Another play of Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game, and another loss. This time, I just wasn’t getting any cap ships to soak up damage to my base until late. Also had a low number of resource providing cards, as mostly it was just attack coming out for me, which prevented me from buying some desirable cards.
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Inspired by your post… I chose El Dorado when friends came to visit. I had not played in a while and so had to relearn some of the rules but it was good fun and we had a photo finish with 4 
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Played Jaipur, where my wife won two rounds in a row by a comfortable margin each time.
We then played Ethnos, which she also won by a comfortable margin.
I am beginning to think I am just bad at games. Or maybe she’s just really good at them. 
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Played a best-of-three series of Ark Nova today! Came down to the third and final game, I’d won the first one 8-3, then lost the second by a wide margin (wide enough that we didn’t bother to count) before reversing the fortunes for the finals and taking the series! Hurray! It’s SO good!
We played a couple of games of Everdell yesterday, with Bellfaire as usual, but also with the Spirecrest weather cards, eschewing the expedition and the other cards. Adds just a tiny wrinkle that changes the gameplay but without adding any time. Always good fun!
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Played the second full scenario of Star Wars Unlock with my wife and her brother tonight. It was a lot of fun, and added a bit more complexity over the first scenario. We finished with a bit over 8 minutes to spare. The game has ways of making you feel stupid when you make a guess that seems logical, only to realize what the puzzle is really asking for and then getting the correct answer. So many penalties…
I have not played an Exit game yet, despite owning one, but I am really enjoying the Unlock method of numbered cards and some app integration. Hopefully we can do the final scenario soon, and then I can pass this on to our friends so they can try it.
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We’ve had a couple of afternoons of gaming recently. Last weekend we played Cloudspire and Planet Unknown.
Cloudspire took a long time (over 4 hours) with three players. None of us had played before so there was quite a bit of puzzling over the rules. It seems like the kind of game you have to play quite a lot to get the most out of it - I’d probably want to stick with the same faction until I got the hang of things.
I really liked Planet Unknown. It was very pacey and a satisfying spatial puzzle. I don’t think I would want to pay the £80 I saw it for sale for though!
Yesterday we went to a local gaming day and started off with Root. I played the lizard cult (as usual), my husband had the cats, and the other two players used a couple of fan-made factions: the doves, who function a bit like the UN and score points by keeping peace in clearings and evacuating refugees. The other new faction was the spiders, who score by “airlifting” opposing warriors to their hospitals after fights and then magnanimously releasing them. My husband decided to go for a dominance victory on the fourth turn which was a bold play that very nearly paid off! In the end the doves won by a couple of points.
Other games we played were Concordia, Cat in the box, and Fjords. Cat in the box didn’t seem to work well at all, so I think I need to watch a rules video to see if I misunderstood something. The rulebook is truly atrocious.
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Oooh, that’s going into my sales pitch for Deep Sea Adventure from now on. Brilliant!
Okay, for my own gaming yesterday… I rented a car to drive down and see an old buddy who lives in London (Ontario, “The Sucky London”) who I haven’t seen in 3 years. It was his 40th, so I figured I’d make the trip (and dole out the $250 for a car for the weekend).
Arrived around 2pm, immediately pulled out Kingdomino, and he (Todd), his wife (Sheina) and I played 2 rounds which they thoroughly enjoyed… so I gave them my spare copy. Success! Sheina won the first game pretty handily, and I won the second by a narrow margin.
His parents then showed up, so it was time to pull out Skull, which Todd won, and then Fake Artist Goes to New York, which despite the markers being absolutely dead still worked a treat. I was caught as the Fake Artist once because the clue was “Architecture”, the specific thing was “Bridge,” and the first two artists put vertical lines and I draw a line at the bottom connecting them. Whoopsies.
A few more friends showed up, and so I pulled out Wavelength for a couple quick rounds. Good times! That game is just… alchemy.
It was now 4:30, and time for me to get back on the road, drive the hour back to Waterloo, and have a staff dinner (our “Christmas Party” every year happens about 6 months after Christmas because working at a game store over the holidays is hell). There were about 15 of us there, but I showed up last (everyone else was there around 5:30, and I didn’t arrive until 5:45), but whatever. The food was okay (but free! That’s worth a lot!), and I eventually managed to rope a coworker and his wife into a game of Team3, which is silly fun. We did pretty well! It was more of a demo than an actual game of it, but whatever, we laughed and enjoyed it.
Then I roped two other coworkers into a game of Skull, where the youngest managed a win with a nail-biting “4” with 5 coasters on the table.
Then I drove home (around 8pm), where my partner had invited two friends over for dinner, and we played Stuffed Fables for the first time and managed to finish an entire story (Story 1, natch) by 1am. Is good! By the end we had two stuffies that were almost invulnerable to the enemies, and there isn’t a real “level up” mechanic but the storybook mechanic is really well handled and other than one question that I’m still not sure how it works, it was a lot of fun.
(The instructions will often say “Generate one Crawly minion per player,” but there are only 3 “minions” of each type and one “mini-boss” of that type. So do we generate only 3 minions? Or 3 minions and the boss? Or do we put all four minion minis on the board and pretend that the mini-boss has the same rules as the other three minions?)
And I can’t find a ruling for it online, so I don’t know if I’m missing a very obvious rule (probably!), or if nobody else plays it 4 player.
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Yesterday was my monthly meetup. We stayed too late and I’m super tired today, mostly because one person with a little AP added to our last game last minute making it run long. I wouldn’t have suggested it if I’d known that player group at the start. Oh well. Not gonna complain too much about c. 11 hours of board games!
Flamecraft - cute little resource management game with dragons. It’s a fairly light version of this type of game and good for introducing people to hobby gaming. Still enough complexity to have actual decisions to make. My husband played a different style game than I’ve ever seen anyone do before, using a couple random locations that happened to come out to great effect and ran away with the win. The rest of us were clumped very close together. 61 - 53 - 50 (me) - 49
Space Base - fun little game of basically build your own slot machine and see if you can make it pay off. Roll dice to get money and points. Spend the money on cards to get better money and points on future dice rolls. There is one card in the deck that has an instant win condition regardless of points. It came out in the market on the deal. I was the only experienced player so I pointed it out to the other players and explained how it works very carefully (has to be hit with dice rolls multiple times not just once and hard to hit but other cards can make it easier and pointed those out all game as they came out). Everyone avoided it all game, until one player was clearly losing on points and finally snatched it up. Everyone else was then grabbing the cards that would make it easier just to keep them from him, but that slowed us down. He got the instant win. So the winner had 2 points while the losers were at 28 - 18 - 16.
Cloud City - very quick little game of spatial management, I guess. Everyone is building their own 3x3 city of tiles, buildings, and bridges. On your turn, you place a tile which will have spots on it for two specific buildings (blue, green, or brown). You place those buildings then you can build bridges between buildings of like heights if you want. Blue buildings are short, green are medium, and brown are tall. There are other little rules, but that’s the main stuff. You can’t do things like put a tall brown building in between two blue buildings you were hoping to connect with a bridge, because the building is taller and would break the bridge. You score points at the end for bridges (longer score more) and three random shared goals. My first time playing this and it was ok. Not going to be a favorite or something I’m rushing out to buy, but I’d play again. I came second to one of the owners/teachers. 48 - 40 - 37 - 37
Champions of Midgard - worker placement Viking fighting game. First time playing this for me though it’s a classic of the genre that seems like it has been around forever. I can see why others might really like this one. There are others I prefer. Two players really kept getting screwed by the random dice rolls of combat. Always seemed to go against them. One player ran away with the game then I got second. We were both new and new players don’t usually win first time on these kind of games over experienced players but we beat the two owners largely because of their bad luck with the dice. 97 - 72 - 64 - 62
It’s a Wonderful World - card drafting/ engine building game. One guy was teaching this to 4 new players. He did a pretty bad job and just kept saying “do the first draft, then we’ll go through the rest of the round and it’ll all make sense once you see it.” So we did and it did but that meant we picked cards the first round with no idea what we were doing and had to make choices about what to do with those cards (trash for immediate resources or keep to build) with still no clue. First round sucked and we all made so many terrible “decisions.” It’s only a 4 round game! Oh well. Now we all knew what we were doing and I felt solidly locked in so rolled through the remaining three rounds. I ran away with the game and apparently all the frustration of the first round for the 4 of us learning ultimately didn’t matter as the guy teaching lost. 54 - 37 - 30 - 29 - 24. I had an idea I might be doing pretty well when I announced in round 3 of 4 that I’d just built a card worth 15 points on it’s own (because I was proud of myself for completing it before the last round when I had expected to), and everyone else freaked out.
Distilled - fun medium game about making alcohol. Buy cards from a market to get ingredients, equipment, etc. to make different kinds of alcohol. One of the hosts of our monthly meetup has been wanting to try this one and he was stuck staying as another group was early in a long game so we offered to stay and teach him. Then just as we were about to start, another guy we thought had left came back in and asked to join. This is the one that we never should have played. It took maybe an hour longer because of the fourth player. Adding a player shouldn’t add an hour, but this player, it did. I won this one as well. 122 - 104 - 99 - 88. My husband was second which isn’t surprising. We were the ones teaching and this is definitely the kind of game experience helps. The two new players liked it but thought maybe a little too fiddly for their preference. I agree with one of their complaints which is some of the necessary game text is just too small.
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Father’s Day allowed me to sneak some free time, so broke out Storm Above the Reich for the first time in a while. Surprised at how quickly I got back into the flow of the game despite it being over a year since I last played.
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Gaia Project - I played as Space Dolphins and learning how to play them the first time
Time Bomb Evolution x3
Imhotep - cute little filler game. Always a joy to play.
Pax Renaissance - a grand 4 player game. I started off with the usual Ottoman opening, where I try to take over the Ottomam Empire and conquer the world. Indeed, I took over Italy and Hungary using them.
But a lot of “Trade Shift: Novgorod” effect appeared which guaranteed that the Novgorod trade route will open, benefitting the Western oriented players (and to my detriment). Trade also shifted from Red Sea to the Atlantic (like in our timeline)
This allowed the Holy Roman Empire (Germany from now on), France, and England to keep their troop numbers up while Eastern Med cant afford to get troops. Whats worse, the Germans formed the Swabian League which allowed the Empire to attain 4 knight pieces (you can only attack other states w knight pieces. And at best, you get, like, 2 knights). A true force to be reckoned with. Green player seems poised to win the Imperial victory through brute force. They can even crush the Ottoman menace (and Hungary) who by now were wrecked by civil wars.
But luck is opportunity + preparation. I kept a card that would cause a civil war in Germany which sapped their strength. Tax revolts and peasant revolts rocked Germany and never recovered.
Two comets were sighted in quick sucessions, opening the Imperial victory (most kings) and Renaissance victory (most republics) as options.
The states were ruined and defenceless (except for some Western European states) that republican revolutions and a republican victory seems very possible. But, alas, the King of France formed a formidable army. The Blue Player took over and built it up. France easily took ruined Germany, Aragon, and Italy. England remained quiet as it was also under Blue’ control. It was enough for an Imperial victory. The Valois of France now stands dominant over Europe.
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Had a good Father’s Day full of gaming!
Started with our first play of (my copy of) Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. My wife and I played this at SHUX last year and I really enjoyed it, so bought a copy. Despite a lot of comments about not knowing what they were doing (from a strategy viewpoint), my wife and her brother both trounced me, with her brother winning with 82 to her 67 and me in the rear with 49.
Then my wife and I played a couple games of Kingdomino, both of which I won, first 31 -23, then 45 - 37.
Before dinner, we got in a play of 7 Wonders Duel, which I also managed to win (to my surprise), 66 - 59. She had the military marker pushed just 4 steps away for a victory, but I was able to prevent her getting it any further. Similarly, I only needed one more science icon for a science victory, but just couldn’t make it happen. I honestly thought she would win by points, but I had a good chunk of points from yellow, while she had none.
Gaming finished up with our first play of Star Wars: the Clone Wars. This is the Pandemic inspired SW game, though in practice it plays very differently. You still have a character with a special ability, get 4 actions a turn, followed by a method of spreading badness across the board, but that’s about where the similarity ends. Instead of diseases, you are fighting battle droids led by a villain (Asajj Ventress, in our case, but there are three other options), using a die and your hand of cards. There are also missions which you need to complete in order to get to the Finale, which is different depending on the villain you are playing against.
Rules rundown
There are only four actions: Fly (move to an adjacent planet), Attack (roll the die, add any red OR purple cards, not both, to the result to remove enemy pieces from the planet your Jedi is on, and take damage based on the result and any remaining enemies), Reinforce (draw a card from the squad deck), and Attempt Mission (described below)
As usual with Pandemic, you have a hand with a 7 card limit. These are just spread on the table face up in front of you. Instead of spending cards like in normal Pandemic to do actions, you instead exhaust them when using them. There are five types: Red (Assault), Purple (Stealth), Blue (Transport), Yellow (Armor), and Green (Ally). Red and Purple are used when Attacking, exhausting any cards of one color to add hits to the attack roll. Blue will double your Fly movement, allowing you to move twice. Yellow will soak up a damage done to your Jedi. Green are essentially the special events from Pandemic, and these DO need to be discarded in order to use their abilities.
When your Jedi takes damage, you have to discard a card from your hand, but this takes place after you have exhausted them for their aid in the combat, which lessens the sting a little.
There is a small deck of mission cards, which need to be completed before you can get to the Finale to defeat the villain. We played on Jedi Knight difficulty, which meant we had to complete 4 missions. The missions list a number which is the amount you need to roll on the die and/or contribute using the card type specified on the mission card. A token is placed on the planet shown on the card and this is where the mission can be attempted. There are two missions active at a time, orange and white, unless the Jedi have accomplished all but the last one, in which case both mission markers are placed on that planet. This is done because the Invasion deck (Infection deck in Pandemic) has a card for each mission color, meaning each planet has two or even three possibilities of getting reinforced from the Invasion deck.
Usually, multiple Jedi can contribute cards to a mission if they are on the same planet, but we did encounter one last night that required a single Jedi to accomplish it alone. Once the last mission is completed, the villain sheet gets flipped to reveal the Finale and how to win the game. You lose the game if the Threat track ever reaches the end (which I think was 7). Threat advances in four ways: a planet already has three droids on it and is invaded, if you need to place a droid (or blockade) mini and none are available threat is increased by 1 for each mini that cannot be placed, if the Invasion track needs to be increased but it is already at the end of the track, and certain villain effects can advance it.
You may have noticed “blockade” in the bit above. Whenever a planet with three droids gets invaded again, instead of adding a fourth droid, you raise the threat and put a blockade mini on the planet. There are only three of these minis. When a planet is blockaded, Jedi cannot affect droids, villains, or missions on that planet until the blockade is removed. Blockades have two health. Villains are also out on the board and prevent you from completing mission when they are on the mission planet (and in the case of Ventress, she advanced Threat at the beginning of the villain phase if she was on a mission planet), but they can also be attacked and defeated, removing them from the board until their deck brings them back.
So a game turn is similar to standard Pandemic: on a Jedi’s turn they first ready all their cards and then perform 4 actions. When they finish, a card is drawn from the villain deck to see what they do (for Ventress, it was usually move towards the closes mission planet, and then cause damage to nearby Jedi), then draw a number of Invasion cards from the deck equal to the number on the invasion track and place droids on those planets. Play then continues with the next player.
In our game, I played as Ahsoka Tano, my wife took Obi-Wan Kenobi, and her brother played as Anakin Skywalker. We accomplished three of the four missions, but the threat marker reached the end of the track when the white mission planet invasion card got pulled, when the planet already had a full set of droids and a blockade on it. We got really unlucky early in the game as after the first “Planet Under Siege!” card (essentially an Epidemic card from Pandemic) which reshuffled the Invasion deck discard and placed it on top of the deck, we drew the two planets which had been issued three droids each during the setup, giving us two threat right off the bat. Ventress also reached a mission planet, which I was on, but meant she started her turn there for the other players’ turns, adding two more threat due to her ability. So we were really trying to come from behind really early in the game.
It was fun and I look forward to giving it another go sometime. And thus ended my Father’s Day gaming extravaganza!
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Last night at Local Game Group:
- Tinderblox, my game of the show from UKGE. Quick to pick up,everyone laughs when someone messes up. Great stuff!
- A couple of rounds of 6 nimmt!. Silly game, obviously biased against me.
- On to BANG! The Dice Game, dice selection meets light social deduction. (I really must try The Resistance with this group…)
- and finally Deep Sea Adventure, in which the new players did the classic new player thing (in the first round at least; we had tried to warn them) and I had less excuse.
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I need to play Tinderblox
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The thing that made me realise it was subtler than it looked: you have “logs” (more or less 3×1×1) and “fire” cubes (1×1×1). But the fire is just a little bit larger than the shorter dimension of the log…
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Games Night! Surprise bonus attendance
Brian Boru (5 player), this is good. Went for a have a presence everywhere and marry the princess of Denmark. Unfortunately it didn’t beat slow and steady score something all the time strategy.
El Grande (4 player). Lost this too but a good time had by all
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Had a game night with a bit smaller attendance than expected but good games nonetheless!
FUSE: Played this to start. Won a game on standard difficulty with two minutes to spare, so clearly another quick game on the next level should go just as smoothly? 
Bunny Kingdom: A fair amount of hate-drafting in the game, which is not super advisable. I took special resources and ended up with one big pointful fief and won handily.
Sagrada: The tools were evil. Reroll 1-2 private dice (and never get the numbers you want), move 1-2 dice of the same color as a die on the round tracker but obeying all placement restrictions, and swap the drafted die with a private die (such a specific case when that would ever be useful, and only at the very beginning or very end). Very few 1s and 5s came out so I finished dead last. The new player took the win on this which is nice!
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My wife and I played Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game again yesterday, and I actually won! It was really close though. She did 15 points of damage to my third base which has 16 health. Thankfully, I was able to do 16 damage to her 14 health and ignore-the-first-two-damage-dealt-each-turn base on my next turn, taking the win.
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Played 4 player Clans of Caledonia last night and really enjoyed it. I find the game so satisfying and fun. It is a bit arbitrary with the contracts but I find the economy and action selections always satisfying and interesting. Plus it has the bonus of being quite snappy for a euro of it’s weight. This game saw some quite fun stuff going on with the market too. Plenty of buying and selling saw prices being really dynamic so that was exciting too.
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I got notified a game from Allplay was incoming… thought it was Sail. But in this last half hour I have developed a sudden grudge against one Mr. Ryan Courtney of the convoluted mind.
After playing my first thought was this is Sprawlopolis on steroids
Probably not really. But for now the puzzle is quite tough. I barely made the 31/30 points for the Weichei (beginners) mode.
You are building nice loops for biking, hiking and cayaking. And I thought I had done a really nice bike loop (red) … but when I began counting the points (trailmarkers) turns out I did not. I was a bit too ambitious I note… hybris…
Awful man this designer. My poor brain.
Must play again. Now! Loops! Better loops! More loops… actual loops…
game2
the lower right corner of second level hybris
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Frosthaven, which did not go well. The hardest (and most infuriating) scenario we have done so far. We’re thinking of dropping back to easy difficulty for it. Lots of enemies on the screen, and more being added on every single turn. The objective was to be next to a tower to cause damage, very very slowly. No matter how many characters were next to it, it’s still only one damage per round.
Very slow progress, and just painful to play, we all struggled. And once you’ve lost a few cards (from having to negate damage) it’s pretty hard from then on.
Also sucked a bit that we started with poison and damage from a road event where we apparently picked the wrong option (that we had no way of knowing).
Got a few new kickstarters from KS this week:
Up first was American Bookshop. Very easy to learn and play if you’ve played any trick taking games. Play a card, high card wins. But, if the total of the cards played equals 16 (for a 4p game), then whoever played that last card wins straight away. Having a high card is not a guaranteed win, and could just set up another player instead. Interesting idea. And sometimes you don’t want to win a trick, because they are worth negative points at the end, unless you have most in a colour.
Next up was Twinkle Starship. Again, standard trick taking, but the gimmick is that you start with six segments, and these can be used when you play a card to change the value. All of the cards show their number in segments, and you can add to it. So, for example, a zero card just needs a segment in the middle, and now it’s an eight. You can even create numbers outside the normal range (from zero to eight). A pretty interesting idea. And to score the number of tricks you have won has to equal the number of segments you have remaining, so you might want to modify a card just to use up a segment, not to necessarily win the trick.
The third of the KS games was Planet etuC, which we unfortunately did not get to play, because it’s only 2-3p. And I’ve just realised now what etuC is backwards.
The two we played were great, American Bookshop was my favourite.
The Lost Code, our second game. So we figured we could handle all six colours now (introductory game is only five). Unfortunately, we used all the tiles, which was a mistake, you only include the eights if you are playing the variant. One of our players noticed that a dial he wanted to use didn’t go past 21, and with the eights you could have a total of 24. So we started again. To be fair, the note about the eight tiles is under contents in the rules, not where I would have expected it to be. But we restarted, and had a great game. I got five of mine right, but somehow made a mistake on just one tile, not sure where exactly. And had a 50/50 on my last go, which I failed at, but it still gave me the correct number, just missed out on the victory points. Not much between us at the end.
Walk the Plank, always a fun filler.
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