Ur - An unknown Paolo Moro game. A confrontational abstract within the same subgenre as T&E, Shangri-La, and so on. Very fun, but I feel that early game is mostly about maximising the use of 2 out of 4 actions.
American Bookshop - cool trick taker! The two twists in this game are really nice. Not a Top 5 material but good fun
Bios Mesofauna - okay. I’m gonna put some house-rules with this game. No events will be triggered in the first 3 rounds.If the card at the top of the deck has event icons, they trigger. Buying cards is how to trigger events and you definitely need to buy cards at the start of the game (other than reproducing). So you have these cheesy bullshit events triggering at the starting rounds because we are all buying cards. Maybe this is groupthink, but this is annoying.
The King is Dead - the Scots won! But since there’s a tied between me and another Scottish supporter, we looked at the 2nd faction. I have the most influence with the English.
Crash Octopus played bajillions of times during the Escapade
Another round of Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game last night with my wife, but this time I won, and rather crushingly as well, though it was still 3 -2 in base destruction. But I wiped out Hoth in one turn, which felt nice and appropriately Empirical.
Last night at Thirsty Meeples, Earth – which I found clearly in the Terraforming Mars Ark Nova sort of space, but much more fun. Lots of moving parts, less pressure to form a plan up front.
I’ve been a victim of the “Three Company Dump” or something like that. What is TCD, you ask?
Player 1 has 3 companies under control. I invested in one of them above 10% - we’ll call this Company C. Player 1 needs to do a mandatory train purchase in Company A because A doesn’t have any trains and a company MUST have one. That’s them rules. Player 1 needs to pay out of their pocket (aka their victory points) for it but One doesn’t have cash. So One needs to sell shares to gain liquidity. But One is NOT allowed to sell A shares and dump the responsibility to someone. Nice try. One, then, sold their shares on Company C and in turn making me the new director of Company C. Oh, Company C doesn’t have any money nor trains too. Ooops.
What’s the point of Company B then? B is where you stash all the assets you’ve stripped from C.
I’ve had it happen to me and I genuinely felt duped. But then I did the same thing next game looool.
The Old Prince is only available for PNP and online, but I think this game is now one of my favourite alongside 1860: Isle of Wight. It does what I want from 1830 style games but /feels/ better. The train rush is much more fun here and really feel like I’m always in the verge of being crushed by the rampaging locomotive and I just can’t outrun it.
2nd: I had a go at 1825 by Tresham himself. It is indeed like 18GB, 1862: East Anglia, and 1860 Isle of Wight. This solidifies my opinion that I really love this style. It doesn’t have the impeding doom that you get from 1830, but that means that the heuristics is sooo different here.
More Gloomhaven - we played with the scenario where we loot an area and get TWO expensive artefacts. But our tank was one space short from escaping the map, and therefore, lose the scenario. So, we have to do the alternative: we sacrificed one of the two artefacts to finish the mission. It was a bummer not making that much bank in that mission, but oh well. At least we did it
I’ve been hoping 1825 will get a reprint (or, perhaps fiscally more reasonable: make the files available for personal use). It’s ridiculously expensive here in North America. I’ve watched some BGG users spend $500 or more trying to collect a complete set of the extension kits.
Oof! I have spent some getting Unit 1 and 2 (and the others) but it was buttressed by trading away 1 game that I dont need. I have all the Regionals with most expansion kits. Im missing Unit 3, Dev Kit D1, Ext Kit K6.
And now, they are planning to release Unit 4 and Regional Kit R4. Maybe the whole shebang will get a reprint. But I bought these before knowing that they are making new maps.
Endless Winter:The Paleoamericans, got my copy of this after trying it at a game day so got it to the table this week for a two player game. I lost - I think I put too much energy into culture cards and made some misplays with the megaliths and area control sections of the game. I still think it’s awesome, keen to get it to the table again soon
Legacy of Yu, I’ve definitely done better this campaign and I’m hoping to win my final victory on the next play. It’s still super fun, would recommend for sure if you’re after a good solo game.
I‘ve been playing Trailblazers all the time. Sometimes for variety I throw in a game of Cascadia or Naturopolis. But mostly I want to play the „pipes only“ game And it is hard. I lose a lot unless I play easymode.
Frosthaven, the same scenario (14) we failed so badly at last time. We had intended to do it at easy difficulty (instead of our normal 2), because we really didn’t want to have to do it a third time. Eventually we did it at difficulty 1, but we made a house rule. The scenario starts in a single room, with 13 enemies already, with 3 more enemies added each round. We wondered if the special rules (explaining how you damage the objective) also meant that the new enemies only came out once we started to do damage to the objective. Well, that’s how we house ruled it anyway. Otherwise it just seems impossible to get to the other end of the room. We googled it and couldn’t find anything on it, except that a lot of people seemed to have trouble with the scenario. And it’s only rated as medium difficulty. We’re done with it now, that’s the main thing.
Treasure Island, which is always good fun. I didn’t win, but one of us did find the treasure, so that feels like a win.
Yesterday marked the first aniversary of Maryse’s cancer diagnosis. What I expected to be a very somber, emotional day turned instead into a celebration. It’s true that things are going WAY better. We also played some games:
Three of Pandemic, one regular one with three characters we ACED, and two with all seven. We lost the first one and won the second, only just.
Then we broke out Terraforming Mars, where, despite playing with Phobolog and getting the Security Fleet out TURN 1 with an ample supply of titanium, I managed to lose 136-94. I am GREAT at losing.
Finished the day (after a celebratory dinner of rotisserie chicken delivery) with a nice game of Everdell, which I won 67-65. Stuuuuuuupid tight. It was, as always, fantastic.
I’ve started a tradition of taking Sunset over water - pocket edition with me on holiday, after the time I was stuck in a hotel room in Prague with my entire body complaining, and played a solo mode game of it on the bed.
Well, my current holiday is going fine, but I did play another solo game just now. (Did fairly badly after a harsh last two rounds and only scored 29).
Yup, I tend to have at least one wallet game in my bags at any time. They take up next to no room, and it means that even if I’m not expecting to have time on my hands, I always have something to play.
I’ve played a bunch of Mists Over Carcassonne solo this weekend, and I’m really enjoying it!
I’ve always retained a soft spot for Carcassonne but haven’t played it with anyone in ages (my partner seemed to go off it, which made me sad), so I’m really pleased to have good first impressions of MOC.
A while ago I’d picked up another tile-layer Small Islands on the strength of good reports of its solo mode, having realised that a solo tile-layer was something I wanted. It took me ages to actually get hold of that game though – I’d had an order with a shop who after several months let me know they couldn’t get it after all, and refunded the payment; so I then ended up paying more to get it from elsewhere. In the interim, however, “Mists Over Carcassonne” was released, and I really should have gone for it faster. Not doing so was probably a combination of already thinking that “Small Islands” might be the one for me; thinking the ghost theme of MOC was goofy; plus disliking what I’d seen of the current Carcassonne artwork (from any distance the cities look like pizza, and I think it makes photos of the game look bad when compared with the original artwork).
“Small Islands” is a competitive game with an automaton opponent in its solo mode, whereas “Mists Over Carcassonne” is a co-op game, and I’ve found the latter immediately more enjoyable for solo play, so I see myself playing this a lot in the coming days.
There are 6 levels which gradually introduce new features and difficulty. I lost my first game at level 2, but I need to show off a photo of the next game. The target score at this level is 75, and I was 31 points shy when I completed that city containing meeples of all four colours. That city scored me 88 points :)
