Got a few games in since I came back home after the Holidays:
Three games of Pandemic, the first was a perfect game, the other two were very narrow defeats. We really only needed one more turn to get all the cures. Next time!
We played our second game of Great Western Trail New Zealand, starting to really understand the new strategies. I still lost by around 40 points, though!
Two games of Ark Nova! I heartbreakingly lost yesterday, 29-34, after being in the lead the whole game (and not a narrow lead). Today was a MASSACRE though. Lost 22-54, and Maryse managed to get her conservation marker all the way to the end of the track, first time that happened. Look at this (sheās the yellow player):
Two games today. First was Everdell, with all three of us. My wife made some great combos, earning a decisive victory with 63 points, to my 54, and her brother at 38.
Then it was just the two of us for Tyrants of the Underdark. Despite me giving her numerous Insane Outcasts (worth -1 each), she kept getting total control of the cities, so won the game, 82 - 74.
Yeah - itās by no means a completely random game. Iām assured that people whoāve mastered the strategies involved can win somewhat reliably. But it is unavoidably luck-influenced throughout and sometimes youāre pretty solidly destined to win or lose based on how things line up. See for example my very first game of Final Girl, where I lucked into burning Hans down so fast it felt almost unfair, or my first game against the Evomorph (from season 2), where it almost immediately evolved into its adult form and I barely even got a chance to attack it before Iād been torn to shreds. (ā¦which was several turns later, itās just very fond of hiding).
Well, I just got a much better revenge, this time at Terraforming Mars, where I won 170-140. I got stupidly lucky with Jupiter badges using Phobolog (I think itās Phobolog, anyway, the one that increases your money production every time you play a Jupiter badge) and just kept drawing the exact cards I needed, including three that give out VPs per Jupiter badge (of which I had a whopping 9).
By the end, I was earning 97 megacredits a turn, along with 7 titanium (in an obviously space-based economy). The board was completely full (not just from my stuff of course) and I had placed all of my cubes. Also had the Pets, Livestock and Herbivore cards, and they all paid off very handsomely.
There was a serious cash imbalance in this game, Maryse played a blinder to get that high a score, honestly (she got a lot of points, amongst other things, from a couple of microbe cards that synergized very well along with her corp, that allowed her to use a blue card twice in a turn). She was proud of that, and rightly so.
Happy to play, as always, and glad I got a win, but man, I got a big assist from Lady Luck in this one.
Three games of 2-player Pax Pamir 2e, which were spiky and intense.
My first game of Cthulhu Wars, with 4 players, inspired by lalunaverdeās enthusiasm for the game. It was good, but the mediumatures were too big and too monochromatic for easy board parsing.
Innovation with 3 players, crazy as always. A little crazier than usual, if anything. All three players had 4 achievements, and the game ended on an 11 draw.
This game. Our table needs to decide on a small game to play as a closing game. We looked at the pile and we just shrugged āInnovation?ā. I think I need to cull my heavy small games if we just āInnovation shrugā every time. Newbie really liked the game too.
Christ on a bike, this is not an Exit game (and we love those). The production is off the charts, there are fake Wikipedia pages and multiple fake websites.
The puzzles seemed to be relatively simple or really, really hard. We used a lot of hints (the system for that is really cool). I remember using lots of hints in our early Exit games and real life escape rooms. Weāll see how we go with the other puzzles and see if we tune in to the style. I hope we find the balance between feeling clever and being challenged.
Your post intrigued me so I looked it up andā¦yeah, I would expect production off the charts for 3x the price of an Unlock for what appears to be a similar or slightly higher amount of gameā¦but Iām still curious.
MicroMacro Crime City (OG) - Solved all the cases, except for one 5-star difficulty case. Iām sure itās more of a case that I canāt see where the next person is. I only tried the tutorial before. At least I know what I am getting into when I bought the whole series. This is very fun to play. Iāll be going through the rest of the series. I even set a challenge of it this year.
My City - I tried. I went through 6 games of it and Iām bored playing this. Sad. One of Kniziaās duds for me, As expected, some RK fans like it.
Pax Renaissance - playing more back-to-back games with @mr.ister . After some bad plays where I am not paying attention to the async board state, we played a tense close game. I opened with the Reformation wars in England, and proceed to dominate Western Europe with my trade network. mr.ister did the same on the East. I spend a dollop of gold to buy the comet card outright to activate the Renaissance Victory. This led to us overthrowing kings and establishing Republics. I didnāt manage to grab enough Law icons so we hit a stalemate. I started going for Globalisation Victory as a backup. After more stalemates, thereās more stalemates. mr.ister went for Imperial Victory by gaining the German Emperor and the Pope. (In hindsight, I was too eager to put up republics that I forgot that they donāt attack their neighbours. Oh well!) He also took up more Patron icons which allowed him the win when the decks ran out and the tiebreaker is the Patronage victory
This is solidly in my Top 10 now and also my fave Pax title.
On Saturday I met with my mate Ben and his wife Alex and we played Massive Darkness: Hellscape. Nice dungeon crawler/dice chucker, where you lad adventurers into a scenario of 4 tiles of 3x3 areas and need to eliminate a boss on each to scape from hell. The adventurers gain an extra dice that can activate their special ability if the fight in darkness (ruled by the colour of the tile: reddish is bright, all the dark blues/greys are dark).
We had a long teach (a bit longer than I expected) as each character has different special abilities, and then we went into it. I must admit it felt way easier than I expected it, perhaps because we were having good rolls at the beginning, and then we managed some good equipment hat gave us an edge towards the ends. My ranger centaur special ability to hurt each enemy on line of sight came really handy to deal with groups of minions, and the shaman powers were really good to keep us full of HP.
After a good few hours that went flying by we defeated the final boss as we were getting really crowded. Enjoyed it fine, but it turns out to be a tad too long for just three players (about 4 hours plus teach), so I still favour Cthulhu: DMD.
Then yesterday I played a game of Firefly solo. The scenario was to first gain being solid with all but Harken, and then two misbehaves in the central area (Valentine and Ariel, perhaps?). I had Malcolm and managed to find Walsh and Zoe early on, plus a massive sniper rifle, so everything went quite smooth. The Reavers gave me a couple of scares, but having Walsh and being a mechanic allowed me to evade expending a fuel. Eventually I managed to find the expensive Fake ID that even fools custom searches, so it was plain sailing from there, the last two misbehaves I hardly needed rolling. Still love the story-making ability of this game. I completed the scenario with 3 turns to spare, and packed it up ready for another play tonightā¦
Today we played Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea and Expeditions.
The former is one of those ā4xā games thatās really a Euro in disguise, which was fine although not very exciting. Expeditions is not very much like Scythe but has the same setting:
Itās another of Jamey Stegmaierās efficiency puzzle games, so itās just as well I like both efficiency puzzles and alt-history steampunk. Iād definitely play again
If anyone wants to hear Rita Orlov talk about what goes into their work in these nutty escape room boxes the. She did a podcast with eggplant (originally spelunky podcast)
Had a (belated) Christmas get together with old board game friends and got to play some games!
The Great Split - Definitely will need some plays to be able to play it well and trying to work out what other people want will always make things a bit fuzzy. The scoring is a bit fiddly, but people only need to understand basic stuff to play the game and then you can walk them through it when itās time to score. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.
Spots - A lot of fun with charming art and simple rules. Lots of satisfying chances to roll many dice and be dismayed when everything goes wrong.
My Gold Mine - Just as fun with 5 as with 2. Thereās a temptation to try and shuffle the gold cards āwellā, but I donāt really think you can do it badly, as thatās just part of the push your luck element.
I went to Stabcon. (It originated in a meetup for postal Diplomacy games, hence the name. These days itās a mix of boardgames and RPGs, mostly the former.)
Mostly I played games Iād brought - which is fine, I bring them because I want to play them.
Piepmatz - always fun. Nature red in beak and claw.
First in Flight - hmm, not really my style of game anyway, but the thing that irked me was taking a perfectly good mechanism like last-on-the-track-moves-next but then making the spaces one actually wants so rare that it mostly ended up being great leaps to the next useful space.
Xia: Legends of a Drift System - nobody flew into the sun! In fact it didnāt come out of the tile stack by the time we ended the game. In spite of this flaw, good fun, and nobody tried to stop me mining ember (three times in a row, while immune to ice damage spread and getting a bonus per cube sold thanks to ship powers).
Project L - first try with a 5-player game and therefore the variant that has two turns moving round the table at once. Worked pretty wel.
Deep Sea Adventure - I did try to say donāt be greedy. I always do. Nobody ever listens.
Machi Koro: Bright Lights, Big City - one of several editions that attempt to fix the brokenness of the core game. Felt very random and restrictive to me, but I came last so maybe I just donāt get it.
Trio - good filler, still want the original art versoin.
Nokosu Dice - two of the players had never played a trick-taking game before. Still, we got there.
Flash Point: Fire Rescue - we have to do something about firefighters smoking on the job.
Zombie Dice - decent filler
Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition - two plays, with quite different feels. Harpy, Haka and Bunker against Citizen Dawn in Megalopolis (terminal birdsplosion just barely avoided); then Wraith, Expatriette and Mr Fixer vs Ambuscade on Insula Primalis, where Wraith turned off the volcano with the Sonic Neutralizer while Mr Fixer punched it to death. (Oh, and there was this hunter guy.)
Today, Maryse asked for her revenge at Terraforming Mars. I played Republic of Tharsis, and she played the corporation that lets you use heat as money (man, Iām bad at names, the corpos for our previous game were Saturn Labs for me and Viron for her, for the record).
This was a VERY tight game, even if I once again got my economy going very quickly. We actually started counting the VPs on our cards and on the board at the same terraforming level of 42.
In the end, she pulled it off, beating me 130-119. Brilliant game of a brilliant game.
Not much on the table. Butā¦ it seems I am addicted to Daybreak-Solos on BGA. I just like the combos and I really really like the little animation of the oceans and trees eating the emissions cubes. It is so satisfying. If you want to be a little frustrated by the contrast with realityā¦ highly recommendedāweāll take my cardboard copy on vacation I think.
I forgot to report my second game of Firefly solo from Monday night. I failed, this time I was really struggling to get a crew together with Marco for a long time. I got a decent crew with Pilot and Mechanics from Space Bazaar and Osiris nice early, but a Reaver attack killed both before I had bulked up with weaponry. So I did not make it in the allocated time (plus I was playing the King of Londinium scenario, managing to earn the money for the first goal proved to be trickier than I expected).
After I went over the solo turns limits I kept playing, and eventually I closed the three goals one after another quite rapidly, I had managed to get the extra crew upgrade and put together a great gang with a bit of everything. But I did not find a single pilot the whole game, so getting close to Reavers or the end of the outer space deck was tricky. Luckily the final missions were in the Alliance area or far away from where the Reavers lurked.
Still a little light on gaming over the last little bit, but hereās what Iāve played:
Meadow, taught this to Mum who said she found it very involved for the kind of day she was having. Mind you she won. I imagine weāll play it again together soon. I love the theme and presentation heaps here, even if the game is fairly straightforward most of the time.
Ohanami x3, two wins to one in my favor here.
Tyrants of the Underdark, great 4 player game of this for my Bāday. Tried the demons, they are great - aggressive use of ghouls early on and lots of aggressive promoting served me well.
Glasgow, lost this one from too aggressively focusing on factories. The opposite of the problem I had last timeā¦
7 Wonders Duel, solid points victory here. My opponent said he found it a bit too abstract but didnāt hate it.
Silver and Gold, close game! Iām still keen to check out the sequel, but this one is great.
