Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Boardgames
8564

We have played some games this vacation.

  • Sail, 2 times. Was pretty good, I didn’t think I could have a cooperative 2 player trick taker.
  • Chomp, 2 times, solo. Not bad but for solo I think I prefer the Sprawlopolis series. Need to check how this one does in multiplayer but everyone has their own little landscape so it‘s probably a bit on the solitaire side as well
  • Grove, 2 times, solo. Still like this as a tight little puzzle
  • Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game. It becomes obvious almost immediately who has played a ton of any TM game and who has not. My partner was building only production and forgot to go for points. I got lucky to get two cards with terraform as main actions on them that I could easily trigger… but games with big decks are all the same, they try to distract you from what really matters with tasty cards that aren‘t worth the dice you need for them. The trick is to not get distracted. I have practiced this skill a bit.
  • Naturopolis: I can play this one and Sprawlopolis forever. I am not sure why Agropolis didn‘t make me want to play as much?
  • Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game: my partner won this one with the Rebellion. But it was pretty close, I got some big ships out through most of the game. Just never got the right combo to deal the last 2 damage to his last base…
  • Forest Shuffle: Long game, since I know how my partner plays I never pushed for tempo and so we got pretty high scores. He went for butterflies, toads and various insects and bats… while I went for tree variety, deer and birds. But what really pushed my score were foxes and hares. 3 foxes and 7 Feldhasen made my game. 347 to my 461
  • Daybreak, 2 times, solo: I have now played this 10 times this year, mostly on BGA. Today was on the table. There are multiple ways to go about winning: push energy and then reduce non-energy emissions by spending that energy. Or you could got for Energiewende and quickly get rid of all the non-green energy. Resilience is important if you can‘t get rid of you emissions fast enough. Rewilding is also not a terrible strategy. I do hope to see this more at multiplayer there are some nice interactive elements where players can help each other. One other note: there are three types of energy in the game: solar, wind and nuclear. I mostly go for solar there seem to be more solar cards than wind and I seem to go out of my way to avoid nuclear. When I noticed today, I actually held some pretty good combo for nuclear cards but during a research action (card drawing to get fitting combos) I just didn‘t get the one I needed to complete the combo and so went for solar… again. I won both games today. The first one was close though, a bad run of dice with the major weather systems track gave me 2 additional temperature bands in round 5 and if I had not achieved drawdown that round, I would have been in the death spiral that precedes a loss in this game. (after round 6 it is over anyway)

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I forgot to report that Wyvern and I played Mottainai after Gus and Roger left. We played 3 matches and it was fun on each one!

For Sale

Rurik: Dawn of Kyiv - 4 players. Alas, it was in Tier 2 or 3 in my ranking so it was sold. So I am glad that I get to play this again

Nokosu Dice with 3 players

Art Society - one of the new ones from Essen Spiel last year. Blind auction for paintings and you put them on your wall (your personal board) and you score this and that if you put this painting here next to that painting and so on. It was fun! The agency on selecting what size of paintings to be put up for auction is interesting too. The best part is how the paintings are valued. The left over painting each round will increase the value of those paintings at end of game. E.g. the red one is the left over. It gets discarded and red paintings will score more than the rest.

Carson City - as usual with Xavier Georges’ designs, you can’t really explain them well in a sentence. He manage to make a worker placement game very interactive and interesting. And also thematic as well, using your workers to rob other people’s buildings and spark duels with other workers in a Western themed game. And it doesn’t take too long and the rules aren’t that heavy.

Tempel des Schreckens

Can’t Stop - someone brought in the Korean version of Can’t Stop where the box itself can transform itself into the game board. And so the game itself is very handy (compare to Eagle-Gryphon Games’ edition)

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Played Beacon Patrol, first play. A cooperative game of playing tiles and steering your boats around. You explore tiles by surrounding them, and then score points by exploring tiles with buoys and lighthouses. It’s fine, really. It can be easy to get stuck, because tiles can only be placed in one orientation, and water and land have to be matched. And after placing a tile, you need to able to move your boat onto the new tile, and obviously boats can’t travel on land. You can swap tiles between players, which is helpful. At the end of the game you tally up your points and see how you did. We scored “a solid effort”. Almost a relaxing game, with lovely art.

Firenze, a game about building towers of various colours. You take a card from the market, which gives you building materials, and then you can make towers or add to existing ones. If you have a tower and you can’t add to it, it gets destroyed, which isn’t great for you. Each card has various abilities too. It’s one of those games where you can take a free card, or pay to get a card in the market. Somehow, I won.

The Search for Lost Species, our second game. Didn’t go too well for me, figured out one species but struggled to put anything else together. One player decided to guess where the lost species was, mainly because then he could have a break, and got it right. He said it was just a guess, so he’s either pretty lucky, or was going a lot better than he thought. And it’s not like you just have to guess a single location, like Planet X, you also need to correctly identify two adjacent locations.

Potato Man, I had been nagging my friend to bring this along, and he finally did. I saw this on a list of good trick taking games, and I do like a good trick taker. And…it was ok, I guess. This is a trick taking game where you don’t follow suit, you have to play a colour that hasn’t been played. Not the only trick taking game to do this. And there’s not much else to it. If you get higher cards, you’ll win. The only cool bit is that a high red card (the evil Potato cards) can be beaten by the lower ranked yellow cards (ie Potato man). And that’s about it.

Poo – the Card Game. What can I say about this game? You play cards, flinging poo at each other. There are reaction cards that can redirect any incoming poo. Probably not to be taken too seriously. I can’t remember who won.

Dungeons, Dice and Danger, a roll and write. You roll dice, then arrange them into pairs, and try and cross off squares on your pad. There are treasures to be had, and bosses to be defeated. Obviously the game is about trying to leave yourself as many possible values each turn, otherwise you lose health by not being able to cross out a number. I really do badly at this game.

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MLEM 2 player, fun but probably more fun with more!

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I have to leave early on our Weekend Escapade :frowning: but it was tons of fun still!!

Stephenson’s Rocket + US/China map - Z wants to play this after hearing good things from SVWAG and it being in my Top 10

We played with 3 on the US map. I was too focused on making sure the game works well that I didnt really enjoy the game to its fullest but it was still fun and only made me yearn for S-Rocket

Glory to Rome - 4 players and it was fun. Great game!

Through the Desert - 5 players. There’s an interesting decision on which camel you wouldnt take in a 5 player. Pretty cool. But I feel that having all 5 riders is still preferable.

Through the Ages - taught 2 newbies and I did so well with Moses that I was steaming ahead on Age II but stalled here. One player manage to run a Barbarossa + Great Wall strategy that he manage to catch up by Age III. Both of them thought it was epic and Im glad to play it again.

Through the Ages - we were so hyped by last game that we kept talking about it and asked “wanna play it again?” We did. We played it from around 2130 to 0200. Indeed by then I was so drained. But it was super fun

Cartographers - roll and write :face_vomiting::face_vomiting: but at least there are nasty cards that makes you write imps on other players’ boards, which made it a more hilarious experience

Race for the Galaxy + Alien Artifacts

Brazil: Imperial - 3 fast players and we blitz through the game and yeah, it felt like a light weight Scythe. And do dislike it the same way as Scythe - not enough combat. I would even say that there’s fewer incentives for combat

Special Mention:
Horrible Histories: the Board Games - the airbnb has some board games for kids like Jenga and stuff, and we found this. We thought it would be fun and do it. Basically roll and move with Trivial Pursuit Q&A. The Q&A are defo more fun than TP. But I thought it’s really lame that there are some empty spaces where you land there and do nothing. The Q&A is the fun bit and we do fuck-all on some spots!?!?

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Monthly game meet up today. Our dog has been limping this past week so I took her to the vet yesterday. Vet gave some meds and recommended rest that means we shouldn’t leave the dog alone for very long so my husband and I planned I would go to game day in the morning, he’d come eventually and we’d overlap for maybe a game, then I’d head home and he’d stay for the later afternoon/evening. We it came time to switch, he said he wasn’t feeling it so I got a full 11 hours or so of game day without him.

Played exclusively longer and heavier games this time. I prefer to mix it up with heavier and lighter but that somehow didn’t really happen this time. First up was Concordia (a game I love so very much) on one of the new maps that just came out. This one (Sicily) has a volcano that can mess up a few of the provinces for usual production and building. I won by 1 point (114-113-99) and the guy right behind me thought he had us beat by quite a bit.

Then it was Great Western Trail New Zealand. This is probably my favorite of them all. I pulled off another win, but this time we kinda all knew I was ahead. 134-113-84

Next ( after a lunch run) was Beyond the Sun. I love this game and have so much fun playing around with the communal tech tree in space but I suck at it. I forget what I’m supposed to do to score points and just do what seems like fun. I lost by a decent amount (48-43-43-32). Oh well. I had fun.

Last up was Ark Nova. I’ve played this once before and didn’t really enjoy it. The learning game was real rough so figured might as well give it another try. I actually got an engine going this time and enjoyed it more. Still not madly in love with it, but it’s ok. I won (25-10-minus 1).

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Yesterday we played Food Chain Magnate. Took just over 2 hours, which was much quicker than expected. We just played with the base game, but I’m hoping to play more often so we can try out some of the expansion modules soon.

It was nice to play with people of a similar experience level to me - makes a change from going bankrupt every game :laughing:

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I’m really interested to see if people who didn’t like Ark Nova prefer Earth instead, as some reviews suggest. I bought Earth recently but haven’t got to play it yet.

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Well, I do, but I also don’t particularly enjoy Terraforming Mars. At least as far as my perception goes, Earth has less pressure to take a bet on particular cards coming up later, so you can keep more potential payoffs in play until you see what cards you’re actually getting.

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I’ve not tried Earth yet. My husband did and he thinks I’d really enjoy it. I don’t love either Terraforming Mars or Ark Nova, but I don’t hate them either. Which is good since TM is probably my husband’s favorite game therefore one of my top 5 most played games. Maybe Earth will be just different enough from the other two to click with me more?

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Earth sounds VERY different - much shorter, less heavy, more forgiving.

Still seems like a lot going on from a read of the manual, but I’m excited at the number of people putting it high in their charts very quickly.

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I think that’s fair. My usual experience is that, each turn, I have a choice of actions, some of which are obviously not helpful, but it doesn’t reduce to the single obvious thing to do.

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Met up for a friend’s birthday yesterday and played some games.

CDSK - An interesting trivia game where you get asked to rate your knowledge on a subject from 1 to 10, then asked a question based on that rating. Level 1 questions are stuff like “Is Steven Spielberg real?”, whereas one of the level 10 questions was “Name all 3 members of Rush”.

I won quite easily thanks to being about a decade older than everyone else :older_adult: (Seriously. There was a question about The Generation Game.)

Skull King - Definitely putting trick taking in the category of “this is a fine mechanic, why is it the whole game?” (along with deck building and roll-and-write). It was fine but way too long.

Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest - My friend requested I bring this along as she really liked it when we played it a while ago. Went down well this time too. Possibly one of the easiest games to teach, as almost everything is open information and you’re just going through the steps together.

Telestrations - Pretty much a given for playing with a big group at the cafe. Highlight was a drawing of “smoked turkey” being interpreted as “hot rat” and that resulting in a drawing of a rat in lingerie and fishnets.

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Thanks. Was considering this one, as there is a new edition out here (ugly though) and I thought if they went to the trouble of making a new edition it’s probably worth it…

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Don’t let me put you off if you’re interested. All my friends love it and it’s one of their most played games. But it very much is just a trick taking game, with all the special cards just changing who wins a trick.

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Played Sol: Last Days of a Star with @EnterTheWyvern , 3 players. It was SICS through and through. Sharing infrastructure is pretty fun as your Mothership orbits around the Sun. I heard Dads on the Map talking enough about this so I was glad to back it and it lived to the hype.

We played with the full game and with events which are pretty fun. I am very keen on playing more of this.

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What does sics stand for?

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Shared incentives; common space

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You forgot the accompanying video Phenomena

But yes, the game was really fun. There’s a bunch to digest however the differing strategies available are interesting, the presentation is beautiful and it’s pretty brain burnery. The balance of shared infrastructure and varying rewards is an interesting set of decision points. I hope the weird end is based on first play.

I have varying ideas on things to try next time so that’s hopefully a good sign and I hope that the different possible suit powers change things up on what’s good to do as well. I think I didn’t get on cards early enough which could have generated more points for me. Thanks for bringing. Less thanks for making me regret not backing :roll_eyes:

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We really enjoy it - a good round can really change the game. You can play the full 10 rounds or shorten it however you please.

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