Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[RogerBW]

Thirsty Meeples last night, and we played Rock Hard 1977 (which was on my “view at Essen” list).

This may be the most thematic game I’ve ever played. Although the core mechanism is worker placement, every time we did something and there was a consequence, it was easy to imagine what kind of real-world event it might represent. (Drugs are universally referred to as “candy”, which solves the problem of blue-nosed objectors while also being amusing for everyone else.)

Mechanically there’s nothing complicated though we felt the candy rules could have used some clarification. (But I didn’t have a thorough look through the rulebook; generally it seemed to be well laid out and easy to find things.)

My slight concern is that there may only be one real path to victory: get some skills, demo tape, record deal to get some income coming in, give up your day job, up your skills to improve your deal, hire crew, play bigger venues. But this was just a first game and we took at least slightly divergent paths to get there.

At three players we didn’t use the after hours events much (these both give you some immediate effect and count towards set collection goals) and I suspect this would be better with 4-5.

Even though we took over two hours to learn and play, we all felt enthusiastic about playing again, and this has moved to my “buy” list.

[yashima]

interesting. i had it so high up my list and then I saw some people complaining about it as a game (including Radho who generally thinks all games are sharp) and it went to the bottom of the pile. Everyone agreed it was thematic but the actual gameplay was mediocre. So does the theming make up for that? or did the people just have to complain because drugs were already candy and they couldn’t complain about those?

[RogerBW]

Well. It’s not a super complicated game. It’s basically worker placement with a risky way of getting extra actions, as you gradually build up your stats. If it didn’t have the theme I wouldn’t be interested in it.

I think this is a matter of taste in game style more than the mechanics actually being bad. There’s no obvious “always do this every time or you’ll lose to people who do” action. If I were a fan of the sort of heavy Euro where the theme is just barely present and it’s mainly about the mechanical puzzle, I wouldn’t rate this game highly, but it isn’t trying to be that.

The same is true of Firefly, and though there’s no mechanical commonality I think there’s a similar idea of theme making up for mechanics that aren’t the latest shiniest.

[bort]

Bomb Busters, first play. A cooperative deduction game, so that’s cool. You are bomb disposal experts, trying to snip the proper wires and obviously not snip the red wire. So you each have a board filled with wire tokens. Most of the time, your action is the same – point to someone else’s token and say what value it is. If you’re correct, you snip that wire and one of your own, matching that value. Things start off easy enough, with values only from one thru six, and no pesky coloured wires (yellow or red) to worry about. You can still lose of course by incorrectly naming wires, and you can only make a few mistakes before the game is lost. We played the first few missions, which gradually increase the range of wires. And we lost a few times, it wasn’t easy. You start knowing one value from each player board, but after that it’s up to you. Things can get easier one you’ve found all wires of a number, but it seems like you just have to have a guess at some wires. Still, it was good fun. The box promises 66 missions, within five boxes that you open as you progress. Everyone loves secret stuff!

The Icarus Club. first play. Another trick taker. The gimmick here is that you have a row of cards that determines what colour you need to follow is. And each time you win, you can take one of the cards and place it on top of another card in that follow row. Easy to learn, played quickly enough. But you don’t to win the most tricks, you want the second highest (the highest gets zero for the round). And the same at the end of the game, the highest score loses.

Red 7, it’s been too long since we played this, always fun.

Project ELITE, yay to realtime dice rolling. We always have a great time with this, and we pulled out the win, so that was even better.

UGO, another trick taker. You each have five kingdom cards, and you’re trying to place your highest cards on these. Whenever you win a trick, you place the cards by colour, in any order. Each kingdom also requires farmers to score, and these farmers come from the cards. You can be mean in this game, but dropping low valued cards into a trick, forcing your opponent to cover up their higher scoring card with a zero or worse. Easy to learn, fast to play.

Gadget Trick, first play. Yet another trick taker. The theme is that you are robbing a mansion, and have to avoid being caught by the sensors. Each game has three sensor cards, which can be conditions like “win three tricks in a row”. If you meet the condition, you’ve been eliminated. The winner is the player who wins the last trick without being caught. To help you, you get to choose a gadget card, and these are special abilities that only apply to you. Like having another trump suit, or being saved when caught by a sensor. We had a few questions about the way some cards interact, but unfortunately there aren’t many posts on BGG about the game. Definitely has potential, trying to avoid the sensor conditions is great fun.

[Bondy034]

Couple of weeks of play (including a game day at a local venue):

Stamp Swap x2, really enjoyed this one! I wasn’t intiallly sold but the puzzle is great, and the combo of drafting and I-split-you-choose works far better than I expected it to. Will definitely pick up a copy of this once it hits retail here.

Azul:SP, great as always.

The Red Cathedral, still enjoy this, still haven’t tried The White Castle, but it’s on my list to check out.

Catan, taught this to a table of fairly casual gamers. They all said they enjoyed it - so few sevens though! 2 early on and then zilch for the rest of the game.

UNO:Show 'Em No Mercy, yeah this game is terrible. Substantially worse than regular UNO. Theres so many cards being drawn, the only route to victory was via an optional rule (!) that eliminates players who have 25 or more cards. Our game didn’t stretch too long, but the folks that brought it said it normally does. Yuck. Will actively avoid.

Garbage Day, this one went long as we were seated under a big aircon vent and everything kept falling with no human intervention. First time the environment has messed with a game to this extent for me… Yikes.

Jekyll vs Hyde x2, excellent two player trick taker. Will be picking this one up also. Not sure where it ranks with The Fox in the Forest, not enough plays to judge but my intial impression is super positive!

Terra Nova, a bit of an improvement on Terra Mystica for me. Great streamlined version of it. Still not sure it’s a game that I’d reach for heaps but would be happy to play more.

Viticulture, played with most of Tuscany. I did well but ran out of steam in the end as our winner had quite the payday in the final year.

Suburbia, taught this to a new table and it was super popular. I would’ve come in second but after missing out on one of the public goals (in the final turn) came in third. Our winner had a close to perfect game - nabbing the right stuff at just the right time, and strong economy early which powered his mid-late game dominance.

Airlines Europe, it’d been awhile for this one, though luckily it’s easy enough to grasp. More there than TTR, but still pretty light shares game. One of the few share games that persist in my collection. I did come in second this time, but our leader (same guy as Suburbia) had like 30 points on me.

Scout, still a go-to filler. Real terrible game for me though - i had like 6 points at the end of three rounds. I did pretty well in the last round, but still way behind our winner.

My Island x6, started a campaign of this with Mum. Took a little while for her to warm to it, but by the end of these 6 games she said she thought it was better than My City. The rules in the envelopes are also better written than My City. Verdicts still out for me, but so far I’m enjoying it at least as much as My City at this stage.

[lalunaverde]

Age of Innovation - 3 players. Euro game expert won despite me playing as the OP faction. Very good game.

Looot - light game that is like a melt between old German design and modern design. And it’s so bad that it has bad traits from both schools and it is uninteresting game to play.

5 Towers - simple auction game with some Lost Cities element to it. Not sure how I feel about it

Insider - it’s been a while. Not sure if the dynamics between the roles are airtight

Sidereal Confluence - finally get to play it. The 2nd edition got better art now, but man, the production choices is still shit-bad. The brown and black cubes look so similar on the card. The game at least worked by saying big/small black cubes. Avoidable problem.

The game gave me more insights on what the game is with this play that I didn’t noticed back in the day. The cube themselves have an approximate value to each other, but that is indeed merely a guide. The cubes changes value based on supply and demand. So a small white cube and a small green cube are not of equal value. I need more plays to see how initial values can skew the game towards a player by holding the best starter cards by accident (but they have to realise that first) and trying to snowball their way to victory.

The trading phase was limited at 10 mins and yet there’s people on the table that still manage to AP themselves during the auction phase.

This is also where I whine and I thought that table was an awful one. Aside from 2 people, no one bothered helping on setting up the game. I even gave them simple instructions (dump the cubes out of the bags) and they did fuck all. I have snapped internally and thought “fucking do something”. Lack of attention from rules explanation was also rude behaviour. That was one of the worst tables I’ve been in

Penguin Party

Heck Meck

[RogerBW]

My new copy of Deadly Dowagers. Still works at 2, though I’d like to try it at 4+ so that the drafts don’t repeat. Still jolly good fun and doesn’t take too long.

[Lordof1]

Had a board game session with my partner, our house guess and the two kids last night (10 and 7) - actually the longest board game session we’ve had with them. Earlier in the day we’d played Happy Little Dinosaurs and Descent (stripped down - the game, not us).

In the evening, with pizza and a fire we played Pit, Exploding Kittens, Codenames, Rhino Hero, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, all went down very well. Looks like I may have opened a can of geeky worms as they asked to go to the board game cafe for lunch today as well. Happy nerdy dad.

[mistercrayon]

We played the one of the new maps from Ticket to Ride Iberia - the Iberia one. (The other side is this natty looking South Korea map which clusters all colours near their own sort (all the oranges are clumped for example). also some area majority aspect too.

Iberia itself has three main twists
1 and 2) you are forced to draft 8 tickets in the game (4 in the first half of the game and 4 in the last half). You can draw tickets only after you’ve drafted the second 4.

3. within the colours deck are city cards which join up to the big cities. As they are drawn they get placed on the board and if that respective big city has a route connected to it while it has one of its cards out the player collects all of them that are on the board. The more of a single city card you collect the more points it’s worth.

The 3rd of these creates a chicken dynamic where it is better to wait for card to a city you are going to go be revealed as it is worth more points to do so. The problem is delaying can be a mistake too. The other thing the city cards to is incentivise playing off your best route as the points are pretty decent.

The draft creates an overegging situation that adds more tension.

I had a fair bit of fun with it. The biggest gripe perhaps is that the city cards can create a lop sided game if they randomly fall in favour of someone. But I found it kind of amusing.

Neatly the game comes with its own colour cards so you can get a complete game with just adding some trains.

[bruitist]

Regular board game cafe had its second birthday party last night, so I went down to mingle with various friends, have some cocktails, and play some games.

Anomia - Many moments of brain farts as always. Including me thinking “hamster” for “pet”, but instead saying “badger”. Also pointing out that Al Pacino isn’t actually a mobster.

Jazz - Great filler game. Doesn’t matter if you win or lose or even if you have to stop early. You’re just doing a silly activity for a little bit.

Azul - Introduced a new player to this and despite them (unwittingly) constantly taking tiles I wanted, I managed to beat my friend who’d previously destroyed me.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf - A couple of small games of this. I managed to be unhelpful both times as I was the drunk and the insomniac (and my role didn’t change for the latter).

Forks - Quick 2-player game while we waited for people to return from grabbing food. I’m still bad at it.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf - This time with 13 players despite the fact it’s only meant to go up to 10 (but there are enough tokens for 13). Very chaotic, but I somehow (after starting as the drunk) managed to deduce I’d become a werewolf. I got killed and turned out to be right.

Jazz - More Jazz! (And more quoting Bee Movie.)

6 Nimmt - Finished off by introducing people to this (just 4 players). I did badly and only narrowly avoided being last.

[lalunaverde]

Played 18GB 5 players with my friend, Z (user name Conquer in the image below). Modern board gaming have conditioned us to sleep by late game. This is why you must still pay attention on a late game 18xx play.

I manage to catch up to Z and beat him with £100 delta within 2 rounds.

[BertFill]

First try, solo, of Ark Nova.

Very fumbling and clueless to begin with; started to get a bit more of an idea by the end, but far too late to have any chance of getting anywhere near the target victory score!

I think this might be a very good game indeed and I might end up liking it a lot.

[Simfers]

Broke out Great Western Trail New Zealand again, first time since… February I think? There was a LOT of fumbling around and looking things up in the beginning (the set-up alone took ages), but once we got going we found the game again. It’s good, crunchy fun, though we prefer the look of the base, first edition one. It’s clearer. But we’re glad we have both. This was actually my Christmas present from my darling Maryse.

Oh, and surprising no one, after three hours, she’d won. 344-250.

No typos in those numbers.

[Whistle_Pig]

Played A Feast for Odin with The Norwegians on Sunday. I think I prefer it to Agricola/Caverna, but it’s so long since I played the others that it’s hard to know. Despite there being loads of action spaces we were getting in each others’ way all the time, and several times I ended up structuring my entire turn around getting the first player moose next turn. I didn’t do nearly enough with the islands, so am keen to play again to do that properly.

[Phil]

@Whistle_Pig

the first player moose

I want a first player moose.

[RogerBW]

Last night, another Deadly Dowagers which went more quickly now that we both know the rules, and I discovered another “best” win condition: be on 2 Infamy, strangle your husband (+7 Infamy) and marry the Duke anyway.

Then Sea Salt & Paper which I continue to love, especially to start or end a session.

[Captbnut]

I have a 3D printed first player moose that we use with all our games

[Phil]

I love it! Do you have a photo of it?

[Captbnut]

This is the fella

[BertFill]

@BertFill

First try, solo, of Ark Nova.

Very fumbling and clueless to begin with; started to get a bit more of an idea by the end, but far too late to have any chance of getting anywhere near the target victory score!

I think this might be a very good game indeed and I might end up liking it a lot.

Second game. Neither fumbling nor clueless (it’s nowhere near as complicated as it first seems), and oh my - this is a good game!

Smashed the 100 point victory target as well, so should probably have a smaller beginner’s head start next time (so will lose).