Nusfjord – Solo
Ooh, fancy! I got one of these dusty boxes off my shelf and on to my table! My collection data suggests I’ve owned Nusfjord for more than 3 years. Time, then, it seems to get this thing played. One of the most touted Rosenberg games, and certainly one of the often cited best Rosenberg solo games (Odinfeast being the prime competitor in both categories, it seems; a game that I’ve avoided because I can be persnickety about spatial puzzles and how/when they fit inside my head).
Nusfjord, then, hmm, what is this thing? Well, it’s like if your run-of-the-mill fish had an illicit relationship with your stock standard stock market. If you’re having trouble picturing what that would look like, don’t worry and let me help: it looks a bit like a Norwegian fishing village with a lot of old men (but NO old women; again, if you’re having trouble picturing that… well… You might have to research ancient Greece on your own).
Okay, then, what’s the game? Fishing, that’s the game.
Mini Express – Solo
So, I Kickstarted Mini Express a few years back. I actually don’t remember much about my thought process for backing it because back then, I don’t think I really knew much about cube rails, nor how to spot them in the wild. But the graphics looked great and…
What do you mean I didn’t finish talking about Nusfjord? Fine fine fine…
Nusfjord – Solo – continued
Okay, so, yes, it’s a game about fishing. Or… is it?
Yes. Yes it is. But we’re not talking about Freshwater Fly. The extent that you go fishing is that at the start of every round, your fishing boats bring in a load of fish, which you must then distribute to the shares you’ve issued, the old men whom you’ve wooed, and then, finally, the shares you have in your own company.
So far, so Uwe Rosenberg, yes? Well, not really, because I’ve not mentioned any of Herr Rosenberg’s usual trappings. Are there working placement spaces? Yes. Is there a deck of cards of which some you will see and some you will not, and you can play those cards in order to increase the range of actions you can do on your turn when placing your workers? Also yes. Okay, there, done; we’ve established it’s a Rosenberg game.
But, hang on, let’s get back on topic: why is this such a popular game? You just play 7 rounds of fishing and then placing workers, and then you add up your score. So far so lame, yes? Well, what if I were to tell you two things make it an eye-opening experience?
- The game takes about 20 minutes for someone who knows what they’re doing (and about 40 minutes for those who don’t, such as myself).
- Those random cards you’ll see? There’s combos there, you just have to find them. And there are 3 different decks (5 if you include the expansions that will eventually all be bundled up in a big box), each deck offering different types of card synergies; and in classic Uwe Rosenberg style: do not mix the decks, because you won’t get those cool combos.
I really enjoyed playing; the core game loop is very tight, and yet it has a classic Rosenberg escalation that means your first turn will be fairly ho-hum, but your last turn will be dramatic and exciting.
I won with 33 points. I mean, it’s hard to lose, really. But a win is a win. And 33 points is not terrible, but not great. I do wish there were dynamic score targets based on, perhaps, the mix of cards you got to see; but there are solo challenges hosted on BoardGameGeek that are probably worth checking out (which I might try to fit into a solo schedule)
Mini Express – Solo – for real this time
So, I Kickstarted Mini Express a few years back. I actually don’t remember much about my thought process for backing it because back then, I don’t think I really knew much about cube rails, nor how to spot them in the wild. But the graphics looked great and Moaideas is a name I recalled seeing good things said about.
Well, by the time it arrived, I had given up on trying to do solo gaming in the evening on my dinner table (because it was just too exhausting to have to setup, play, and then pack away games before going to bed). I’ve had my dedicated solo gaming table for a bit over a year and I decided it was finally time to check out solo-able cube rails! (that means, hopefully, we’ll be seeing solo playthroughs of Age of Steam, Luzon Rails, and Railways of the World soon!)
Sadly, Mini Express earned the first pick for soloable cube rails because I felt like it was the least discussed and, as a result, I expected the least from it. And that’s what I found! I also found a cube-rails game that does not include any actual cubes 
Ooh, that sounded mean. I should say that I really enjoyed my game of Mini Express; and the solo AI is actually pretty clever. It was originally developed to make the 2-player game feel more like the regular 3+ player game; but they extended it to a solo mode once it was done? I think?
I played on the North America side which, probably for game balance reasons, doesn’t include Kansas City, despite its importance in early US railway development. Oh well, it was probably just too close to Omaha which also has a prestigious railroading history and is often the one glossed over on the game boards. I setup the “Easy” mode bot because each additional difficulty level adds or modifies an additional rule, and I wanted to keep things as easy-to-operate as possible for my first game.
Mini Express is somewhat like Paris Connection; there are 4 companies and each company has a pool of available cubes (they look like trains, but I assure you, they are cubes); that pool is both the company’s value, i.e. the cost to buy one of its shares, but also the number of rails it can build on your turn if you select to build rails for that company. If you use those cubes to build, then the next person can buy a share for cheaper. But buying a share adds cubes to the pool! OOH, that’s the game and that’s so GOOD!
Players don’t, however, have cubes (or trains); they have influence! Your influence in each company is what you would use to buy a share. If you have 8 influence in a company and the share costs 2 (because there are 2 cubes in the company’s pool), you can spend 2 resulting in Influence 6 and an extra share of that company.
You gain influence by connecting companies to cities. Each city has 2 icons randomly assigned to it at setup; when you make a connection to that city on your turn, you get 1 influence bump for both of the companies shown, regardless of what company built the connection.
At the end of the game, the company’s share is worth a number of points depending on two factors:
- how many non-city cubes the company has on the board
- how you rank in influence of that company
That’s a bit complicated, but let’s say you have the most influence in a company that has the most non-city cubes on the board: you’re probably winning! That is… if you… have some of those shares?
If you have a TON of shares in a company but ZERO influence, those shares are worth 0.
Most of the time, it’s going to be somewhere in the middle. And then everyone totals up their points and someone is the winner!
If you’re playing against the solo AI on easy mode, I’ll save you the hassle: YOU WIN! It’s not quite that straight-forward, but it’s essentially the case. You will lose the race for “most influential” in any of the companies, but you could possibly tie for one of the four if you play correctly. But as long as you’re buying shares when they are cheap or free as often as possible, you’re going to win. The other trick is, when building, only build with the company that the AI is currently “on” because it’s impossible for the company to select that company on its next turn. Yeah, the AI is fairly flat and predicable.
This is a great cube rails game with a beautiful package. Just turn the trains upside down because the colors chosen are pretty bad unless you are playing on the surface of the sun (at which point the smoke point of wood, and flesh for that matter, might come into play); the screen-printing is even worse and makes for a hard time to tell what’s what – it’s best to just turn them over and forgo the screenprinted graphics in favor of the single-color train.
I need to try this some more at harder difficulties, but I suspect this solo AI is better at causing noise in 2-player games than it is as a solo experience. I’m very happy to own this game, though, and I’m eager to play it multiplayer. I do have expansion maps coming as part of a crowdfunding project and I do not regret that investment in the least.
Dream Home w/ Dream Home: 156 Sunny Street – Solo
It’s called 156 Sunny Street because it adds play modes for 1-player games, 5-player games, and 6-player games.
It does not add play modes for Sunny-player games nor Street-player games, though.
After packing up Mini Express, I still had some time and energy left at the end of the day, so I popped Dream Home on my table; it had recently been there as I organized the expansion stuff into the base game (vise versa, actually; I packed the base game into the expansion box). In doing so, I had accidentally read the rules for the base game and the expansion twice because it’s a very simple game with not a lot of rules.
I set up the solo game, which uses a few bits from the expansion but is mostly a base-game experience, outside of the “construction plan” cards – added stipulations you can use when drafting cards to get extra points.
A very simple game. Setup, setup clarification research on BGG, playing, scoring, teardown and packing it away took almost exactly 60 minutes. Probably about 20 minutes of that of me asking stupid questions about setup.
I’m torn, friends. This is a great game. And it very much competes with Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig – only it’s probably way easier to teach and way easier to play with “non-gamers”. It does contain some “power” cards that you can draft that could be complicated; but unlike B2CoMKL where sometimes weird things happen and if you, the rules expert, have to coach, you have to do it in the middle of the game while your two neighbors are trying to talk to you, in this game almost all (or all?) of these happen at the end of the game – a great time to be able to help new players, especially because other new players can benefit (for future plays) by walking the person through these effects; e.g. swap a room in your house with one in the discard pile, or swap the position of two cards in your house (both of these can have some rules nuance, but nothing brain-melting).
I won with 55 points. Again, like Nusfjord, I’m not sure you can lose? But 55 is a strong win with definite room for improvement. I think the solo rules say that if you play again and do worse by 10 points, you lose a rank or something… but… joke’s on them, I didn’t join the Dream Home Army so I cannot be demoted.
Awkward Guests: The Walton Case – Solo
There I was, at at my gaming table at 11pm on a Friday night, knowing that the upcoming weekend was going to destroy my energy levels, and yet still feeling the urge to get a game played.
The weekend before, I had spent some time watching a solo playthrough video of Awkward and playing along at home. This time I spun up my own game in the app and played my way through it.
The playthrough I watched prior was a bit of a rough introduction, because the person playing made a note-taking error during setup and that skewed both the difficulty and the decision-making during the playthrough. So, me, sitting there without any self-imposed handicaps, wondered just how to to go about tying up all the loose ends, something the video hadn’t really managed to find the time to do because of the aforementioned gaffe.
I ended up with an “a-ha!” moment at the very end, and I realized that sometimes “cheap” clues can be just as valuable as expensive ones (solo-mode points-wise, that is). I solved it handily with a mere 4 points remaining. Think you could do better? Give it a try!
016543-B
If I had played this prior to Turing Machine, I would have just been stunned. But as it stands… I can get community-provided software to generate new puzzles for Turing Machine; and even outside of that, I can get Turing Machine puzzles without an Android/iOS smart device on their website; Awkward Guests mandates using their proprietary software and only supports Android/iOS. Maybe their next crowdfunding will unlock a web-based version?
If I had to choose, I’d probably keep Turing Machine. Which is really a shame, because I can see it being easier to introduce “Clue/Cluedo but Better” to people whereas Turing Machine would literally make some of my friends/family run away.
Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn w/ Ashes Reborn: Red Rains – The Corpse of Viros and Ashes Reborn: The Spirits of Memoria – Solo
These are some long winded product names. I wanted to get Ashes played, finally, after owning it for more than 3 years. I randomly selected from the Phoenixborn that I own and landed on Sembali Grimtongue. I set up against Standard Level 1 The Corpse of Viros using the Fury aspect deck.
My first thought was, “oh, crap, Sembali is going to get wrecked!” But then I retconned setup and decided that one of Sembali’s suggested starting cards targets something that Red Rains is never going to have (conjurations), I retconned Channel Magic in the place of Chained Creations prior to taking my first turn.
It was a bit rocky as I Sembali got established. I think I accidentally cheated in the second round by using Angelic Rescue against combat damage; I’m not entirely sure, I think at the time I thought the combat damage would occur prior to the special effect damage, but when the same thing happened later in the game and I was about to handle it the same way, I realized that Angelic Rescue couldn’t save my Celestial Knight like it did before, and it made me question whether I used it correctly the time before – these types of effect/card interactions are best handled when two people are sitting at the table and can catch each other on rule bungles, even better when the players are adversaries… something solo/co-op game modes just are never going to do as well.
Eventually, I learned the types of aspects that I would be facing and I figured out some better timing options for playing my cards and abilities. And, especially valuable, I learned from watching a playthrough video that figuring out what dice you need for which cards you plan to play is vital to planning your round.
I don’t know if I’m ever going to love playing as Sembali Grimtongue; at first glance I thought I would, but it’s a pretty slow deck concept and relies a lot on what your opponent does.
I managed a win. It was a bit of a nail-biter for a bit, but that necessarily was part of my journal to analyzing the timing of what I’m playing vs what Viros was planning to do. I felt like I got the bad end of the luck-baton a few too many times, but I did manage to end the game with Viros only accumulating a total of 5 red rains tokens (experiencing the brunt of “Ultimate 1”, but not quite hitting the threshhold for “Ultimate 2”, leading me to question literacy levels at Plaid Hat Games).
It’s a very cool system and it’s a cool way to play a head-to-head game without requiring an opponent; you get to see what different deck concepts do in practice without having to just shrug at the other person while you both select a random deck and say, “Let’s try these two, I guess?”
I’m a little annoyed that the Corpse of Viros came with only 2 aspect decks and a single Chimera, with more being offered in other ~$40 packages. I can see now that if I choose to continue to invest in Ashes, for my wallet’s sake (or, more likely, for my family’s wallets’ sake), I’ll have to choose between putting Red Rains expansions on my wishlist or more Phoenixborn standalone sets, not both. The good news, I guess, is that the Red Rains are being packaged with Phoenixborn? Maybe? Corpse of Viros came with alternate-Phoenixborn cards for existing Phoenixborn… which I’ve not internalized yet.
. My party-game-hating friend declared it not her cup of tea.
I managed a decent 56 with the Architect and a few final game scores. She whooped my ass on most of the other games besides Raiders.