Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[Acacia]

In a surprise twist, the Mrs has asked to play some games in the evening. What? Scrolling isn’t doing it for her anymore. Now I’m on the hook to deliver solid fare.

Fortunately, I’ve studied for this.

First Rat. Scoped this out after baby 3 was born, looking for games that fit in a 30-45 minute window but still has some sprawl and arc to them. I have a ton of great 15-45 minute games, but most of them are focused and distilled, to do one thing really well, and they’re great. But you sometimes need that arc. That sprawl.

Following off Tiletum, First Rat was truly delightful. It feels so new and so unique in the glut of games that play like a chatbot created the rules based off of training data from every manual in the last ten years.

I know, I know. It’s a rondel. It’s a linear rondel, like GWT. It’s a rondel where you can move one or move several workers, like Teotihuacan. It’s a recipe fulfillment game like Lords of Waterdeep. I see all that. But it feels unlike anything I’ve played in the last few years when it’s all put together. I think it’s that rondel, the rules for moving multiple rats at once, and the way the game timer is squeezed into all the other goals.

I was also worried that it might not have legs. And it’s true, I don’t think this game would stand up to 100 plays. But in our five games so far, even without the variable setup, they have felt different. The different bottlecaps (end game scoring bonuses) and limited back packs and comics (action bonuses), along with the interaction on the rondel have forced me into different engine/scoring archetypes over most of the five games we’ve played.

The problem is I’ve won five times now, so we need a break before coming back. She’s closed the gap; first game I won by 50, second game by 25, third and fourth games by less than 10. But she’s frustrated now so we’re looking for the next option to clear the palatte.

More on that later, but First Rat ftw.

[yashima]

Got to play Arnak on BGA last night to teach it to a friend.
It’s just a nice comfortable game at this point. I lost. I enjoyed myself.
Seeing how much time I took puzzling out moves, I think it’s best at 2 maybe maybe 3. But I’ve never played it with more than 2. Two works very nicely.

I hear the 2nd expansion is good? Has anyone here played it?

[Brattyjedi]

My husband and I have it. The co-op campaign mode has been fun. He gets a bit frustrated with it sometimes. Most of the scenarios require racing to the top of the research track by a certain point in the game and he doesn’t like being forced into a certain style of play. The new stuff (characters, cards, research track overlay, etc.) is generally interesting and a solid addition to the regular game outside the campaign.

[Acacia]

Two of three here. Intermixed with First Rat we’ve been playing Scout. I’ve noted this before, but it Scout at 2 is boss. Three not so good, hear it gets good again at 4. But the two player rules are very well done and create a crunchy duel.

We split these games 1 and 1.

Also one round of London. This is one of our favorites and, after Burgundy, perhaps our most played couples game. However, right now, it was too much. It took two hours over two separate nights. Most of the conversation devolved to, “Did I pay for these cards already? I don’t think I did. Oh, did you take poverty for your loan? No! I’ll take it now. I’ll take two. I think I forgot it during the last run. Oh, you didn’t flip your cards over. Oh right…” The good news is that she won, as she does 90% of the time at this game. But we’re headed for less administrative territory to keep pace with our current brain states.

[lalunaverde]

Brass: Lancashire x2 - both instances are with different people. I am playing this more now that the tech tree feels rather straight forward. As usual, which avenue is viable depends on what the other players are doing. But my issue with B’ham is that while they lengthen the tech tree on some, it deemphasises shared incentives and more towards “Euro efficiency”, so that doesn’t really solve my problem.

John Company - 3 player. I thought it was still fun. There’s so much entanglement that it didn’t feel like it felt like an unfair 2 vs 1 confrontation like other shared incentives games like Cube Rails. I felt that I wanted to give the Chairman (player 2) and the Army Commander (player 3) some good stuff for me to get good stuff. It was basic scenario but it was still great!

[EnterTheWyvern]

Today Bubastis took control of the Primeval Earth and pawed all living things around like ball of string. Was a really fun game of Cthulhu Wars. Poor @lalunaverde got mashed up by Crawling Chaos and Opener of the way sat in a corner and just messed with my plans as much as possible. Despite accidentally giving me my 6th spell book. I think much fun was had by all.

Primeval map seems interesting. I’d like to play with a faction that uses gates in the map next time to see what it feels like in a more normal way. As always Crawling Chaos is a sod. Black Goat is an odd duck and Opener I still don’t know so much about. Cool minis and the magenta/pink is appropriately garish. So, so good.

[Benkyo]

Are you using the latest errata for the game, and would you say they make a big difference?

(I have only played once, didn’t know the errata existed, and was surprised to find out later how much better Cthulhu is supposed to be.)

[EnterTheWyvern]

I havre a final onslaught edition which I believe has all the errata already in the boards and pieces you get. So I think we are although I’m not super up to date with checking if more have come out.

When we started playing first edition I don’t remember Cthulhu being a less powerful faction. What was up with them?

[Benkyo]

Bear in mind I’ve only played one game, and I only glanced at the errata once, but the two changes I noticed that seem pretty big:

Dreaming(?) cost from 3 to 2 to convert an acolyte
Emerge from submerge cost from 1 to 0

[EnterTheWyvern]

They are definitely much better costs. Also might explain why I’m not in the habit of dreaming much as that seems like an unusable cost and old habits die hard. Submerge was still cost efficient for moving more than one space or moving more than 2 units. It’s just better now but I still remember it getting a lot of mileage in the older editions due to that efficiency. I like Great Cthulhu as an aggressive faction so it still fits. Maybe it’s slightly a response to power creep so in first ed these costs were balanced anyway.

[lalunaverde]

Made the annoying Dreams strategy cheap to annoy everybody. Im cool with that. Thats what I like to do with Cthulhu

CW was fun as usual even tho i was battered badly

[bort]

Played Goonies; Never Say Die, and it was a win for the Goonies! Generally went ok, although one player did get down to a single health point (which wouldn’t have lost us the game, but it wouldn’t have helped). We almost screwed up, but we were reading from the wrong card. Good team effort! Although I think we’re getting sick of the GMs ability to add rubble tokens to a passageway, forcing us to spend an action to remove them before being able to move.

Renature, such a lovely game, with it’s cool wooden domino-like tiles. It’s basically area control. As you place your tiles, you can also plant a tree, which counts for control of an area. Things were pretty tense right up to the final moves. The winner was only one point from second. Third and fourth a bit further back. Timing is important – when you place a tree, you score points according to the other trees already planted (that are equal or less in value). So drop your biggest tree into a crowded area and you might pickup quite a few points. And of course more points for actual control of the area. This is actually a game I had marked as a possible sale (mainly because I hadn’t played it for ages). Thought I’d give it another go, and I think it’s a keeper. It’s pretty easy to learn, and every move seems important. Lots of player interaction.

Sol: Last Days of a Star, first play. This is an older game that I picked up from it’s last Kickstarter, only received it last week. Wasn’t too hard to learn, but we’re not sure we played everything properly. But I’ll get to that…You are in orbit around a dying star, trying to extract the most energy before it inevitably blows up. You start with a Mothership, a few Sundivers (small ships that do all of the work), and some energy. On your turn, you have three choices: Move, convert, and activate. Move lets you launch new sundivers from your mothership, and move your existing ones around. The board is divided into various levels, and you can’t move from one level to another unless you build a gate.

The second option, Convert, lets you construct various stations. Gates allow you to move between levels, energy nodes give you energy, sundiver foundry build new sundivers, and transmit towers give you victory points.

Your last option is for activating your various stations, giving you energy, ships, or points. What you get depends on how many levels you are in. Each level has a base amount and a bonus amount. If you use your own station, you get the base and the bonus, but you can also use someone else’s station and they’ll get the bonus if they want (and if they can’t do it for any reason, you get the bonus instead!). Win!

And that’s about all the rules. It’s a pretty concise rulebook, with good examples. The only issue we had was the length of the game. The box says 45 to 90 minutes. After a couple of hours (ok, that was the teach as well) we were nowhere near the end. The game length can vary, because you construct the deck using various cards, including 13 solar flares. When you draw a flare card, the end of game marker moves on. Once your get the last one, the sun explodes. I’m fine with this sort of unpredictability. But you also add coloured cards into the deck, which have various abilities. So we had this huge stack of cards, and you don’t even start getting cards until you build into the higher levels. I think we had played for an hour before anyone had to draw a card. Again, the teach was part of that hour. And maybe we were playing badly and you need to dive into the higher levels? We’re not sure. Apart from not finishing the game under four hours we seemed to have a good time.

Finished the day with a couple of quick games of Strike!, which is a pretty basic (but fun!) dice rolling game. Roll dice, take any matching dice, don’t run out of dice. That’s about it.

[SteveB_uk]

That Sol board looks so good. If I saw that on a table with the pieces on it, I’d want to play that game.

[bort]

The components are very nice - and all the motherships look different, which is cool. Although one of them does look a bit like a pair of scissors (the silver ship at the top of the screen).

[COMaestro]

Got to play Unmatched yesterday, trying out Tomoe Gozen from the new Sun’s Origin set. My wife played Medusa, per usual. She ended up managing to make me run out of cards in my had, and then hit me with Gaze of Stone which is only a strength 2 attack, but if she wins it does 8 damage as an After Combat effect, which took me down to 1. Game was pretty much over at that point, but I did get her down to 7 health and killed two Harpies, so still a decent showing.

After, we played Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game and I crushed the Rebels beneath my Imperial heel. If she hadn’t had a good draw that let her hit me for 15 damage, I would have won with only losing my first base, but as it was, she got my second, but I took her third out on the next turn.

[MarkSP]

Played a few games yesterday, not all of them I managed to photo though

Deal with the Devil Another run through on this, I was cultist, which seems an almost impossible position to win in, but came a respecable third. A really close game, the closest so far, and one which illustrates the potential of the game. Unfortunately, still too long and fiddly. The best part of the game by far is the trading phase, everything else is just clutter. Really they should take the chests and app and put it in something as simple as Chinatown.

Sagrada was alright. Everyone was beaten roundly by someone with loads of green dice and a green dice bonus.

Inis one of my favourites, but this game was a true slog. Bit of background- whenever we have new players come to the club I always try and gauge what games they would do well playing. One of the players yesterday said he likes concordia and Terraforming Mars. OK, then he’ll be fine with reading cards to see what they do and playing them. Not so. Every round he asked me what cards he could play and what they did, got the cards consistently muddled up, and had no real idea what was going on, stretching the game out to two hours. Sheesh.

Terra Mystica Just a solid game. Chaos Magician win after I was permitted to cut across the middle island.

Forks 2nd Edition Took it along to take some photos, which came out terrribly, but everyone had a great time playing it so that was success enough

[RogerBW]

@MarkSP

which came out terrribly

“Ah, my old nemesis overhead lighting, we meet again.”

[lalunaverde]

Keyflower with a full house of 6 players. I really prefer this one. Much tighter and does skew towards the auction side of the game rather than the Euro efficiency side of it. Very fun! And we were surprised that we all played in a nice duration.

Modern Art

For Sale

Pax Transhumanity - more depth (and misrules!) discovered. Apparently, in order for an idea to be commercially viable, you can check the entire splay for that correct colour combo, not just the cutting edge. Doh!

Play went well and more empowering as a lot of ideas are easier to commercialise. Winner won via Tycoon Victory by building their 6th corporation.

Indonesia - went last Tried competing for Siap Saji and left bruised and on last place. I tried the oil gambit, it was only mildly effective.

Agricola - people love this one, I know. But it still didn’t worked with me. The card combo is fun, indeed. But I don’t like the feeding mechanism and the scoring system overall.

Modern Art - won by a few Dollarinos. I went on the usual strategy of being the Seller once it became obvious that one player likes being Le Collecteur. There’s always one or two on a low-skill table of Modern Art.

Hehehe I don’t mind taking your money, Monsieur!

But - gasp - I found myself buying art at Round 4. Some bargains were had, but I bought some Mondrians that end up being worth shit!

Still won.

Chicago Express - Experience is now to the point that I am beating newbies easily. It’s still a fun game, but I am now wishing players in the club to learn more game concepts outside of the narrow-minded Euro-gamer mentality.

Knowing about value eval and being aware of player positions are important.

[Benkyo]

The station is going to burn up on re-entry, and the only two officers on board were fighting in the Shred Room…

Station Chief, instead of revealing to regain control of the character, first tried to trigger Abandon Ship by getting conspirators to sabotage the station, and when that didn’t work out, resorted to getting Counselor to release Project X. Project X turned out to be a Combat Swarm of drones, which was promptly hacked by Stowaway to go on a killing spree - cut short by Exile piloting the Swarm into Magnetic Containment.

The chaos was all being caused by Medical’s conspirators, Medical wanting more bodies to “help”, and Daredevil’s unwitting conspirators, Daredevil wanting to be the only human to escape alive to the mesosphere.

Meanwhile, Stranger was trying to escape along with at least two Maintenance Clones (to prove that clones exist and are being treated like indentured slaves). Two clones had set up a perfect situation where they were about to escape in the Medevac Pod along with the dying Troubleshooter, when Daredevil gave up on a daring solo escape and dragged Troubleshooter on herself, taking two of the three spots in the pod.

Final result: Daredevil escaped with her buddy, Troubleshooter, and a clone. Stranger escaped with another clone. Station Chief went down with the ship, feeling some satisfaction at the number of survivors. Medical got to be helpful.

Also Hansa Teutonica, which was fine, and Innovation x2, which was great as always.

[Acacia]

Next game up for the new tradition of evening games: Glass Road.

Here I was expecting Uwe board development/resource management with the flair and fun of Libertalia on the card selection. What we found was Uwe does Roborally.

This is not going to enter our rotation. It’s gone to the “cusp” list and, if you pressed me, I think it’ll stay around after the tires get some hard kicks. But maybe not. For now, the mental load going in and the learning curve required just aren’t on the docket.

So here’s how Glass Road goes down: You collect resources. You use them to build buildings which a) score points, b) give you a windfall, or c) allow for future, free resource transactions. When you collect the right combination of resources on your resource wheel, they are instantly and involuntarily gobbled up by Bricks or Glass - the most valuable resources in the game.

But there is no worker placement. Instead, you grab a hand of five cards. Each card has two actions. On your turn you select a card, and if no one else is holding that card, hooray! You take both actions. If someone else is holding the card, they triumphanly (or miserably) smack it down on the table, and you both get to do only half the card’s actions. For the reactor, this may be a great windfall and gotcha. Or they may have been forced to play a card out of sequence ruining their whole turn.

Sounds fun!

In reality, you have 12 buildings and 15 cards. You have to plan your next five moves, maybe also trying to plan your opponent’s moves so you can scoop (or avoid them). And then, halfway through the round, a piece of glass suddenly gobbles up your quartz because you forgot that would happen. Or you find that card 2 in your sequence relied on the effect of card 3, while card 3 co-relied on the effect of card 2, and your whole sequence is jammed up.

Or someone responds with the same card you chose and you both are ****ed.

You can’t plan. There’s too much. So the crashes happen and your bucholic glass making robot drives into the abyss. The number of buildings, cards, contingencies, and resources to keep track of was way too much.

I think, with the right mindset, and with some time on the learning curve to get used to thinking through all the consequences of each action, there’s a lot of fun here. There is, in fact, a deep resource collection and conversion game. And there is a player interaction game that is both crunchy and silly.

But yeah… it’s a bit too far up the tree for now. We’ll come back to this.