We had to guess two of the last 3 whim cards to win…
We did it!
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Absolutely gorgeous production, also. Everything is so so nice.
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Sunday at Stabcon:
- Mag-Blast, not much to it but it has its moments;
- Vast, I think it would repay a lot of plays with the same group (rotating roles so that everyone knows what everyone is trying to do), but I had a good time anyway. I am at least temporarily cured of my desire to own it.
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Vast Crystal Caverns, or Mysterious Manor? I understand the gameplay is essentially the same, but I hear that manor is a bit better when first going in. Whether that is from better written rules or more balanced roles, I do not know. I own the latter, but have yet to play it
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Original Vast, so Crystal Caverns I guess.
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Andy and I finished our campaign of My City with me pulling a commanding victory out at the end. The last 5 or 6 missions I won all but 1 of them, and although Andy did some very clever movement with the trains and gold display cabinet, it wasn’t enough. Final score was 47 - 43.
For most of the game there is a good balance between “You win and stuff gets harder” but with additional “You lost and stuff gets easier,” but around Chapter 6 that stops being true. Suddenly winning doesn’t make your life much harder (a little, but a very little amount), and losing doesn’t help at all (or, arguably, helps in a very minimal way). But otherwise, a very, very good game. One I am happy to recommend to almost anyone.
I’m glad we played it, but I’m also kinda glad it’s done? We can do another entire campaign with the two unused player boards, but I doubt we will in the near-to-immediate future. But that’s okay.
Tonight I’m hoping to get her to finish up another Unlock! or two, or maybe a game of Lost Ruins of Arnak. We will see.
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Vinhos Deluxe - we played with the 2016 mode, and from what I’ve read online after the play, it’s the more streamlined version. 2010 is the bigger one. So, yeah, I was surprised that the game is pretty streamlined along the lines of the Gallerist, rather than Lisboa. But I found the decisions in the Gallerist to be more compelling. The alliances are better in the latter. The mixture of long term and short term goals are better. I will have to ask my friend if they are up for the 2010 mode. Hopefully, I can convince them.
THE LACERDA RANKING:
- The Gallerist
- Lisboa with the Queen’s Variant
- Vinhos 2016 variant
- Lisboa
- Kanban EV
- Mercado de Lisboa (trash game)
Mille Fiori - meh Knizia. Point salady, indeed. It’s not bad as the teach is pretty easy, but there’s so many Knizia’s I can just play with its 1 hr duration.
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We had our second game of Bitoku today, and I feel it confirmed everything I felt in our first one: An excellent, deep game that’s hampered by a messy presentation that makes it seem way more overwhelming than it actually is (again, if you can play something like Great Western Trail comfortably, you can play this). But we both love it. The sheer variety of strategies and possibilities is fantastic. I lost this one 115-109 by focusing mostly on crystals, the vision cards and the pilgrimage with some buildings thrown in, while Maryse focused quite a bit on the lake treasures with some buildings, the Bitoku cards and a dash of pilgrimage. The narrow margin of her victory makes me think that we both had good plans.
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Iirc the balance in latter My City comes from the space to to opposing strategies. So you can either go for the the normal win or speed off and hit some targets. Broadly they work out the same in terms of points. That was my impression of how they t remained relatively close towards the end.
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Tried out Heat tonight, playing a solo game with a full complement of Legends. Due to some very unlucky draws when using Stress and Boosting, I came in 5th, just two spaces away from 2nd though.
I really like it so far. I was confused for a minute by the slipstream rules, before remembering this does not work like Flamme Rouge where all movement happens at the same time, so only the active car takes advantage of it. Once I got that through my head, everything else made perfect sense.
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I attended Games Night in Napier (Monday night) in a very rainy night. Honestly, it has been over a week of continuous rainy weather, Hawke’s Bay has never looked this green in summer…
I played a good game of Azul between 4, where I had a slow start but a great 3rd round where my left side grouping paid off and I managed to pull away scoring 16 points in just one round. In the end I got trapped with a pile of blue tiles (7 or 8?) but I had prepared the bottom row for it, so I managed to minimise the damage. In the end I finished drawing first at 58, the third was at 57, and the last at 47. Really enjoyed that tight end.
After that we joined two tables to play Secret Hitler at 8. The same person had Hitler two times in a row, so they managed to pull away those two wins. We switched to three games of Telestrations, where some cameleon by a railway got us all on the floor laughing (it should have been a winery, that sort of developed into a farm…)
Two of the players left a bit earlier, so we played two more rounds of Secret Hitler for lack of any other social games. At least we managed to win the very last one as liberals. The three times I was President before I ended up with a hand of three fascist cards, so it was nice to have two rounds of presidency on the last game and have a bit more variety… and to end up winning the last one by one decree.
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Played the Mysterio scenario in the Sinister Motives campaign of Marvel Champions today, still using Miles and Gwen. This seemed really easy in comparison to the previous scenarios, as I never felt in danger of losing. The threat on the main scheme never got above 10, when 16 was needed to advance, and the two heroes only took about 8 damaged combined between the two of them the whole game.
I almost finished with no side schemes in play, but the last villain phase brought out three, and I just couldn’t risk sparing the time eliminating them when I was so close to winning.
On to the Sinister Six!
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Due to some family reasons I had to move the night of my boardgame group and thought I’d re-highlight it on the village Facebook group. We’ve had 10 new people wanting to join, 9 of which are complete novices. While I love getting people interested in the hobby, it’s going to be a bit of a nightmare for those of us who do play more advanced games cos we’re going to have to play entry level games most of the time until these guys get used to it!
Oh well - it’ll be nice to meet some more people in the village.
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From what I can tell from our groups here, it can take a bit of a toll on somebody to be the person introducing and teaching games to newbies, so we tended to have a rota for that “role”. Now we have an agreement with Hastings Libraries where we host a games day for a Saturday a month, and that is where we receive most of the newbies, so that has taken that role away, but I think if the group starts to grow, it doesn’t hurt to plan a bit.
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At the moment, I don’t mind - I actually quite enjoy seeing people ‘get it’ so happy to do it. One woman who came last night actually said she was going to go away and buy a game and she would teach it to us next time!
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And next week, you’ll be:
A) wondering where did she even find the copy of The Campaign for North Africa: The Desert War 1940-43
B) asking yourself if your friends and family will still remember you when it’s done
C) remarking how much easier the gameplay is than you ever imagined – her rules explanation was incredible!
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I know someone who has a copy… 
(Probably - I don’t know if this is a real game or not but he has soooooooooo many war games)
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Now I am thinking that in those lists of games you should play at least once in your lifetime… they forgot that one.
And go to the extreme, take a week off, go camp somewhere and play it like Rommel did.
EDIT: Minus the tanks and bombs flying round. That might involve a trip to a warzone and we would not recommend that
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Okay, so. TTS because I am still scared AF to do in person gaming (every time I think about inviting somebody over for games, they come into my workplace without a mask a few days before the weekend, just to banish any thoughts that they are being as cautious as I would like), but I managed to get a full game of Battletech in!
4500 BV. I took an Archer 2K with an Elite pilot (named “Killingyouguy”), an Orion (“Grunt”), a Hatchetman (“Hacka di Planete”), and a Locust (“Dedman Runnin”). My opponent, Nick, brought a King Crab (“Pinchy”), an Axman (“Lil Chopper”), a Hatchetman (“Big Chopper”, yes, he knows), and a Wolfhound (“Bill”).
He wanted an Elite pilot but couldn’t fit it in… But that’s because he accidentally took a LosTech Axman (double heatsinks, large pulse laser, ferro-fiber armour). Ah well.
Early shots were mostly pointless: my Archer found a hill and stood there all game,.lobbing LRMs at anything that poked it’s nose out of.cover. Turns out the 2K varient generates way more heat than it can deal with if you use the lasers and the LRMs, making it a pretty stupid design (12 heatsinks, and one round of shooting generates 26 heat… ridiculous). Ah well, lessons learnt!
My Locust circles around behind the behemoth King Crab, but then decided to unload on the Wolfhound instead: the laser did some middling damage, but a machine gun burst managed to get 3 Crits on its torso! Two crits to the engine and one on the gyro. In response, Nick’s Hatchetman managed to land a solid blow with its ax to my Locust… and hit the head, cleaving it clean off in a single blow!
(There were lots and lots of missed shots at it as well, of course)
His Wolfhound shutdown from heat… so we were both down our Lights.
My Orion and Hatchetman went after the enemy Axman, raking it with AC10s and medium lasers and a few hacks from my hatchet. In response, the King Crab casually blew off the Hatchetman’s left leg, then left torso. My mech fell, the pilot knocked unconscious.
The final round saw me pouring everything I had into the Axman to little effect, but enough damage to cause it to fall, and fail his pilot roll, knocking it out. His King Crab opened up on my stationary (and massively overheating) Orion, but missed all its shots: the heat caused it to overheat, then it’s AC20 ammo exploded (taking out it’s left torso, the large laser, and knocking out the pilot). His Hatchetman fared little better against my Orion, but it was basically pristine at the end of the fight.
I conceded (it was getting late), but things weren’t as dire as they may have been. I still had two functional heavies, and his King Crab was useless aside from it’s LRM15.
Gosh I love Battletech.
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I love Hardback. It is my favorite word game. by a lot. I should really rate it a 10 on BGG to reflect this I guess.
And I really really want to like Paperback Adventures. Tonight was my third game. I only have 1 of the character boxes. And maybe that is for the best. Maybe it was a mistake to listen to SVWAG talk about it while I played it.
But they really just confirmed the niggles I already had about it. I present evidence #1: the components. Well the component that they call the „dealbreaker“. The idea is good. Track the HP, energy, crowns and poison values for yourself and your opponent in these pretty plastic trays. I do seem to remember that during the campaign they struggled to make it all fit. The end result is: it fits so snuggly that if you are not careful it pops right back out. Also if by chance you have two trackers in the same slot (3 fit in there) if you have to get out the first one … you have to get out the other ones, too. And guess what you have to move around at least 1 marker on each board per round. More often it is 2 markers per round. Up and down. If I could take time on how much of the play time is spent fiddling with these things… I stopped putting them into the slots and just dropped them on sideways.
For me the component thing is meh but not the dealbreaker.
I love books. I love the idea to have a wordgame about books. I love all the cards the Mc Guffins and what they do and the items… I love that this game has a card called Chekov‘s Gun. Except the gun is mostly useless. Like most of what is in the picture. It is all mostly useless.
#evidence 2: please see the upper right corner of the previous image. You may see the „shop“ sign. Well, I just played a 90 minute campaign of 6 fights and I bought 1 letter from the shop and I couldn‘t even upgrade it. I played a whole game and didn‘t upgrade a single card (they have really pretty sleeves that allow flipping the cards to the upgraded side). I got all the items and McGuffins as rewards for the fights, I got 2 full crowns over the course of the entire game… (crowns is what you use to buy stuff but what one of my character specific items also uses to do stuff… so not getting any is pretty much eliminating a lot of the game).
So maybe this is just not this character‘s specialty? She is a poisoner after all and not after Crowns. So I use the poison track and my other special item to deal damage to opponents in a sneaky way. And on 1 of 3 games this actually worked because I lucked out and drew an item that allowed me to pay energy to further poison opponents … this time not so much. So my special did a grand total of 3 damage this whole game.
More complaints:
- What really bugs me the most is that I stopped caring about the words. I draw 4 cards each turn. I get to add 1 vowel from the boss and 1 wild. And in 2 of 3 games I actually had items that allowed me to draw an additional card for a total of 7 letters. But then some cards give bonusses for being discarded and the boss vowel has strategic use that supersedes it‘s use as a letter: including it in your word skips over an action that might be worse than the next one. The wildcard gives you energy to spend on items if not used. Quite a few letters give bonusses for short words. So I end up making words like „At“ or „Gun“ or „Sing“ …
- tricky housekeeping issues: you only get the bonusses from the word in the „clash“ phase but have to use all items before that and then need t keep track of what you did and when and…
- the game purports to be a deck builder. But it is more of a deck management game: except for 2 of the boss fights all cards you add to your deck are not added but replace other cards. So you begin the game with 10 cards and you end it with 12. Those 12 may be better than the starting cards sure…
- at least you gain a lot of items and McGuffins in the game more than anything else but those are more or less random draws from the decks and once again in this game I had at least 2 that didn‘t do anything the whole game.
- to win the game you have to rush each boss with maximum damage. I have rarely ever found it useful to splay left for defense. The strategy seems to be to do damage quicker than the opponent and use the boss vowel to skip over actions that would damage you to badly. And since this is not in line what this character box says it should feel my guess is the other boxes would play very similar. Edit: reading through this again there is also another reason to rush: each word you make exhausts the top card from your word so it is out of this particular fight. As each opponent has two sides and you have a maximum of 12 cards to exhaust playing for time and going slow is just not a valid strategy.
Finale: The arc of the game is flat. There is no real trilogy with a suspenseful opening and a climactic boss fight to remember at the end—it feels like 3 books of boring „middle part“. After half the game I get bored… is it unfair to think I would rather have played Ark Nova tonight? After all that game is Top10 now on BGG. But I also think I‘d rather have read a book than played at being in one. Or lost more at Agropolis (More on that in another post). This game frustrates me, the little jokes, the cards, the ideas and the theme speak to me and I have nothing else except Hardback that hits that note… but I don‘t think I want to play it.
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