I did an order from Portland Game Collective, 2 copies is the sweet spot for getting it to the UK
Isn’t it Alpha on BGA? I’d be up for a game
2 Likes
That feeling when you’ve chivalrously bought the ‘British History’ pack for Timelines to improve your chances with your American partner, and you lose handily anyway.
10 Likes
Mech vs Minions - had a test drive and it’s pretty fun albeit, Mission 1 is too easy. Of course, that’s fine as that is just the easy mission after the baby-level tutorial mission. If I am gonna play it with randoms, I’ll go for latter missions, but @EnterTheWyvern is eager for a proper campaign so I will keep this game in its condition for now.
Zoo Vadis - Yes. You will keep seeing ZV in my posts from now on. We played with 7 players and it was epic as usual with active table talk
Zoo Vadis - 5 players. And boy, they pretty much gave me the win. I easily won with good amount of pts. Board state awareness is very important, folks.
Arborea - another boring multi system Euro
Arcana Rising - boring
7 Likes
Had a couple of games of Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game the past two evenings, first as the Rebels and then the Empire. Empire won both games. My game as the Rebels was horrible, as any good cards that came out were always discarded or destroyed before I could afford them, and I felt it was a moral victory just managing to destroy her second base before getting crushed. Our last game with me as the Empire was much closer and really could have gone either way.
We also played Ethnos last night with Dwarves, Centaurs, Minotaurs, Elves, and Merfolk. I just couldn’t catch a break here. I did good with bands, but my wife won most of the regions both rounds, and I just could not compete with that. She won, 102 - 85.
5 Likes
Game night with a quick Red 7 to start while we waited for our fifth. My unfortunate wife went first, then it went around to her, and then she was out.
Hansa Teutonica with a whole five and what a fun game. There were quite a few going for bonus tiles so we were close to ending the game by running out of them, but I got to 21 points before that happened. Not a lot of people were well set up so I kept first place after final scoring, but all scores were close.
Whirling Witchcraft went very quickly because the person to my left just made all reds and I had terrible luck in potion cards and so couldn’t use any of them. He got 1 point in the third round and the remaining 4 in the fourth.
8 Likes
Some games over the past week:
Glasgow, another play of this - another significant loss. Couldn’t manage to grab enough factories to stay competitive, so my opponent left me in the dust!
51st State, I really like this game - the puzzle is always fresh and dynamic - trying to cobble together a strategy as you go is a lot of fun. I won this one, even playing as New York (which is the faction I tend to find the toughest to play). It did not feel like a sure thing as my opponent was consistently taking more actions on his turns than I was, but I had some good combos and high scoring action cards that gave me the win. I really wish it was easier to get the promo factions for this game in Aus. I’d love the additional variety honestly.
Parade, lost this one, though not by as much as I’d expected as I had a number of majorities - and in fact my friend denying me one majority I was counting on swung the game in the final turn!
Red Cathedral, such a great little box, this one. I don’t feel the need to grab the expanion (especially as it seems to be about the same price as the base game!) but I really enjoy it as is.
The Gallerist, finally got this one to the table - had organised three players but one bailed at the last minute 
Luckily it still seemed to work pretty well with two. Wasn’t as hard to teach as I’d thought - it’s still a relatively long teach, mind you. But it all kind of makes sense with the theme. I really loved this game and am super keen to try it with three. Also more interactive than I’d expected - mostly in positive interaction with raising the popularity of artists (and a bit of denial on the international market). And our game came in at just over two hours, which was a good deal shorter than I’d expected. Really terrific fun - it’d be a ten if it were a little easier to get to the table! But it’s still amazing!
Modern Art, won this one despite winning very few auctions - I did warn people beforehand that you can do just as good not winning auctions as you can winning them - if things go your way. As indeed they did for me in this game.
New York Slice, won a lot of majorities here which gave me a solid win. This game is totally underappreciated - it’s below a 7 on BGG. It’s a really unique and fun game, for me.
9 Likes
How long on average are your games of Zoo Vadis? We are having friends over this weekend and it would accommodate our player count, but need to be able to give a fair estimate on time. All would be new to the game.
2 Likes
More players certainly adds time due to different angles of negotiation. But we had one 5 player game where it ended in 20+ mins because we are all rushing towards the Star Exhibit. The game ends when it is full up so it really depends on how fast/slow the players want to fill that thing up.
3 Likes
Over 45 minutes would be a slow game IMO. three out of four avaiable options on your turn move something towards the star exhibit. Yes, I’m counting ‘put a piece on one of the first exhibits’ in that.
The last option makes it easier to move towards the star exhibit.
2 Likes
We visited our old gaming group in Bedford on Wednesday and got in a few games with old friends. My husband spent the whole evening playing Age of Steam and I played Stomp the Plank, Photosynthesis, and Scout. I’d forgotten how much I like Photosynthesis!
9 Likes
I picked up the Escape Curse of the Temple Big Box at SPIEL. So I’ve played before but I needed a rules refresher and since the box claims one can play this solo… I did.
So a question.
Have any of you tried this? Did I miss anything? Is there a special mode? I found a few attempts at homebrew solomodes on BGG.
The standard game seems impossible as a solo?
Do any of the expansions change that? I only tried base game…
I did not buy it for solo-ing but I’d like some confirmation that I didn’t miss anything obvious about playing, because it is so bad that putting 1 or even 2 players on the box seems disingenuous. BGG says “best with exactly 4” and I am inclined to believe that right now.
3 Likes
I’m generally pretty darned good on history yet I often lose handily at this! (We use 3 mixed packs)
1 Like
I once played the American history version with a group of late stage doctoral candidates/recent PhDs, all in either American History or American Studies. I think we collectively got 1 wrong then started going through the pack and decided that was a fluke as there were several other cards most or all of us couldn’t place with high confidence.
3 Likes
We’ve had the base game with no expansions for years. I’ve played it solo several times (although not for a long time) and I don’t remember it being impossible. You can certainly fail abysmally on any particular attempt, but you can also succeed comfortably sometimes too. From memory most games are in between - ie whether you succeed or fail it isn’t by much.
And we’ve certainly had fun games of this with two and three players.
2 Likes
All my dice got stuck regularly. Did I miss a rule that you unlock your dice once you have all black masks? Because that happened to me on all 3 attempts.
2 Likes
With the proviso that I may be remembering this wrong:
If your dice all end up as black masks, you have to spend one of the two additional green gems to re-roll all your black masks (I think you can do this whenever you want - you don’t have to wait until they’re all black masks).
But you really need to make sure that doesn’t happen!
Are you remembering you can use one gold mask to regain two black mask dice?
Also - Are you using seven dice (instead of five) for playing solo?
4 Likes
I was not getting back 2 masks for a gold and i was using 5 dice. Thank you so much. I can‘t read it seems. Half remembering rules of a game I played many years ago certainly did not help 
Sounds much more doable that way.
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It’s almost impossible even with basic rules to finish the game if you only unlock 1 die with a gold mask!!
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Gosh - no wonder it seemed impossible!
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Also, remember you can always keep a gold die in reserve until you have 2 blacks to get rid of.
I never played solo, but I did make dice trays for the game to actually slow people down. If you have to lift dice out of the tray and put them on the table to use them, and the dice tray provides something to roll against, it provides a structure that optimizers seem to need. Otherwise dice don’t get rolled, they get “slammed/dropped”, and “use” is instantaneous and people lose track of what is used they are doing everything so fast.
3 Likes