Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[bort]

Dog, a new game bought for our hosts. It’s from Switzerland, and it’s a bit like Ludo, which I played at least once as a kid, might have been called Sorry. So, you have your marbles in their home spaces, and you have to move them all out, run around the board, and end up in their finishing space. It uses a standard deck of cards, with some special abilities. Most of the cards just have moving a marble that many spaces. The Jack can swap your marble with another players, and will piss them off as well. Every card must be played, and you have to apply the entire movement. So, you’ve just moved your marble around the board, and it’s coming back around, but you have the wrong cards to get it into the final spaces, so off it goes around the board again. There didn’t feel like a lot of choice here, it almost plays itself. Not a big fan.

Furnace, always a great game to play. Very clever auction system, where if you don’t win a card, you get compensation (either a resource or a conversion). Leads to a bit of AP, but it’s still a quick game. We decided not to use the Capitalist cards, some seem clearly better than others. I’ve got the expansion for this, so I thought I’d get the base game played before adding any new stuff.

The Crew, nearly finished! Fairly simple mission – a player had the highest card in a colour, and the player next to them had to win all of the cards of that colour. We didn’t get a good deal at first, one player had all the rocket cards, so that didn’t work out. But we nailed it on the second go.

The Search for Lost Species, tough game. Finding it harder than Planet X (still my favourite of the two). We all seemed to be fumbling around a bit. One player had a go at guessing, but failed. I took a bit of a punt, and managed to find the lost species (first time I’ve managed it). But, sadly, I lost by 39 to 37, so close! Just a bit slow to identify animals.

12 Chip Trick, deceptively easy to play There’s only 12 cards!

Boast or Nothing

Trick-taking in Black and White, good fun, so easy to play.

[lalunaverde]

For Science - difficult! A more cerebral coop dexterity game. Very cool.

Seas of Strife - we played with the variant rules, and it’s way better than the base game rules.

Transatlantic - good Mac Gerdts game. Not as good as Imperial, but I would need more plays to see where it sits.

Inis - 3 players. It’s great that we all know how to play the game and we blitz through it.

[MarkSP]

Here it is, played La Granja deluxe edition on Saturday. I can see why people like this game. Despite there only being 6 rounds, it feels a lot more generous compared to other euros, and full of options. Lovely chunky pieces, next step is to play with a signicant number of the expansions.

Before that however, I competed in a Hive and Quarto tournament, depsite not being that bad at both, my speedy recklessness got me knocked out straight away.

Then I played Tekhenu, a dice drafting Turczi game. Not my favrouite to be honest, just a bit too tight- all but three of my actions were temple building, because my initial card draw said score the temple twice. I had a tech which let me use forbidden dice as well, which made a lot of that part of the game moot. We played with the expansion, which added very little tbh.

Then Gifttrap, which I forgot to photo (but won thanks to my accomodation of an antique door as a gift) and finally Inklings. Convey words with symbols. A bit lukewarm on this tbh. Pictures style scoring, so I won despite my words being impossible to guess.

[Captbnut]

Allplay trick taking Kickstarters arrived last week.

Played Bacon yesterday and have already sold it!

It’s fine, but it’s ‘My First’ Tichu. I would have given it another go, but Kate and the boys were very underwhelmed and I can’t foresee an opportunity to get it played again when there is so much competition in our card game collection.

Hopefully the other 3 will hit the spot.

[raged_norm]

I’m reserving judgement on Bacon for the team game. Lunar was bad at two, I suspect it will be sold as games that only work at specific player counts (that isn’t two) never get played in my collection.

Makes room for some odd Japanese ones at least.

[Captbnut]

Yeah, the twist in Lunar seems pointless if you’re not playing in teams

[mistercrayon]

We played pueblo last night. That is a tension filled game in the fun way.

[lalunaverde]

A Feast for Odin + Norwegians - okay this is very good. Rosenberg designs doesnt go out of control like Lacerda does, yet (some of) the games he does have enough depth in them.

We played again with 4 players. I went for buildings and chickened out on taking an island - which was fatal as I end up behind. In hindsight, if I am gonna go for buildings, then I should go all in. I did some silly mistakes with not being competitive on emigration, and so I got elbowed out by the others.

Note to self: LLV, unless you got a point-pooping-machine, you take an island. Islands are great at pooping points!

[MrJackdaw]

I’ve always liked the look of A Feast for Odin, but I know none of my players will want to engage with it. I’ve heard it’s great solo… so still tempted!

[RossM]

Played Neanderthal solo. Lost. Hard

[Brattyjedi]

I played Odin + Norwegians last weekend at 3 players. My husband lost hard because he took too many islands (4 or 5) and wasn’t able to get enough out of them to fill all their negatives. I won with 2 islands.

[COMaestro]

Had a crazy game of Lost Cities against my wife last night. Everything just kept going my way, to the point that I won 249 - 49.

Also won our game of Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game as the Empire, though she won the game the previous night. Feels like the Empire has been chalking up more wins lately, regardless of which of us is playing as them.

[Benkyo]

More than 2 islands seems risky to me. 4 or 5 is crazy.

[Brattyjedi]

He had an occupation card that gave him a lot of money for having lots of islands (or something like that) and was hoping that would push it over the edge.

[Acacia]

@MarkSP

played La Granja deluxe edition

Boy. These pictures make me question my decision to get the old version. I do think the old version is still more readable from a board state perspective, but that new one is awful shiny and does seem easier to parse (game in progress) than it looked like in the marketing images.

Well, if I make enough room in my collection, maybe one day I’ll swap for the biggun.

[mistercrayon]

I’m having a similar thought with castles of burgundy but I think it’s fine.

Definitely fine. Nope not tempted.

[yashima]

Oh how I missed having this game on my table. But waiting for Nature Incarnate made me avoid this one. Not that I needed new content but… I don‘t really know, I was angry about the whole mess GTG made of this expansion in Europe.

Last night, after a long and stressful day though Spirit Island proved again why it remains my favorite game of all time I played with 2 of the new spirits. I deliberately chose 2 of moderate complexity and no opponent. I had a hard enough time as it was.

Ember-eyed Behemoth is a an angry hill (not a mountain I think) that moves across the land stomp-stomp style with their Incarna. Good fun but a bit fiddly in the management of movement vs stomping invaders (probably only because playing 2 handed).

Towering Roots in the Jungle also has an Incarna (new spirit avatars that strengthen the land they reside in a lot and they can move around more freely than normal presences). This one strengthens the land’s resilience with a new token type that prevents the grey ickiness from spreading in that land. They can also draw invaders to their Incarna where they don‘t do damage anymore but also can‘t be damaged until Towering Roots uses their innate „Withdraw Sanctuary“ to … remove them.

Both spirits are on the slow side… so it took me a while to get a grip on things and I won by stomping enough invaders to generate so much fear that when Behemoth stomped the last city I won.

For a weird reason, I had lots and lots of beast tokens on the board and the beasts never ever did a thing. Every time they would have damaged something the invaders were already somewhere else.

I like the Incarna mechanism of these two a lot. Next, I have set up a game with Relentless Gaze of the Sun (some kind of super-laser that moves around the lands shooting invaders from the sky while also burning the land, oopsie) and Hearth-Vigil, a Dahan enhancing watchdog.

[RogerBW]

@yashima

(some kind of super-laser that moves around the lands shooting invaders from the sky while also burning the land, oopsie)

“This land is now safe from communism the Invaders.”

[Acacia]

Been kicking the tires on some games, mostly via digital means:
Harvest (japan): This one didn’t rise to the levels I’d expected. I wasn’t playing with the most nuanced gamers, but the prevalence of negative value cards seemed to make it pretty easy to determine where to play cards. We weren’t really coopetitioning, just trying to score points and penalize our opponenents. It was decent, but not what I expected. Will play again with more savvy players.

New York Zoo: This is good. Really good. Quite amazingly good. It’s also a fiddle fest, by which I don’t mean exciting Irish music. The setup is fiddly. The rules for placing and moving animals are so unintuitive and fiddly… I mean, mechanically they make perfect sense and I can see how they are necessary to make this game such a superstar to play. This one is officially off the “maybe cull” pile but I’m nervous about teaching it to anyone who isn’t all-in.

La Granja: 10/10. More of this.

Through the Ages: Nations, please. I do get pleasure playing this but I’m always ready for it to end after 2/3 of the game is through and it’s too obtuse for me to zero in on “trying something different” next time. Playing on BGA has turned me back onto playing on the app, which is a pretty good medium for this beast. But overall impression is, “it’s been too long since I’ve played Nations.”

Caverna: I avoided this for at least a decade (two?) because I didn’t need “weak sauce Agricola” in my life. I’m really enjoying it, and also surprised by how different it is. The two share mechanisms and iconography. The main changes are in feeding (Caverna = you can always get food, but do invest in something to make it easier) and scoring (Caverna = 1 point per thing, no limit) transform not just the mood but the entire point of the game. This has me thinking about ranking my Big Uwe’s and I think it’s Agricola, Arle, Le Havre, Caverna. Caverna reaches the top shelf.

Hallertau, Glass Road, and Odin are the question marks - 7 is too many but I don’t know which of these lower three can go yet. I’m looking at Hallertau in a way that is making it very uncomfortable, though…

[yashima]

I have yet to try Caverna. I am almost ready to possibly get the „big box edition“ for the 2 player version because i doubt very much I will ever need it for more players.

Hallertau is also the one on my list to maybe … get going. I think I need to play it again before booting it though.
Glass Road is getting a new Black Forest iteration this year—I am holding out for that one, as it‘s „almost home“. I got a rules explanation many years ago at the fair but never followed up with a game.
Odin with Norwegians is really nice. I wish I could actually play it on the table as much as online—but with the viability of BGA becoming a bit of a question mark for me with the recent news, I am definitely holding on to it.