Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[lalunaverde]

The Old Prince - played the Old Prince and still Da King

Hegemony - played with 4 this time. I feel like I kept feeding the State with my pro-State cards that gives me nice bonus - some of them basically allows me to buy up public services and goods at half price! On Round 1 I even went for Free Trade policy for cheaper food and luxury imports to the detriment of the State, the Capitalist, and Middle Class (kinda. they like the cheaper imports too)

Due to cheaper commodities, I went hard on Prosperity, which has triangular scoring. First step is 1 VP, second step is 2VP. Every round, I go down one step. So it make sense to keep consuming to ramp up the VP rate asap while things are cheap. But things continue to be so cheap despite low wages that forming trade unions went on the wayside until the last rounds.

Capitalist got some strong influence so they got wages down to Lvl 1, but striking made them balk on some companies and put wages to Lvl 3.

Middle Class (same player as last game) kept their isolationist gameplay where they kept prices up so I don’t get to buy them. Capitalist didn’t do well. Winning on the previous game tend to make a player not see their flaws on their strategy and didn’t cope against a changed Working Class gameplay despite low taxes and low wages.

The State was the newbie and pretty much played the balancing actor between the classes. Since i always take advantage of the State, they don’t help me in return. How to fight against the State and against the Middle Class as the Working Class remains a mystery. But not playing ball with them is the first thing I could think of.

Pax Renaissance - we planned for 2 players, but 2 late comers came around and we played with 4. A lot of trading occurred which enrich the kingdoms and so it’s hard to overthrow them. Coronation was the easiest avenue unless you can hit a kingdom twice and deal a death blow on the 2nd card. One player was close to a Gloablist Victory. I was 2 turns away from Renaissance Victory because I got hit. The other was hit was well and was prevented on an Imperial Victory. And the game ended with a Patronage victory.

Yokai Septet - 3 players. Very fun still! And the other two players thought it was a cool game (it is )

6 Nimmt - we played with the advanced version where we play cards on both sides. Chaos and hilarity ensures.

[Marx]

Played a few games this week:

MLEM, an upcoming Knizia about launching cats into space. It’s a simple dice-rolling push-your-luck that’s aggressively fine. Nice components, but overdesigned… it would’ve been fine as a $25-ish dollar game, but at $40 it’s not great. Not one of the good doctor’s best, but definitely not one of his worst.

Stomp the Plank, okay, this one we technically played in French (“Le Planche de les Pirates”, or something similar) because the French version has been available from the Canadian distributor for Asmodee games for months and months, but the English version never has been. Thankfully, 100% language-free once you learn the few rules. A neat, fun little push-your-luck, super simple and silly. Not as good as Deep Sea Adventure or Incan Gold/DIamant, but way faster to setup and play. Played 2 player with my partner and won, played 3 player with my group as we waited for the 4th player to show up and lost: both times involved a lot of giggling.

King’s Dilemma, finally finished the campaign after 15 games. Came in last by a fair margin. Heading deep into spoiler territory here, so ye’ave been warned.

Not actually a big fan of the “game,” although we had a great experience. The ending in particular was weak… it sort of made all the wheeling and dealing and negotiations feel pointless? Two of the players were so far ahead that there was nothing the other two of us could do to stop them, and all they had to do was discuss between themselves how they wanted to try and outsmart each other. Plus at one point we were brutally punished for saving a child? And the game kinda gives a big thumbs up to slavery? I dunno, I still will recommend the game to customers and I did legit have a good time, but yeah. I kinda checked out of the game itself about 2 or 3 rounds before the end.

Still had fun. Also, have started to clear out games from my collection because I just have too many. Getting rid of GKR hurt on a physical level, but I haven’t played it in years and years, and the last time I did play it two of the three players hated it and the other player was me, who spent so much money on it that I still question my objectivity. Anyway, one game down, 29 more to get rid of.

[raged_norm]

@Marx

MLEM, an upcoming Knizia about launching cats into space. It’s a simple dice-rolling push-your-luck that’s aggressively fine. Nice components, but overdesigned… it would’ve been fine as a $25-ish dollar game, but at $40 it’s not great. Not one of the good doctor’s best, but definitely not one of his worst.

Have that on preorder, it’s about £25 here which, in the context if £20 card games is reasonable.

[lalunaverde]

Viking See-saw - cute dexterity Knizia

Ninja Master - Knizia’s take on Ghost Blitz but more complex. Perhaps my fave from the 5 Itten games I’ve got from the Kickstarter campaign

3 Second Try - hmmmm… it’s okay?

Stick Collection - gauging a stick to form a pattern, but uses auction as a lazy way to distribute sticks

Judge Domino - it’s like Durian (if you played Durian before) but with dominoes. I feel like I’d rather play Durian.

Coup with 8 players

Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West - 2 games this time. Hah. Looks like we are slowing down now with a larger map. 3 new pieces were added in our last game (in order of appearance): Florida, Great Plains, Open Range. The new frontier from Game 6 wasn’t added yet as we packed up and do it next time We have 6 games done and we might need 3 to 5 sessions, I think. Could be more.

[bort]

Played Goonies: Never Say Die, fairly comfortably. Had an item card that added rubble to paths, making it impossible for enemies to follow us. We found the boss, and thought we might have been in trouble there, but we teamed up and smashed him. The GM was halfway to winning (2 out of 4 objectives), but luckily for us he rolled pretty badly.

Search for Lost Species, first play. Basically, if you liked Planet X, you’ll probably like this. It’s definitely not just a reskin of the earlier game, it has it’s own characteristics. Which is cool – I like moving around the board, and having to go to town to do research. We got smoked by one player, scores were 50/26/22 – sadly I was the 22. Both of the losers had tried to guess and failed. I really thought I had it, but I was just so close. Just mucked up the location of the cuscus and the lost species, got them swapped around. A simple mistake to make. Even if I had realised and had another crack at it, it would have only scored me a few points because I was so close to the player who found the lost species. It’s similar to Planet X in that just finding the lost species isn’t good enough, you need to identify as many of the animals as you can. And I really didn’t do that well enough, probably needed to take a punt – the only penalty for getting it wrong is one time space. Although you do lose the token too, which doesn’t help.

The timing of sighting animals is a bit fiddlier than Planet X, but if you follow the icons you should get it ok. I had printed and laminated off the sheets, but we all had trouble writing enough detail on it, maybe we need finer point pens. Or maybe print the sheets a bit bigger.

Overall, an excellent game, and definitely worth keeping, along with Planet X. I do wish I didn’t have to find toads tho, horrible creatures.

Bacon, first play. Intended as a team game, but we only had 3p. It’s a climbing game where you are trying to play all of your cards out before anyone else. It was ok, would like to try it team based.

Prophecy, first play. A good trick taker, fairly standard stuff but it plays well. You have to predict the number of tricks you win by using cards from your hand, and the trump suit varies from round to round according to a wheel. There are some special cards that will either be the highest trump card (so it always wins), the highest non-trump, a zero (which always loses), and a 0.5 card that adds 0.5 to the previous card played.

9 Lives, another trick taker, but it’s pretty solid. You predict how many tricks you will win, and every time you win a trick, you take a card from that trick and put it back in your hand (can’t be the winning card…). This is becoming one of my favourite trick takers.

[lalunaverde]

Container - I am seeing more depth with this game and it is incredibly fragile. I got serious relief when I saw our money flow flowing really well, after a series of actions where we just build factories and warehouses. Doing the latter is to put money out of the economy.

But selling containers for auction injects money and inflates the money supply. Doing this early saved us from a death spiral.

I love how interesting and deep this game is, but I don’t think I have enough “bandwidth” to explore this when I have so many Splotters, Cube Rails, and other “short heavy games” who are all competing for my attention.

I’ll miss Container. If anyone is keen pm me.

Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio - very unique Cube Rail and mind-bending on how it’s counter-intuitive for non-Cube Rail players and Cube Rail players alike. You assign a colour of track on a company you start, and it follows Through the Desert rules of not touching rails of the same colour. But you get rewarded with connecting with other rails of different colour!

The separation between money and VP swerve this towards Euro-style tactics where resources are a means to an end towards increasing VP rate. But timing issues and opaque decision-making makes this far more interesting then your typical Euro design.

I will be playing more. This is an excellent game.

Mogul - after playing a game about trains. We played a train game with “No Thanks!” mechanism.

We played a prototype with @RogerBW @Gus and @EnterTheWyvern . Then, we followed with Nokosu Dice. This game is just a 10/10 trick taking game. [chef kiss]

[COMaestro]

Played Ethnos with my wife yesterday, using Elves, Wizards, Merfolk, Orcs, and Halflings. After the first age, she had filled up her Orc board, plus had control of most regions, which I thought would put her ahead, but we tied at something like 52 points.

I then proceeded to play a number of large bands and get some points from regions, and fill my own Orc board in the second age, giving me the win 149-120.

After that we played Ra, where our first epoch was terrible, consisting mostly of Ra tiles, two cataclysms which eliminated four of the five culture tiles, some Nile tiles, a couple of monuments, and one Pharaoh tile. By having the one Pharaoh tile, she won that, which was offset by having no culture tiles. I had the one remaining tile for that, but lost 2 points for having less Pharaohs than her.

Second epoch went almost exactly the same way, with the same scoring results at the end. It was only the last epoch where we got some decent lots, though even then I think we filled up the track twice and neither of us bid because it would only have been worth a point or two at best each time. Finally ended with a Ra tiles. She won because she outscored me with her Sun disks by 1, winning 5 points and costing me the same. Had I won that, we would have been tied at 16, but as it was, I lost 26 - 6.

Today we played Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game, where we had some really strong cards show up pretty early in the galaxy row. I got Han on my first turn and later was able to get a B-Wing and Fang Fighter. While I did take out Darth Vader, she was able to use a base ability to get Jabba the Hutt into her hand, and then exile a Jawa to purchase Vader from the discards. I destroyed that base on my next turn, but she then proceeded to destroy my second base in one go a turn later, as she had to reshuffle and got Vader in hand. Ultimately I won, managing to do damage faster.

[Gus]

@lalunaverde

This game is just a 10/10 trick taking game. [chef kiss

It is also evil mind-fookery. Which is why it’s so great.

[RogerBW]

@lalunaverde

We played a prototype with @RogerBW @Gus and @EnterTheWyvern .

Though before Luna made it we also played Newsboys, which is utterly themeless but nonetheless quite enjoyable. Each turn, get three common symbols (from a Welcome To-style double-sided deck) and three symbols on you own dice, and fill stuff in. But very few of the things you fill in will actually get you points. Ligher than I’d expected from the Essen buzz, but an enjoyable filler.

[Acacia]

Late night Patchwork. So very good. I felt I was behind, focusing too much on buttons and not real estate and then found that all the big, cheap tiles were gone.

Squeezed it out in the end because I had more space for the last tiles.

In my first game of Heat and here’s my knee-jerk hot take (compared to Flamme Rouge):
a) A lot more going on in terms of hand and track. Managing gears, needing different cards for different parts, taking and shedding heat, and those turns. A lot less going on in terms of interactions between your two bikes and between other players.

b) This is a more tactical game, about what to do right now with what you have right now. Hand in hand with above. A lot less going on in terms of planning - FR has you shedding cards and you need to plan ahead when and where you’re going to break and how you’re going to get there.

c) I think Heat makes a better first impression and would be the “better” game for most people, plays 1-5. I think Flamme Rouge has more staying power and becomes the better game after 6+ plays.

Again, hot take. Still going through game one.

First Rat entered the collection at Christmas and got played yesterday. Clever game. It just feels innovative and new. Good as well. Not sure how far it pushes from good to great; it seems like it will be easy to fall into a meta and will grow stale unless a moment of genius or an outsider pushes you outside that meta. We’ll see, definitely an easy on to play so it’ll get more time.

Pax Pamir continues to edge toward the cull pile. Which continues to baffle me. I played a final game where I was the most experienced. After a round where I skunked everyone (I wasn’t really trying, but found myself in an absolutely unassailable position and there was nothing graceful but to close it out) we tried again and I very deliberately shifted to neutral and just let the game play out around me. It was probably the best game I’ve been in. I tried to just keep pace with the others and the game unfolded into a much more interesting space. The first Check was in a bit of limbo and then a second card flipped and two people tied. The second Check turned into a looong tug of war, with people pivoting from Faction dominance back to faction parity and trying to bolster or kill tribes, etc. It was a really neat dance with some surprising plays. In the end I still had a chance to leap for the win, given the 2x points for the last check, but I just noted it and let the game go on. We mostly ran out of deck until someone was able to hold a lead long enough to snatch the last check, and we had a surprise winner even so.

This is game 6 or 7 and the first time it hasn’t been a runaway situation with a lot of passive frustration. Confirms suspicions that it really needs players of equal skill in order to work. I maintain that it is fragile, as such, but it’s nice to see what it can be when it works. I’m not going to sell it just yet, in hopes that I can get it into that “works” place more often.

[COMaestro]

@Acacia

b) This is a more tactical game, about what to do right now with what you have right now. Hand in hand with above. A lot less going on in terms of planning - FR has you shedding cards and you need to plan ahead when and where you’re going to break and how you’re going to get there.

I’m not sure I agree with this, for one important reason: Heat doesn’t force you to discard your hand of cards, meaning you can plan and prepare for upcoming corners or straightaways in a way that you simply can’t in Flamme Rouge, because what you draw that turn is what you draw. Though I do agree that you have to plan how you shed your cards, because whatever you spend is not coming back.

[lalunaverde]

I found that Flamme Rouge is too tight that there’s no reason to play low cards unless you’re in the blue/red zone. And you can’t predict player moves anyway so, you should always play high. Being at the front becomes imperative with cobblestone tracks. Exhaust cards are usually a nothing burger since you don’t care much for the long term - there’s no long term! Exhaustion is only a factor at Grand Tour mode.

I found that my results become consistently either first or just behind using this method.

[pillbox]

What’s pillbox been playing?

I admit, I’ve fallen behind on my reporting here.

Race for the Galaxy

Since I’ve last posted, I’ve played Race for the Galaxy using the solo bot from Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm (on or around the first week of December). It was fine. I don’t think it’s great, and it definitely doesn’t feel like the best way to play Race for the Galaxy (having played a few Race for the Galaxy-adjacent games before, and knowing what is likely the thrust of the system). I’m not sure I’ll return to RftG solo at this point, and will likely just keep it around for potential future multiplayer options.

Ticket to Ride: First Journey

Also in December, I played Ticket to Ride: First Journey. This one was actually what prompted me to remember that I hadn’t posted here in a while; I played this with my 6 year old; we tried to play some months back, but she wasn’t ready for it then – this time, however, I think she was starting to get it and, while the strategic horizons are beyond her yet, she picked up the mechanisms pretty quickly. The reason it comes to mind is that school has once again been cancelled due to weather, so tomorrow will be Day #5 of my oldest not leaving the house, and I’m starting to get desperate for ways to entertain her.

1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties

In December, I played 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties solo. Five times. Yeah, that’s right! In part, because I’m developing a small python program to help track the game and take game notes with – and the other part is that the program that I’ve written so far has enabled me to play quite a bit quicker than before! I managed 5 games in about 10 days. In addition, each game, I learned a little more than I knew before and the last two games I scored £9478 (this is actually an asterisk, but I believe it’s still >9000 even after I recrunch the math with the mistake I made), and £10078, which is the second rank of success, but so close that any mistake along the way will surely drop it to the previous rank. These 5 games collectively game me plenty of extra game play examples to consider while developing my program. Unfortunately, at this time, I’ve taken the program as-written to the logical extreme of how it was written and had to start rewriting it to the way I originally wanted to but avoided because it’s a big hassle and uses a bunch of techniques that I’m just not good at (i.e. architecting an application rather than just providing a random assortment of procedural steps).

Between the solo gaming I’ve been doing, the holidays, my kids not being in school (first for Winter break, but later due to inclement weather), and the work I’m doing on my 1862 note taking application, I just haven’t had much time or headspace to spare; but that didn’t stop me from wanting to try out all of my new soloable games I received for Christmas

Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze

So fun. So good. I’m probably getting some rules wrong and playing true-solo is definitely too easy. I played with one of the included characters, Nikola Tesla versus The Mothman & the Skunk Ape, followed by (wanting to break out another box from my collection that has gone unused so far), Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde vs Martian Invader & Tarantula. Both were cake walks and I’m unsure whether to go to Dual-hero play or just increase the difficulty using the options provided in the rules

Heat: Pedal to the Metal

I was very excited to get this out. Going in, the biggest disappointment was that there were fixed tracks rather than build-your-own like Flamme Rouge. I decided to play against 4 AI opponents and I used the Garage Module to immediately jump into the depths the game has to offer (I mean, it’s Days of Wonder, after all).

The first race I came in dead last. Okay, fair, I learned a bit during that race… mostly about timing corners and managing my hand. But I was frustrated that despite getting most of my heat circulating before the first series of corners (pushing it as hard as I could), I couldn’t seem to get enough heat into my hand to put it back to enable more aggressive driving options. It would trickle in, but by the time I hammered down out of the last corner in the series, I laid out my stress cards and watched as all of my Heat ended up in my discard again. Wait, what? Yeah, now all of my heat is in my discard and… I’m fresh out of options.
Game 2 starts and I’m not really sure what I did wrong. I’ll try again! Oh, my starting hand wasn’t great, but my second turn let me do something clever! And before I have to reshuffle all of my Heat is in my discard; it’s not happening again, I’m sure of that! Except, that’s exactly what happened. I watched as 4 Heat came and went right back into my discard. I shuffled? Yes, I shuffled.

I came in 4th out of 5. =(

So I played again! And gave up after every AI opponent hit all of the corners perfectly while it takes me 2 turns to navigate each one (counting out my approach carefully so that I can hit each turn at the exact speed I need and then line up for the next one)… completely void of Heat. As I was coming around the last corner of the first lap, I needed 1 more movement to make it past the corner line and couldn’t find it without a Stress card… and… spun out trying to push it (I was already in last place and the 4th place driver was about to pass me and, no doubt, blast down the straight-away).

I read rules questions and errata and everything and I can’t figure out how Heat management is supposed to be done proactively. The AI drivers hitting each of those corners perfectly was certainly a fluke, but it certainly made my enjoyment of the game fall flat.

I’m going to return to it… but… after hearing so much about how the game is managing your heat… well, in my experience, that has more to do with the luck of the draw than giving opportunities to cool down, because I absolutely had plenty of unused-cooling effects that I could never use. It may be short-lived on my shelf because it soured me so much on the first experience. A shame, really, since due to the excellent iconography and the lack of text anywhere, it was something I thought I could invite my 6 year old to play… but… not if I’m going to be grumping about it the entire time – that’s not what I’m trying to teach her about gaming.

Astro Knights

Aeon’s End, streamlined!?

No. Just different. And not as good. The market decks are less interesting. I admit that something probably should have been done about Aeon’s End static store, but I think they’ve over-corrected. And future expansions will just make it worse. Or, worse yet, future expansions will be just as samey as the existing market decks. I’ve never been less enthusiastic about deckbuilding than having to track the mundane and vaguely-dissimilar card options that pop up after each purchase. The overcharge for tech is cool (but stolen), and possibly easily backported to Aeon’s End. And even then, if they make the tech deck too thick, overcharge will lose it’s value (unless, again, they don’t dilute the deck by just adding more of the same, which is… pointless?) Maybe they’d add different market decks and you randomly select between which 6 decks are available? That’s probably the best of the options, but the rulebook suggests that’s not the case.
It’s fine. Less interesting in my one play than my couple of plays of Aeon’s End. I used the suggested setup which may be milquetoast on purpose?
Still, I’m commited to saving Aeon’s End to explore with my partner whenever her energy for gaming returns (we have a horizon; kid #4 will be kid #final, so eventually, theoretically, the strains and stresses of motherhood will eventually lessen… after… 20 years or so), so I’ll be exploring all of the content contained in Astro Knights and will be wary but curious of future Astro Knight products.

The Search for Planet X

Ooh, I was off to a rough start! The first game I played (Standard Board, Solo mode, Beginnger Difficult [8 free facts]), I really struggled to figure out where the loose ends were on which to pull. I jumped around here and there and pulled on a few levers, but never caught on; by the time the bot found Planet X, I had the following facts: Space is probably real; There are things there (or not?).

Game two went much better, though! I played Beginner again and the Bot beat me to the Locate but 2 time units, but I had enough theories published (and published first) that I won by 9 points.

Game three, I bumped it up to “Expert” mode (4 free facts) and while the bot found Planet X first, I did it in the same number of time units and won with superior published theories.

Game four, I went up to “Genius” (no free facts) and beat the bot to finding Planet X, winning by 17 points! I got very lucky on the first few turns and keyed into some great info right away.

Game five went the exact opposite, falling on some bad luck and never quite finding a good thread to pull on put me in a 50/50 guessing game on one of the X neighbors, which I lost, and then only netted 2 points to the bot’s 26!

Game six was closer, but also a loss to the bot – the “cool science moves” I did in my blowout against the bot in game 4 were not holding up to repeated use, so I guess I learned a valuable lesson about situational “cool moves” and “good openings for the game The Search for Planet X”.

Game seven was actually back to Beginner mode because I needed to entertain a 6 year old that didn’t have school last Friday because of snow, so on my lunch break, we played through the game together and I explained some of the logic I was using (and also, because she’s a curious 6 year old, what the computer was doing on its part because “it knew the answer” so why was the bot not just winning?). Due to the distraction of playing with a 6 year old, I flipped some logic in my head from a fact that we knew and ended up attributing Planet X to a location that it could not be… But since we had a Beginner’s start (8 free negative facts), we were able to publish way more than the bot and won the game on points with an incorrect Planet X Locate! – I didn’t actually check if you could “win” if you attempted and failed to locate X… it was a moral victory regardless.

[RogerBW]

I wonder whether one might make an interesting Flamme Rouge variant by making all cards available up front. The part of the game I find most enjoyable is not the making the most of my hand, but the working out what other people are going to play.

I’ve played Heat… five times now, and I would be happy never to play it again. I’m absolutely not saying that other people are wrong for enjoying it, but it feels like trying to solder in lead gloves: I’ve got this fiddly hand management game to play while I’m hobbled by sticky cards and random draws.

Also the theme seems deliberately broken. So the heat is in your engine, and as it comes out your engine gets hotter, and when your engine has run out of heat you crash. I mean, just not calling the heat pile “your engine” would have been a start…

I would always choose to play Rallyman GT or Flamme Rouge rather than Heat.

I will be the first to admit that having a board rather than tiles gets you a faster setup; that’s the slowest part of the HGG-era Rallyman games. But, as we’ve seen with Formula D back in the day, it also means that you can sell eleventy million track expansions.

I like Astro Knights more than pillbox—but I won’t disagree with any of your points, and the only reason I have it is that the demonstrators get to take away the demo copies at the end of Essen and I landed that one. I have Far Too Much Aeon’s End, and I barely even play that now, partly because I have far too much of it and extracting a playable subset of it can be something of a pain.

[mistercrayon]

I was expecting something slicker with heat but I don’t care what people say seven stages of hand per turn management is not fast play. It didn’t feel like pedal to the metal insanity but a normal board game of strategy. The dressing around the game looks dead on evocotive but I did not feel excited once. In contrast something like Ready Set Bet did have that thrill of whether to go or push or hold and make a decision in the heat of the moment.

[COMaestro]

I am confused by your description of how you are managing Heat. Are you actually burning through all of the Heat on your engine that quickly, since you say it’s all in your discard? Or, are you discarding it from your hand, which you are not allowed to do?

[pillbox]

First, I’m using it; taking it from my Engine and putting it in my discard to resolve the flame symbols on my turn (such as shifting 2 gears instead of 1, blowing past a corner too fast, or simply to enable me to play an upgrade card from my hand that features the flame icon)

Then, once I’ve gone through my deck and need to draw more cards, I reshuffle my entire discard pile to form my new deck.

And then there are two options for Heat cards from here; they can get drawn into my hand (good! because I need to have them in my hand in order to get them back into my engine so that they can be used some more to do cool things) or they can get drawn and then discarded when playing a Stress card, or any card that features a ➕; since they do not have the speedometer symbol on them, if you draw them while resolving a ➕, you put them in your discard pile (this is bad, because now I can’t get heat back into my engine)

[pillbox]

@COMaestro

Are you actually burning through all of the Heat on your engine that quickly

To clarify, yes, I am. Between a combination of pushing it hard around corners (1 over here or there, usually) and using upgrade cards that rely on Heat, and occasionally jumping from 1st to 3rd or 2nd to 4th (rarely ever when downshifting) is what I’ve found I need to do to keep pace with the AI drivers – who, let’s be clear, are absolutely cheating as they blast through these corners.

The problem, primarily, is that I need the Heat to keep pace through the first half of the first lap… and then I can’t get it back fast enough to keep up through the rest of the race. I have plenty of cooling icons as things slow down around and through the corners, but I can’t get my Heat back into my hand in meaningful quantities to take advantage of those icons.

[Number1TheLarch]

I’m the same on Heat vs Flamme Rogue. Why does the game about cycling feel pacier than the game about Formula 1?

[InkyBloc]

I recently picked up the New Characters mini expansion for The Voyages of Marco Polo, which contains four new characters and introduces the concept of “gifts” (random bonuses that you get from certain cities or contracts). The new characters and my evaluation of them are:

Gunj Kököchin has two spaces only they can use, a Move 1 and a buffed Khan’s Favor that also gives their opponents a good. This player did a lot of travel and was the only one to get all their houses down, and got some contracts. The character seems okay overall. Their special power helps with both contracts and travel, but at the cost of helping other players as well.

The Altan Ord gets more and more bonuses for each house they put down. Also did a lot of travel, only had one house left, but spent too much time focusing on money and travel and not enough on contracts. This character seems very weak. You have to do a lot of traveling to benefit (and it doesn’t really help you to do so), which doesn’t leave youmuch time for the contracts that its bonuses help you with.

Fratre Nicolao gets to draw three gifts every round and choose one (or two, once per game). Bit of a gamble, but since you’re drawing three the likelihood is there’ll be something very useful, either right away or not far down the road. This player only traveled enough to get their goal cities and took the same route (but slower) than the Altan Ord, but was able to capitalize on gifts to get a bunch of bonus points, and enough goods for lots of contracts. The winner by a big margin, and probably easily the best character out of the lot. The gifts can be some pretty big bonuses (usually bigger than the base game’s characters get), and you’re getting six of them over the course of the game for free. Compare that to all the work the Altan Ord has to do for a total of seven points, six coins, five camels, and a few goods.

The character not chosen was Khan Arghun, who gets dealt six city cards and can use one per turn as if he had placed a 6 there as a bonus action. In this case he got dealt a lot of “convert goods and camels to points and money” cards. Having a couple of those would be good - having a lot just doesn’t appeal, since you could also spend those goods on contracts, and your power isn’t helping you get any more. So this character is untested but is obviously quite swingy depending on the cards dealt.

Finished the night off with a couple rounds of Red7.