No good? I was keeping an eye on it because it was designed by Taiki Shinzawa, loved a couple of his games.
3 Likes
Trio, a pretty simple game. You just have to collect all three of a number. On your turn, you select a card, which can be one of yours or an opponents, or from the table. If you select from a player, you can only ask for the lowest or highest number. You select one card, then another, and if they match you can select another and try for a trio. If the second card doesnāt match, your turn is over. Thereās a bit of memory and deduction involved. Still a bit of luck, you can easily have two cards of the same value, and so as soon as someone shows the third card, youāre in. Still, fun and pretty fast.
Medical Mysteries: NYC Emergency Room, a medical based cooperative game. You are working the night shift, and someone comes into the emergency department. You have to ask questions, order tests, give medication, and keep an eye on your patient throughout the night. We started with the tutorial patient, which really does all the work for you, and then we tried the first (of four) patients. We didnāt get everything correct with the patient, but she did survive the night, so I call that a win. Various story cards are used, depending on your actions. For full points you have to identify the problem, carry out the correct tests, and any followup actions. It was pretty good fun, but there is no replayability, once you know the solution.
Dorfromantik: The Board Game, we beat our last score (just!) but stupidly forgot to use one of the unlocked components from our last game. And we didnāt want to add it to the completed game, since it uses matching tile types, so easy to just select the best place for it. We still unlocked box 2, so that was cool.
Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King, still a great game. Hadnāt played for years, but wasnāt hard to learn again. Same player led from start to end, he usually does well at any tile laying games. Didnāt explain the doubling of scoring scrolls properly, which led to some confusion. I lost a scoring tile in the last turn, but in actual fact it would have barely made any difference. Should have priced it higher I guess. Had plenty of money with a few coin tiles from early on, still only good enough for second place.
DroPolter, a very silly game of trying to drop various tokens from your hand. You gather all the token, then open your hand and try to get certain ones to fall (according to a card draw). Not entirely sure whatās legal and whatās not, it does say you can move your fingers, but can you use your fingers to hold onto pieces so they donāt fall?
Thatās Pretty Clever!, aka Ganz Schon Clever. Another game we hadnāt played for years. Not too hard to pickup. Found some really cool IT themed sheets from BGG (from the Stephen King novel and movies). Scores were 255/211/193, the difference were the numbers of foxes (which in this sheet were boats, so cool!)
9 Likes
Played a couple games of Spirit Island last night with my husband. Hadnāt played in a while but it pretty much all came back quickly. First game we won without too much difficulty (Scotland level 3 - Guard the Isleās Heart - Lure of the Deep Wilderness and Oceanās Hungry Grasp).
Second game was much harder for us (Sweden Level 4 - Despicable Theft - Thunderspeaker and Hearth Vigil). We nearly lost multiple times and barely managed to hold on. I got super salty when an event card gave us the āhelpā of a required weaker version of one of my main special powers. We won at the last possible moment with both us doing desperate gain major powers hoping to get a new card that would save us and finally figuring out the combo that would make it.
6 Likes
So I am now 7 games into the Earthborne Rangers campaign. It took me long enough. Played a couple of games earlier this year. 2 last year when I got the game and last week remembering the NPI review I ā¦ broke all the rules and went to the website: Earthborne Rangers Resources | Earthborne Games to copy the ranger decks they suggest.
I had played all previous games with a solo ranger. You are also not supposed to change your deck unless prompted by the game. Normally I should have started over with the campaign. Yeahā¦ suppose I could have done that, but noā¦ replaying the story I already know ā¦ nope. So new decks, new ranger.
I also began playing with 2 rangers and today convinced my partner to participate in game 7. Having now played 3 full games over 5 sessions, I feel I have a better grasp of the game at last.
The Pretty Good:
- I think it is the best game of its (highly specific to me) kind. In my limited experience āits kindā comprises: 7th Continent, Sleeping Gods and Arkham Horror TCG with the latter being the closest relative. These all being largely story driven games. Arkham being the only other deck construction game. I didnāt enjoy any of the relatives much. I quit Sleeping Gods 2 games in. Arkham the same. We played several sessions of 7th Continent before giving up on ever solving any of the quests.
- The open world aspect is definitely done really well. You have a map and you can travel wherever you want on it. No restrictions. F.e. Gloomhaven has a scenario tree you have to follow. 7th Continent and Sleeping Gods allow for ārelativelyā free travel along their maps as well but somehow Rangers feels more actually open, it makes sense to return to places again and again as you get quests that lead you there.
- The biomes that you travel in are each quite unique and have interesting interactions among their cards. I remember SUSD Tom gushing about this in the reviewā¦ I donāt think its gush-worthy. Itās neat. But no more.
- With a very limited set of āchoose your own adventure styleā text snippets this game really does a lot and is able to evoke a āliving valleyā.
The Somewhat Bad:
- The introductory mission is meh. And until you have traveled the valley for a bit the game stays āclosedā and is hard to grok. This only unfolds into something good once you are a few games into the campaign and begin to see the over-arching structure. My initial forays into the valley seemed aimless and pointless. It takes 4 days for the campaign to get you onto a track that has a bit more urgency and give you ideas how this is supposed to work. I felt like I was simply running from place to place to avoid danger that came my way for most of the first 4 games. Thatās a lot of time to āugh never playing this againā verdicts.
- Character growth is only through occasional availability of new cards. You cannot upgrade anything but small parts of your deck. There arenāt ways to upgrade your cards or abilities or attributes. Nothing that comes even close to what Gloomhaven does. The reward cards are pretty neat I admit and my guess is there might still be some surprises but mostly this feels like a rogue-like where I get better by getting better not by upgrading.
- While you fulfill quests and therefore make small changes to the valley, the biomes mostly stay the same. The locations stay the same.
- As grandiose as the ideas are, this seems like a very small-scale proof of concept. A very well executed proof of concept and as such I may hesitantly agree with some of Tomās gushing of how āspecialā this game isā¦ but at the same time it feels small and short. Maybe in another 10 games I might change my tune but for now I can see the limits of the box clearly.
- It is one of those games that if you play with 2 you should really sit next to each other but then the table space is definitely not enough. If you sit opposite each otherā¦ there is a lot of text you canāt easily access. I know there is no solution to that. It just annoys me with most games.
The Definitely Ugly:
- NPI is right about it being nonsensical to have a deck construction game that more or less prohibits deck construction. I have ignored this at least partially by rebuilding my rangers completely because the game throws you into the deep-end without giving you enough clues how to build a good deck for the start of the campaign.
- I am playing a character without weapons. It was really difficult to figure out how to run that kind of deck and without the pre-built one from the website I would have missed out on the combos that save my ass every game of the last 3. I really wish they had included a bit more guidance. It has been 20 years since I played MtG and more than 10 since Hearthstone and I tended to copy decks from others even then. There are 4! decks total on the website and I havenāt found much player generated content for the gameā¦
- While you can play solo with a lone rangerā¦ I wouldnāt recommend now that I have tried playing with 2. Having 2 rangers has so much more versatility and you can help out each otherā¦ very few things are harder with 2. Most things become easier. And I admit that 2-handing it is quite demanding, having my partner play the 2nd ranger was so much more fun than solo-ing.
- I needed 7 games to be able to stop looking at the rulebook. Well 3 games in a row. 5 sessions. Taking a half year break between games is not advisable.
- And I still make mistakes and forget to resolve effects because today the quest card was attached to other cards which I normally do by sliding the attached card under the other which then covers the effect we forgot to resolve and therefore made the quest easierā¦
- While you can in theory rest any time you travel away from a location, the campaign sheet suggests (and my experience with some quests does as well) that you there is some urgency here and that you shouldnāt rest until you really need to. This in turn leads to quite lengthy sessions and that meant that I split games over multiple sessions and you have to have either lots of time or lots of extra table space to accommodate this.
Nevertheless I have late-backed the 2 expansions now. I messed up and I have a German base game and it is likely I will not get the to choose languages and will receive those expansions in English but ā¦ I guess I can play a language based game in a mix of 2 languages. I used to have both German and English MtG cards after all. I want to see where they can take this system and the game has grown a little on me after 7 games.
Still, if I didnāt have it, I wouldnāt miss anything.
So I really donāt know, if I am recommending it 
Probably not unless you really really like deck construction and are willing to delve into a whole bunch of cards to figure out the best builds. If you do: send me some of those builds.
9 Likes
More like I donāt understand whatās going on. You have your cards sorted by your right player by colour and in ascending order. But you cannot see them. Then you play. I played a game similar to this called Pikoko, but I understood Pikoko.
2 Likes
We have very different takes on Lacerda overall (heās my top Euro designer by far and I donāt see myself even liking Splotter) but this was definitely my feeling on Vinhos. Good, but Gallerist especially is better. And honestly Iād probably rather play Viticulture if I were doing a wine-themed Euro, even though Vinhos is almost certainly a smarter and better design.
3 Likes
I tried it out for the first couple of days on TTS, and my thoughts are pretty similar to yours. The difference being that Iām not sufficiently interested to continue.
My solo build, with its swap-for-any-being deck searching ability felt kind of broken and overpowered, giving me full deck knowledge of any new environment and the ability to immediately pull whichever being(s) I needed in any given location. So that was kind of unfun, it felt like skipping/breaking a lot of the game. But given a choice between that and laboriously trawling through the deck each time to find what I need, the broken option also seems like an obvious choice.
4 Likes
Some games over the last week:
Trio, interesting little memory game - far better than I expected though not amazing.
Scout, great 4 player game of this, definitely the best playercount for it.
Cat in the Box, less brainmelty than I anticipated. I really enjoyed it, will have to hunt down a copy.
Skulls of Sedlec x3, continued plays of this with my wife. Iām starting to really hanker for an expansion though.
Nut
The Gallerist, second play of this - dealt with a lot of frustration in this game - just not having enough of whatever I happened to need at the time! I did okay though, lost to someone whoās played it a lot more than me, so thatās okay. Heās also a big Lacerda fan, so hoping weāll get to try some of his other games - I do love the theme on The Gallerist the best though. Amd itās an excellent game, hopefully I can get it back to the table soon!
Barenpark, 3 player game of this sans the goal tiles. Was a nice shift after The Gallerist!
Samurai, didnāt even get a point with this one (1 caste piece short)! But the other two ended up with a shared win.
5 Likes
Summer Stabcon! Warm and slightly soggy in the Masonic Hall.
First game was Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition, this monthās challenge (Alpha, Tempest and Haka vs the Fey-Court in Magmaria). Three damage-heavy heroes going up against targets they really donāt want to damage. We even went to some trouble to keep some of the minions aliveā¦
On to A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game, which fell apart quite badly. I havenāt won this since I got hold of The Coast expansion, though I donāt think anything from there really affected us; we just couldnāt kick our heroes into gear to start killing off Walking Dead and gaining Investigation.
Tried out Magic Maze on a new victim. Number of people I know who like this game: still 2. Including me.
Automobiles next, and clearly I am a good teacher because I had taught both the other players and they both beat me.
In the morning, Ark Nova, a game I donāt love but do quite like. This is certainly helped by my now having won two of the three games Iāve played. (My secret is a very simple one: start at the 5-level of the action queue, and if I can do anything with that, do it. Only if I canāt do I go down to the 4, etc.)
After an RPG session, we got back together with the hardcore boardgamers for Citadels (in which I came the traditional last)
and Flash Point: Fire Rescue, where we did rather better (thanks to Paramedic and Rescue Dog, we didnāt lose a single victim).
Next morning begam with DroPolter, sorry, I apparently have the hands for thisā¦
and Imperium: Horizons (Arthurians, Egyptians, Romans, Celts). The Romans had to retire early, and I as the Arthurians made my usual error of not actually checking what would give me points, and the Celts grew fat on Egyptian cattle (but not on Egyptian points).
8 Likes
Trio
Little enough memory that I, very bad at this stuff, can still play effectively.
Dro Polter
yeah, Iāve found this too.
2 Likes
I was keeping up mostly, and I donāt have a good memory. Like Thatās Not a Hat, Iām just awful at (which is a shame, because I think itās a great game).
I watched a gameplay video, and they were using thumbs, fingers, everything. A turn was over in seconds.
3 Likes
Played 4 rounds of Lands of Galzyr with my partner.
Neat game. The basic idea is that there are 6 skills in a circle, with each character having between 0 and 2 points in those skills, up to a total of 4 points (so, for example, the monitor lizard Mor might have 1 point in Might and Thievery and 2 points in Knowledge). Every skill check allows you to roll 5 dice, but you replace those dice with skill dice for the check using your points in that skill and the two adjacent areas (so a Survival Check for Mor would use no Survival skill dice, since he doesnāt have any points in that skill, but it would use both of his green Knowledge dice and his 1 Might dice, since those two skills are adjacent to Survival.
Really clever. The basic dice have one of each result on them (Thievery, Might, Survival, Knowledge, Communication, and Perception), but the skill dice have 2 double results for their own skill, but then 2 results for each of the neighbouring skills (so a Knowledge dice has a 1 in 3 chance to give you 2 Knowledge, and a 1 in 3 chance for either Survival or Communication).
Downsides: itās still a dice game, and early on you donāt have much equipment or any allies, both of which are critical to giving you more successes and dice modifiers (rerolls, or allowing to use Result X as Result Y, extremely important). And you only ever get 4 skills, and you canāt change those skills very often (the character Iām playing I intentionally removed my 2nd point in Knowledge to make sure I always had at least some skill dice I could use, but Iām thinking that was a mistakeā¦ itās better to be very good at a few checks rather than kinda okay at everything).
The narrative is strong, though, and the gameplay is fast and easy, which is really nice, and playing it cooperatively is satisfying (although the default 7 turns the game plays in feels incredibly short).
And critically, my partner is really enjoying it! So we get to play it, which is the most important thing any game can do!
6 Likes
The game environment also changes as you play because quests will alter location cards and such. I introduced a hot air balloon taxi service, for example.
3 Likes
My friend visited and we played Spirit Island: Space Laser + Dahan Guard Dog vs Brandenburg-Prussia Level 1. We won in round 6 or so on the Ravage after the fear card helped us remove one more village and Dahan defended their lands successfully razing the last villageā¦
I also gave her a quick overview of Harmonies and was told to bring that along the next time I visit her 
I also played 4 rounds of Beacon Patrol which arrived today. It came with recommendations from @lalunaverde and I am happy to report that I find it itches the same scratch as some of my favorite tile layers. I showed it to my partner and it being a cooperative game had im watch a complete game and I think he might actually want to play it sometime.
That giant island was really lucky.
And I played my also newly arrived A Gentle Rain. This one is a disappointment. The game not so much but the production. Donāt buy it.
The printing of the symbols is so bad that I have trouble matching the colors/flowers and it makes it from a cozy little tile layer into a frustrating exercise of suckage.
6 Likes
Quartermaster General 1914
The Great War started because some Archduke shot a turkey, or something like that. Austria-Hungary opened with a quick blitz against Serbia and occupied the capital, Sarajevo.
Germany was preparing the Schlieffen Plan - a quick advance through Belgium - but Russia made a mad dash towards the Balkans and the British invaded Gallipoli - knocking the Ottomans out for most of the war. Any dream of the war ending ābefore Christmasā was gone. Schlieffen Plan was scrapped and the German armies focused east.
Bulgaria and Greece entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. The former was quickly knocked out by Russian troops and surrendered. The Serbians retook Sarajevo. Emboldened by the developments, Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente. The Austrians are incapable of mounting any counteroffensives.
The war turned into a stalemate where the Eastern Front froze up, despite repeated German attacks. The goal is to cut off the Russian armies in the Balkans. And any French offensives on the Western Front were met with defeat and heavy losses.
By the third year of the war, Anglo-American forces have landed and repelled the Germans out of Belgium. The Central Powers surrendered.
Beacon Patrol - 2 players and it was nice. Then, after Stella, we played again with 4 players. 4p is difficult but fun.
Stella - a game form the Dixit universe, so it uses Dixit cards. I prefer this, and so did the others on that table. We liked that thereās more structure to it and we like the system itself.
Fields of Arle + Tea and Trade - we played with 3 players finally and I think this with 3 players is the best Rosenberg bucolic experience ever. Might oust Nusfjord, I think.
Rafter Five x2 - hilarious dexterity game from Oink. This is a top tier Oink. WTF is Scout??
On Mars - finally. The Big Red. I think this is the heaviest Lacerda along with Lisboa. And I think I might prefer this over Lisboa, but underneath the Gallerist (for now)
Powerline - pseudo roll and write. Itās alright
Bohnanza
6 Likes
Games this week:
Harmonies x2, had a friend bring this over - I enjoyed it a lot! Very Cascadia-like. I failed to win either of the games but Iād play it again in a heartbeat. One Iāll definitely be picking up for myself at some point.
Gizmos, played this with a new player and a friend whoās a bit of a shark at engine building games. He won, though I was proud I got close to him! That plastic marble dispenser is very shonky thoughā¦
Skulk Hollow x3, got this to the table - super fun little asymmetric card driven tactics game. We played two games back to back swapping sides for each and the monster failed to garner a win in either. The third play was me later running through it solo to confirm that, yes, it is possible for the monster to win. We just didnāt play very well. I think playing as the monster is a little trickier than the good guys, but itāll take more plays to figure stuff like that out. Iām excited for those future plays though! Especially with the 4 very different monsters in the box.
Archeos Society, our new player beat my wife and I handily at this one. There goes our pride I guess. Lots of fun though and shows itās not too hard to pickup either. People should buy this game - itās excellent (and I would quite like an expansion or twoā¦)
Truffle Shuffle, lost this one too, I donāt think I made a straight all game, which probably explains a bitā¦
Skulls of Sedlec x3, we got our new copy of this with the first set of expansion cards in it. We played these three games with the merchants, who are super interesting - Iām not sure I could go back to the vanilla game either - the potential to hate draft toward the end is a welcome addition (as you donāt draft all the cards when playing with an expansion). Hope it does well and we can get the other expansions in this format (which is sadly not compatible with my old wallet version 
- a local boardgame group does a yankee swap for Christmas usually, so I may include this in my offering this year)
5 Likes
Wait, what? What other format is there?
Ohā¦ Huh!
2 Likes
Went over to our local Meetup organizerās home for a couple games. First up we gave a try to Ark Nova, a game about developing a zoo. And its fishy expansion. I specced hard into cards that didnāt match any of the conservation cards on display, which turned out to be unwise. My wife had a huge science and aquarium engine going and got lots of sponsorship cards to support it. She won with a positive score in the 20s, while the rest of us were in the negatives. It was very fun! I like the action card sliding mechanic. And Iām a big animal fan. Unfortunately the raccoon card came out on the market during the teach to tempt me, but everything got reshuffled and I didnāt get to see it (and buy it and play it) again.
Then we played a training mission and a regular mission of Space Alert, and actually the regular mission (with everything thrown in, but easy-level threats) went much smoother. This one hurts the brain! I have trouble trying to figure out where any of the threats are going to be at a particular time. In this case it didnāt matter because we blasted each of them out with one or two shots almost immediately.
5 Likes
Brick and Mortar - A really fun supply-and-demand game. The pricing system is great as this is perhaps the game that does allow you to flexibly set your price (better than Food Chain Magnate). The dance between monopoly, cartels, and competition is really interesting. However, the combos are rather restrictive based on random card draw of the shop deck.
Money - played my copy after receiving it from Playte. Essentially a set-collecting filler game. I usually donāt like these types, but what makes this fun is the bidding and swapping of cards (money) for other types of money
Coloretto - havenāt played this in a while and itās nice to play it again
Fields of Arle - 2 player with my friend who I always play FoA with. We finished the game after approx 1 hr 15 mins. Great game! This maybe my fave Rosenberg farming game. Definitely above A Feast for Odin (also very fun) and potentially better than Nusfjord
7 Likes
Played Lords of Vegas with my wife today, and she actually reached the instant win space! Sure, it was on the game over card draw, but it still counts.
6 Likes