I’ve had success with Christofori, Maria, and Barbara now. Giorgio looks interesting (and was my first plan until you snagged that first and best city expansion spot), and potentially very fast, but I don’t see any way to win with Niccolo - he seems like a way to get a quick start before you raze his cathedral and build a new one.
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I’ve won with Niccolo. Although my limited experience and that of my opponents might not make that a reliable barometer. It was my third game after trying in my second. I think it was about focussing on efficient sequencing of resource gathering to maximise houses with the free house being most valuable. It also has an almost (non mathematical colloquial version) exponential growth. As you get more workers you can get buildings and resources faster which snowballs and my win almost came from nowhere. The university was really helpful too I think. Does one building give you seeds?
It’s been a while so my memories are a touch fuzzy.
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Biology for seeds, yes. I will have to give Niccolo a shot, using forced labour to accelerate things. The storage puzzle with that amount of harvesting and no Christofori will be very tricky.
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I think not storing was the key. On a turn generating what you need for houses and only storing food plus one or 2 extra for strategic house building. Do I remember correctly that you always get a chance to spend resources generated on buildings before the storage check?
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Yup. Yes. You betcha for 10.
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Oh, Nemo’s War looks very much like my thing. Runs to the wishlist
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Pictures, first play. One of the nominees for SdJ, and its probably the right weight to win. Its pretty simple to play. You arrange a grid of picture cards, 4 X 4. There are five rounds to play. At the beginning of each round, each player draws a random row/column coordinate tile, which tells you what your card is for the round. Then, you take one of the five sets, and use it to describe your card. The sets are: coloured cubes that you place in a 9 X 9 frame, building blocks, stones and twigs,icon cards, and a pair of shoelaces. Layout your set anyway you like, anything that will help the other players identify your card. Scoring is straightforward, you get a point for every card you identify, and any people who identified your cards. Play five rounds (so each person get a go with each of the sets), tally the points. Its pretty light, but still a bit tricky to do. Would be a good family game, its pretty entertaining.
Hadara, hadnt played this for a while. Still a great game. I didnt give myself much of a hope, started out so badly on the blue and red tracks (that are such a good source of points thru statues and colonies). I did eventually get all the statues, and pulled out the victory by a point. I’d done pretty well in scoring cards as well. Did not expect to win at all.
Heist: One Team, One Mission, played this just after lunch, which may have been a mistake, because we did awfully. Still fun.
Wavelength, a quick go of the 3p cooperative variant.
Nova Luna, one of the other SdJ nominees. Of this and Pictures, I like Nova better, but I feel that Pictures is more likely to win. Havent played the other nominee (My City).
Gizmos, finished up with this, a pretty good little engine builder from the amazing Phil Walker-Harding. One of his best.
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Had some lovely early afternoon Village with my wife (with both expansions). I almost always go sailing at least once, and decided to try something different this time. My silver goal had me get a lot of scrolls, and one of the first cards in the Inn was the councilman, so I decided to go for an inn+council strategy. I think I picked up around five or six cards from the inn, including the killer combo of Bard (put a boring non-special dead meeple into the Chronicle despite the mundanity of their achievements) and Artist (beef up Chronicle scoring). But unfortunately it wasn’t enough to counter my wife’s profitable sailing and very profitable market days, which afforded her 30 points just from customers, and another 12 from tea and cocoa. So I ended with a nice score of 69 and she was at 76. We both thought it was one of our most fun games of Village.
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I’ve seen a lot of people down on Village Port (and, to a lesser degree, Village Inn). Sounds like they both shone.
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I’ve never understood that. Inn adds a good way to either supplement your strategy or allow you to pivot to another more easily. Port’s life goals give you a good heading right from the get go, and replace the travel section – an automatic loser’s game – with something a lot more dynamic and viable. And both of them add a lot more fun to the equation.
We always play with both, although when I’m teaching new people I usually leave the actual sailing out (so, normal travel) and keep the life goals.
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We’ve got back into Dominion in a big way recently. It’s a good length of game to get the kids to play at the moment. We mostly use the base game and then sprinkle in some kingdom cards from Prosperity and Intrigue.
It’s so cool that every game feels different, just by tweaking a few things. We don’t play super competitively so there’s no Big Money at our table.
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Had to cut Friday’s Imperial Assault session short since my girlfriend was getting too tired to play, but we were most of the way through rescuing some fellow Rebels from local crooks, though evil R2D2 (I mean, uh, BT1 or something) was waiting for us at the shuttle with some of Vader’s Finest Stormtroopers and an officer. The gang itself was, a bit weird? They had a wampa. In the furnace room. >.>
(Randomly spawned enemies at its illogical finest.)
Thanks to a looted frag grenade and a belt of concussion grenades, our friendly neighborhood wookiee took out an entire Imperial troop cluster earlier and left one badly damaged Trandoshan for me to finish off. The wampa ended up starving to death after I stunned it so it couldn’t attack. So all in all, going pretty smoothly.
PS: Boy, the app sure relies on you knowing what Star Wars races are called in a way that normal humans definitely wouldn’t! (Seriously, the movies name a tiny handful of them at best.)
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Played online Patchwork against my sister.
It wasn’t even close, 38 to -14
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“Big money” isn’t competitive…
Yeah, the enemy spawns are very strange, even with just the core set.
We kept fighting…some big mouthed lizard (forget it’s name) in Imperial bases! 
I’ve heard that the later campaigns are a bit better about this, but we’ve not played them yet.
Had another go with my daughter at Love Letter, and on two games we finished very tight, with me snatching a comeback on the first one from 4-1 to 7-6 with several lucky guesses with Guard cards, and a second one where I caught her twice with the princess to win it 7-5.
I kind of feel bad that she can win many hands, but not the whole rounds. But it’s not like the game leaves you much room for manoeuvre to play badly, even guessing wildly with guards I have managed to get her… there must be a way 
That’s just the office carnivorous lizard. Doesn’t your office have a giant carnivorous lizard?
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Tonight, my wife and I finally got the opportunity to play something, so I got to break out my new raptors in Unmatched. She continued her (winning) streak of playing Medusa.
I think I had some bad luck of the draw, as I only got 3 defensive cards the whole game, so there were a number of times I just could not defend. She pinged down one of my raptors over a few turns, killing it just when I got things positioned to use a scheme to surround Medusa. She later used a boosted attack to one-hit-kill another raptor when I was unable to present a defense card. The final raptor went down soon after, having been weakened over a few turns.
I did manage to take out two harpies and hit Medusa for 6 damage, so it wasn’t a total blowout. I never managed to get an extra action from my cards, the one time I was able to play a card that would let me got Feinted. A small weakness I noticed in the deck is how the Clever Girl card, which gives you an action if you win the combat and have another raptor adjacent to the defender, is not as useful against 1 HP minions, as if they die, which they will should you win the combat, they are dead and adjacent to nothing, thus no extra action. Was hoping to use it when surrounding Medusa, but with one raptor down then, it also lost it’s effectiveness.
The raptors were definitely a fun group to play, though, and I am eager to give them another go.
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I went to my brother’s place last night and four of us played some games. I taught them all Dominion, and despite the first reaction I knew I’d get from my brother (he’s really not into boardgames) of ‘oh god, it’s going to be all cards and gold and stuff isn’t it?’ everyone really enjoyed it and it’s been requested again in the future.
The we had a game of Men at Work, which, with a few drinks in everyone got very tense and a lot of held breath, great fun, this will get lots more trips to the table.
I had a quick game of Maracaibo this morning before everyone else got up to play some story mode, which was excellent, and then I had a couple of games of my latest addition, Palm Island.
I’d been after this for a while, and after a speculative ‘want to buy’ post on a UK board game group, I found someone selling it who lived half an hour away!
(here I have 3 wood and 1 stone stored to use)
It’s a great solo (or two player) game played with a small deck of your cards, and the entire thing is played in one hand (hence the name). Turning cards 90 degrees turns a card into a resource, which you then use to upgrade other cards. when you upgrade you either rotate 180 degrees, or flip over, giving more resources on the next round, or more victory points at the end. The whole game fits in a pocket or wallet so you can genuinely play it anywhere, I really like it so far.
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Today saw Clans of Caledonia hit the table first. It’s not a perfect game but I really enjoy every play of it. It’s so finely done and has real smooth play. Good times.
Next was my first game of The Crew. I’m happy to believe the hype now. So good. Some swingy difficulties and particularly shonky play from one player saw us play 5 times getting to mission 3. Failing levels 1 + 2 on the first attempts was hopefully instructive. Time ran out after that but much fun was had. I could easily play this for hours.
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