving zombies aside from Dead of Winter)
5. A Tale of Pirates (sand-timer worker placement done right. Great campaign, fantastic 3D board/ship to work with, excellent app integration… just all-around good fun)
6. Rail Pass (a combo real-time AND dexterity game… so good, so stupid, so much fun. Big fan, although the “You can only say ‘Choo-choo!’” mechanic does break people pretty frequently in a really funny way)
7. Space Cadets (too fiddly for me personally, but sort of a mini-game fueled attempt to make Space Alert easier. It’s not bad, but I think it was more ambitious than it was great. A solid effort, though)

And not technically a fully co-op, but if you can ever get 6-8 players around a table… gosh is the original “Captain Sonar” ever a treat. Two teams working in real-time to find each other and sink the other team. I haven’t tried the newer, smaller iterations (“Sonar Family” and the shortened title “Sonar” are supposed to be 2-4 players), but the original is amazing if you can get the right crowd. Not simple, but not complicated either. Really good.

[Marx]

I got so caught up answering the “Real-time Co-op” thing I forgot why I came here!

Two friends got married yesterday. The wedding was held at the bride’s mother’s house, which is a palatial palace (10 bathrooms, a library room that’s the size of our home’s entire first floor, and a two-floor auditorium with perfect acoustics for piano recitals… and in this case, for a wedding!). 20 minute ceremony, and while there were more people than I was super comfortable being around (At a guess… 40-50?), the house was massive enough that for most of the event I was alone in whatever room I was in.

Did I mention the library? I tried to take a picture, but the room was legit too big for my camera to do it any justice. I could spend two years in that library and not have put a significant dent into the books, and I read an average novel every 3 days.

Anyway. The bride and groom, both friends, asked me to bring some games because some of the guests weren’t comfortable with dancing. There was no way in five hells I was going to dance (taking off my mask to eat was already making my stomach do cartwheels, and my partner and I were alone at our table and further away from everyone and I moved our table even further away before we sat), so I was happy to oblige.

I brought 20 games of the “party” variety with a few smaller-group games in case there weren’t that many people… let’s see: Pictomania, Decrypto, Codenames, Monikers, Metagame, Diamant, Wavelength, Shifty Eyed Spies, Mafia de Cuba, Parade, Archaeology, Take 5, Skull, The Fuzzies, Regicide, Startups, Fake Artist Goes to New York, Deep Sea Adventure, Illusion, Jungle Speed, and Anomia.

A couple came down after their kids had been sent home with their parents, and we were quickly joined by another player and my partner. Having never tried it, I pulled out The Fuzzies as a starting point… gosh, that game is a surprising amount of fun. I honestly thought it was going to be Warsch’s first dud. Jenga, but fluffy? How could it be good?

And yet.

Really good, very meditative and also thoroughly silly. Big fan, keeping it for sure.

Then we pulled out Anomia and played two rounds of that. Tonnes of fun, and I gave it to the couple that came down first. Anomia and Illusion are my two usual “You enjoyed this? Here, take it” games… they cost $10 for me to replace, and I’m always happy to spread a little of the board game love to people who enjoy the hobby.

After that we played Illusion to calm down a little. That game. Gods, that game.

And then we played a slower, more thoughtful game of Diamant (Incan Gold in North America, but I got my copy shipped to me from the UK for a whopping $40 in shipping and fees… worth every penny).

After that it was 10pm and time for us all to call it a night. What followed thereafter was the 3rd worst driving experience of my life. I was going 20km/h on the roads and occasionally coming to a full stop because it was impossible to see the road itself and I didn’t want to drive into a ditch. My partner had to close her eyes because the weather was so bad it was giving her a panic attack… a 20 minute drive took an hour and a half, but I got us home safely, if somewhat sore in the knuckles. Passed seven cars in ditches, three accidents, and a stranded bus. Fun times.