I am also still waiting. and because of awful communication when they would send it, it has my old address.
edit: got a random notification of a package from poland in my DHL app to my old address (no mails from anyone whatsoever). Hopefully I succeeded in redirecting it to a post-office closer to new address.
Tried BGA for the first time. Had 5-player games of:
Incan Gold (works great online, might buy Diamant),
7 Wonders (I finally understand it, online telling you “pay this person 2 or this person 1” helps a LOT) and
Yahtzee (which was over once one player got two yahtzees and went hundreds of points ahead, but everyone had fun).
Oh no, BGA just became a viable way to play games, eek.
Join ussssss …
Not enough Yahtzee in the world. 
My life is now just playing Ark Nova on BGA. My ELO is kinda shaky at 100. Got higher but then lost a string of games. Need to build it up!
(Of all games to have ELO, having it on Ark Nova is funny haha)
The latest NPI podcast has a segment on it - they did find some positive things too but were negative overall. (Of course, as they admit, they aren’t going to have time to delve into multiple plays and get to the whole campaign element.)
Everything I saw during the campaign convinced me it was gonna be great and I have not had a bad experience with Mindclash. Not everything is gonna be for everyone and their brand of heavy Euro (especially in 4x form) even less so.
Though admittedly I am mostly looking at it for coop/solo, can’t swear I would like the PvP.
I think this is an under-emphasised point, especially in boardgame reviews where there’s pressure to say “good/bad”. The games I enjoy may not be the games you enjoy, and neither set is “good” or “bad” on that basis.
My regular board game cafe have a deal where, when you pay, you roll 5 dice and your bill is free if you get Yahtzee.
Twice now I’ve been one pip away 
Little Town
Push It! x3??? - we kept playing until 7 and then play again.
Samurai x2 - Give yourself a favour and play with open scoring. Otherwise, it’s a strategic crapshoot from start to finish. I’m leaning hard nowadays on “HTI Bad” because all it does is screw up the newbies and give benefits to old players. Samurai’s hidden info - unlike, say, El Grande - is way too significant. You need to know who is leading on what. Indeed, the significance is very similar to Acquire where you NEED to know who is dominating which companies.
Bohnanza x2 - 5 players and it was a blast. Newbies on the table so they are often trading rare cards for common cards. They gain more understanding as they play tho.
It’s always nice to play games multiple times in one session.
Games night
Quest for El Dorado, using an easy map. smashed it
Concordia, game owner said he’d never seen the game end with soemone placing out all their houses. Challenge accepted. I won by endin the game and getting a seven point bonus.
American Bookshop, fun little trick taker. cam third out of four
For Sale, 6 player. Lost badly.
Tempel des Schrecken x2 - I was one of the insider team and when I’ve been out by the table, I started being helpful which clouds doubt over them. The game emerges with these kind of funny stuff.
Orongo - more Knizia. This one is rather unknown compare to his classics. And I think this one is rather ruthless with its network building and blind auctions. The blind auctions is interesting where the player who bid the most puts their bid in a kitty (represented by an atoll). Everyone else gets their bid back. Highest player places 3 tokens for their network, 2nd player puts 2, and everyone else puts just 1. However, if you bid nothing, then you will get all the money in the kitty, but you don’t put any tokens for networking. Share if multiple people bid zero. This Knizian concoction end up being a nasty game with weird values for turn order and for the items on the board.
Trick Taking in Black and White - okay. more plays, and I really like it. Super easy to explain. You have 36 cards and each has a black bear and a white bear: the values always adds up to 37. When a player leads with the black or white bear, you have to follow. Highest number wins. Since each card can be played either way, there’s no off-suit. Scoring is simple: you win black tricks and white tricks. If you have them in equal number (e.g. 2 and 2) then you score +1 per trick. And if you don’t have them equally, you score -1 per trick. Our game end up being aggressive where we simply feed others of the colour that they have a lot of. So, if you have white tricks, we let you win white tricks to screw you up!
I love this game! Incredibly simple rules and the game end up being exhilarating. The bears are cute too!
Planet etuC - played another game with 3 players and it’s been great again. Very difficult game on how to play cards, when to take control, and if you want to sacrifice a number pair to play a colour-pair, or vice versa. Much easier to explain than Maskmen or Tichu. Better than Maskmen and Scout
Cross Clues
[This Japanese game that isn’t mine and I forgot its name] - It’s yet another word association game where every player get a pair of unique numbers. You have to write a word clue to associate these two words. Yeah, sounds familiar. However, once you’ve done all that. There is an odd number that doesn’t belong to anyone - this is the X number. Everyone then reveals their word clue and you have to figure out which is the X number. It’s not a coop (phew!). If you guess the X number, you get 20 points. If you guessed someone else’s, you get nothing and they get -10 points. So, you want to get it right. And also you want your clue to be good enough that people don’t shoot for your numbers. It end up working so well! Yet another word association game that I would love to play again.
EDIT: it’s called nigoichi. The cards are in Japanese so we use Codenames cards as proxy
I think nigoichi is slang for “2 combined into 1”, used to indicate very close partners or friends, or even for making 1 thing out of 2 incomplete/broken things.
Also can be read as “2, 5, 1”, which I guess explains the cover image of a 2 and a 5 looking pally and a 1 eavesdropping.
The 2 says “vegetables”, the 5 says “kara-age” (like fried chicken), then they both say “(stir) fry!”
Howdy! Welcome to the forum. Hopefully you’ll find lots of great tabletop games conversation here.
I don’t really play the kind of phone/digital game you linked so I can’t help you there.
Sunday’s games:
XCOM Board Game: An evil and fun co-op with a lot of tense dice rolls. Took a little while to get used to how everything worked because the owner was not great at teaching and of course there’s famously no manual, but we got into it well enough. And then got our asses kicked because our squad leader was getting exclusively terrible rolls.
Nusfjord: A very popular game in our group. I went with a shipbuilding strategy since I basically got a 2-gold discount on schooners. So I was low on shares but putting a lot of fish into my reserve, and built a building to let me transfer it automatically when full. I had an incredibly satisfying turn of using the pond builder to distribute just enough fish to fill up my reserve and trigger a windfall for myself. I tied for the win with my wife who had the building that let her serve one fish every time she did an action, so she was just racking up the gold the entire game.
Friday games:
XCOM again, this time with one different player and couple roles shuffled. Since this was now the second game for two of us from Sunday it went better and for some reason the dice rolls were really in our favor tonight. Close to losing on base damage, but completed the final mission in one go!
Cockroach Poker Royal: God this is fun isn’t it?
Got slaughtered by my wife in Ethnos. Cards just were not going my way, so while I had some decent bands, I only won one region in each age for 8 points compared to the 40+ she got in age 2. Final scores were 89 - 47. Just horrible.
Few games over the last week or so:
Mexica, got my new copy of this to the table. It was excellent. It’s actually a lot more different to Tikal than I was expecting. The movement rules and rules for building temples give it a tense kind of push and pull. Super interactive. I do still love Tikal, to be sure, but this one is kind of neck and neck as to which is my favourite atm. Honestly it’s one of the most original feeling games I’ve played in ages - even with it being part of a trilogy with the same action system, and from decades ago! Highly recommend.
Quarriors, had a request for this one which hasn’t seen the table in awhile. Honestly I mostly keep it for sentimental reasons (my wife and I played it a lot when we were dating) but it’s fine. Not amazing, not terrible. It’s fine. The dice are fun at least.
Hanamikoji x2, this one continues to hit the table frequently and that it’s still engaging after 15 plays says a lot for it, especially given it’s so simple.
Splendor Duel, won a game of this with a bud who loves Splendor so that felt good. It was close though!
Gizmos, hey I won this one! That’s a first (or second if you count online plays). Managed to feel purposeful and done without any Pick gizmos. I did manage 4 level threes so that helped of course.
Archaeology:TNE, it’s still really good. I’m starting to see the level of luck in it is a bit higher than I’d like ideally (top decking maps with some of the monuments is overly strong), but still lots of fun.
Garbage Day, another game I keep cause its simple. Lots of take that, and going out first can suck, as it takes awhile to build back up to the point where someone’s in danger of screwing up.
Bohnanza, another one I never win that I managed to this time around! I’m not sure exactly how - I felt one of the other players got some very favourable deals but eh, shows what I know. I couldn’t go back to the version with the Wax, Coffee and Cocoa beans after playing this one - it just adds length that is so not needed. Bohnanza is great as a sub 1 hour fairly chill card game.
Frosthaven, a bit of a slog, took us about four and a half hours. And we would have failed if any of us had become exhausted. Managed a great attack in the last room and killed a few guys surrounding one of my shadows, probably my best turn ever. Cleared the path nicely to our escape tiles. Still wouldn’t have made it without the help of our Banner Spear who managed to move me toward the exit. I had almost no health left, already had to negate damage by discarding a card. Which is usually a bad sign when that happens. It’s still a lot of time spent nursing my deck before I can finally do something cool in the last half hour.
Aliens Bug Hunt, first play. I’m a fan of anything Alien/Aliens related, even bought the RPG (maybe one day I’ll play it). This is a pretty light, cooperative dice roller. You build up the grid of rooms as you play, adding aliens as required. On your turn, you can move, and then do one of the following actions: shoot, take objective token, breach a barrier between your tiles, or reload (which makes your team ready for action). When you shoot, you can use up to three of your characters (usually one named character from the movie, plus two generic grunts).
The aliens are represented by dice, and you add them to tiles as you explore. When the aliens take a turn, a marker moves up a track, and at various points trigger the existing aliens to move or shoot, and then new aliens are spawned. I thought we were going to win easily. We only had a couple of objective tiles to find, and the aliens didn’t seem to be putting up much of a fight (we were rolling pretty well). The six sided dice have four blank faces, and two alien symbols. Somewhat confusingly, the blank faces are good, they mean you killed the alien. Would have rathered they put a symbol there, like a bullet perhaps. A small gripe. One of the faces means that the alien not only survives, but cause a wound on your soldiers.
The longer the game goes on, the more alien turn cards are added, which means you’re moving up the track faster, causing attacks and spawning aliens. Each character has a health, which is how many wounds they can take. When they reach the limit, you start turning over the wound tiles to see if you die or not. There’s a few ways to lose the game, if you can’t place aliens, or run out of alien cards to add. And you lose if your team is killed off, which is what happened to us.
Hol’s der Geier - Great fun as usual. Definitely one of the blind buys that end up being really good
Planet etuC - yes. Again. It’s great. The table end up being consist of Tichu players and we all agree that Tichu is better, but this is easier to put on the table. (Tichu is love. Tichu is life)
Orongo - I think I need more plays. This Knizia is already great, but I think I need a few more plays to say that this is one of his best ones. Great game
Terraforming Mars 2x - Finally. Never played this one since 2018 or 2019 because it’s just boring. Now, I played it again, and nowadays I always carry a whip when playing board games, so we play 1.5 hours on both plays with 2 newbies on the table.
Both games are enjoyable. It’s been years so I forgot the innards of the game. But first two plays confirmed some of the issues I have with this game. Unlike RFTG, there’s not much card income in this game, which dampens my feelings. The procedures in this game are more bean counting - I said in my BGG comment that you’re like Elon Musk’s SpaceX accountant. And that is indeed the feleing. Increase this income, decrease this income, add cubes, remove cubes, go up this meter. The map gameplay is rather shallow where it doesn’t matter much how you build up Mars. Card engine suffers the usual issues with these card-driven dregs: the first few rounds are a crapshoot - especially when there’s no way to increase card income. Again, something that RFTG have done well
Yet, the game remains appealing. There’s something about the hard science of TFM and the terraforming process of the Red Planet that makes the game’s theme very appealing. In way, this shares the same appeal that I get from Matt Eklund’s Pax Transhumanity, despite the dry-Euroness of this game. I would still put any of Tom Lehmann’s card games ahead of this or Carl Chudyk’s, or Seasons. Hell, I’d rather play New Frontiers. I still enjoy this and I would be keen on playing it again. I think I’m on a card-driven craze at the moment.
If you try Earth, I’d be really interested to know what you make of it.
I only played it on BGA. I would rather try it for real before saying anything
