Had some friends down for the weekend. Circumstances turned a touristy weekend into a gaming weekend
Bohnanza first play, and I’ve now played everything that SUSD say I should play. I really enjoyed this. A less chaotic and more gamery version of Pit. Would happily play again and will probably end up buying
Anomia we’ve bought this for Christmas. My brain still hurts. Extreme snap
Cosmic Encounter x 2 - once with 6, once with 7. Chaotic nonsense. Kids love it.
Second Chance a flip and write polyomino game. I’m terrible at Tetris puzzles and don’t really enjoy them. It’s a small box but wouldn’t rush back to it.
Happy Salmon don’t know how to describe this apart from another chaotic, stupid party game. It was brilliant and we bought it at the table.
Doodle Dash as someone who can’t draw, this is the drawing game for me. Loved it. Also used the components for a game of Just One because I’ve lent my copy to someone else. Both created lots of laughs with minimal downtime.
Orleans a grail game play for me. Really, really enjoyed this - an old school euro that is a bag builder. With 4 players it was actually pretty elbowy. We played with the Trade & Intrigue expansion - only downside is that I was close to the municipal board so used it a lot but ignored the contracts. The players near the contracts used those and the shared board less. I’m going to be grown up and not buy this, but I really enjoyed it.
Carrom and Crokinole post roast pork flicking. Both are great, Carrom is more punishing.
Omerta I was really tired now and I don’t think I understood what was happening. Social deduction adjacent.
I saw Dice Tower show this game, and it looked GREAT.
(For a running around and shouting family party game)
If you think you’ll enjoy it, you will.
Wow, it’s already been a week since it happened, but things have just been crazy!
For my daughter’s 5th birthday, I took a day off work (on Cyber monday, of all days) to go on a daddy-daughter date. She is really starting to enjoy both boardgames and their rules, so I thought it would be fun to take her to the nearby boardgame cafe that is adjoined to our FLGS.
We got there, ordered a hot chocolate (for her), a coffee (for me), and an order of super-messy nachos for us to share.
The cafe has a really nice collection of games; some out-of-print gems that would sell for hundreds on eBay… and they know it – but even still, the whole thing is on an honor system. Grab what looks fun, put it on a table (right next to some messy nachos!!!) and put it back when you’re done.
Since I was with a 5-year-old, most of the options were right-out. But we found some fun ones without having to resort to the backups I had brought from home.
Hedgehog Haberdash –
The game was pretty beat up, but it was still playable. Each player gets their own unique-colored hedgehog board; if you have less than 4 players, the other hedgehogs are also used but just set to the side. On your turn you roll a die and it tells you whether you get to draw a leaf from the bag (or box top, in our case, as the bag was missing), or to take one of the leaves from another hedgehog (either another player or one of the dummy positions). Each leaf has two colors on it, one on each end – you must decide which of the two colors to use, placing it with that color upwards in the appropriate hedgehog. If you take a leaf from another hedgehog, it’s really up to your memory to know what the other color is. First person to fully cover their hedgehog in leaves wins.
We played in a friendly way, and more than once we gave a leaf we couldn’t use to the other player, rather than a dummy.
My daughter legitimately won by getting a good amount of double-leaf draws, but also remembering a key leaf in one of the dummy positions.
I might be interested in picking up the game if my youngest ends up showing interest in board gaming too; I think the 5-year old is probably almost too old to find it really entertaining… though those hedgehogs are adorable.
Glitterluck Unicorns: Cloud Crystals –
The obnoxiously-pink box is saved by the chonky illustrations of unicorns. It’s a roll-and-move game; you roll the blue die which will let you move between 1 and 3 spaces, or it might roll up a cupcake, which means you’ll use your entire turn to stop and eat a snack. If you land on a pink cloud, you roll the pink die and take that number of cloud crystals. If you land at the top of a rainbow, you slide to the bottom of it. If you land on a purple space, you give one of your cloud crystals to another player.
The person to land on the final cloud first gains a bonus of 4 cloud crystals. Once everyone is safely on the final cloud (and far away from the storm cloud where you started), the person with the most crystals wins.
Dice are weird. My daughter went first, gained three crystals, and the rest of the game we basically had the exact same movement rolls. I got stalled out by a cupcake in the penultimate turn and she won handily by fairly regularly scoring 2 or 3 crystals when rolling the pink die, whereas I mostly rolled singles. She won 14 to 6.
It’s fine. It’s a $20 roll-and-move kids game that is various colors of pink, purple, and blue; but with some chunky dice, cute unicorn meeples, and plastic crystals that will get lost in my heating registers. My daughter would like to put it on her wishlist… which will probably happen, but hopefully she’ll just play it with her sisters and I won’t have to play it again.
Coconuts –
Coconuts is an in-depth passion project detailing the strife and struggles of monkeys needing to throw tiny (by comparison) coconuts into their cup-shaped-barrels. The goal of the game is to win, and the first person to get six cup-shaped-barrels constructed into a tower wins, just as in real life. However, instead of actually being monkeys, the players instead use spring-loaded plastic monkey arms attached to plastic monkeys to fling the tiny
coconutssmall, rubber, coconut game pieces (I checked, they aren’t real coconuts) over the monkey’s head and behind them to, hopefully, land in one of the cups in the middle or one of your opponents’ cups, which you could then steal. If you get a coconut in a red cup, you get the cup and you get another turn. Coconuts are returned on missed shots, thankfully.I was doing very well at the beginning, but my daughter managed to master the monkey-arm-catapult that I, honestly, didn’t think she’d be able to. The arm has a large range of motion, but anything more than half of the spring-travel would be way too much (as we proved by launching coconut replicas across a boardgame cafe a few times).
She pulled out another legitimate win, stealing a cup from me before sinking the winning coconut on her very next turn to take the win, leaving me with merely 4 cups of the required 6.
A great beige medium-heavy euro it is not, but it was delightful in its components and gameplay.
When we had cleaned up our table, we left by way of the adjoined FLGS to check A) if they had Coconuts for sale, which I would have bought immediately if they had, and B) if I needed to update my FLGS-specific games wishlist to facilitate my loved ones’ shopping for me for Christmas… but it’s hard to properly analyze the shelves of euros (completely out of eye-shot of the kids’ games section) when you have a hot-chocolate-fueled 5-year-old tagging along with you.
Sounds like you had a brilliant day
Bit more BGA tonight, this time real time games
More Wingspan. I can see now why it’s so highly regarded, even if it doesn’t excite me.
2 more games of Ginkgopolis. Still enjoying this a lot, the lack of being on a table means I ignore the area control a bit on BGA.
Was taught how to play Living Forest which was pretty good. A light take on deck building with a couple of side games to add interaction. I can see my wife and I playing a few games.
Just finished our game of Honey Buzz! What an absolute delight of a game, super inviting and gentle, but space can get super tight, it must be quite mean at more than 2.
I won, 142-140! 
Tomorrow, Bunny Kingdom! 
Part way through our first game of Hamlet. Enjoying it greatly but the play time is way longer than expected either because the estimates are off or because we’re learning, exploring too much and have one player who’s very much under the weather… yeah… it’ll be the estimates that are off 
Things we’re liking:
- Building out the village
- The way the available actions increase as the game progresses. I suspect this might make introducing people a little easier as you don’t really need to explain all the rules before putting the first tiles down
- The fact many of the things you do might benefit the other players more than you
Things we’ve got wrong so far:
- Your donkeys only move one tile each turn. We were allowing free movement. I suspect our village planning might have been neater had we got this right from the start.
Things we’re not sold on yet:
- Nearing the end, one player is quite a way out in front and we have zero idea what the final scores will look like. There’s a great deal of scoring at the end of the game and it may be that without a good understanding of that it’ll be hard to win. That sort of thing can make it much harder for first time players.
Late replying to this one but congratulations on the with Roger - very well played.
Xia really is one of my favourite games at the moment, though it does need quite an investment in table space and set up time.
I took on Tainted Grail earlier this week in exchange for a small (but physically huge) bundle of games that weren’t selling. I was somewhat unenthusiastic about it, mostly figuring it was an even trade and something potentially more enticing to put up as trade fodder. Particularly given its shelf demands (it’s a gameplay all-in), I wasn’t really thinking about keeping it around. I’d take it for a spin though, of course!
Uh oh.
I played my first chapter last night without even getting past setup in the manual, just referencing the (unexpectedly lean) rules as needed. The included tutorial did a good job getting the core basics out of the way and the quick reference materials are excellent, so playing the game is a snap once you familiarize yourself with the components and get set up.
I really didn’t expect to be loving it as much as I am. My first chapter started out with so much tire spinning as my destitute pariah kept engaging with game elements that demanded payment or at the very least shoes and a shirt. Eventually though, I was granted access to some cosmic truth that allowed me to push the mission forward (at great expense to my health and sanity) and light my first Menhir.
I’m a few turns into Chapter 2, and things are grim. I have two Guardians pursuing me while I’m at death’s door, scrambling to get out of range and heal up. I have no prospects for rekindling the Menhir should it wane, so my only hope is to push on and hope for better fortunes. This is a brutal place to hang out!
Maybe NPI hating on it should have been my first clue, but I’m sure in love with it so far. If I fail in the next few rounds (all but guaranteed) I’ll reset entirely as per the rules as written. I’m even excited to do so! But I’ll be curious if that remains true once I’m halfway through the campaign. They do offer a “story mode” which basically softens the result of a player death (reset chapter, not the game), so at least that wouldn’t be something I need to house rule in.
Well, we had to switch out Bunny Kingdom for something shorter. My wife spent most of the day sewing, so she wanted to spare her back.We had our nieces and nephew coming over for a few hours, so we swapped in Carcassonne, originally planned for the 23rd. BK will get its time in the sun, just not today.
Played Carc with our nephew. Kid’s 6 but really good at the game, barely needing any advice. I won 119 to 117 (my wife) to 80 (nephew).
Tomorrow, in theory, should be Lotus, but that depends on if my mother-in-law comes over for her birthday, since it’s nowhere near as good at 2 players. Carc, being so lightweight, was originally paired with Full House, so that’s still on the table.
Today is my partner and my 16th anniversary. After a lovely ordered-in dinner (chimichuri salad and nachos for starters, steak, mashed potatoes, and brussel sprouts for me and linguine arrabiata for her, and then I baked ice cream bread for dessert), she suggested that we could play a bigger co-op game to spend the evening.
The excuse to finally get Descent 3rd Ed on the table! WOO!
Spoilers in the following images for anyone who is super concerned with what the map may look like for your first campaign game of Descent. I don’t know if/how variable these maps might be… but I took a few pictures of us tangling with the first boss after about an hour and a half.
For an opening mission… phew… that was a lot longer and chunkier than I expected! Andy was playing Syrus the Mage-Without-Spells, and I was attempting Brynn the Not-As-Tanky-As-Expected. I got wounded very early on (which, honestly, I wasn’t concerned with, thinking that the first 3 enemies would be all the enemies… they were not).
I think I really like it. I love the story thus far, and the characters seem to have real… character. And the fact we can switch up with heroes we take… that’s a neat element. Really glad I painted this one up!
Anyway, game finished just shy of 2 hours after a brutal final fight. There was a chest and several other elements we could’ve interacted with but I didn’t know we had to before beating up the Blood Witch. Ah well, I’ll know for next time. I do like that the mission didn’t rush us until that last fight.
Anyway, we reached Frostgate (I am suddenly very wary about Childres’ creativity…), got through the prologue dialogue, and then stopped for the evening. Unlikely we’ll get another chance to play, but it was a really nice way to spend the evening together.
We played a quick game of Lost Cities tonight, interrupted before scoring the first round by needing to let our older kiddo soak in the tub for a bit (he threw up at school today and has not been feeling well most of the evening). I won the first round by around 40 points, my wife caught up a bit in the second round, and I really outscored her on the third round due to her getting hit with a pretty big negative on one of her expeditions. So I won, 118 - 69.
I played a few rounds of Elevenses For One which I’d not broken out for a while, but which is still one of the most agreeable solo micro-games I own (the whole thing is 13 cards, but one of them is effectively redundant, and two others are only for scoring, so it’s really 10 cards in practice). As a take-anywhere ~5min solo card game, I don’t see myself ever getting rid of this one.
Likewise a few rounds of Food Chain Island which I still find a nice little puzzle; and it’s quick enough that I can either try to think multiple moves ahead, or just go on gut instinct and see what happens; and either way, it won’t take too long, and if I lose I’ll just shuffle up and try again.
Then it was Solar Storm vs Tetrarchia in a small-box solo Pandemic-ish show-down…1
Before I’d gotten my hands on Tetrarchia I was really anticipating that it was going to take top honours in this category, but I’m leaning the other way now. My current thought is that Solar Storm is reliably more engaging throughout, while Tetrarchia is liable to be unpredictably and frustratingly swingy. Today’s games of Tetrarchia were actually pretty decent in this regard (I also lost both of them, which might be related), but in general I’ve found it incredibly variable, whereas my game of Solar Storm (which I won) had me engaged from start to finish.
Tetrarchia is faster to set up (or at least it is since I ditched the silly plastic components box they included as a kind of substitute insert, and just threw all of the pieces needed for a game into a plastic bag), as it only needs a few dice rolls to place ~10 wooden tokens and then you’re underway, whereas Solar Storm is card-based and has a few different decks to shuffle and set up. I’m still experimenting with difficulty options for Tetrarchia, and I have yet to add the expansions into the mix, but for the moment Solar Storm gets my vote.
1 I believe Tetrarchia is a wee bit more Flash Point: Fire Rescue than Pandemic; but I still haven’t played FPFR, and so I have no insight into whether that’s a strong comparison or merely a tangential one.
For a minute there I was assuming that map was included with the game, and thought it looked really nice. Then I looked closer and realised what it actually was.
The 3D terrain looks like it might be a bit crazy/pointless. Is it?
Tainted Grail is either my #1 or #2 game of all time, so I’m glad you’re having a good time. (The other candidate is Gloomhaven.)
That’s hard to say. It’s gorgeous, and incredibly well designed and sturdy. It’s not super fiddly, which was my major concern.
On the flip side, you are paying a lot for that beauty, and it doesn’t really add a ton. But you could make the same argument about, say, Space Hulk, or about models in general. In the case of Gloomhaven, par example, I think you would have a point: the models are awful, and the terrain is pretty fiddly, and there is so much of it that it’s a pain in the butt to organize and setup each game/map.
In Descent 3rd Ed (I almost wrote “Descent 3D,” ha), it’s not so much you can’t organize it or find it. The models and terrain are beautiful, and it does make the game look super, super pretty. Does that matter? No, not really. But I love all the FFG-RPGs I’ve played (Imperial Assault and Journeys in Middle-Earth particularly, but Mansions of Madness is also strong), and I think the game is great.
Should you or anyone else buy it? Gosh, that’s hard for me to say, even when I’d advising people at work. You have to be a bit nuts to drop $200 on a game just because it’s pretty, and there is a LOT of app integration. I don’t mind (keeps me from having 4 million cards on the table), but I understand why people don’t like it.
So! Yes. Sort of? But better than some. Grab it on sale if you can and you like the FFG-style RPGs.
A third of a way through my solo advent “calendar” (in quotes because I don’t have any semblance of a plan), and it’s been a good reminder that I own a lot of excellent solo games. 
I have a tendency to laser-focus on one game for extended periods of time, to the detriment of the rest of my collection, and I’ve really enjoyed being forced out of that rut. I might try to extend this into a monthly thing, playing a different solo game every day. But anyways, the games:
Heat – still fantastic! I have now played with all the Advanced modules, and they all contain that magic element of improving the game when they’re added, but also improving the game when they’re removed. When playing a Championship, I use a small variant I devised to keep the Legends competitive (which you can see here, but even without that it’s an absolute blast. I have also managed to played a few games with (gasp!) another live person, specifically my wife, who loved it as well.
Ark Nova – I’m starting to realize I’m quite bad at this game! When it comes to these kinds of engine-builders, I tend to get so focused on accomplishing “a thing” that I forget to try to win the game, which is less than ideal. Still, this is a fantastic solo game, and my current favorite card-based engine builder. I have a great time pulling all the levers the game provides, and even when I lose (which is quite a bit), I feel satisfied with what I’ve done.
Marvel Champions – Played a few more games with Wolverine, who has been a mild disappoint to me. He’s definitely fun, but his main gimmick of “take damage to play free attacks” isn’t nearly as interesting as I initially thought it would be. If I’m looking for a damage-soaking risk-taker, I would much rather play She-Hulk, who remains one of my all-time favorites.
Longshot: The Dice Game – super dumb, but a lot of fun. It’s a rare game that feels like I have a lot of control over the outcome, even if I probably don’t. I need to get this played with my wife, because I think it would be tons of fun with actual humans.
Great Western Trail – I really like this game, but I don’t know if I actually enjoy it. The dual core of deck management and worker movement is fun and cool and interesting, but almost everything around it feels more fiddly and overwrought than I would like. And the solo mode, while quite good, has a tendency to rush its way to Kansas City in a way that severely cramps the potential play styles, and can be surprisingly swingy depending on the cows they buy and when they place new buildings. I played 4-5 games of this, and I’m no closer to deciding if I actually want to keep it.
Battlecrest – This game is, to put it simply, rad. It’s the only Button Shy game I’ve played that feels more ambitious than its card limit–a quick, dense skirmish game with no luck and loads of hidden depth. The solo mode is kind of weird (the AI doesn’t care about range considerations, so it can smack you around from anywhere on the map), but it cuts down on upkeep, and my own considerations are kept relatively intact, which is awesome for this kind of game. I can’t wait to get my hands on the expansion (which I should be getting soon!) to add some replay value to this, because it is a fascinating little design.
Welcome to the Moon – Why am I not playing this every minute of the day? It’s such a great design, a huge evolution of the original game to eight (eight!) maps, each of which feel interesting and distinct. I don’t love all of them equally (adventure 6 in particular is way too fiddly for not enough payoff), but it’s shocking how much of it works; it feels like a light-to-mid-weight Euro game, while keeping the same breezy feel of the original. And there’s even more content in the box! The little variant cards for each adventure are small, but they add some extra flavor to each map that help keep it fresh after repeat plays. It’s such a generous box that it kind of boggles my mind.
Unsurmountable – I just got this from my Button Shy Game of the Month subscription today, and it fits right into the vast majority of Button Shy games in being “pretty good!” You’re building a pyramid of cards, but you have to arrange them in a way that leaves a route from the bottom all the way to the top. It’s definitely an engaging experience, but the flow of the game felt a bit weird to me–you’re looking at the row of cards, figuring out a sequence of powers to activate to get the card you want to play into the right spot so you can actually play it, and it renders the game arc kind of stilted. Not bad, but I would never play it over the phenomenal ROVE.
So yesterday, we played our game of Full House for our advent calendar. We’d originally paired it up with Carcassonne on the 23rd since they’re both VERY lightweight, but with the reshuffling on Wednesday, it got bumped to yesterday. The plan was to play it and Lotus (which is REALLY not as good with just two players) with my wife’s mom, since it was her birthday yesterday and she loves both, but that didn’t happen, so we just banged out a game of Full House.
It’s… Well, it’s a game that exists. A less infuriating (read: Much shorter) Monopoly, perhaps? There’s certainly thematic similarities if nothing else. There’s zero skill involved, almost no decisions (and they’re all obvious). Hard to recommend it to this particular crowd. It has its place, but it’s definitely for children or non-gamers. The sheer randomness of it can be funny, but one and done is the most that can be hoped for here.
Oh, and I lost. My wife made it to $250,000 before me (I was at $238,000).
Today will be Terraforming Mars. That’s gonna be much better.
We just finished WyvernCon tonight. We played 2 days. A game of a long AF 18xx game on each day. First was 1817 which started at around 11AM and ended at 9PM. Same deal with 1837: Austro-Hungarian Empire. (We had lunch and dinner breaks)
1817 - A game that I had flowery opinions on. Alas, I didn’t manage to get my early game right. Also, I think I screwed up on mid-game where I should have cut my losses and sold perhaps 2 of my corporations. Bailing them all out was defo a mistake. I really prefer playing it face-to-face as I get to have a clear history on what happened.
Despite me playing this for 10+ games this year, I still don’t know how to play well. Good sign.
1837: Austro-Hungarian Empire - another epic game with an epic map. This one is run-good-companies with full capitalisation. This is weird because I can run companies 1830-style. If they need bailing-out, I would dump down to just my director’s certificate, and keep running the companies. Another weird thing is how the 4 Trains are permanent, so it makes the company dumping more lenient and not focused at all on bankrupting players. I still enjoy this. It got some heavy decisions, short-term/long-term trade-offs. Another weird thing is that it incentivised players away from dominating their own companies. All of these weird things in a good way.
Other games this week:
Tinderblox - super easy to play and it comes in a small tin box. Awesome!
Wreck Raiders - it’s fine. Contract fulfilment, set collection. At least it has player interaction. But ultimately mind numbing. I have now come to this point in gaming where if I want a serious game, I’ll play Cube Rails or Splotter or other shared incentivey games. If I want something silly, then dexterity, Dixit, card games, party games, even Ameritrash. Anything to make the table lively, talky, noisy. People First!! If the mechanism itself is the game, I’m just bored playing it.