Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

Spectral, a good little deduction game that doesn’t take long to play. Apparently (according to the other players), I’m filling in my sheet incorrectly. To be honest, I didn’t really look that much at the rulebook for how to fill out a sheet, I just did my own thing. I don’t think I’ve won, so maybe my method isn’t helping. My brain seems to get confused by the rows A-D on the sheet, because, while you use that section, the actual order will most probably be different.

Cowbell, first play. Apparently this is an easier introduction to a traditional Swedish game called called Vira. This is played with a standard deck of cards. Players will choose which contract they will try to fill, from threee difference types, each one involving the stock cards (which are the remainder of the deck after players take their cards). The types are Take Contract, Dump Contract, and Buy Contract. For Take Contract, you take all the stock cards. If you choose Dump Contract you discard 9 cards from your hand, then add the stock cards. The final option is Buy Contract where you discard from zero to 13 cards from your hand, then add the same number of cards from the stock. In all three types, you discard down to a hand of 13 cards. If you buy a contract, the other players can also discard cards from their hands and draw from the stock.

Within each contract type, you can select how many tricks you will win or lose. So, each player must take a better contract, or pass. Whoever is left is the Declarer, and they can set the trump suit as well as whether an Ace is a low or high card. The other two players are the defenders trying to make the declarer lose. It’s pretty standard trick taking, you must follow suit if you can. I think we were too conservative, the same player was the declarer and then easily won the tricks, we couldn’t stop him. It was good fun, and all you need is a standard deck and a printed form with the score track and the contract types.

Spring Cleaning. first play. Another diy effort, but you could play with two standard decks. You need seven suits with values from 1 thru 9. This is a shedding game, you want to get rid of your cards. You have to play single cards, cards with the same rank, or sequences. But you can’t rearrange any cards in your hand. You also have cards in front of you, called the offer cards, which can be used by any player, including yourself. If you can’t play a higher hand, you take a single card from the deck or from another players offers. The first to play all of their cards receives no trash, while the other players take trash tokens depending on how many cards they had left over. Good fun, players seemed to like this. Being able to use other players cards was pretty cool and gives you options.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game, did ok, a new high score. Things were looking a bit tough early on, but we pulled out the win. Our scores so far have been: 93, 120, 129, 206, 209, 201, 240, 236, and 257.

Hygge, first play. A quick and easy filler game where you gather animals and use them to store provisions for end game scoring. You can take all the cards in a row or column, and then use any one animal to hopefully match the object cards for scoring. Anything left in your tableau is worth negative points at the end, so you don’t want that.

10 Likes

Inis - 5 players and it was highly interesting. The relatively new 5 player cards add in new heuristics that changes the game. New tactics to win and all that. I also like how 5 player makes Domination victory more likely than the other player counts.

Planet Cute - there were 3 of us in the table, and so we played Planet Cute

Through the Desert

Cat Lady - a nice cute game at the end of the night that I wouldn’t bother playing otherwise.

High Frontier 4 All - 3 players with the Module 0 - Politics expansion. The module was meh. But I had a good time immersing myself into this new age of solar industrial revolution. Would be keen with more plays and with the other modules, which I heard are good.

As for the game: there’s not much game. It’s a rather simplistic game obfuscate with bad rulebook and thematic setting - both adds into the weight of internalising the game’s system.

8 Likes

Evacuation. Move your stuff from one planet to another in a euro fashion. Pretty cool, don’t need to own but would be happy to play

Obsession. Perfectly cromulent game. Pretty nice setting it leans into.

It’s a Wonderful World. Meh.

Xylotar. Yass baby, this is good

Faraway. It’s a collect resources, turn to points game, squeezed into a card game

Spring Cleaning, ballsed up the teach but tis good. Needs more plays but it might replace Scout

9 Likes

This was exactly my take. But as a result, I couldn’t be bothered to finish a single game.

3 Likes

Yesterday’s games:

Evolution: Climate: pretty much the same as Oceans, but without the possibility of invisible mega-krakens :octopus:

Heat: my husband prefers this to Flamme Rouge because there are more ways to manipulate your deck and mitigate bad draws. I prefer Flamme Rouge because it has less faff.

Tiny Towns: a particularly unforgiving set of cards this time, and everyone insisted on choosing the wrong colours :laughing:

8 Likes

Down with this sort of thing

8 Likes

Besides a bunch of Pink Dorf games (I play so much better with my partner than alone…) which have been lovely…

I tried the new Terraforming Mars Automa by Nick Shaw and Dávid Turczi.
To preface this I need to say: I have a general dislike of automas because of monstrosities like the Clockwork Prince (Oath). I have encountered a variety of Turczi’s designs both games and automas. I don’t dislike his work but I am also not a superfan. I think he’s done a great job giving more games solo options but not all his solo modes are equally good. I initially struggled a lot with Imperium:[ x ] especially his automas aren’t always easy to learn. Same for Voidfall. The solo mode has it’s own challenges and sometimes it feels like it would be easier just to 2-hand games.

Enter Terraforming Mars.

I have played the OG Solomode… dozens of times. I am not sure I’ve broken past 100. But I am probably close. For those who haven’t tried it: you have a limited number of turns (12 with Prelude, 14 without) to terraform all of Mars (O2,Heat,Oceans, and optionally Venus Next). It’s a challenge mode that changes the gameplay substantially. It’s great fun and I love this mode. But it changes how you have to valuate a lot of cards: animal cards are auto-discards in this setting for example. Asteroids are still great but really only if you go full asteroids with titanium production, the missing take-that element is not replaced and… etc. VP Cards are often not worth the points unless they also push terraforming: winning comes first, points later. And you are all alone on the map.

With the new Automa you get an actual opponent. And your own gameplay returns to what is demanded in competitive mode including everything on the map. And it sings. Just 1 play and this is probably my favorite of everything I’ve seen of Turczi’s designs. Caveat: I really like Terraforming Mars so that probably plays a huge role.

How does it work?

  • For each of the standard maps available there is a different board and automa cards for the bot.
  • In the image you can see the bot’s board to the right of Mars.
  • The bot uses tracks and all of the “tags” are sorted together into the tracks. On each track there are a bunch of actions the bot takes when it gets to that track. It’s super easy to grasp.
  • For the initial setup of the bot, take the specific sheet for the map insert it into the track board and set all the track tokens to Slot 0. Then get the Bot’s Special Action cards numbered 0-6 plus any that are specific to the included addons. F.e. for Venus Next there is a card included that mimicks the Solar Phase.
  • For each round the bot gets 3 cards and one of his special cards as his action deck and it resolves one card on its turn.
  • Card resolution: go through the card’s tags from left to right, advance the associated track, do any actions you hit or follow the instructions on the special action card.
  • The map specific setup card includes a list of tie breakers for placements of tiles on the map mostly. The bot places cities, greeneries and oceans and it gets one special “neutral” tile that allows it to score extra points.
  • The bot terraforms for TM rating through actions on the tracks or some of the special action cards
  • There simple rules in place for Milestones and Awards and how the bot scores each those are on the map card. It acquires Milestones and sponsors Awards through special action cards.
  • The bot accumulates MC for extra points through placement bonuses and when it cannot take an action for various reasons. The longer you play the more these extra points are worth. F.e. my bot had 91 MC which gave it 1 VP per 7 MC because I finished terraforming on round 13.
  • If you enter round 20 you automatically lose.
  • Otherwise whenever Mars is fully terraformed the game ends. Map tiles are scored as normal.

There is obviously more and there is still some fiddly decisions with tile placement but all in all for this being a complex game it simulated another player quite adequately without demanding a lot of my attention. edit: At the same time it allowed me and–this is super important, can’t believe I originally didn’t think to write this down–have SOME idea where the bot was going to go next. Now that I thought of that I can’t stress enough that this is a major point. There is more transparency here than in the average bot. Or so I feel right now.

There is a scaling difficulty setting as well. I played on normal and there is easy, hard, and insane.

I am absolutely looking forward to trying this with more expansions on more maps. It has rules for each expansion and each map.

I would absolutely recommend this. But only for dedicated solo players and people who already love Terraforming Mars. A game takes a good long while… definitely much longer than playing the solo-challenge on the app.

8 Likes

Careful now

2 Likes

Keep in mind most of Turczi’s solo modes are collaborations with another person who is usually doing the main development on the solo bot. So what you are probably finding is that you like some of his collaborators more than others.

3 Likes

Small local gaming convention this weekend. We had some friends from out of town crash with us to go. I played 11 games total Friday to Sunday. Major highlights were:

The Fox Experiment - Ive been wanting to try this one for a while. Borrowed it from the con game library. It is a light to medium card selection game where you pick a male and female fox to breed (roll trait dice) each round then assign the dice results to pups to breed the right foxes for a variety of scoring conditions. It was cute and I would definitely play it again. I’m not sure it has the longevity for me to want to add it to my already too large collection.

Concordia Venus with partners - I love Concordia and will never pass up a play of it. My husband is iffy on it but wanted to use the con to get some big, over-the-top games in so we convinced the friends staying with us (who first taught me the game many years ago) and a couple other people to play a six-player game using the partner rules. It is definitely different and you have to keep your partner in mind. I love it for the occasional different challenge, but I’ve also only ever played with my husband as my partner and having a good partner you can sync with definitely helps. Individually we were first and fourth at the end. The team score is both players’ scores combined and we won, narrowly beating the team that was second and third and comfortably beating the team that was fifth and sixth.

Harmonies - this seemed to be the new game of our mini convention with many people bringing new copies or buying copies from the couple of vendors. You use tokens to build a landscape to match scoring conditions. We have a game called Reef and this is a slightly more complex version of that. My husband was more impressed than me and interested in picking it up. We don’t have as many light to medium 45-60 minute type games so maybe.

8 Likes

If that’s the case, what the heck is Turczi doing?

2 Likes

I don’t want to give the impression he does no solo design. I couldn’t swear to that and I don’t think it’s true (he’s talked about having a solo-only game in the works, for example). But he’s also been very explicit about collaborating on most of the solo modes he’s credited on and trying to make sure the other designer(s) get credited as well. What exactly his contribution is probably varies depending on who he’s working with.

2 Likes

I played landmarks today with my partner. It’s really a party game so take any judgements with a pinch of salt.

I’m not sure it’s that well designed. The game itself has a decent concept i think in theory. One person is given a hexgrid map with bombs and acceptable spaces and the other players are ask to find the acceptable spaces with clue words given to them.

The big problem with the game, for me, is that they seemingly didn’t grasp (or at least narrowly tested) that about half of these games are mechanics and half the effort in the game is the list of words provided. Instead everything feels a bit slapdash. The maps don’t feel fun to navigate and the starting words feel randomly put together. Kind of frustrating.

5 Likes

that’s sad to hear. it is one of the games I was excited to get a look at at SPIEL.

2 Likes

Six player Twilight Imperium 4th with Prophecy of Kings.

Started at 10am with race selection and teaching one new player.

Stopped at 12:15pm after setting up the map and finishing round 1 for lunch.

Stopped again at 3pm for coffee and dessert.

Tragically had to stop at 6:20pm as one player had to leave for a family function during the last turn.

8 hours of “real time”, about 6.5 hours of game time, and we were this close to finishing. Probably needed an hour, since the last turn tends to drag and a lot of plans get tossed around and a lot of interrupts to plans occur.

Final scores: Xxcha with 8, Mahact and Sol with 7, and Hacan, Argent, and Arborec with 6.

12 Likes

I think it’s called brand management, and there’s a huge amount of money in it if you can get it right!

2 Likes

I started to sus this when the phrase “Turczi Team” was used. Not hating. He obivously built the reputation of being that “solo designer”

3 Likes

Tried out Undaunted: Callisto 2200 solo.

The setup wasn’t exactly elegant, but I managed to get a handle on it pretty quickly.

Also, as always, Rodney’s tutorial was spectacular. I have to stop watching them because it means I don’t read the rules… but whatever.

The first scenario has some issues with the AI: specifically, it is very unlikely that they activate or move their mechs, which is kinda critical to the Mercs faction. As it was, the AI still did a damn fine job moving up and claiming territory, but I was able to punch them to death (Survey Techs hit HARD at zero range) and claim the win.

Overall, a very solid solo game. Not sure I like it as much as Under Falling Skies or Paperback Adventures, but those don’t have multiplayer modes, so…

10 Likes

I think Ora et Labora might be very good! Have had two solo goes at it, one France, one Ireland.
Don’t think I’ll be hitting the 500 point target any time soon…!

Also had a first solo play of Beacon Patrol, which is lovely. Also, it’s harder than it looks; a nice little puzzle.

8 Likes

Scholars of the South Tigris.
After one solo play I’m confident in saying there’s a bit more to get my head round in this than in Beacon Patrol.
It feels like a lot, when you don’t know what’s going on.
But - I do feel like it’s a good lot, and it’ll be a lot of fun once I’ve worked it all out.

7 Likes