The Pyramid’s Deadline - dice drafting and build a pyramid. It’s fine.
Troika - It’s a push-your-luck and make 3-token sets. One should be a 3 of a kind to act as fuel for your ship. The 3 runs are your ores you’ve harvested from the planet. It’s a decent game, but we got so many push-your-lucks tbh. This one can compete with its small size.
In a Grove - the rules seems good, in theory, but once you play it, the logic is just too straight-forward that there’s not much uncertainty going on. Players earlier on the turn order are obviously hosed.
Kobayakawa - Finally! A great game from this session! The twist with the Kobayakawa card supplementing the lowest card is a wild twist that stops the game from being too predictable. This is a good one from Oink.
Rurik - not an Oink. It’s another troops-on-a-map. Still fun. Not very elegant system. But the flow is nice. Once players know how the entire system works on Round 1, then Round 2 is easy.
Thirsty Meeples in Oxford tonight. (If you’re near Oxford and would be up for an occasional outing to try new games, give me a shout.)
Akropolis, a tile-laying city-building game; it felt to me like a blend of Between Two Cities (without the “between” bit, but a similar set of constraints on the zones of different colours) with NMBR 9 (tiles on top of others are worth more). Didn’t feel as though it was doing anything terribly original, or anything to do with akropolites, but it was good fun and I’d play again.
Heat: Pedal to the Metal, and I think I start to see what’s going on. On the one hand, yes, there’s card play quite like the same designers’ Flamme Rouge; on the other, they’ve removed the consumption of cards which ties races to a particular length, and cards can be swapped in and out of the system as the race progresses. It’s hard to justify getting this when I already have both Flamme Rouge and Rallyman GT, but I’d certainly play it some more (at least if I couldn’t persuade people to Rallyman instead).
Wonder Woods, gathering with partly hidden price information. Pretty basic but I’d put this under the nose of a bright kid and it wasn’t offensive.
the traditional Timeline, in this case Historical Events. Which includes the extinction of dinosaurs as well as the release of Nelson Mandela, and I had quite an easy time of it.
That’s disappointing. Everything I’ve seen so far makes me relieved that I took a “wait and see” approach to Paperback Adventures. I like Paperback and I love the thematic touches with the book titles and illustrations (they always make me smile), so I was imagining a solo word game with a great theme, but it seems like the designers lost the plot (or at any rate designed a game that doesn’t hold any appeal to me at all).
Had our first game night in what feels like forever!
For Sale with a full complement of six, first play of this! It was a lot of fun! You run out of money in the bidding round a LOT faster than I was expecting, but I still did alright. I had the 29 and the first 15,000 card came out on the second-to-last round, so I had to guess whether my friend with the 30 would play it. He didn’t! So it was close but he beat me by 2,000 in the end.
Ethnos also with a full six. Merfolk, Wingfolk, Orcs, Giants, Skellingtons, and Minotaurs. Fun fights over the territories as usual. I ignored the Merfolk completely and mostly got points from Giants, which I held the token for in the last two rounds (and got the points from the big Giant bands that implies).
Finally two rounds of No Thanks, a big hit! Won both times by the same person who had a whopping -7 in the first game.
I also played two rounds of No Thanks last night, with six players. I lost both games (the first with a catastrophic 74 points to my name). I think that, in both games, every single time I thought I was safe to allow another circuit around the table to get more tokens before taking a horrible card, someone else took the card and its tokens just before me – and then something equally horrible would get turned up and I’d have to take it with virtually no tokens on it at all. It was awful! I love it :)
I also played Handsome the other day, which is an ingenious micro-sized word game in just 18 cards.
And I’ve been playing a bunch of solo Cribbage on the train, which I can do with just my travel-sized board on my knees, the card box to hold the discarded cards after each hand, and everything else I can manipulate in-hand and between fingers – the remaining deck, my hand, and the crib. I can get a couple of games in on my usual train trips, so it’s my go-to option.
Also a few rounds of Calico, which is my current outdoor solo game of choice when the weather is nice (being another breeze-resistant game). I remember being a bit overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of cardboard and tokens when I bought this, and wondering whether I’d made a mistake; but with every cat stored in its own zip-lock bag it’s pretty quick to set up, and I find this a really enjoyable game to play, so I’m glad that I picked it up.
Splendor Duel, it’s great - all the best bits from Splendor with more interesting decisions throughout.
Azul: SP x3, played a best of three with my Mum when she was down visiting. She won. I’m better at this than the original, apparently still not great though
Takenoko, super close game of this one which was great.
Spring Meadow, my favourite polyomino placement game (if we’re not including A Feast for Odin)
Galaxy Trucker, man it had been awhile for this - it’s still excellent though. Our winner did really well all three flights and despite me doing pretty great at runs 2 and 3, his lead was enough to make him a clear winner. The intruders from the expansion can really screw with you, but I like that with them included you can’t just build a ‘perfect’ ship and cruise through the game - there’s always a threat you can’t totally prepare for. Robosmokies suck though. (Also am I missing a reference there? Cause I continue to have no idea what is going on with that card…)
I have only played Cottage Garden and the fall themed one … have you played those? What does Spring Meadow do to be better? (My favorite has always been Cottage Garden but maybe only because I played this more than the fall one the name of which I cannot even remember and I have not played Spring Meadow)
Just got done learning Furnace. Super simple (if you’ve played it, about the same complexity as New York Zoo), but oh boy, that’s brain-burny. Kinda refreshing after Beyond the Sun and Bitoku, LOL.
Oh, and I won against the stuffed monkey 54-40. No idea if that’s a big gap. I had a LOT of problems playing a two-fisted game of this, for some reason.
Food Chain Magnate base game with 5 players. Boy it was such a wild dynamic. With more players, I found myself blindsided a few times. It only went for 3 hours with 4 newbies (still faster than some Euros) yet the game felt really epic. When using the word “epic” to describe a gaming experience, this is what I am looking for.
I forgot to report my game of ISS Vanguard on Thursday night. We played the second mission (still quite tutorial-ish) and really enkoyed the feeling of living your own Interstellar-like adventure (with less physics involved, but hey, give it time I guess?). The systems are slightly complicated, but the actual gameplay is nice an easy, and I am liking the choice selections that are involved though the adventures.
At some point, the reduced supplies were really feeling stressful, and I think we managed well even though at some point it looked like some of the team would not be able to return. I can see this being a heavy part of future missions (a bit a la exhausted cards systems in Gloomhaven but with dice instead)
We managed to only get a couple of recruits injured, but we did clear all the unique discoveries and even an extra one that might come in handy on future planets. Looking forward to our next sessions, to see what the game will feel like full on.
If you’re not feeling it you’re not feeling it, but a few comments from my own single play (with Damsel also) thus far:
I also got almost no crowns. That did feel like a problem but it’s possible that it’s rewarding riskier play (the effects I had with crown generation generally didn’t do a lot else) or more challenging words (also they were on letters I had some difficulty making top card). I definitely didn’t use them for my item.
I had like 8 of my cards upgraded due to victory rewards and a right out of the gate Boss McGuffin that upgraded cards in my fatigue pile when an encounter flipped (and then put two of those cards back on my deck).
At the very end of the game I had an item that I could flip for a one time hex injection (it’s poison for Damsel but it’s a generic mechanic) but otherwise I was mostly generating hexes from letter cards, especially a Plot effect that added one. It may not seem that effective but I found it tremendously useful for peeling that last chunk of HP off, especially on stage 2. Especially as it’s loss of life, not damage. (I did eventually get an X that let me double the hexes on the enemy, but didn’t get to use it much.)
I only had one effect that rewarded me for short words and I swapped that out almost immediately. But that’s also specifically a Damsel thing - the others don’t have any cards like that and Plothook actually has a mechanic that only fires when you have 6, 7 or even 8 letter words (he accomplishes this through his Crew mechanic which allows him to play letters from his fatigue pile). And I early on got a Z that I could Plot into a larger hand the next turn, so that actively encouraged longer words at least some of the time (when I had a Critical Hit and didn’t have a bunch of Plot cards).
There are definitely enemies you need to block, e.g. The Titan. I agree that offense is generally more useful but most of my fights lasted at least 6-7 turns and not infrequently more, and I never once used the enemy vowel for its effect and made it pretty handily to the final boss (though I didn’t win that one. It just happened to have a hex effect that I couldn’t deal with. The vowel wouldn’t have been useful.)
It’s definitely a random game, and it’s less a word game than a tabletop version of those roguelite card games where words are a major constraint to wrestle with on how exactly you deploy your cards, so I wouldn’t recommend it for people who are primarily into it for a word game. But I had a much better time than you apparently did, and with some of your complaints I wonder if you might not have had a better time with one of the other characters.
I agree that some of the issues may just be that I have the „wrong-for-me“ character box. This core-box model is really meh. I thought: if the game play is good I‘ll be able to buy the other boxes later. I should be able to judge the game by 1 box.
(I chose Damsel b/c in Slay the Spire the poison guy is my favorite to play with)
I admit I am a little worried that I am just unable to grok the game and how it should be played and that I am missing out. But then I have played this 3 times and every game I was a little less excited to play.
I find it very difficult to put into words how I feel after a game of Paperback Adventures. Mostly, I feel frustrated because it feels like I should win fights with dexterity and elegant moves but instead I wield my deck like a cudgel that just crushes everything in its path with blunt force with the help of a random hodge-pudge of items and McGuffins. I play games to make cool moves and combos. And this game seems to signal „you can make cool combos“ and I am frustrated because I cannot seem to create any.
This game has so much potential. The core idea with the splaying of the words to gain effects is so nice. I love it. But how this is integrated into the larger game just doesn‘t sing for me. I wish to see this mechanic in a completely different game with the same theme…
I barely ever house rule anything. This game tempts me to make up my own game from the components.
Rapido - which is a reprint of an older Knizia called Excape. Good dice chucking game. This might be my fave dice chucker, but I need to play more Gang of Dice
Razzia! - as a card game form, this is just better than Ra. I need to see how good the reprint is by 25th Century Games. Fingers crossed.
The Estates - tense as ever. I have to say, this is better than a lot of Knizia auction games.
Just played a pair of games of Furnace. What a delightful brain-burner of a puzzle. So few rules (the manual is seriously 4 pages), but there’s a LOT of game in there. It’s VERY good.
Maryse won the first game 72-69, I won the second 63-55.
Plays perfectly well at two players. Like Tzolk’in, the game adds a neutral player to block/snipe buildings.
I saw that in ZATU and I legit started ranting alone how “back in my day I can buy Castles of Burgundy or the Village brand new for 20 quid”. I know times change, I’m just a whiny old man
Last night, my wife and I got out Concordia, which we have not played in a while. We used the Creta map. As the game progressed, I had most of my houses out on the board while she still had a handful, but she did a neat trick of Diplomating my Consul, then Tribuning, and finally using her Senator to take the last cards from the display, ending the game.
Due to the house disparity, I was still feeling pretty good until I saw her cards splayed out, as she had three Mars cards to my one, and with both of us having five of our colonists out, it meant she was getting 20 points over me in that category, though we were pretty even on the other cards.
Final scores were 119 - 118, she just beat me out for the win. One of our closest games ever!
I was definitely making combos. I dunno, I have a similar experience with Slay the Spire - everything comes slowly and painfully and I feel the opposite of powerful. Meanwhile people are cackling about their absurd overpowered combos and I’ve never managed any such thing. Sometimes things just don’t click, I guess.
