Wow, that’s interesting I could see how that could raise some eyebrows to put it mildly. I was looking forward to that coming out. Hopefully it doesn’t delay things too much.
4 Likes
From what i understood, censors didnt like it. Not the first time I heard something like that. Hearts of Iron 2, the video game, had some trouble selling it to China due to the protrayal of an independent Tibet.
5 Likes
I could see how the 19th century opium trade might not be a popular subject with the Chinese authorities…
5 Likes
Played two games of Ra with my wife yesterday. I realized I had read the rules incorrectly and after Ra was called for whatever reason, I was having the player who called Ra take the next turn, when it is supposed to be the player to their left. So that made a bit of a difference in playing.
I won the first game 36 - 16, but she destroyed me in the second, 86 - 57.
7 Likes
I played Envelopes of Cash in alpha on BGA.
It’s an efficiency euro with an interesting trade off between resources now or more resources later.
Most appealing though is the theme, which I think is awesome.
You are a College Football Coach, trying to recruit High School Stars to your team, by bribery, marketing and generally being in the right place at the right time. It’s quite fiddly - you draft a card, then some dice (which give you your envelopes of cash) - more pips means more money, but to get the most money and the most efficiency you push it into the future. Then you take actions - travelling, placing bets, using your asymmetric power or bunging cash at a 5 star punter from the mid west. Your cards build a tableau to give you in game efficiency or end of game scoring.
I really enjoyed it; it’s very tongue in cheek but it held up as a game.
7 Likes
I managed to get a game of Targi in last night when the DnD session was cancelled (again).
Ah well. I’ve been wanting to try Targi for a long while, and I finally got it on the table! Not quite what I was expecting (I didn’t realize the corners weren’t playable, and I thought the ring around the outside was variable, but it’s not), but as good as I was expecting. Managed a narrow victory against Terry (a more experienced player) by going heavy into the “When you buy X, pay one less ware” strategy. Accidentally cost myself a few points because there’s no “undo” action on BGA, but still won 36 - 30.
Really solid game, glad I’ve been recommending it to players who like 7 Wonders Duel but want something more strategic.
9 Likes
Last night, when Local Game Group collapsed into Roger’s Living Room Group… Aeon’s End. One of the players asked for it and, after a bit of a delay as I tried to remember how I’d stored everything, we got to it.
It was a bit of a slog at first (none of us had played for a while, one never before) but once we got the hang of it I remembered why I bought all those boxes. And even though I now have and enjoy Sentinels of the Multiverse, which mechanically occupies a similar space, I found myself very much wanting to play again.
9 Likes
Quick game of Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game last night, which resulted in a great turn for my wife’s Empire eliminating my third base. At first we thought I survived with one hit remaining, but she then remembered she had not triggered Tarkin’s ability which lets her take an Empire card from the galaxy row for free into her hand, she just has to remove it from the game at the end of the turn. The Star Destroyer she picked finished me off.
2 Likes
When I saw that Pegasus had printed the (pnp) solo mode for Orichalcum as official mini-expansion, I had to have it. My print at home version… sucked.
Today I finally got back to the game. Since it had been a few months, relearning was in order. If I knew the rules, this would be a comfy casual little island building game:
I narrowly won but that stands on shaky ground due to some rules mistakes). I hope I‘ll get it out again soon.
4 Likes
Edit: wrong thread
2 Likes
My 3rd attempt finally yielded a game where I stopped making so many mistakes. This time, I didn‘t start over after the 2nd hike 
Waypoints. I bought this today from postmark games (I think it was also on KS previously and I kind of regretted not backing it).
It is pretty neat and the result is kind of pretty (I played on my tablet where I could erase at will so that helps). There are 4 maps, I think. All you need is a pen and a D6 (preferably one that rolls low numbers)
(legend: brown is paths that cost movement every time you cross any line, you roll for daily movement on the outside of the map starting on the top edge. Blue is canoes which take you up to 3 squares along the river or they can serve as a bridge. Pink is gliders which go to a waypoint that is not a mountain on the current square or an orthogonally adjacent one. You have to finish movement on a waypoint and you get bonus points if you finish each hike at a campsite—actually in hardmode you have to finish at a camp)
7 Likes
Ooh, that looks very tempting…
3 Likes
I don’t know what this is yet, but MAPS! Who doesn’t love a map? I am drawn to the map… (so to speak…)
3 Likes
Last night at Thirsty Meeples in Oxford:
To start, Diamant/Incan Gold, which I’ve never taught before (and only very rarely played with the physical bits). The cardboard chests were in very poor shape, something we see quite a bit here when games have fragile components. I still had a good time, but I think it would be better with more than three players.
The main event of the evening, Votes for Women – which is very much a theme that interests me, but fell rather flat, for several reasons.
First, and I suppose this is inevitable with any card-driven wargame right back to Twilight Struggle, is what I call the historian’s irk. A few cards have prerequisites, but mostly you can just play an event when you want to. But, well, Sojourner Truth or Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t pop up out of nowhere; they acted when they did, and they had the effect that they did, because of the context in which they were acting.
Second, having a “Suffragist” player and an “Opposition” player reduces the very complex arguments to two sides, and gives them both human faces. What about the splits among the suffragists over whether black people should be allowed to vote? Can there really be said to have been a concerted “opposition” rather than a bunch of individuals defending their own privilege? I realise that a more realistic game would have taken vastly longer and the idea is to give a quick introduction to the period and some of the issues, but it felt to me too simple to be useful – perhaps, to be fair, because I’m already broadly familiar with the history.
Third, there’s a two-stage process for victory: get enough markers in Congress to get the Nineteenth Amendment passed, and then get enough states to ratify it. If Congress doesn’t pass it, the Opposition straightforwardly wins, and the Opposition player went all-out on that, largely abandoning the battleground of the states in favour of the sure victory. That’s fair enough, but the process of getting those Congress markers into or out of play is inevitably luck-based, and I was reminded of London Dread which I played some years ago – it’s all very well to say “build up your pool of dice and rerolls so that you can have a better chance of victory”, but if the dice don’t cooperate, it feels as though your win or loss wasn’t really your own doing after all.
Also calling your orange pieces “red”, particularly when there are actual red pieces in the game, just irritates me.
I wouldn’t be utterly opposed to playing this again, but I didn’t enjoy it much.
Timeline Twist, the new iteration on Timeline, was quite divisive. It’s fully cooperative, and you’re trying to build out the timeline (in order forwards and backwards) from a random starting point. And… well, it’s not Timeline and it’s not meant to be, but it felt extremely random and arbitrary, to the extent that on most turns I didn’t have a meaningful choice about what to do. Meh, not for me.
9 Likes
I’m very interested in people’s opinions of this vs the newly-reviewed My Gold Mine, as I probably only need one pure push-your-luck game.
4 Likes
All I know about MGM is what… Tom said! in the review VIDEO.
Ahem.
I would say D/IG loses some of its tension at 3 players but is fine with 4, but I got the impression MGM worked reasonably well there. MGM looks more sophisticated - the only decision you make in D/IG is “do I continue or do I bail out now”, and then the effects are always the same (all the bail-outers get a share of the loot further back in the expedition). In MGM you make that choice but then pick one effect from the card you take.
You can play D/IG on BGA - I think it’s premium but if a premium member starts an open game you can jump in.
2 Likes
Rather sparse this week
Dungeon Petz - ah! This is a fun Euro! Vlaada didn’t disappoint as usual. The theme actually comes through with raising your pets. A good amount of randomness, but there’s mid-term planning and it is satisfying to do and pull off. Me winning with a good delta definitely didn’t nudge me towards giving it a favourable view. 
The Estates - 4 player game and we all had a great time. The couples on the table are players who want to screw you up, so I ended with -10 pts and they all got positive points. Great game!
The Old Prince - Omg I keep getting hit by the train rush. How do you win this fking game!? 
This particular game was very interesting where we are fighting over control of the national company - Prince Edward Island Railway (PEIR) - but the thing here is that if you start one of the major companies, it steals a specific station and a specific share away from the PEIR. And this is the only way to get rid of PEIR shares. So Player 2 and I are starting new companies to deprive each other of PEIR shares to take control of the PEIR with its juicy trains and its fat treasury. We ended with floating all major companies and the PEIR closed. It’s amazing. I hate this game.
Dice Hospital: ER - Emergency Roll - It’s a roll and write.
7 Likes
The simplicity of Diamant (much easier to find as Incan Gold) is its main appeal. Can play even with 3/4 year olds when the only input they need to make is stay or leave.
8 Likes
This is a bit of a cheat but I two-handed a quick learning game of Cairn which seems to have come back into print with some very minor alterations. So minor, in fact, that the rulebook is still riddled with loose franglais, making me guess it’s mostly untouched aside from a few new tiles and a graphic design rework.
This is a (mostly) perfect information abstract, so I feel like I got a decent enough sense of the game flow in spite of the “solo” play, and it feels like Matt Lees’ old review is pretty spot on: This is a test between cognitive loads. As the megaliths come onto the field the chain reactions that become possible are kind of outrageous. More than a few times late game I would make a “savvy move” only to end up worse off than I was able to conceive, in spite of it all being out there for me to see.
The fun part is the lag, by which I mean it’s got this wonderful delay between the points where you’ve formalized your play and recognized your mistake. Maybe even before your opponent recognizes it, which makes my explosive groans something to try and stifle once I get a proper opponent to the table! It also feels like it will foster some “from-the-gut” play.
This is the kind of AP-inducing game I’m more than happy to introduce to my partner because it’s kind of the entire MO, yet remains quick and snappy. Hopefully snappy enough to break through those first few games and work up a rivalry.
8 Likes
Aha; I’d forgotten about that.
From what I can see (based only on a few BGG images identified as for the new edition), the differences to the visuals are very slight indeed. (This one shows the previous version.) The actual artwork throughout looks essentially the same as before, with just a few new adornments.
- The box art is identical save for the lettering of the title.
- The plastic insert is transparent with a variant of the box art included behind it as well, so that looks nice (and has a practical benefit of indicating with colour which set of miniatures goes in which half).
- The miniature sculpts look identical to me.
- The board looks almost identical aside from emphasising the colour/position of the totem squares, and the score tracks are different.
- The megalith tile art looks identical to me, but it seems that the icons have been re-oriented wrt the central picture (previously each icon was at 90 degrees to the picture). I’d say this is the most noteworthy visual change.
- The transformation and action tiles are better differentiated with a more obvious border.
- The circular score tokens also have similar borders added.
4 Likes