Just finished up a game of Lords of Waterdeep with my wife and her brother. We used the Undermountain expansion.
Her brother and I kept jockeying for first, leaping each other until I burst ahead for a while, but he eventually caught up. Meanwhile, my wife languished in last place the whole game. When she bought three buildings pretty early, we had her pegged as Larissa, the builder lord, which was confirmed on round 6 when she played the Open Lord Intrigue card. She did manage to build all nine buildings she could, maxing her score with her lord, but it was not enough to win.
I had the plot quest which gave me 2 points for each Intrigue card I played, and on my last turns, I played my last one on her brother for 2, and when the scores were totaled up, I won over him by 2 points, so that felt good!
Scores were 189 - 187 - 181, so really close overall.
9 Likes
Iāve been having a tremendously hard time encapsulating my thoughtsālet alone experiences!āwith Resist! This isnāt my first attempt to do so, and I keep ātiming outā with respect to finishing my thoughts before theyāre irreparably broken by interruption. So, here we go in a few words:
This is an insufferable sonofabitch that makes you agonize over everything and frequently presents you with a badly unconquerable eff-you, and makes you wince at every decision madeāgood or bad. It resets quick and I bloody love it.
9 Likes
Race for the Galaxy always satisfying.
Cat in the Box again, everyone wowed by the concept, but again, Iām still not convinced it translates into interesting decisions.
Modern Art I now know itās not a 3-player game for me.
Impulse good game. I had a ābrokenā command and sabotage combo going that got wrecked by a massively reinforced attack, everyone got to do cool ābrokenā stuff.
8 Likes
Just played Earth on BGA with a friend. I had previously played 2 solos, it was his first game. Obviously, I lost 
We both like Ark Nova and Terraforming Mars. Earth definitely falls into a similarish thing with tons and tons of cards you get to play into your 4x4 tableau. It begins fairly quick but as your tabeleau grows so do the consequences of your actions. With everyone playing in parallel most of the time, I feel like this is more of a multiplayer solitude experience than TM and AN.
And the upkeep each round that on BGA is being handled for youā¦ it is quite daunting to imagine that on the table. Has anyone played this on a real table instead of an imaginary one?
6 Likes
We just wrapped up a game of Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game, which started out close, as I took out her first base, and then she took out mine the next turn, repeat with the second bases a few turns later. So we both had full strength 16 HP bases, undamaged, going into what turned out to be the final turn.
My wife drew a X-Wing, which lets you draw a card if the Force is with you (and it was with her), and Princess Leia who lets you buy a card of your faction for free, and if the Force is with you, put it on top of your deck. She also had Jyn Erso who looks at the opponentās hand and if the Force is with you, picks a card to put on top of their deck, plus a basic shuttle for 1 buying power and I think a Y-Wing for some damage dealing. The other cards also had various buying and damage points.
So, she buys a cheap card from the Galaxy row, which gets replaced by Han Solo, so she uses Leiaās ability to get him, and then the X-Wing to draw him. He has the ability to draw a card, giving her a basic trooper for 2 more damage. Overall, she deals 18 or so damage to my base, obliterating it in one amazing turn.
Sure, she gets that, while my last two draws were mostly just basic buying and damage cards. 
3 Likes
Gave this a try today, with 4. Very enjoyable! Itās always cool to see a trick taking game where the suits actually mean something and not just āThis oneās trump, the others are all equivalentā. We didnāt really keep score, but I did go for an open-hand bet of 1 on the final hand and made it, which was satisfying and also I think broke the ice for that group; we had all been nervous about those premium bids.
4 Likes
Been a while since Iāve contributed to this thread, but weāve played a few games over the last week or so, so here goes:
Weāve played around 6-7 games of Carcassonne, I have lost (badly, too) all but one.
Recently I got obliterated at Everdell: 90-45, the absolute widest margin of victory weāve ever had.
We also annihilated Pandemic, achieving a perfect victory before even getting to our fifth epidemic card.
We played two games of Calico yesterday, the first of which ended in a 45-45 draw, the second I lost by about 20 points.
We just finished up a game of Tzolkāin that Maryse won 65-61. Super close game. Resources were insanely scarce in this gane due to the neutral workers almost all being added on the same gear.
Weāre about to break out Ark Nova!
10 Likes
Played our second game of votes for women. For the second time Iāve won and held off womenās sufferage.
Itās a good game, reminds me of watergate a bit, but with some more theming and stages of play.
I am concerned that the opposition has a significant advantage. It just seems like itās easier to block although I did have some very lucky rolls. The latest game came down to the last state. Both of us rolled for Idaho the women had 5 buttons (5 shots to reroll and the advantage of winning ties). On the first roll I got an 8. 5 re rolls later I won.
7 Likes
More fun at the local games cafe! 4 players this time.
Azul: Summer Pavillion - Enjoyable, but definitely still prefer original flavour. Original Azul is one of the few games I can actually plan ahead. With SP, the added complexities mean I have less of a handle on what Iām doing, plus the bonus tiles are something you just canāt plan for.
Dogs of War - First time getting to play this in ages (wish its size didnāt mean it crowds out other games in my bag)! Went down really well with new players and they quickly grasped the strategies. I won with the cunning tactic of waiting to see which factions were coming out ahead and grabbing lots of support tokens for them.
Calico - Enjoyed this as well, but confirmed I was right to not get it for myself. A bit annoyingly dependent on the luck of what gets drawn.
Block and Key - Waaaayyy overproduced for the depth/complexity/length of game it is. Our first game was abruptly interrupted as I knocked into the weird platform assembly while reaching for the bag of blocks. The second game ended with kind of a random winner as we realised on scoring that the colour bonus cards were way more impactful than we thought.
9 Likes
A solo game of Sleeping Gods, which ended with us being attacked by a vampire panther. Which was a shame.
13 Likes
Played Ethnos with my wife, using Merfolk, Wingfolk, Dwarves, Trolls, and Halflings.
Things were really close after the first age, just a few points separated us, with her in the lead. I was feeling confident nearing the end of the second age, as I had the 1, 2, and 3 Troll tokens, while my wife just had the 4, but then she surprised me by getting a 5 band of Trolls, so the three or so ties I was expecting to win were now going the other way.
Suspecting a loss, as there was already two dragons out, I started playing bands for points, but suddenly a lot of orange cards were out and I had a Troll and two other oranges in hand already. Luckily the last dragon didnāt come out before I grabbed three more cards and was able to get the 6 token, so I won the ties, and the game, 125 - 113.
4 Likes
Had some games played this weekend!! Yayy!.
Love Letter with the girls on Friday night, beat them twice fair and square this time. Sometimes you need to show whoās boss. And sometimes you start learning what cards they like to keep in their hand and catch them with Guards left right and centre.
Then on Saturday we had an event in the Library due to Nerdvana (a geeky weekend that every year is coinciding with the closes weekend to Star Wars Day on May the 4th) where I had some D&D in the afternoon and then boardgames and pizza in the evening. Played a nice game of Champions of Midgard where I did terribly. Even though I snapped the biggest boat first, I was really struggling to get my dice to work, so got left behind in points mid way through the game. I like the āLords of Waterdeep with dice rollsā vibe, but I think I prefer a single work placement game better.
On Sunday morning, the little one wanted to play Everdell, but I convinced her to play Raiders of the North Sea instead (we have played too much Everdell lately, and the Big Box is a bit of a pain). Mum and her elder sister had gone cycling to swimming lessons, so we had a couple hours spare before lunch time. With a bit of assistance, she beat me by 3 points, 78-75, which I think it was good for her. I still like this game a lot, love the art and the simple mechanics of place a worker, take a worker.
6 Likes
A few games this weekend:
Corrosion: An engine-building game about building engines! You start with a hand of engineer cards that let you do stuff and get stuff. On your turn you can either play an engineer card into your factory, which activates the card, or run your factory, which lets you run machines and get your cards back. You can also follow other peopleās actions on their turn with a card of the same suit or higher. The interesting bit is that you have to place cards/machines/resources into a particular numbered section on your factory. When you run the factory you turn a wheel on your board which runs some machines, but also either letās you take cards back or corrodes all the resources in one of the sections, so thereās a time management aspect to the engine building. I spent a good few turns desperately trying to use up loads of cogs Iād produced because Iād miscalculated when they would corrode 
It was very slow to get going. Apparently someone has worked out a variant that speeds up the start, so weāll probably try that next time.
Oath: A game full of stealing banners. The chancellor needed to hold the banner of the peopleās favour to win, and halfway through the game a visionary emerged who needed to keep hold of the banner of the darkest secret. We managed to wrest the banners away from the chancellor and the visionary, only for the chancellor to regain the peopleās favour at the last moment to win.
After the empire: A combination worker placement and castle defence game. The worker placement phase is focused on building up your defences and then thereās an attack phase where you have to fight off an ever escalating number of invaders. I thought it was an interesting idea but it was very low interaction and took a long time for the amount of game, mostly because figuring out the damage to your castle was quite complicated.
Cascadia: Very chill spatial puzzle. The rules are very straightforward, which was a nice change. I might recommend it to my parents, although apparently itās hard to get hold of in the UK at the moment. Our friend got her (English language) copy in a shop in Hungary, which wasnāt the main reason she went but she did definitely scope out the shopās stock online in advance!
11 Likes
Played Ra again. So good at 5.
Taught Scottish Bridge to my family last night, which I think is variously called āOh Hellā or āUp and Down the River.ā Itās so good. At 13 cards No Trump, and 11-12 cards, everyone is staring at their hand doing Bridge calculations on suit length and high cards and so forth. At 2 cards weāve gone full Vegas and everyone is staring each other down, wordless, trying to gauge the strength of other hands and what path to take. I did horrendously.
Wingspan again, for the sake of my sister-in-law. The more I grudgingly play it the more I appreciate it. When we started, I won with 45 points. Nowadays I lose with 89. The game is more generous as you learn to build the engine. Still gets dinged for too much text and what I consider āworst-in-classā tableau building but Iām not grumbling anymore.
Iāve also been introducing my daughter to games. Sheās 5. She does not have a learning disability, but her physical disability does preclude her from certain lessons that other children take for granted. Like moving a piece down a path. Itās something that just āmakes senseā in abstract to āeveryone,ā but someone who has not been able to move about freely and has trouble manipulating toys, that map to abstraction doesnāt form.
I got out Survive and let the kids move the whales and dolphins around. They got the gist that each space holds one piece and you can move around the board. I got out Hive and showed them how the pieces fit together and how the grasshopper jumps around. Weāve also been doing starter games like Count your Chickens. The concepts are coming. Iāve had to be creative about what the lost lessons are and how to teach them. Weāll make a gamer out of her yet.
10 Likes
Maidenhead games for the bank holiday. Naturally, Revolution! (I had Guillotine with me too but we didnāt play it). We had six players, so I used the Palace expansion, and after one or two learning rounds everyone had got the hang of it. Great fun, and going by my logs I havenāt played this since 2018 ā I really should get it out more often!
Then Lovecraft Letter, which I have to say dragged a bit; the sanity rules meant that there was a lot of randomness, and at six players card-counting was hard work. Had its moments, sure, but I find Iāve rather gone off it.
Itās a Wetherspoons, which means a modern loud pub, and some of the players at the other table were very loud, so we bailed out at that point.
6 Likes
Played Hegemony - Lead Your Class to Victory - it is that kind of game where the whole system is a very integrated system - this would be the opposite of the so-called ātheme park Eurosā that this forum have nicely coined. It got that really compelling interdependency between the 3 classes. I would need to play the State to make this final conclusion, but I feel that the State player is the most detached among the four of us. But I feel that the dynamic would be very different without the State player on a 3 player game.
I have played as the Capitalists. In retrospect, the dynamics between the players is interesting. I found myself in alliance with the State in terms of minimum wage and against the State and with the Middle Class in terms of taxation. I am also in full hands-on with the resource management aspect of the game as the Capitalists with its 4 resource types. The commodities - food and luxury - I am competing with foreign markets if I went down this path, and found myself supporting protectionist policies. Protectionism is also a way to cripple the Working and Middle Class prosperity. With services - healthcare and education - I am in competition with the state on providing these.
the weakness here as the player is that I failed to internalise the system enough to see what the other classes wanted and provide them. Selling internally is more efficient than to export the goods. I have also been stuck on high taxation that crippled my funds (and thus, my VPs). But the poor understanding on how to play well has been the culprit, but that is okay. I just need to play it again and again to discover more of the gameās depth.
I cannot comment on the other factions as I donāt think I can do a proper explanation on how their dynamics work. The Middle Class for example is a half-way house between the Working and Capitalist classes where they can setup companies and also work in companies. Thereās no way I can explain how their faction feels like.
Hegemony falls under the same category as Root. The standard rules are alright. But it is the asymmetry of the factions and HOW these factions interact and get all tangled together is what causes the opacity. So, same as Root: please please donāt explain all the rules. We started the game with me and my friend who are new having read the rules and went ahead to play. No teach was involved! But this is more highly integrated than Root. Obviously, with 4 factions only, they are designed to work certain ways. Unlike Root where the game gives you the space to mix and match different factions and on different player counts.
Bad stuff: it took us 4 hours! And thatās with setup. I am not sure if the game can be sped up with repeated plays, but I will assume it can be brought down to 3 hours on a 4 player game.
If you can get a weekend with 3 or 4 players: I highly recommend you try this game and see if you like it.
8 Likes
I would like to try it, but the guys who played it for the first time on Sunday took 6(!) hours, and Iām just not into that. I actually will play a 6 hour game, just not a 3 hour game that takes 6 hours.
5 Likes
This is now my safe space to vent, because AFAIK nobody here plays games in York, but after another terrible Blood on the Clocktower game Iām so close to packing the game in, and I (used to) love it, I just cannot stand one of our storytellers scripts. Heās a nice guy, but doesnāt have any eye for what actually makes something fun, and yet again I feel like I wasted my evening.
Vent over.
12 Likes
That was my major critique and what held me back from pledging for it:
It is extremely reliant upon the storyteller.
To the point that a bad storyteller will tank a game and a good storyteller will get stuck always being the storyteller ā until they get sick of it.
I really hope an expansion or second edition comes out so thereās more by-the-book procedure than there is āloose-y goose-yā artistic storytelling ā and possibly some sort of sliding scale for applying it without losing the soul of the game, to offset the needed balance of the game with the talent and insight of the ref.
7 Likes
