Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[bruitist]

Managed to have a few sessions at our local board game cafe recently - which makes a change from just going there to run D&D and eating free food.

First up was a 3-player evening:

Scout - I enjoyed this, but the points scoring was very swingy. I’ve seen the comments in this thread saying it’s not best at 3, so I’m excited to try it again with more.

Cat in the Box - Loved this! I’ve never been that interested in trick-taking games, but the quirks of this (and the lovely production) really hooked me.

We tried to start a game of Condottiere, but only managed to get through the rules explanation and one round before people had to go.

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Then we had a similar evening a week later, but had 5 players for the first game. Then various people went home and we switched to 2 players.

Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest - Much like my first game, I thought I was doing clever things and then proceeded to lose completely. Still really enjoyed it though.

Royal Visit - Did a “best of 3” of this, which I won! I even managed to get the king into my château in one game!

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A friend and I went to see the D&D movie yesterday and had some time to kill before D&D at the cafe in the evening, so got there early and played some games.

Nova Luna - Played a couple of games of this. I basically walked my friend through the first game, giving them tips on placement, reminding them of rules, etc and they ended up winning. The second game was much closer, but I won by being able to take a couple of turns before they could (and likely place their last piece).

[raged_norm]

Games night!

Deal with the Devil - fairly big standard worker placement but with an app and hidden roles. Fairly interesting trading mechanism using the app to obscure who offering what via chests. Didn’t find much else to draw me back though.

MarraCash - ended up with less money than the starting amount! Really good player driven game, want to play again.

[lalunaverde]

Glad you’re enjoying MarraCash. It’s nuts.

Gaia Project - forget to mention this one. Played a 2 player with @Whistle_Pig

Terra Mystica - 4 player game with the Fire & Ice map. I wasn’t paying attention to the alternate scoring and had the game swung against me. Oh well.

Dominant Species - another game of DS. 4 player this time and I think this is better than 6 players as you have more pawns to use. I lost badly as the Arachnids beat me on my own niche and they always end up being dominant whereever I go. OMG just leave me alone!! Great game

Qwirkle

Iberian Railways - weird game. There’s not much scoring, except for grabbing “achievements”. So having the most X cities will give you 1VP and so on.

Southern Rail - tight game and you are like being tied to the hip with another player and you have to make it work because the decisions here are tight. I’m not sure if I’m wowed by this, but it’s still very interesting

[raged_norm]

@lalunaverde

Glad you’re enjoying MarraCash. It’s nuts.

We had a runaway leader with about 5500 at the end, the next two were 3000-4000, then me on 900. Our collective mistake was letting the leader own most of the shops round one entrance.

[KIR2]

Tried out Star Wars Deckbuilding Game. It was delightfully simple and a lot of fun. Thought it would bore me after all the negative press I had heard (super generic, fisherprice deckbuilder, only good for star wars fans who don’t play boardgames etc etc), but it had just enough of that feel-good deckbuilding essence to make me want to play it over and over. Maybe that’s a low bar, but it does the job. With some expansion’s it could be great.

[COMaestro]

Really? I haven’t heard any negative press (other than complaints on the card stock quality), as most reviews I have seen liken it to Star Realms, which is a rather beloved deck builder, and often said it was a bit better with the ability to attack the market for rewards.

Only other complaint I noticed was that the market can get clogged up with capital ships, as they cannot attacked.

In any case, glad you enjoyed it. I did too, which is why I suggested it when my wife asked if there was anything relatively inexpensive I wanted when she was trying to bump up an online order.

[KIR2]

@COMaestro

Really? I haven’t heard any negative press (other than complaints on the card stock quality), as most reviews I have seen liken it to Star Realms, which is a rather beloved deck builder, and often said it was a bit better with the ability to attack the market for rewards.

I listened to no pun included and saw random internet comments. That’s on me!

The market rolls can be big swings for sure. I had one game where I got Luke, Leia and the Millennium Falcon within the first 4 or 5 turns. That got crazy fast.

[DJCT]

Just having a lovely easter steamship ride aboard the Manticore in an alternate world looking for totems when this happened …

[lalunaverde]

Cthulhu Wars with @EnterTheWyvern . I played as the Great Cthulhu himself and I have annoyed people on the table as I always snipe any loner cultists and convert them into my cultists. So if you have a cultist alone with a gate. Thank you so much, I’ll have that gate pls.

Still great fun and yeah, playing with the simpler factions made me enjoy it more as I have more control.

Insider - 20 Questions with secret identities. What more could you want?

Authority - social deduction with shooting other people a la Bang!. But there’s actually more nuance here than in Bang. Bang is just terrible… The dice game is an improvement, but still bad.

Glorantha - okay. First game and I got blindsided as I know CW a lot. Playing Glorantha is different. I swear, it’s like an 18xx game where you can learn the rules here just by knowing the rules of CW, but then start doing things really wrong because you play the game like a game of Cthulhu Wars. It’s not!

Buildings can be built anywhere for as long as there are no buildings there. So you are no longer restricted by geography like in CW. Playing Cthulhu means you always start at the South Pacific and expand one space adjacent like Australia or Indian Ocean. Not here. However, I am not sure if area positioning is actually consequential - I have to play more.

Income and VPs are no longer linked. In CW, you score VPs and gain income based on the number of gates you control. Here, you gain 2 income per TYPE of building. 1 VP per building. So spreading out with low level buildings is a nice way to increase VPs, but building tall is income.

Attaining all “spells” (they are called gifts here) is not a victory requirement any more. Your “spell book” is divided into 3 parts, if you finish a part, it will give 1 VP during scoring. It’s not a requirement, but it does speed you up on the track. However, with income, you gain 1 more income if you have at least 1 on each section of your spell book. Again, the game is tearing you between VPs and income in such a simple elegant way. Glorantha really shows how unimaginative so many games are.

Glorantha also made moving cheap. 1 power spent and you choose an area and you can move all your units there into several adjacent area. Again, for only 1 power. Unlike CW, where you pay 1 per unit.

I didn’t mentioned “the Great Compromise” and “Chaos Rift”. I was rather unimpressed with the Great Compromise feature, but need more plays to see more of it. It’s just a way for players to close the score delta for like 1 to 3 points and speed up the game for the cost of half of your power. “Chaos Rift” was underwhelming without the Chaos faction who will be incentivised to keep the Chaos Rift open, as they gain a reward and alll other players lose a unit or a building. But closing the Rift is a big incentive for the Sky faction to get their Sun God out of Hell without gaining other players’ permission.

I am keen to play more of this. And also keen to have Wyvern play this one. I need more plays, but bloody hell, I might end up keeping both.

[EnterTheWyvern]

@lalunaverde

I played as the Great Cthulhu himself and I have annoyed people on the table as I always snipe any loner cultists and convert them into my cultists

But you didn’t do that enough to me sadly. I could have done with just spending one to summon cultists rather than 3 or more to move them around the board.

Really enjoyed this game. First time playing Yellow Sign and they were interesting. They lack raw combat power without being too weak. The interaction with being power hungry to move lots of stuff around while getting a cheap move for some of your weaker units was a tough balance to get to desecrate areas without being over exposed to attacks. I think I got away with one here where the Windwalker player got aggressive with LaLunaCthulhu at a good point for me. Meant I could run around largely unmolested desecrating northern Europe and the Amercias.

[mistercrayon]

Played our recently arrived copy of Illiterati. I got the deluxe with wooden tiles.

The game is significantly like a co-op timed bananagrams type game where a tonne of tiles are out and you just have to try and make use of all the letters available (so in a 2p game your initial set of communal tiles will be 27 letters and depending on difficulty you are allowed to leave 1-3 of those spare at the end of a round).

The gamer rules to make the game a gamer game for gamers are the following.

1. you have some kind of target such as theme (like body parts or cities) or word rule (like anagrams or alliteration) that means you are aiming to make words that fit that target. This is the method of progress between rounds.

2. at the end of the round some hindrance to word making is applied

You keep making words and topping up your supply of letters until you reach a final round where you try and beat a harder target

The game has a decent breeziness but some really crap rules and really irritating cards where the hindrances come from. Luckily with BGG this rules ambiguity (how to deal with an inability to complete a hinderance for some reason) is clarified (generally it seems you ignore it).

The puzzle is weird. It’s surprisingly easy to do okay and survive but really hard to sometimes complete the targets. (You can survive rounds by just making sure you use enough letters in words but to win those words need to meet the criteria of the targets).

I think it’s pretty good fun and might work really well as a solo game.

[Whistle_Pig]

Played Space Station Phoenix yesterday. It took a long time (3 hrs), probably because none of us had played before and there are a lot of choices to parse!

It’s a worker placement game where you score points by building a space station and recruiting aliens to live on it. The interesting wrinkle is that you start with 9 ships in your fleet which are the action spaces and you need to scrap progressively more of them to get the metal with which to build your space ship, while limiting your own future action choices. Since you can use other people’s ships as well (for a price) it can be advantageous to scrap one of your ships to stop other people using it.

[Benkyo]

Impulse good fun.

Modern Art first play, really impressed me. I liked how smart card play gave you a decent amount of control over the auctions, and everyone had a good time with it. May have usurped High Society as my favourite auction game.

The Great Zimbabwe crazy game, my first ever that ran long and had a really confusing, crowded board. I had almost no income early on after just pushing up my monument, so I jumped on the builder specialist and starting dumping down secondary craftsmen. Very nearly worked, but the long game favoured the player with the herd and early income god.

[bort]

Frosthaven, our first proper scenario, fairly straightforward, just kill everything (as 90% of Gloomhaven was, and I’m guessing it will be the same here). Harder than I expected for a first scenario. We lost a character about 75% of the way, and two other characters were about to be exhausted when we won. I need a guide on how to play my class (Death Walker). Most of my attacks come from putting our shadows, which I can then attack from, while I stay at a safe distance. But it seems that I only have two cards that actually put them out, and one of them is a loss card. The whole thing was just a slog to the end, took us about 4 hours, including farting around at the end with outposts (still don’t really know that works). I heard that there are over a hundred scenarios to complete. With Gloomhaven, we finished with 41 plays, and that was enough for me. And now we have to play twice that many.

Tiny Turbo Cars. first play. A racing game, where you select your moves on a four by four sliding puzzle controller.

Only the 2nd and 3rd lines of the controller count, so you’re sliding them around to hopefully make your way through the race. There’s your normal forward and back moves, a jump, diagonal moves, missile firing, and an increase/decrease piece that uses your next instruction. If you hit an obstacle you take damage. It’s pretty manic fun. When you’re happy with your controller, you take a smile token, which determines the player order when you actually move your car. When only the last smile token is left (and it doesn’t look happy), the last player gets ten seconds to finish. It’s a pretty fun bash, easy to explain, and things often don’t work out as you thought they might.

For the Queen, first play. Another semi-roleplaying game, but pretty simple. The story starts with the Queen travelling to another country for diplomatic reasons, and taking along the players as her retinue. You draw cards in turn, which give you a chance to add to the story. Is the Queen evil, or good? We enjoyed it, had a few laughs, but it’s all a bit random. And obviously you only get out what you put in. Not sure if my group is really into that sort of thing, but like I said, we had some laughs, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Ra to finish up. I had a pretty terrible game, only ended up with 20 points. The winner had more than that just in monuments. We had a good time with it – maybe we should have tried to stop the winner from getting so many monuments. I had the two highest bid tiles for the second and third epochs, and never used them, probably bad play from me. Sometimes you can hang out for the perfect auction, and it just never arrives. It’s all about making the most of your chances. Such a great game, definitely my favourite Knizia, and just maybe my favourite game ever. And now I don’t need to be ashamed of my crappy second hand copy.

[Griffster77]

@bort

Tiny Turbo Cars. first play. A racing game, where you select your moves on a four by four sliding puzzle controller.

That looks completely mental…

Tried to play Ticket to Ride: Europe with my 8yr old and a friend and his 8yr old. They mastered the idea of the gameplay but the play time was too much for them. Only got about 25-30mins out of them before they were wandering away from the table, playing outside etc. So we know we can play games away from the ‘My first…’ or ‘Junior…’ games we’ve been playing but we have to choose shorter games!!!

I’d love to post a picture of my 8yr old daughter’s manically gleeful expression as she forced my wife off the board playing Tsuro last week but I don’t really post photos of my kids online!

[yashima]

@bort

. I need a guide on how to play my class (Death Walker). Most of my attacks come from putting our shadows, which I can then attack from, while I stay at a safe distance. But it seems that I only have two cards that actually put them out, and one of them is a loss card.

I am playing Death Walker in our campaign. And I am also finding it a bit difficult to get going–the first couple of turns in each scenario are really hard and I take a long time to adjust to scenario in every single game.

I recently had a scenario where I had a scenario goal to not play attack cards for the first 3 rounds and that was actually easy with Death Walker (it was a short scenario) because with the insane prep time of 3 rounds in round 4 I could … explode. (Also I have a 2nd level card that is a bit helpful with the not-attacking anything and still taking out something)

The issue I have is that Death Walker has 2 aspects: use the dark element and shoot monsters from afar or use the shadows and melee through the shadows. The starting deck has both in somewhat equal measure but I struggle to have dark when I need it and use it when I have it while also maintaining a “healthy” number of shadows.

Last scenario I decided to try and optimize with the Level X cards and ended up taking 2 cards that I wished desperately had been the 2 cards I left behind throughout the game. Will I do better next time? I will find out in 5 minutes… (We have already set up another game)

I find key cards are the two Strength of the Abyss and Call of the Abyss. Both of them “loss” but giving you permanent advantages. I usually hesitate to put out both because your deck immediately shrinks by 2 cards.

One card gives you the ability to get new shadows from enemies you (or your summons) attacked (note: enemies includes stationary objects you destroy in my interpretation, the alternate word would be monsters and that would not include objects), once this is out you just need to poke the monsters to get new shadows. In a 2 player group with few monsters you basically have to try and get a hit on every monster though. The character has several “aoe” attacks to make this easier to achieve in larger group settings. I think Death Walker is better in larger groups.

The other gives you the ability to sacrifice shadows to gain damage or movement and experience. This is incredibly helpful, as they have a lot of weak attacks and very little in the way of big movement cards.

[Brattyjedi]

I played Death Walker as my first character from Level 1 and recently retired at Level 7. Slow start is a real problem most of the time but I enjoyed playing it and the slow start stopped being frustrating and just part of the puzzle after a bit.

First thing to do every scenario for me was decide if this was going to be a hit everything hard and fast type scenario or a long-haul scenario. If a hit hard and fast, first round play Eclipse for the top lost action to have 3 shadows at the start then second round play Call to the Abyss for the top lost action shadow engine. I did that many times and only exhausted a couple games.

On the other hand, if it looks like a long haul scenario, especially one requiring moving across a big map, and you don’t have the luxury of two lost cards off the bat, first round is Call to the Abyss for the bottom not lost action to just have one shadow. Ideally, get a stamina potion if you’ve figured out how to make that. Use that to get Call to the Abyss back round 2 and play it round 3 now for the top lost action. Without a stamina potion, replaying it has to wait a full deck cycle. In either case, best uses I came up with for the first shadow was either putting out a summons if we needed it badly enough or trying to save and position it for a top action Call of Doom or similar to mark multiple targets as future shadows once top of Call to the Abyss was in play.

Otherwise, using perks on the +2 make night attack modifiers helped some with the other power boost option of the action cards. Those weren’t the first perks I took and still wouldn’t be first if I did it again, but I might take them earlier than I did for that possibility of extra night production.

[bort]

Thanks for the Death Walker help guys, very useful

[Benkyo]

@yashima

One card gives you the ability to get new shadows from enemies you (or your summons) attacked (note: enemies includes stationary objects you destroy in my interpretation, the alternate word would be monsters and that would not include objects),

Haven’t played Frosthaven, but this struck me as odd. Definition search turned up this:

Enemy - A figure’s enemy is another figure that is fighting on the opposite side of a battle. Generally, this means characters are enemies of monsters, and monsters are enemies of characters. “Enemies” does not universally refer to monsters, but, rather, is defined by the context of the card.

So, not stationary objects, sorry, unless they are objectives. The definition of objectives seems to put them as enemies. Maybe that’s exactly what you were saying though =)

[yashima]

For example from the special rules for Scenario 10:

„Each ice pillar has (formula) hit points. They are enemies to you and allies to all monsters.“

My card says „During your and your summons‘ attacks before drawing an attack modifier card, you may place one character token on the target of the attack. When that enemy dies, place one (Shadow) in or adjacent to the hex it occupied“

The main mistake I made is ignoring the sentence that says „whenever you place a character token with this ability remove any other you placed with this ability“ which hasn‘t come into play a lot. Because with two players there aren‘t that many monsters to begin with and as I previously complained, I have not been able to utilize the AoE attacks for the most part.

The second mistake I made was not realizing I could place shadows adjacent. Which might have helped a few times.

So I think my mistakes balance out.

My wording in my previous post was bad though. Those are not just any objects to be destroyed, those are in some ways scenario objectives indeed.