Pics of the whip, please. I’ve been looking into similar solutions.
5 Likes
Long week-end over here (Labour Day), and I got to finish work at noon yesterday, so we played quite a few games. In the mood for mostly lighter fare and classics:
Patchwork X3. As always, we played a small tourney. Also as almost always, I lost said tourney 2-1. All games were close at least. This is one of the first two games Maryse and I bought together, and it hasn’t lost any appeal. Love it.
Chromino X3. Maryse introduced me to this years ago, we hadn’t played in a long time. We use a scoring system of our own devising (as far as I know anyway, we came up with it independently but it very well might exist elsewhere). We split the first two games and they were VERY close (actually won the first one by a single point), but the third was a massacre (three guesses who got massacred). Always a good time.
Bunny Kingdom. We’re one of the few who prefer the base game only to playing with the expansion. It’s at just the right level of complexity and levity. While two players is obviously not the optimal count, it still works quite well and it’s a lot of fun. Also, the art and the puns are adorable. Won by 2 points!
Quacks of Quedlinburg with The Herb Witches. Oh boy, it had been so long! Our new storage solution (a jewelry case from the dollar store) removed the big annoyance of set-up snd tear down and now the game’s just a blast to play. It’s great! Lost by 5 points, a very tight game!
Patchwork X3. Again, a tourney. This time I won 2-1. Yay!
Great plays so far!
Edited to add: Great plays continued with Everdell with Bellfaire and Newleaf. A weird yet fascinating game with SUPER long seasons. Got into Autumn with no more room in my town, so focused on visitors, events and travels. Lost 131-105.
6 Likes
Played at TableTop Scotland
A lovely little game and surprisingly tactical. Would be happy to play again.
Made my brain hurt. This says more about me than the game. My excuse is that I’m a Social Scientist and I’m sticking to it.
I have the previous edition. To misquote The Brigadier “Wonderful game, all of them.”
Same mechanic as The Cursed Earth game but far better balanced.
If you like push your luck dice games, this is one. I liked it but not as much as I like Piraten Kapern.
11 Likes
Had my Mottainai-playing friend over for some 2P games. (You can probably see where this is going.)
But first, we played Five Tribes, which I hadn’t played in at least four years. It’s still fun! Especially at two players where, in the late game when good moves get slimmer and slimmer, you’re considering your moves not just for their value but for what kind of moves they set up for your opponent.
Then we played two games of Mottainai. The first was essentially over before it began, because on his first turn he crafted Poem and immediately returned it to complete the top card of the deck. That happened to be Jar, a clay work that allowed him to move two cards from the floor to his sales. And what do you know, there were two clay cards on the floor! So it was a pregone conclusion after that. The next game was equally bad for me. Glad I won Five Tribes though!
11 Likes
Today is superjaz’s birthday, so yesterday we met up with some friends for karaoke, and then went to our FLGS with them and played two games of Mysterium. She likes playing as the ghost, and does a good job of not facepalming when we inevitably conclude something completely different than what she was trying to convey.
First game, I just blitzed through the three levels, and all of us managed to identify our person, place, and scenario (used Secrets and Lies expansion) in record time, but we failed to stick the landing for the final vision, jumping to an incorrect conclusion too quickly.
Second game went similar to the first, though I got stuck on the scenario long enough for everyone to catch up to me, but we all completed it by the end of the fifth hour. Once again, though, we failed the final vision, this time by talking ourselves out of our first choice correct answer and, though one of us did vote for it.
Still good fun. One of our friends had never played it before and enjoyed it, and it is always nice broadening someone’s board game horizons.
10 Likes
Just played our first two games of Renature (I, of course, lost both). Excellent light-to-medium weight game. Chill yet mean, and pretty breezy at 45 minutes for each of our first two games.
9 Likes
Played Spirit Island 3 players and 2 spirits each, with @EnterTheWyvern . It was wild and very enjoyable experience.
We then played Seasons next. Managed to pull off a bonkers combo at Year 1 and steamrolled ahead.
11 Likes
Yep, great day’s gaming. Playing the 6 player game of SI was great fun. Having so much to consider and coordinate was cool. I think using a less solitary spirit in my selection would elevate the experience a bit.
Seasons was a great learning curve. I really should have pressed on with sacrificing a card to get more use out of the every 4 turns card. Also makes me thing the boots of winding time are better than I’d initially given them credit for. Getting hit twice by reduce summoning gauge also set me back heartily. Was good to grind the gears and see more of the game though and like many games I really should play it more.
8 Likes
Weekend board games!
Civilization: A new dawn with the Terra Incognita expansion. It’s fine, but I’d rather play the computer game.
Gizmos: a neat, light engine builder. Might recommend it to my parents as an alternative to Wingspan. Speaking of which…
Wingspan: I still prefer this to Gizmos, because birds. I’ve played this enough that you’d think I would know lots of bird facts… Alas, I only seem to be able to retain the most disgusting ones:
- Turkey vultures can projectile vomit as a defense mechanism.
- European roller chicks vomit on themselves to deter predators.
You’re welcome.
Enemy anemone: a quick trick taking game wherein you are forbidden from following suit. My husband got very competitive for someone who “can’t see the point” 
7 Likes
Enemy anemone
I absolutely love this title.
4 Likes
We got Chinatown to the table today. Three player is not ideal but still fun. I got a complete 4-tile business on the second turn, which jumped me ahead of my wife and her brother, but kind of stalled out after that, other than an incomplete 4-out-of-6-tiles business. I was able to get 5-out-of-6-tiles in another business, but it was completely surrounded, so there was no chance to finish it.
I was making the least amount of money for the last few rounds, up until the final round where I was able to convince my wife to trade me a location in return for two of mine and $20k, which allowed me to finish the original 6-tile business as well as another 4-tile one.
My wife still won, but we tied in money at $1.4m, and her brother had $1.28m. She won because the tie breaker is most shop tiles placed, which she definitely had as I still had tiles, but she didn’t. Amazingly close game, all things considered.
6 Likes
Last night at Local Game Group:
Pictomania, never played before, quite enjoyed it but I was very slow.
Realm of Sand, I still regard this as significantly better than Splendor because of the spatial puzzle, but it never seems to have got much traction.
9 Likes
Finished out our gaming week-end with a rousing game of Ark Nova, which I lost miserably, as has now become tradition, on the final move. I forced the end-game in the hopes of catching Maryse with not enough money to pull off her usual move, but, well… She had enough money to pull off her usual move. So 43-21. Ah well. Game is still amazing. 
7 Likes
Bit of Gaia Project tonight.
Didn’t exploit my asymmetric power enough so came third. First place scored pretty much double my score, but took twice as long to play.
So on a points per minute score we’re equal. Would play again (without the aforementioned player)
Followed by ハーベスト (Harvest). This is a good game of shared incentives and screwing people over.
7 Likes
Damn you got me. I saw this at Travel Games, but skipped it.
2 Likes
Two games worthy of mention:
Feast for Odin. If at any point somebody says that there must be a loving God, please remind them that Feast for Odin is currently out of print, and has been for years. If they can believe that a loving, benevolent god would allow such things to happen, they are too far gone for rational discussion.
Seriously, though, what a cracker of a game. Lost by a mile (75 - 14), but what a fantastic puzzle. Couldn’t figure out why anyone would bother upgrading greens to blues (they don’t get you more points!), but then I tried to start fitting things into my Longhouse o’ Hording, and click.
What a design. What a game! Must play again.
My Island, the sequel to My City, which I loved. This one… only one game in, and I’m… hmm. Okay. Here’s the thing: the hexes aren’t nearly as pretty as the polyominos from My City. The art doesn’t “make sense” (roads leading into walls that float in blue-space… even the scale makes no sense…), and it’s really pretty ugly. Plus, are we discovering the island’s regions, or are we building houses and roads? In the previous one, you were building a city (which magically got bulldozed every year), but now… are you making farms? And building houses? I…
Look. All I’m saying is that Knizia’s themes are normally stupid, but this is spectacularly stupid even by his standards.
As for the game… cautiously optimistic? I need it to be better balanced than the last one for the late game… I won our first game, but at least it was pretty close. We’ll see if that holds out.
10 Likes
I’ve been on a much-needed holiday. We were on an island in the Pacific, and so I played a bunch of Sprawlopolis exclusively with the Beaches expansion (and then “one with everything” as a finale).
The four beach cards each act as a boundary for the growth of your city on one of its four sides (and beach cards must be played immediately when you draw one), but you’ll only end up with three boundaries, as the fourth card is used for its scoring criteria instead (selected at the beginning).
8 Likes
Quick game of Lost Cities tonight, which had my wife up by 2 points after the first round, up by 3 points after the second, and then with me winning overall with 150 - 135. Luck broke my way right at the end.
5 Likes
As well as a bunch of Sprawlopolis, on my holiday I also played Cribbage (tableau solo), Village Green, Food Chain Island (using the Whale every time, as we were there during the humpback whale breeding season) , For Northwood!, Skulls of Sedlec, Tetrarchia, and Regicide.
My partner and I played a bunch of Hive, Hansa Teutonica, Patchwork, and Martian Dice, but I mostly only thought to take photos after solo games.
10 Likes