Even though he has a traditional dislike to train games, I may be having a game of Brass: Lancashire soon with my mate Ben, so I had a “refreshing my memory” couple of games (two handed) the last couple of nights.
In doing so, I discovered I may have been playing it wrong in the past on the sale option, I may have been flipping port tiles when selling to foreign markets. Perhaps I wasn’t, but I had a moment of: oops, have I taught/played this wrong in the past?
Anyway, I have to admit the game is a delight. Cannot wait to play it with others again.
And remember, you can access foreign markets regardless of whether the port tile is flipped or not. For as long as it has the trade arrows icon, you good
Several rounds of Heat via BGA. What can I say? It’s good. The whole table was scratching our heads at the equation, Heat #45, Flamme Rouge ~250, Automobiles ~1,000 (BGA rankings). All three are good. Probably a toss up and personal preference on which is your favorite. Flamme Rouge is mine. Another at the table prefers Automobiles. One liked Heat best. And I think that’s appropriate; all good, all evocative, slightly different flavors. Why this massive disparity in popularity?
Also played The Wolves with @COMaestro and @lalunaverde. Definitely want some more looks at this one. There were some brilliant moments - LLV was trying to hunt game and my pack closed in from the other side, prepared to “dominate” (read: abduct) one of his wolves, and he danced around it to snatch the wild pig. An early chance to cash in tokens to hustle the scoring phase and claim two scoring tiles for an early lead. COMaestro pulling ahead and then camping his entire pack on one of the last scoring tiles, abandoning the rest of the board but securing his lead. Just some interesting situations and clever plays.
Also I was left wondering if this has Blue Lagoon’s “porous” problem. Yes, I threatened LLV’s pack early but he just moved to a different terrain type. Yes, I secured some early scoring but by doing so CO just focused on other scoring avenues. Does the interaction mean anything if players always have three other, equally viable options to the thing you just took? If not, it’s just a race.
I’m not sure which way it will fall. I, at least, made a lot of little rules mistakes and didn’t keep track of all the scoring options so repeat views may bring it into focus. Regarding the common criticisms I’ve read, there is a player order problem. Giving later players extra starting tokens or better first placement seems perfectly viable for sorting that, just waiting for consensus on what and how much to give the later players. Regarding a static meta, I think that doesn’t hold up and it’s just a result of bad play. I’ve read comments that “of course everyone does [this] first every game” and I think any of the three of us would have instantly picked those strategies apart. Managing the game clock is central to the game and anyone who is off doing [that thing] too much will be left behind by anyone watching the board and the clock shrewdly.
So Wolves. Maybe genius, maybe mediocre. Time will tell.
The one of those (and I’d add Rallyman GT to that list of vaguely recent racing games) for which I noticed a marketing campaign was Heat; it was very well timed and I have to assume they managed to enforce quite a small release window, because I was hearing about it from many different places in the same week or two. It had the air of “we want to be this generation’s Formula D”.
Obviously marketing isn’t everything, but Tom raved about Heat and it’s produced to look and feel lovely in play. (Shame about the manual and the price.)
Heat had the small cache of being a Days of Wonder coming back to something slightly good after a couple of weird mediocre things I think. Also even if flamme was a success there is something to be said about heat building on that flamme success with some ace production and something far more generally appealing (race cars vs racing bikes)
Also by the time I think Flamme was regarded as good it was kind of old and with Heat people can get in on the ground floor of a “guaranteed” success.
Flamme got the same rave from Quinns and Tom Matt. It’s interesting how sometimes the reviews resonate and sometimes they don’t. I also think about Bruxelles 1897 and Red Cathedral. If anything, Bruxelles got the better treatment from Quinns but everyone latched onto the Cathedral instead.
In the SU&SD Plays, Quinns: “We kind of sometimes get a feel for how many copies have sold, based on our reviews, and we didn’t manage to sell as many of this, because you guys felt it looked boring.”
I always dislike such points. I feel like there must be a way to design upgrading to be rewarding in and of itself, so why is there (nearly) always a points prize added too?
(The answer is, of course, because all actions have to be rewarded, even at the end of the game, but that is very unsatisfying to me.)
Space Base - I kept calling out numbers I wanted the other players to roll and they kept rolling them XD. A big success - really hits the “feel good” button over and over.
Bunny Kingdom - A funny end where my wife was tied for second, and she had the card that gave her 10 points if she was in second, so she moved up 10… to be tied for first!
Space Base again. Also had a tie! My wife and I both hit 42 on the same round, and it turns out the solution is to play another full round. Her huge 1 machine (which she had swapped from her 12 slot) didn’t pay off that round so I got the requisite money to buy a final big colony and clinch it.
Behold the start (turn 2!) of my 2nd attempt at playing Tetrarchia—I quit the first due to an egregious rules mistake. I ended up winning because well I played with all the ships and all the garrisons. I probably made more mistakes along the way and I had to consult BGG for rules clarifications because as short as they are, they aren‘t all that clear or well explained in the rule booklet. Never mind that though. This is awesome. And such a small box
PS yes I later removed the erroneous revolt from Sarmatia
In this instance, the upgrade is rewarding in and of itself. A Lair gives two extra points of control in the region, cannot be dominated the way a Den can, and also gives you a bonus terrain token when you build it. Plus, if you time it right, since your old Den goes on the Moonlight board, you could trigger scoring right after seizing control of a region.
My best guess for the points gained after building is to help players who are behind in points and have not managed to earn many points from the scoring phases to still compete. There can only be one Lair per region per player, so it’s not like you can just spam them all out in the last couple of regions to bolster your control there, but you could upgrade a den in an already scored region to gain a quick 5 points, and a bonus terrain token which could then help you with dominating an opponent’s piece in an unscored region.
A game of Elder Sign this afternoon with my son. Looking at the log, this is the most played game in my collection. It’s just good!
Had a go on Paperback Adventures tonight. Hitting the dictionary with all sorts of rubbish wondering if it might be a word!
Beat a level 3 boss, just. But, it was the last two that really set the scene…
We played Lost Cities tonight, and it was a bit of a blowout. I scored 120 points in the second round, mostly thanks to white cards that I kept drawing after pulling all three wagers from the discard pile. Managed to get the 20 point bonus for having eight cards in the expedition.
Final score was 211 - 57.
Also, on Valentine’s Day, we stopped by our FLGS before going to a movie and played a few games. They had a demo out of Kiri-ai: the Duel, which I won taking no damage myself, though my wife was not really giving it much thought.
After that, we played two games of Kingdomino using the store copy in their play space. Managed to win both games, first one 45 - 31 and the second 33 - 29.
