Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Whistle_Pig · 3 February 2023 07:34

Pub games on Wednesday:

Living Forest: combination deck-building, push-your-luck type game. The cards (animals) have various currencies on them that let you buy more cards or work towards one of the three victory conditions. You keep drawing from your deck to build up your available currency to spend on two actions, but if you don’t stop drawing before you have 3 solitary animals in front of you, you only get one action. The art is very pretty. I’d play again but wouldn’t necessarily suggest it - didn’t think there was anything especially interesting there.

The Palace of Mad King Ludwig: still my favourite out of the Ludwig games. We were playing with someone we’d only just met, so everyone was being a bit less ruthless than usual!

Coloretto: this is a good pub game. I enjoy seeing people realise that there’s actually quite a bit of tactical thinking involved, and start trying to work out the most annoying place to put a chameleon

EnterTheWyvern · 3 February 2023 08:21

Got back to Expedition to Newdale and played chapter 5. There were really interesting twists in this one. The map was a headache in a good way. Had some really tough card draws so really enjoyed the battle to wrangle something out of the game. Maybe my favourite play of the game so far!

Next we put Helionox Deluxe to the table and really enjoyed this one also. It’s just a good coop deck builder. It does the basics right and isn’t too fussy. A bit like how SVWAG talk about Shards of Infinity as boiling down in to the core of deck building. That being said having to spend resources to move about it adds just enough pressure to make the purchasing choices interesting so the deck construction isn’t as straight forward so it’s tense. Also realised I’m pleased that Helionox Chronicles was a disappointment so I have no future ‘upgrade’ to worry about so I can just settle in to enjoying this for what it is again.

RogerBW · 3 February 2023 18:28

A long game of Flash Point Fire Rescue (broken overnight, in fact). Even when I know what I’m doing there’s still more stuff to try.

RogerBW · 3 February 2023 21:16

…and introducing a relative novice to modern boardgames. Jaipur, 6 Nimmt!, Deep Sea Adventure. Whee!

acharlie1377 · 3 February 2023 21:31

Played a couple solo games of Level 10 (previously titled Okey Dokey), a small-box card game by Hisashi Hayashi. It’s good! You’re trying to play five rows of cards in strictly ascending value (sort of like a cooperative Welcome To), with some specific restrictions on when you can play certain cards and when you can (or are forced to) play the two “reset” cards per row. If you can finish all five rows, you win, and if you ever can’t play a card to the grid, you lose.

It’s good! I think it would shine more in multiplayer, where you have less information about what cards can be played next turn, but even solo it’s a surprisingly thinky puzzle. Unfortunately, it falls into the same bucket I place games like Lost Cities, Battle Line, and Arboretum–specifically, the bucket titled “Good Card Games That Can Be Reasonably Approximated With A Standard Deck Of Playing Cards.” That’s not to diminish the quality or value of these games, and I know the art and components contribute to the experience, and I am sure the balance is lessened if you tweak the variables to work with the standard deck… but the essence of them is unchanged, and it’s much easier and cheaper to carry around a 54-card deck than several small-box card games. I don’t regret the purchase, but I can’t imagine pulling it out or taking it on a trip when I have a much more versatile alternative.

Marx · 4 February 2023 13:34

Nick and I played another digital game of Battletech last night. He had a BV advantage of 500 over me (My 4800 to his 5300), so I upgraded one of my pilots to 3/4 while the rest stayed at 4/5.

He picked a scenario: 5 flags (middle and then 8 hexes from middle in each cardinal direction) that if you have more BV than the opponent within 3 hexes you claim the flag (and it stays claimed until the end of the game or your opponent claims it). You then score 100 extra points per flag at the end of turn 8: 500 points is more-or-less the value of a Light, so not hugely impactful, but not totally ignorable.

Nick’s lance consisted of a Highlander (AC20, LRM, and a few Med Lasers), a Javelin (4 Med Lasers), a Grasshopper (1 Large, 4 Med Lasers, and an LRM), and a Blackjack (2 Large and 2 Med Lasers).

To counter that I had a Lancelot (Jim Galahad, PPC, 2 Large Lasers), a Rifleman (Gunnar McBlasto, 2 AC5s, 2 Large Lasers), a Shadow Hawk (Greg Birb, AC5, LRM5), and a Crusader (Timothy Hospitaler, 2 LRM10s, 2 SRM6s, and… a laser of some size). I upgraded the pilot of the Lancelot… which, in retrospect, was a mistake only because it turns out that the Lancelot is LosTech which we agreed not to use, so I chose to downgrade it from Double Heat Sinks (26) to Single Heat Sinks (13)… a single round of shooting generates 26 heat, sooooo…

Anyway, neither here nor there. It was what it was. My big problem there is that the Lancelot is a 2500s design (the time-period), which means it shouldn’t have LosTech. Annoying.

First round saw us running at each other and a few LRM shots, all of which missed.

Second round Nick started to circle towards the other flags while I attempted a Denied Flank, sending my Lancelot and Shadow Hawk to the east while my Rifleman and Crusader ponderously lurched up the middle. I landed a single LRM5 hit, of which a single missile landed. First bloo… first paint-scratch!

From there out it was all downhill. In the bad way.

Lancelot got to close range and opened up on his Grasshopper… and missed every shot. 13 extra heat for nothin’!
Shadowhawk fared little better: a hit with the AC5, but everything else flew wide.

My Crusader landed one of its LRM10 shots with 2 missiles impacting against Nick’s Blackjack.

In return his Grasshopper raked the Lancelot with fire, but politely spread it uniformly around, and his Highlander missed the AC20 but landed everything else on my Shadow Hawk. One lucky hit landed on his head, and on a 3+… my pilot fell unconscious and the Shadow Hawk tumbled.

Next round, down a Shadow Hawk, my Lancelot opened up on his Highlander, inflicting a respectable 26 damage… which staggered the Highlander and made it fall, inflicting more damage on the back! At this point, the Highlander had…

… more than 75% of its armour remaining. Man, Assault Mechs are a trip…

In return my Lancelot’s heat skyrocketed, shutting down the reactor and knocking it down as well. When it was knocked down, it landed on its head. My pilot was knocked out.

At this point it was 11:30, Nick had managed to claim every flag (his Javelin had sprinted behind my Crusader and Rifleman, basically untouched, to take my flag too), and I called it. My Shadow Hawk woke up, but the tide was basically set unless I got a really lucky hit (which happens! See my last game where Nick’s Highlander stumbled into decapitating two of my pristine mechs!).

Lovely game! Next time we’re going to try the “Death From Above” Battletech show’s rule modification that changes rangebands from 0/+2/+4 to the more manageable 0/+1/+2/+3 (adding in Extreme range). Higher pluses are bad (increasing the target number), so this should hopefully make long range fire more meaningful.

Plus, I’m going to make sure I have the same BV as him.

GeeBizzle · 4 February 2023 22:16

Played our first game of Turncoats tonight. Really nice game with some simple rules. The multiple draw resolutions can be a bit confusing at first but the layout makes it intuitive after a few games.

At two players it’s thinly and fast, feeling somewhere between pax pamir’s loyalty system and hives abstract movement (better comparisons are sure to exist) but I could see it really singing at higher player counts.

RogerBW · 5 February 2023 00:15

I think my only real niggle with it is how often the tiebreakers matter. And it is only a niggle.

Today at the 1 Player Guild get-together:

PitchCar (traditional opener, I did terribly, I blame playing Crokinole last weekend)
Sentinels of the Multiverse (with some RCR content: Expatriette, Argent Adept, Mr Fixer, Bunker and Haka vs the Fey-Court in the Realm of Discord)
Shamans
Xia: Legends of a Drift System (possibly my worst performance ever, great fun)
Just One
SCOUT

mistercrayon · 5 February 2023 00:31

Has anyone else played Kabuto Sumo? Does anyone else feel like it’s got that noughts and crosses thing where if two players are broadly competent or comparable then (in a 2player game) the game sort of becomes this boring ping pong like attrition?

We’ve played 2 games now and I think we get into a stalemate for ages. Even if someone wins it doesn’t feel like cool winning more like oh a thing happened by accident and now I’ll exploit that. winning.

I’m sure there’s more in it and it deserves a few goes but…

VictorViper · 5 February 2023 06:33

That was my big takeaway after several rounds. It’s hard to say a 10 minute game really overstays its welcome with a straight face, but here I am saying it. Everyone I showed it to enjoyed it well enough, but none of them (myself included) wanted a rematch.

Whistle_Pig · 5 February 2023 08:11

I’ve played Kabuto Sumo and really enjoyed it. Perhaps having a third player really makes a difference. Did you use the special abilities much?

mistercrayon · 5 February 2023 09:21

This could be part of it. we agreed we needed to use the moves more. I think our game would have been shorter (I would likely have pinched enough pieces to accelerate the ending).

Whistle_Pig · 5 February 2023 18:36

Just a quick solo game…

I haven’t even started playing yet - tired out by the setup!

Captbnut · 5 February 2023 19:07

Taught our youngest Beyond the Sun. How there is no scoring pad for this is beyond me. Or that someone hasn’t done an app.

For the first time in ages I managed to get my production going and I always had what I needed. I enjoy this, but if my wife didn’t love it I might be ready to move on

malkav11 · 5 February 2023 19:48

Haven’t really been posting much here but I’ve done bits of a couple solo games lately, including the first act of a Hoplomachus Victorum campaign, and the first chapter of Wreckland Run, as well as embarking on two new campaigns with my regular group and a new girlfriend respectively: Aeon Trespass: Odyssey and Artisans of Splendent Vale.

Hoplo is, as is my usual experience with Chip Theory, gorgeously produced and great fun. I was a little skeptical of having so many skirmishes in a solo campaign but it turns out they really are pretty bite sized and quick as the tight arena confines and the one-unit-a-turn spawning and delay before you can actually do stuff with (most) units means each side tends to only have a couple of units out and clashing at a time, and while the tactical puzzle is surprisingly rich between arena special features and unit and hero special abilities and the possibility of using tactic chips, the latter are a limited resource and the former mostly modify how you choose to do your moving and attacking. So turns are actually pretty fast. I’m interested to see how the difficulty scaling works out because it doesn’t feel like I am powering up enough to compensate for the additional bonuses the bad guys are going to get in later acts. But maybe I’m either wrong or have played badly! (Despite the fast skirmishes, this is still definitely a multiple session affair as you’re looking at potentially 48 “weeks”, a substantial subset of which will contain skirmishes.)

Wreckland Run is a fun little dice placement puzzle. I think I cheated a bit while still learning the rules but ah well. Looking forward to the next chapter.

Artisans is also absolutely gorgeously produced and has been a really cool narrative experience, played largely out of giant paragraph books for each character, with character specific paragraphs and character specific things to poke on exploration maps (also in the books) and choices. Everyone has unique powers and crafting mechanics, and combat is pretty smooth with everything you need except meeples and dice right there in the “action scene” map book. Combat is sadly a bit simplistic despite a couple of interesting mechanics (a dice pool for action selection and shared damage for enemies of the same type) but it’s not the majority of the experience and I’m hoping it gets a bit more interesting as we unlock abilities and scenarios get more complex (?).

Aeon Trespass is a gorgeous beast of a game, full of imagination and cool storytelling and worldbuilding, and brutal, exciting combat. It’s most of what I enjoyed about Kingdom Death Monster, with way less than I’d feared of what I didn’t enjoy. (KD:M was ultimately not for me. Even without the pricetag.) The much heavier emphasis on story and exploration is very much up my street but may not be for everyone.

EnterTheWyvern · 6 February 2023 00:14

Played 1835 this afternoon/evening. Won the first game off the opening draft so we reset and got a second in the full game. Pleased that the third player who’s been gaming less time got a rare and cherished victory. This game had a few twists, like a structured order that companies float and a sort of National rail that is formed from a bunch of minors plus odds and sods. Really unusually you can own up to 100% of a company and once you own 50% you can buy shares from other players without needing consent, the shares then cost you 150% of the current price. Also if you own 70% of a company it bumps your cert limit up by 1 as well. The map was interesting and the trains helped. The rush wasn’t too rushy but it was interesting dealing with trains that ran some cities and that could run x plus x where both x is the same and it could touch that many cities plus that many dits. This pushed the 4s in to position of first permanent. All in all decent first play and will definitely play again.

COMaestro · 6 February 2023 00:33

A few games this weekend as we were away at the coast.

We started with a game of Sobek: 2 Player, in which my wife got a nice set of ivory for a bunch of points, ultimately winning, 85 - 69.

We followed that up with Ethnos, using Skeletons, Elves, Minotaurs, Dwarves, and Wingfolk. Scores were very close after the first age with me just ahead, which I predicted meant I would get blown out of the water in the second age. And I was right. Well, maybe not blown out of the water, but soundly defeated, 79 - 67.

That night, I played two games of Heat with all cars using the Legends module. First game was on the USA track. I ran low on Heat during a corner, and ended up spending my last one to Boost a bit later when I had a lousy hand on a straightaway. Of course, this meant at the next corner when I was stuck in 3rd gear and had to play a Stress card, I went over the speed limit and spun out for the first time. Never recovered from that, and finished in last place.

Tried Italia next and did much better. Still had some rough hands of cards, and with a huge straightaway after the three corners, it is really easy to fall behind the Legends since they move anywhere from 10 to 19 spaces each turn, but I managed to finish in a very respectable 2nd place.

Was hoping to fit in one more game with my wife this morning, but since we had to finish packing and checking out,and I would have had to teach her the rules, I felt it was best not to push our luck. Hopefully sometime soon though.

Snobbydolphin · 6 February 2023 01:34

Had some Barenpark with my partner. I eeked out wins in both games by 3 and 2 points. She was very quick to declare that there WILL be rematches and repercussions. She was also very unsure about it at first because “If it takes this long to set it up, how long is it going to take me to learn it?”

Two solo games of Dune Imperium. Hadn’t played in a minute and remembered how much I enjoy it. As noted by many others, it is not a deck-builder by any means. I do think that a unique feature of the game is having to be pragmatic about what you get from the market. I stopped trying to be strategic with the deck and worrying about synergy and that helped me win the second game fairly handily. The house Hagal cards really can be just as brutal as playing with others, and I think it’s probably one of my favorite attempts at making the solo game synonymous with the multiplayer.

Got my first games of Motor City in this morning. Oh, my goodness. That rulebook is atrocious. I was not surprised to immediately see a thread on it on BGG when I went looking for clarifications. Three Sisters has a great rulebook that does a really good job of helping you orient yourself to the game’s visuals. Motor City has so much going on and it is not always very obvious where things are, and the rulebook almost makes it feel more complex. However, once I got things sorted the game moved along fairly nicely. Lots of great little decisions and those sweet, sweet combos. COMBOS! I’m here for anything this team puts out because they all have these painful decisions where you sometimes have no idea just how big a risk is going to be or how disappointing that reward you’ve been obsessing over will turn out. Rule book awful. Game good.

Marx · 6 February 2023 04:02

Had a couple over for brunch today.

I won’t say things are “returning to normal” because I don’t know what normal is any more. But it was nice. I made eggs, Canadian bacon (or as we call it, “bacon”), bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon, apple slices, and fresh scones.

Scones weren’t my best work. They were okay, but I over-rolled them. Anyway. Games! We played a few games.

We started with two rounds of Dream Crush, which is such a weird little thing. I enjoy it because I think of it like Dixit: there are rules, there is nominally a winner, but nothing you do will result in you winning or losing so just enjoy the ride.

Then we played a round of Furnace, and despite a few glazed-over looks, I managed to explain the rules quickly and we got a pretty solid game out of it. Final scores were 46-47-52-75, with my partner crushing us all beneath her iron boots of doom.

I have another game day scheduled for the 21st, and I am very hopeful that we can play meatier fare (there will be three of us, so… Heat and Dune Conquest and Tyrants of the Underdark maybe? Maybe. Oh! And Beyond the Sun! Been forever since I’ve gotten that one on the table.

Maybe Xia… gosh, I have to stop thinking about it because it still might not happen. T’is the times we live in and all that.

Phil · 6 February 2023 04:24

So this title had passed me by as a game of potential interest for solo play, and I’m suddenly intrigued.

However… I’m not a Dune fan. I once read < 50 pages of the book, and the only related film I’ve seen is the (amazing) Jodorowsky’s Dune about a film that was never made. All I know of the fiction is “deserts and sandworms and spice”.

So for someone with absolutely no investment in the Dune franchise whatsoever, would anyone recommend this as a solo game?