Regarding Quacks, I would say, it’s NOT a roll of the dice. It’s a bag. If you’re getting good draws, keep going. If you’re getting bad draws, assess your reach-in style and find some corners that you haven’t been touching. Shake it up. It’s very possibly for a good tile to end up in an unvisited corner of the bag, or to keep grabbing the same tiles you put back in, at the top, to perpetuate one bad round!
3 Likes
Goonies: Never Say Die, unfortunately, another loss for the good guys. Managed to overcome the enemy at the end, and was feeling good, but then they flipped to an enraged side, and that didn’t go well.
Heist: One Team, One Mission, always good for a laugh
Race for the Galaxy, hadn’t played this for years, so I was a bit rusty, and the first few turns were a bit rough. But we got through it, and I think we played it correctly.
Biblios,love this game.
For Sale, another game I’d never get rid of. One of my favourite filler games (along with Biblios). So easy to play.
My City, another play of this, but on the forever side of the boards (We finished the legacy side).
9 Lives, great trick taker
7 Likes
Brass: Birmingham
Hellapagos - Very pleased to play this party game again. This island is so full of lazy and lying rat-bastards (except for me. I always think about the good of our castaways’ colony 
) I manage to get a magic ball which allows me to vote after everyone else voted, which is powerful. It was crucial when we had a vote on who is to be exiled when we didn’t have enough food. Several days later things got ugly. 2 people found guns in the wreckage. I was the first one to get shot. Aaahhh the good always die young.
The tyrants culled the castaway population until there’s enough food, water, and makeshift rafts for everyone’s left in the island
Anno: 1800 - last I played this was years ago. It’s still cool to me as the flow of the game is so smooth. Player interaction is very subtle but significant.
Turfmaster - a game from 1998. I need to play more but upon first impression, this is one of the best racing games with cards that I have played. Downside: it seems to only shine at higher player count: 5 to 7.
Ticket to Ride Legacy - we played 2 games of this and there’s only one left. It is still very fun.
Inis - 3 player game in sub-1 hour. Thats how the game is played. Still great!
Age of Innovation x2 - yes. We played twice. This is a top of the line Euro game. I definitely prefer this over Terra Mystica
Glory to Rome - combos for days. Manage to set up a construction combo to rush some buildings. I drew up Catacombs, and then built it to end the game immediately
The City - way simpler than Jump Drive and I think I prefer it that way. I feel like Jump Drive is in the awkward spot for me where it is complicated enough (or maybe the people on the table just struggle to internalise rules idk) but is too short. City seems to fix that by making the game dead simple
8 Likes
Concordia, Solitaria, Balearica.
Lost 159-147, which I’m quite happy with to be honest. If I’d got the Concordia card (and I so nearly did) I’d have won.
Every single time I play Concordia I remember that it might be my favourite game.
(There are a few games that might be my favourite. But Concordia’s definitely one of them. Playing Concordia feels like what I imagine driving a Rolls Royce feels like.)
5 Likes
Played Die Saulen Von Venedig on Friday, one of my favourite 6 player games, everyone had fun- easy to teach, full of choices, charming, interactive, plays in under an hour. Just a really brilliant game. A Spiel recommendation back in 2007, it’s astonishing it never received a English language edition. I think if there was any game I’d like to get the rights to publish it would be this one.
6 Likes
We’re back from a week’s vacation with our friends and their 2 kids. I’ll probably post some pictures of the places we saw later in the Where in the World thread… for now I “have to” report that we got to play lots and lots of games.
- Just One (1): a single game on arrival. Most of my pens are rubbish now. I forgot to bring my replacements. The game is not rubbish. Never.
- Harmonies (3): taught this for my first multiplayer. We played a total of 3 games. It’s a very relaxed little filler that is just nice to play when you don’t want to brain yourself out. Everyone enjoyed themselves but a few mistakes were made along the way and playing “flat” really speeds up the game.
- The Crew 2 (5): played a few rounds late at night. I had a migraine and I was rubbish. Not the game. Never
- Libertalia Winds of New Edition (2): with 6 players lots of mayhem, very successful. These were my first plays since acquiring it ages ago. Good fun. Learning the cards might help in future games.
- Mischwald (3): I only participated in 3 games, I played in one of those. The other 2 were total misses… this is not a game I enjoy with 5 people at the table, especially because our friends know ALL the strategies backwards. Once I tried to play butterflies because they said with the expansion it was now a valid strategy but I needed the Maulwurf/Mole to play them for free on a single turn. I never got one. I was frustrated because it was all going so fast and I had nothing. My partner 3 spots downwind says “I’ll help you, okay? I’ll pay with a card you want.” Then he proceeds to play a Mole… I howled. The whole table fell over backwards with laughter. I think I don’t need no Mischwald for a while. Especially not with more than 3 players. I think 3 is the ideal player count for every game that is not a solo game. The others must have played another half dozen games of it.
- 7 Wonders (2): This is always fine. But also our friends have played this to death and … … in the second game I battled it out with a player sitting exactly 3 spaces from me to either side because EVERY one was always ducking out of the fights. But at least I was participating. Not my favorite anymore but inoffensive. We played with additional wonders, leaders and cities. No ships because the table wasn’t big enough. Yay. I don’t like ships.
- Stella Dixit Universe (1): our friends hate Dixit. I didn’t know I had never played with them. Someone taught it to them in a weird way it seems. Stella went down well enough but didn’t get a 2nd game despite some fun interactions. I think I prefer actual Dixit. I don’t really need a game around the cards
- Cascadia (1): with Landmarks and 6 players this can take surprisingly long.
- Ares Expedition (5): I played the base game coop mode with the son five times, maybe 6 who knows. We lost. And lost. And Lost. (he played at least 3 more games of this with his dad and a few solos). We got closer to winning. I think the base game mode is really really difficult. I have played a lot of solo OG Terraforming and I know it is tough to get the rhythm right. We began playing OG: TM solo on our respective apps to check if it was us or the game. But it is different enough to not be comparable at all. As soon as I got home I checked the expansion coop mode and I think we should have used a set of cards as dummy player as the “X for the Galaxy” 2 player games do. The Crisis mode does this–of course it also has a specific board and the Crisis cards. Still we got closer to winning with every game. But terraforming Mars with 2 phases each round in 15 rounds and reaching 80 points… hard. I had almost put this on the cull pile but now it’s back
Might even get my partner to try it with me. - Ark Nova (2): I participated in 2 games of this, one with 2 players and one with 4. Four is too much. I had a very nice primate Zoo in the 2 player game and scored 51 points. Everything just came together perfectly. I built on every spot in the zoo. Every single enclosure housed an animal. Lots of bonusses… really nice. 2nd game all 4 players complained things weren’t working out. While I didn’t win I had a better flow than the rest. I had a nice start with the Africa conservation project for 2 green points and next round I was able to directly play the “Auswildern” (releasing the animal) Project. I got all my workers quickly and I was soooo rich. I had a card that gave me income from kiosks the others played and someone had a zoo that asked him to play lots of kiosks…
- Cryptid (2): two very quick rounds once late at night. Had not played in a while. Still a good game. Not my copy, they bought theirs after playing mine
- Pollen (1): friend learned the rules for my copy and then taught it to us. Luxury. Was a bit of a weird game everyone seemed to be playing in their own little corner of the yard… and we had not quite understood the scoring and knowing a lot of Knizia games I was the only one who saw the result coming–I didn’t win I did really badly. But 2 people had collected lots of tokens of one type and neglected collecting a 2nd type… third player won. Has some potential and is very quick and easy to set up. Box is too large and that’s Allplay the usually get it right.
- Wyrmspan (1): I like it. But everyone I have taught it to, doesn’t. It’s getting long. The change that puts people off the most is that where Wingspan has fewer and fewer actions as the rounds go on, Wyrmspan is likely to give you a few bonus actions in later rounds (Coins are actions). And my game ran away badly with me having 9 coins at the start of the last round (I took the 3 I had left from previous round over to speed up the game and take my extra turns at the end because I didn’t want to make anyone suffer. The other critique is that the caves are colored as are the cave cards but there is no requirement to play cave cards to matching caves. This irritated everyone. I won with a nice 90-something points and an 11 Point lead. But I had very lucky draws.
- Welcome to the Moon (1): first map was well received and if more of the pens had still been functioning we might have played another round. I got the end-of-game condition wrong and so we couldn’t actually score points. But I think they enjoyed that being fans of the Ganz schön Clever series (which was also played but I was mostly playing Ares Expedition when that happened)
- Cockroach Salad (1): we had to play one game for old time’s sake. It’s fun enough when you have nothing else to do. Then we had to pack and play a final round of 7 Wonders…
- A few small solos of Sprawlopolis, Grove and Trailblazers mostly in the mornings…
Overall a very very good gaming vacation.
Games we wanted to play but didn’t find time for:
- Istanbul
- Lost Ruins of Arnak
- Formosa Tea
- And a bunch of small card games.
Games I should have brought because it was finally the right group:
- Sidereal Confluence
- My 2 unplayed Splotters. (TGZ + FCM)
10 Likes
Just tried out Suburbia. I lost, which should surprise precisely no one. 
113-85.
It’s a devilish little puzzle. Not a lot of (or any, really) wow factor production-wise, just solid mechanics and loads of decisions. Really glad this is finally available in French.
9 Likes
Played my first ever complete game of Lisboa solo. It was fun a bit of a brain burner in both the competing systems and turn planning. A few rules look ups but was pretty smooth.
Got completely trounced 205 to 150. Still having got through it feels like a win.
5 Likes
Played Tokaido for the first time in absolutely ages. If there’s another game that feels similar, we’ve certainly never played it. It’s lovely.
5 Likes
Pollen with the lovely glass bug tokens is a perfect fit. Go deluxe!
I’ve heard Parks and Glen More. Both share the “last on the path” thing but neither has quite the mood of ambling.
4 Likes
I took it upon myself to reach out to some friends. I informed them: it is my birthday. We are going to find a date to get together and play Sidereal Confluence. One of these people has a kid. Another lives in Seattle (a cool 2,500 miles from here).
Well, we did it.
Feelings? It’s an incredible piece. Unlike anything any of us has played before. That said, we all saw bright and clear that it’s not a game you unlock or enjoy in a single session! For instance, we all were stripping gears on our engines. The result was that, in round 4, not a single technology was researched (which kept boards static for two rounds). Then like 8 things were researched in the following round. So there was a bit where we were in a holding pattern, followed by a final round where everyone was awash in new cards and not at all set up to use them.
Also, the level III research teams came out and we all were like, oooohhhhhh. All those little cubes I didn’t need and I’ve been trading away for cheap/goodwill, I see I should have been saving them for the endgame…
It was a solid tie, 43-43 between the Kits and the Kjas (me). Next was 40 and the poor Faderan came in at 25. Faderan was ship poor and ultratech rich, but didn’t note that until too late. The result was no early research.
We also commented that it was a surprisingly solitary experience. For the pre-eminent trading and negotiation game, we expected a wildly social experience. The fact is, it’s so asymmetrical, that you’re often isolated in your own little puzzle. No one else is wrestling over the same stuff. You don’t really know what your opponents are doing. When you know what you have and what you need, you look around the table to see where the blue cubes are and have a limited conversation around them. But it’s like little windows opening between players. We all had to talk for a long time afterwards as we felt like we hadn’t necessarily been together for the three hours of the game. Interesting.
All in all - not the sort of thing you fall in love with in a single session. But plenty there to invite you back for more. Definitely want to spend more time with it.
After a social and dinner break, we settled on Hansa Teutonica for the second game. This was my second play, (first was Covid Tabletop Simulator). This, too, wasn’t the S-tier game I was hoping for. It was good, but not S-tier. Which is fine, I think it’s also a game that gives you more as you play more, and with two wholly new and two mostly new players it’s not going to reveal all its wrinkles. We all knew afterwards what mistakes we had made and how we’d approach a next game.
I took a commanding position across the Privilege and Merchant upgrades. Someone else went for the full 5 actions. I barely squeaked it out at the end by being the one to end the game, 55-51-something-something. Had I failed to end the game, Mr 51 / 5 actions had a big turn in store that would have reversed the landscape.
So good to play in person. With my youngest turning 1 (Saturday) and Covid well behind us, maybe more in the future?
And we may have to focus on more immediate one-shots, games like Cyclades that reveal themselves in a single play, until we can get something more regular. Many of these greatest games need a few repeats before you get max joy out of them. Still, lovely to finally get these behemoths played.
9 Likes
After playing a bunch of base-game coop mode for Ares Expedition during our vacation…
I finally got around to learning the Crisis mode from the expansion and played 1 learning solo with a lot of rules mistakes and 1 actual solo on beginner mode which–after correcting my mistakes which made the game needlessly hard–was a bit too easy.
By the end I was gaining resources faster than I was able to spend them.
Quick overview of Crisis Coop/Solo mode
So for those who know Ares but not the Crisis expansion here is how it goes in solo (coop is mostly the same except some different cards for the crisis and the dummy player)
- All gauges start at fully terraformed
- Start of round all current crisis do whatever they do in persistent mode
- Then you draw a new one and execute ONLY the immediate effect (not the persistent!)
- The dummy player phase cards provide you with 2 additional phases, you draw 2, choose one then play your own phase card
- I played with Discovery which gives cards that give you upgrades to your phase cards
- You get 2 play 3 phases most rounds unless you deliberately choose your own phase to match one of the dummy phases for whatever reason
- You can only terraform once the gauges have dropped due to crisis cards
- During the round you can try to fulfill the crisis card conditions f.e. play a blue card, play a green card, raise temp etc. to remove the 1-2 (in solo) crisis tokens from the cards, once it is empty it gets removed. It is mostly possible to do so within one round. Sometimes I left crisis cards in place on purpose so the I could then terraform to gain TR so I could get more money.
- Crisis advances through stages 1 to 5. Stage 4 is a single card that says: you can now win if everything is fully terraformed at the end of a round.
- You lose if the Crisis deck runs out. Any gauge is on “purple” at the end of the round or you need to lose another one from a gauge and can’t.
In beginner mode you add 3 level 0 Crisis cards that do nothing. I think I am fine to continue without these next time.
Key Combos this game
- Anti-Grav and Aerobreaking combined to give me 2 plants and 2 heat on every red card (event) I played. With one of them triggering for all cards even.
- A card income of 8 is really a lot of work to filter through (but that was only the last 2 rounds)
- I played a ton of bacteria cards that turned out quite valuable during the action phase mostly. There is one that you can trigger once it has 5 tokens to play a card with a 25 cost reduction and during the action phase this is especially valuable. I had other cards that added tokens to this one…
- A ton of Science tags were probably the most valuable thing I had–I needed those to play the Anti-Grav early on.
- Card Draw / Cycling is very valuable and my Corporation had an ability that provided just that. It was one of the Crisis only corporations.
6 Likes
Bank Holiday games
Aquaretto - fun board game version of Coloretto
Through the Desert - wooooooo!! Manage to convince people to play this with me!!
I added the expansion where you draw two random objective cards. Only 1 player get to have 10 pts from these.
Calico - perhaps my fave from all these “take and make” MPS games. The multifacet ways of scoring is fun without really feelling like point salad
Age of Innovation - 4th play this year! Top tier Euro game.
Quacks of Quedlinburg - they were playing Galaxy Truckers on the other table, but said table doesn’t have enough ppl so I join Quacks instead.
Glory to Rome - combos for days!
10 Likes
Concordia. Solitaria. Italia. Salsa.
Victory! Beat that pesky Contrarius 131 - 120.
Did it by building like crazy to make sure I finished the game and got the 7 point bonus. Just managed to build all my houses before they took all the cards.
11 Likes
Ah we’re half way or just a bit short of that on lights in the mist (the tarot puzzle adventure). It’s pretty interesting because the the rules say something like you can ignore the story or the puzzles and just do what you prefer (genuinely I don’t think you should buy this if you don’t want to engage in the puzzles).
But this tells you how separate the game and the story are - which I think is cool in a way and stops each thing impinging and ruining the other thing. Most of the puzzles have been a fun challenge I think - just a nice balance of solving the “idea” of the puzzle then a satisfying amount of busywork to make it not a trivial experience. One we got stuck on but I think it was fair in hindsight.
What was not expected is how dark the story is. Man if you wheel this out as just another Exit prepare to have themes that might hit a bit close to home or whatever and not something completely breezy or dark with an element of humour.
4 Likes
No phone signal in our Airbnb has meant a lot of games being played.
An epic game of Tichu which our youngest won for his team (not mine) by going Grand Tichu, Grand Tichu, Tichu, Grand Tichu in the last 4 hands.
Bohnanza.
Some Skull King silliness.
A free trial version of Suspects (a Claire Harper mystery) - a co op, Consulting Detective style thing which we didn’t really enjoy.
Noobs in Space - a babies first co op thing.
Tricktakers with the expansion characters, one of which was bonkers.
And as we’ve left our eldest in West Wales for a couple of nights camping with his mates, we’ve just played our new copy of Haggis with 3 players, which is an excellent climbing game where you have to pay more attention to what cards you win than in Tichu (or I’m not paying enough attention to what cards I win in Tichu!)
9 Likes
Games night!
Two games
Cooper Island, 3 player. A decent enough euro efficiency game about developing an island by stacking domino hex tiles. Came second on 10 points. Winner had 12.
Bacon, 6 player. My team went into round 6 behind on 20-11. We got out in places 1 2 3 to steal the win. Lots of fun but I don’t get how you’re supposed to convey strategy and it’s a 4 or 6 player game. I don’t know how often it will be played with the lack of flexibility.
5 Likes
Elevenses For One during the flight to Porto. Holding the available cards in hand gives ample room to play the rest on the little tray.
I’ve always enjoyed this tiny game for what it is, and I take it everywhere – 13 cards in a little zip-lock bag.
7 Likes
Cousin in town for the weekend (for Sidereal Confluence, among other things). Got a few things in while he was here!
Res Arcana: Still like it. Two sides of a coin with Furnace, can’t really choose one because they each do half the game better than the other. RA is falling into the same bucket as Air, Land, and Sea where I seem to always be teaching it rather than playing with experienced people. It doesn’t do well with mismatched experience. So a little underwhelming. We were hoping for a second, real round with pearls but it never happened.
Great Plains: I mean, this isn’t a blockbuster masterpiece. But it’s an elegant, minimalist 2p area control with just the right balance, just the right constraints and levers. It’s 10-15 tight minutes and this game deserves a lot more love than it gets. Thumbs up.
Harvest
OK, hold on. Something magical just happened.
My first play of ハーベスト was… fine. Fine. Played again this weekend, as I’d bought two copies from amazon.co.jp and the other one had gone to this cousin. Our first game was, again, fine. Third game there was one harvest and then we went cat’s game and blocked the board. Boring. Then. THEN.
Then then then.
Then we played again.
This thing came to life. Suddenly we all kind of knew what was going on. Blocking. Betrayal. Shameless whinging. Finger pointing. Name calling. A tentative cabbage placed on the border, with the question, “do you want to be friends?” Perhaps a matching 10-cabbage would show up in the next field. Perhaps a -20 would air drop behind it. Perhaps just a simple Corn, a cold shoulder as a different alliance was tacitly proposed.
This thing sizzled. Loved it!
Last game of the weekend we got four, as well. The larger, truly symmetric board took it to a whole new level again. All the back doors on every space - you might get sniped with a -20 and try to block it, just to watch the next two players create a cross-board diagonal and profit on your downfall.
Note 1: Furnace. No question. I’d choose Furnace (+ Interbellum). But I’m not getting rid of Res Arcana anytime soon.
Note 2: We all still have Sidereal Confluence on the brain. Despite the inability to really take hold of the game in the first session, we all are ready for another. Sign of a good 'un.
11 Likes
Yeah. Thats how to play Harvest. It’s a shared-incentive filler
2 Likes