I have managed a game of unmatched outdoors (Good size and not too many components) and felt that as you have your own deck and miniature your turn interaction was pretty safe.
It may be one of the “safest to play with others” games I have right now.
EDIT: probably a forum topic in there. As I don’t see social distancing going anywhere anytime soon.
…Have you ever thought about taking out a loan?
That’s a very good question. There are some recurring mechanics across many of his designs, but to me he is the epitome of “you can’t do that because you haven’t drawn the right card” frustration.
(The one of his I’ve really enjoyed is Exodus: Nouveau Paris which hardly anyone knows.)
Aha, I see you’ve played Brass 
I posted a bit ago about my husband’s middle niece being in town for a week with her grandparents and us having a board game afternoon / evening with her. The oldest niece now had her turn this week and we did a couple hours of board games with her last night. Well, the plan was for US to do it, but my husband got a very upset stomach out of nowhere so I ended up playing games with his niece alone. We played Disney Villainous as her sister had enjoyed it so much when she was here and talked it up to the rest of the family. Her Mother Gothel beat my Cruella de Vil. Then after a break for cake (the s’mores of last time were rained out), we played Bob Ross: Art of the Chill. I won at 30 Chill Points to 27, so close.
Her entire family arrived in town as we were finishing Bob Ross. They stayed the night at my husband’s parents’, then the trade off with the oldest being picked up and leaving with most the family and the youngest niece being left for her week with the grandparents is today. I believe the plan is family breakfast soon then group games before lunch and those leaving will hit the road after lunch, so we’ll see what gets played today.
if you’re looking for a game be sure to hit me up.
The only Martin Wallace game I’m confident I’ve played (there may be something else I didn’t realize was him) is first edition A Study in Emerald. And that game is terrific, if a bit hard to wrap one’s head around initially. Unfortunately, nothing I’ve heard about the changes made for the second edition sounds good to me, and the first edition is never being printed again. (I really hate when people do that with boardgames. I’m probably in a minority, but I like first edition Descent better than (non-app) second edition and I think they’re so different that it’s wrong to replace the latter with the former. And that’s not the only time FFG’s done that.)
PS: I do own AuZtralia, because of the Study in Emerald connection, but we have never played it and at this point that is unlikely to change in the immediately foreseeable future.
I’ve played a fair bit of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Core Set over the past couple days, and I really like it so far. The game is almost entirely skill checks, but I find the mitigation to be ust so fun. It all boils down to “choose the skill you want and which cards you want to spend to add certain dice”, but it’s so much more fluid and fun to manipulate your deck to add dice, then roll a handful of them and scry them like you’re reading tea leaves. I also love the deck construction in this game. You don’t get to freely wheel through your deck because once you run out of cards, you’re dead, and your deck is only 15 cards, so every card matters, and you have to be smart about where to mitigate your luck and where to just hope you get 7 or better on a d8. The slim deck also makes upgrading your deck feel great; you’re swapping out one card, but that’s a significant amount when you have 15 of them, and you also get to boost your character’s stats or abilities, or even give them an additional card in their deck. It all makes your deck feel like your character more than any other deck construction game I’ve played I haven’t finished the adventure path in the core set, but I’m having a blast, and I’m excited to try some of the PDF adventures Paizo has put up online.
This evening: three local friends came over for socially distanced gaming in the gazebo, which turned out to be Aeon’s End. First game for one of them, second for the others, and we didn’t make a great showing against Blight Lord, but this is still one of those games which I own, and enjoy playing, but don’t play often enough.
Played 4 player Indonesia this time with @EnterTheWyvern
Another Splotter game and it was fab. You own production companies that produces rice, spice, oil, and there are shipping companies that transport them to the cities.
The merger mechanism is highly interesting and have led to cases where players value the merged company differently during the auction for the said company.
@EnterTheWyvern played really well (expected, as it is his fave game!) and Im surprised I did relatively well at 3rd place considering the bad plays I did.
Good session. I defo want to play more of it
I really enjoyed the game. I’m bit unsure I played particularly well overall. My start was wobbly and my last ships placement was poor. What I am however pleased with was my play to change the situation where I hit D’s position on Siap Faji with the shipping change. I left myself exposed on the rubber which worked out well for D as well. I also should have gone up mergers last turn. That would have allowed me to screw money out of my Siap Faji company that only delivered 5 of 12 goods and additionally would have increased my shipping fees.
The game remains brilliant. To steal Tony Fryer’s phrase, Indonesia has depth and current. The sheer quality of player interaction is great. I also like how murky the positions are so the auctions are more about feel than calculation and as a result how tense they are. Then you add in that companies are free as is the R&D so players have tools available to them to really play the game. You need money to behave like a dick which is how you win the game. Maybe less obviously than FCM but ultimately more accurately it describes a critique of modern capitalism. Maybe the game that mosts makes me feel like I’m playing the role of someone most removed from my own life experience.
Edit: fixed typo that drastically messed with me intended meaning.
Azul, havent played this for a while. The first game is still my favourite, although I’ve only played one of the other games. One of the other players had a pretty bad run and gave up in the last turn. She wasnt purposely getting targetted, was just a bit unlucky. I know the feeling. I thought I had stuffed up (had the chance to get all five of a colour for a bonus 10 points), but squeeked out the win by just a couple of points.
Luxor, a nice easy playing game to get into. Ended up pretty close (but I lost).
Pictomania, this is my favourite drawing/guessing game I think. Up there with A Fake Artist Goes to New York. Its a shame I dont really get the numbers together to really make these games fun. At 3p it just works. Still fun, but I remember some of our games from years back at 4/5p, it was manic fun (just as the name suggests!).
Forgotten Waters, we fought some lizard creatures (they looked a bit like Murlocs from World of Warcraft)
Pictures, some imaginative efforts
The Crew, polished off a couple of missions
Polterfass, an older German game of rolling beer barrels. You all take turns being the innkeeper, who gets to roll these cool plastic barrels. After a roll, the other players play one or two cards with values from 0 to 7 on them. The innkeeper can then decide to stop, or keep rolling. If they roll and none of the barrels are standing up, they’ve gone bust, and the players get points from the cards they’ve played. If the inn stops on a higher total than the players total, all the players get their points and the innkeeper gets the difference. If the players total is more than the innkeeper, then whoever had the highest total takes it as negative points. It sounds complicated, but its actually fairly straightforward. There is a bit of math to do on the fly, since there are special barrels that can cancel or double a value.
Byzanz, another game of this cool little auction game.
Silver and Gold
Samurai, a Knizia classic. You place tiles to capture caste figures (rice, buddhas, castles) by surrounding them. To win, you need to have the most in 2 castes out of the 3. It was an interesting tussle.
A War of Whispers, second time I’ve played this. Still not quite sure about it. Its interesting enough as you try and influence the five empires. At the start of the game you random distribute your faction pieces to determine which empires you want to win eventually (and which ones you want to lose).
Byzanz X 2, more of this great auction game. Quite a bit of table talk involved, which was entertaining.
I played and won Spirit Island vs Level 3 Sweden last night using two of my favorites: Thunderspeaker and Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds. I love being able to move with the Dahan and Keeper while slow at the start is able to block off their part of the island so fast once they get going…
Level 3 raises damage of towns and cities. I played it that they had the same hitpoints though.
Interestingly the fear cards become more important and due to higher number of vanquished towns and cities more common.
Cannot wait for the new spirits to arrive (I have had a peak at them via tts earlier this year and omg it’s going to be awesome).
Played some Marco Polo 2: the sequel a couple of times this weekend.
I think it’s a very good game hindered a little bit by some tough design choices. The board I think is kind of tricky to parse but I think it’s a result of making the game variable. In essence by having variable set ups via cards and tiles placed on the board the spaces these require is more than putting icons on the board. This means everything needs to be giant to be able to see the the icons that are permanently there and it’s less about the map and exploring it and more about The mechanics.
Having said that I really like the game. It’s got some nice push and pull between generosity in giving you stuff while also being in play fairly tight.
I also like how wild all the characters are (I think this wildness is why the games needs a variable set up and them being interesting only works in a set up that is not static because if the board was static the characters would
Need to be more balanced or there’d just be a definite best one). In one game you might be constrained by needing to pay coins to move so in the next game you can take a character that pays zero coins for movement (of course you lose out in other ways)
I like it it’s a good solid crunchy euro game that values a planning mind b
I’ve never played Marco Polo 2, but 1 has crazy player powers and a fixed board and it seems to work fine.
Been playing some Rallyman GT online.
It’s good, you choose how far to push your car and whether you go for it (for a reward if you pull it off) or a more cautious approach
Is it fixed? It looks like a lot of the worker placement places and bonuses are selected at the start of the game? Do you need to place a trading post to use that spaces action?
Maybe I just misinterpreted your post as meaning the board is more modular than it actually is. Yes, there is some variation in setup in MP1. I can’t remember any specifics.
City and trading post bonuses amd action spaces (i think thats what they are called) are randomly setup.
The “first visitor” bonus is also randomly setup
The cost of moving around is fixed and printed on the map, and the main action spaces are fixed.
Played a game of 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties another session was 2pm to 11pm this time thanks to a more difficult rules set so we all had more learning to do at the start. My brain hurts now.
Over all I enjoyed it. Maybe more words in the future when I’ve rested and if anyone wants to know 