Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[bort]

Raja of the Ganges, a quite good worker/dice placement game

Trial by Trolley, a game from the the website Cyanide and Happiness. Its based around a classic philosophy question about choosing the best of two terrible tracks. You have 2 teams, each with a track, which you place cards onto. There are 3 types of card: good, bad, and a modifier card that can be placed on any card. You’re supposed to argue about which track the train goes along, which really isnt the sort of game we play, so it only lasted one round. My friends had picked the game up from PAX, without really knowing what sort of game it was.

Cat Rescue, first play. A cooperative game of herding cats around on a 4 X 4 grid. You slide new cat tiles in, which shift every cat on that row/column across as well. You’re trying to make a line of 3 or 4 cats of the same colour, which then means you get the flip the card(s) in the middle over. If you can push these flipped cards over, you rescue them and send them to their forever home. At the end of the game you’re graded according to how many cats were rescued. We did pretty well on our first try.

Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale, first play. This is a roll and write, well, without the roll. Each player has a pad to write on, and each round a set of cards will be turned over, with one (or more) shapes, and terrain types. There are edict cards, so you might get points for farms next to water, or something like that. There are four edict cards, and each round does a different set from two of them. So round one is A and B, round two is B and C etc. There are also ambush cards, where you pass your pad onto another player, and they add enemies to your paper. Any blank spaces around an enemy is negative points for scoring. Good game, it seems easy at first, but things get crowded after a while.

The Crew, finished a few more missions.

5211 first play, a quick filler card game. Didnt particularly impress me.

Pictures, which was a lot of fun. Its surprisingly difficult, which is half the fun of course.

Silver and Gold

Heist: One Team, One Mission, we finally beat level 5 with a perfect score. Woooooo.

Forgotten Waters, scenario 4, died due to crew mutiny

Illusion, such a clever game. And I am sooooooo bad at it.

[Benkyo]

First adult boardgames in ages, taking an irresponsible risk to play, for which I feel guilty.

Root, first time playing the Vagabond, and just barely missed the win due to not noticing the Alliance’s protection from an attack crafted card. Had planned to quest a lot, ended up with nearly all my VP from forced attacks netting 2VP per token and crafting.

Pax Pamir 2e Very tense game in which the Russians, to whom I was not (or barely) loyal dominated the first and second checks due to the other two players cooperating. I just barely managed to make the third and fourth checks fail while they vied for Russian influence, so I came out on top.

Glory to Rome Two engines were just gearing up, with one aiming to convert a huge stockpile into personal wealth and the other utilising a huge clientele base, when I cut the game short with a catacombs to squeak out a win.

A great day. I hope my assessment of the risk involved was accurate.

[Chewy77]

Just a quick three games of Love Letter, that my daughter has come to love (there is a princess and loads of female characters, after all). And I am glad to announce that she won the second go at 7-5, well and proper. That made her night.

[raged_norm]

@Benkyo

First adult boardgames in ages, taking an irresponsible risk to play, for which I feel guilty.

I think you’ll be seeing this more and more as the risk of catching COVID-19 starts to outweigh the perceived mental health benefits of a slice of normality.

These things are managing and balancing several different risks at once.

[Benkyo]

I wouldn’t risk it in the UK or US. I’m lucky that people are generally so responsible here !

[Tika]

It’s my favorite deck builder! I think with a different theme (and expansion cards that have the same finish and size as the base cards) it could have been as popular as Clank!

[Tika]

Sure it’s thematic to win the game when there’s still a person left in the burning house, but you’ve met your quota.

[KIR2]

Yeah, DnD is such a poisoned chalice of a brand. It has a similar issue to Aristeia from Corvus Belli - comes from a tansgential tabletop space where it won’t sell to fans of the brand because they view it as an incidental side project to the main thing they sink SO much money into, but it also won’t appeal to the boardgamers because that brand is almost an immediate turn off or not on their radar.

And God, the colours. Who chose purple, navy blue and black?! It’s good to see the TTS mod uses more sensible choices.

I’m still unsure of the Smash Up deck stylings of two half decks forming a full deck. It’s a neat idea, but the wrong combination really drains the fun from the game.

[malkav11]

Okay, fine, it’s only like 97% thematic.

[yashima]

While I really really want to play in-person games again so I get to play games other than Wingspan, The Crew, Codenames or Wavelength, I am not ready for that yet especially with groups bigger than two households.

So we opted for an online meeting with Codenames last Friday and it was great. At one point I was sitting under my desk silent screaming at my team mates to get on with their guessing. The good thing about playing online is that I could chat with my co-spymaster behind the scenes about how badly that particular board was going for both of us

We also recently played another round of TTS Wingspan and we all felt like we were failing the whole game. I think we’ll play our next game without the Europe expansion. It seems to add too many gears to the mix that don’t mesh with the rest. So I played a solo Wingspan with the Automa last night and won easy and with a far better feeling about my tableau. For the first time in “ages” I felt like I knew what I was doing and then the game is really fun and now I want to play again.

And as promised, we played one round of Cosmic Encounter Duel.
So I must admit first that I’ve only ever played the big Cosmic once so and it didn’t work well for that group.

I enjoyed Duel. I think it does at least one thing better than its grandfather: the cards for the “plans” and the reinforcements. So instead of one big deck for everyone that mixes all the different types of cards you could play in a fight, both players get their own deck of plans with cards from -2 to 42. All the +something reinforcement cards sit in a separate deck at the start and you slowly add them to your own deck through events or supplies. This feels way less random than original Cosmic and I liked that a lot because in our big round of Cosmic the card distribution was very uneven. But this is the only thing that is less random.

Just as in Big Cosmic, a player needs to control 5 planets to win. Each player controls a race of aliens that have some kind of special ability. You start out with 20 ships, 5 of which are in Warp the rest sits in front of you, there are no planets yet they sit in a stack with the types of planets face down. Each player starts with six cards from their deck of “Plans”. The leader and the laggard (no idea the German word is Bummler) are determined randomly and off you go. The Bummler gets the weird cat token. The leader usually gets to go first, but the Bummler gets to win ties…

Each round a card is drawn from one of three decks: discovery, events or supplies and then you do whatever the card tells you to do like duel for a planet or have a contest or get ships from warp or draw cards… each of the cards also tells you which type of card to draw next round. The main mechanic are of course the duels for the planets. The discovery cards let you discover a planet which means it is put in the next spot in the row of planets and then players get to duel for the planet.

For a duel, each player sends 1-4 ships secretly. After the number of ships sent is revealed, they get to choose one of their 5 tactics and a plan that are both placed secretly. The tactics are the weird little tokens with the two numbers and the shield and fireburst symbol. Each player has tactics from 1-4 strength which they can use to either attack their opponents ships or defend from an attack–destroyed ships go to warp. A tactic used in a duel gets depleted and can only be used again if the player uses their fifth tactic to refresh 1 or 2 depleted tactics. Then the plans are revealed and players can play re-inforcements. Each planet discovered also gives a bonus to the player that has the most ships still in play on that planet… the winner of the duel gets to keep their ships on the planet and the loser has to retrieve them back to their stash (they do not go to warp).

Each discovery also usually has an additional effect that either the winner or the loser of the duel gets to execute. Sometimes you really want to lose a duel because that additional effect may be better than getting another planet.

The event cards sometimes have you duel on existing planets or have other types of contests that are executed in a similar fashion except without ships.

The supply cards will usually let players draw cards or retrieve ships. What happens is often determined by the symbols on the planets.

There are also ambassadors from other races that you can befriend and that give you an additional ability for duels…

I thought it was fun though it is obviously lacking the whole “will you help me defeat the other player” type of game diplomacy and backstabbery. So if that is the only reason for you to play Cosmic, duel is going to be boring.

Our game was a lot of up and down until at some point my partner couldn’t win anymore, it took another 2 turns or so for him to actually lose and I thought there were plenty of options for him to turn around the game.

I will definitely play again

[EnterTheWyvern]

Got in a session of Too Many Bones. Gasket and Nugget hunted down Duster. Enjoyable session with some awkward losses(damn goblins! Ambushing beasts ) more squeaked victories and one battle so easy it was a waste if time setting it up . And then Duster was finished in short order thanks to a card that should be kept quiet. It was good to play one of the longer duration tyrants to really have the story expand slowly and really get there Gearlocs statted up in a manner similar to Undertow which is much freer with the training points.

Finally played Street Masters after the really long drawn out fulfilment process meant I got the game in April this year. (Still waiting on the missing stretch goal stuff)

The game was fun. The card play is really combo focussed which gets nice and satisfying as you play building up your capabilities.

We played 3 games. Got spanked by a Dimtri in short order. Learnt some valuable lessons then got our revenge on the RPG wielding bad dude. Then we messed up Juan and the Cartel on the Supply and Demand stage. While the game was fun I’m concerned how easy it is might stop the variety giving some longevity. Losing our first play was a good sign, but the lessons were easy to learn and the next 2 no mental sweat was broken.

[RogerBW]

@yashima

The good thing about playing online is that I could chat with my co-spymaster behind the scenes about how badly that particular board was going for both of us

This is the one thing about Codenames that actually feels “spy-ish” to me - the way that as spymaster you have more in common with your enemy than with your nominal allies.

[yashima]

@RogerBW

than with your nominal allies.

Sometimes when they insist on torturing you by debating all the cards that they think fit your clue they do not feel like allies

[lalunaverde]

Played online with friends: 6 NImmt with the double side variant - meaning you can place cards on both left and ride side of the row. We are getting used to this and I think it’s much more interesting.

For Sale, Coloretto, and Just One - still constant faves for our group

[malkav11]

Personally I found even the Golden Dragons (only one step up in complexity rating from the Brotherhood) were significantly harder to deal with than Dimitri. I’m guessing that how punishing a particular setup will be will depend at least partially on what the villain and stage do when. The villain getting permanent buff cards out early will make them a lot harder, and the environment could really screw you over but I mostly was drawing the worst cards at times when they did much less. And there are tiers of both that are I suspect much harder than those initial decks.

[EnterTheWyvern]

Thanks, that sounds promising. I’ll try the Golden Dragons next.

I wondered if we were lucky against the cartel to get 2 of the women with bats as our first 2 draws from the baddies deck and get to nullify them before they could throwout their support abilities to other enemies. Maybe the game’s potentially quite swingy in that regard?

[Chewy77]

Had another Monday Night gamer’s club session last night. We played Dune between 5, and I had the Fremen. Only one of us had played before, and we had to leave the game on the beginning of turn 3 after 3 and a half hours. I must say, games like this are what make me want to play board games. Ambitious, complex, vicious, full of treason and comical moments to be thrown in.
I wasn’t doing great with the Fremen against the Harkonnen, they had whooped my ass on two occasions, and I had no chance to actually ride the sandworms, but I could see the potential on the faction, poor and adaptable, with great Fedaykin warriors, but not being able to afford much on the bidding for treachery cards was my downfall up till then (plus no Atreides to ally with).

Having played this, I cannot wait to get my hands on Twilight Imperium: 4th Ed, Inis or Root. I know the mechanic of the game is different, but these asymmetrical war games do really bring something that I love in a game, that stimulation of the strategic part of the brain can be quite a buzz for me.

I cannot wait for Saturday, where we have the 5th anniversary of the Guild and we have a full day of gaming ahead.

[TamiJo]

We have played it twice and both games ended super quick.

I do not understand what we’re doing wrong.

[IssiNoho77]

Yet another trip to Nusfjord last night, and my first try of the solo campaign mode. I honestly thought it was just going to be filler, but it turns out it’s a real challenge and really good fun.

In the game you have cards for ‘A’ buildings, ‘B’ and ‘C’. You pick one of three decks and then randomly deal half the A, half the B and some of the C into the game. In the campaign however you play three games back-to-back. The first as normal, then the second with the A and B cards you didn’t use the first time. In the third game all of the buildings you didn’t build get shuffled together and you play a game with all the buildings you didn’t want for some reason. It’s a really clever and unique system I’ve not come across before.

The manual says that pretty much anything over 30 is a good score for a single game, but the goal of the campaign is a combined total score of 100. Anything over that sets your rank for future games to try not to lower. I did okay and set the bar too high for future games probably with a score of 108. What a great game, and easily my most played this year.

[Chewy77]

Had another session this morning with my daughter, two games of Love Letter (she is getting there, we won one hand each 7-5 to me and 4-7 to her) and then another go at Pandemic, just to see if what happened last time was just luck. It seem like it wasn’t, playing with Scientist (only 4 cards to cure a disease) and Researcher (able to swap any cards) breaks the game a little. We had no outbreaks and only one epidemic before we managed all cures. It did help to have an early government fund to build a research centre in Bangkok, and the fact that the initial cities with 3 cubes were close in pairs (Madrid and Algiers and two of the red ones, Bangkok and Taipei)
We may increase the difficulty with extra epidemics to balance it, but I think that combo of characters is the best suited to find all 4 cures quicker.