Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[Acacia]

Evacuation

A lot of thoughts. Probably best not to dump everything here, but if anyone wants to know everything about Evacuation we can head over to the “Anyone have any thoughts on…” thread.

• Pulsar 2849 / Space Disco remains my favorite Suchy, and really the only one that has a chance of staying in my collection.
• I can’t decide whether I like this more or less than Praga. Fleeing a dying star? Colonizing a planet? Lots of PvP touchpoints? There’s a lot here to beat out Praga. But Praga is also beautiful, effortless, and dumbly satisfying, while this can be a headache with cheap art and components.
• Suchy, I think, best exemplifies complexity for complexity’s sake. So many little rules grafted in to create tension that is neither elegant nor organic. Case in point: Stadiums (proxy for “culture”). You need 3 on your new world by game end. That’s fine. But Suchy requires you have 1 by the 3rd round and 2 by the 4th. Stadiums already drive player order, which can be incredibly important, and repeating the same action in a round comes with added cost - so waiting too long is organically inefficient. Those mechanics still allow you freedom if you wanted to push things and outrun the costs - there’s no band-aid needed. I can think of a few reasons why he band-aided it anyway, but it remains inelegant and possibly unnecessary. Suchy uses these bungie cords to force counter-tension throughout most of his designs.
• I’m torn on what to do - I kind of want to play 2-3 more rounds to see the rest of the tech trees and try the advanced action module. I do want to play in race mode, which requires actual humans, as I think that is how the game was designed (as opposed to points mode, which is required for solo). The game won’t survive beyond those, but I may not get to them anyway.

And these are all thoughts I had before poor Evacuation had to be contrasted to Pipeline:

Wow, we got a live one here. The Ludvig solo is quite good and smooth. Short rulebook, small action set, beautiful design (O’Toole, thoughts of Kanban througout)… though I’d really like those Puerto Rico / Keyflower hex barrels for the oil rather than cubes.

This game is hard. Like, your first game is forecasted to end at $300-500. Good players score $1,500-$2,000. There’s also a lot of room for AP - you’re playing Trailblazers with one hand while managing an unwieldy economic engine with the other. Plays well solo when you can think, though with multiple players I imagine everyone else’s turn is long enough to let you plan your own.

What I love about the engine is its circular nature - like Polis or Nations. More interesting and more deadly. Most engines are linear - collect wood > build fence > house animals > breed animals… left to right. These harder games take the output of your engine as a required input. Here: Money to buy oil and pipes, pipes to refine oil, refined oil to make money… and back again.

That same money is siphoned to build pipes, machines, and tanks and to run said machines. And then to buy more crude as your primary input. And to take extra actions or invest in R&D. It’s easy to drain this machine into the dirt and literally run out of gas. This is where the interest and the learning curve come in, trying to balance inputs and outputs to both grow and run the engine. The gap between right and wrong can lead you anywhere from zero to thousands.

It’s not overly interactive - there’s a lot of touchpoints and they can be mean, but it’s mostly incidental. Still, really impressed with the depth and polish of this one and eager to git gud.

[raged_norm]

I’ve played points mode in Evacuation and agree that the stadium rule seems weird. Sure you can ignore it for a points penalty but 3vp in a 40-50vp game is a lot.

I enjoyed it enough to play again, but didn’t really feel the need to own it

[BertFill]

Ezra and Nehemiah. First attempt. Solo.

It took me all morning. I’m still a bit confused, but I do now know how the game works well enough to understand the rule book. Which I shall read carefully, because I’m pretty sure I must have made some sizeable goofs. First off, scores for me and the bot seemed somewhat low. Second off, I appeared to win narrowly, which seems unlikely in a complicated game I didn’t know how to play. I’ve certainly never beaten any other Garphill bots at the first attempt. So, as I say, I reckon I did some things wrong.

I like it though. Assuming I have made mistakes, and the game isn’t just way too easy, it’s good. Lots of decisions to make all the time.

[lalunaverde]

Essen Spiel special:

Day 0

Castle Combo - filler game of making combos. Decent.

Endeavor: Deep Sea - I love OG Endeavor and this one is pretty and has interesting game play. Not sure which one I prefer though. I would like more plays of this

Age of Innovation - 3 players. Excellent modern Euro

5 Towers

====================

Day 1

Cities - Tight drafting and it’s kinda fun, but also BS with the rather arbitrary random draw of the cards/tiles

Nova Roma - Cool Euro but a bit too Feld-ish on how many mini-games are in this design

Moonlight Market - very old school German game. I like it.

==============

Day 2

Luz 2nd edition - I loooove this production. Alas, no stock.

Slide - surprised on how much I like this filler game. Very spatial. Maybe that’s why

Trick 100 - bluffing game. It’s ok.

Stich Fur Stich - trick taker with deduction. I remember why I got rid of this game. The deduction process is rather simplistic and procedural. And once the murder is solved, you play the rest of the round as a normal trick taker. Rather bizarre.

Panda Spin - shedding game by Carl Chudyk. Amazing shedder. I really love this one

Spectacular - cool drafting. MPS but decent as there’s good amount of planning

[bort]

Another game of Bomb Busters today, and we completely failed on four attempts. We’re still doing the training missions, so that’s a bad sign. I saw a post on BGG asking if the game is really deduction, or just guessing. I feel like we’re guessing. "Ok, I’ll take a punt and say your first tile is a “1” (or your last tile is a “12”). There doesn’t seem to be any way to convey any information past the tile that you identify at the start of the game. If you’re lucky you get some repeated tiles at the start or end, and you can indicate that. I want to like this game so much. Our last failure was really my fault, I had a yellow wire and I didn’t place it properly – it’s value was 11.1 so it should have been placed after any actual 11 tile.

Koala Rescue Club. first play. This is a print and play roll and write from Phil Walker-Harding. You roll a dice, then fit the shape it represents onto your board. You are trying to circle trees, and then the koalas in the trees. Finishing rows and columns gives you bonuses. Pretty easy to learn, and good fun.

Dorfromantik: The Board Game, game 10 and a new high score for us. We got our tasks tiles done fairly early, still quite a few normal tiles to go.

Rewind, first play. A diy trick taking game. The usual trick taking rules, follow suit if you can. There are two rounds, using the same cards. So, in round one you play tricks as normal, but rather than taking your won cards, you place a token on the board indicating where you came in the trick (first, second, or third). Then, in round two, you take all your cards back into your hand, and then play all the tricks again, starting from the last (13th) trick, and continuing so that the first trick is the last trick in round two. If you get the same place as in round one – first, second or third – you get to take your token for that trick back. If you failed, the token stays and you get points for your placing. Points are bad, you want to have the least points. It’s a cool gimmick, we had good fun with this one.

Fixer, first play. Another diy trick taker. Each player has boards between them and one other player. Rather than playing a standard trick, all of the tricks are one on one. As soon as two cards are played to a board, you resolve it, like a standard trick taker. If you match the suit but play a higher value, it’s a normal victory and you get the losing card, while the other player takes your winning card. But each suit will win over one particular suit (like, hearts always beat clubs, but always lose to spades). If you win using the suit, then this is a critical victory, which means that you get an extra four points at game end. Each of the player boards contain three tokens, so you can only play to a board if it still has a token. Seemed to go over pretty well.

Aliens: Bug Hunt, fun little dice chucker. Based on the movie of course, you each have a squad of named characters plus two grunts. You move around, completing objectives and fighting off the ever increasing numbers of aliens. And…we lost, one of us lost all of his squad. But we had fun.

[lalunaverde]

Flash Point - played it with @RogerBW . It was the first time I have played the game ever.

Bomb Busters - it has Hisashi Hayashi on the box so I can’t resist the chance when I saw them looking for players. It’s a nice interesting deduction game. I thought it was too easy, and then I discovered it was the intro mission and the game has 66 missions. Glad to try it. I’m keen on the more challenging missions to see if this game is worth getting and see how it fares upon repeated plays. My assumption that it makes itself entertaining by adding more and more different kinds of hoops for players to jump over.

Altay - played it with @yashima . Deck builder with civilisation style gameplay. So, one can focus on miltary, or building, or whatnot. I like this one, and I’m not one that usually like deckbuilder (I’m not hot about Dune: Imperium, for example). I would like to see what a full game looks like and how it fares upon repeatedly plays. Also, my (cough) neighbour keeps attacking me, and not only that, I’ve been gaslit that I was the constant aggressors all along. Absolutely scandalous experience.

Amazonia Park - Knizia filler game. It’s okay, but the egregious box size makes it a no-no. Who wants to pay a full size board game for a Knizia filler, even if you like Knizia?

Panda Panda - during dinner with all the members of the group, we played some quick fire Panda Panda with one of the members and his kid. It was the perfect filler game for that circumstance. I would definitely would like to play this on different contexts/circumstances. Looks like Allplay succeeded on this one.

[felix]

A lot of board games tonight, none of them are new:
Bananagrams - I really like Bananagrams. I think it can feel frustrating for some if there’s a skill gap but everyone seemed to have a good time.
Spicy - this is probably my number one card game, especially for non-gamers. Everyone has played cheat or bullshit and being able to ease people in by comparing it makes the teach super easy. We also have a house rule where when you put your “paw” on the table you say “meow meow meow” which is an excellent addition, I tend not to mention it’s not in the rules as written.
Forks (from @MarkSP) - everyone I play this with loves it. Our guests seemed very keen to get themselves a copy. I can’t make sense of any potential strategy but I’m not sure that it matters when it feels like I’m making clever investments (or more commonly, stupid investments). The pace of this makes it easy to break out and play a few rounds of.
Las Vegas Royale - I’ve never played with the extra modules and have never felt like the game needs more complexity than the base. Chucking dice and hoping for the right numbers is straightforward fun.
The Fuzzies - a bit of dexterity to finish, lots of laughs and a change of pace. Very few rules which was good at that point in the evening. I had the least to drink which probably gave me a significant advantage.

I tried to pick a variety of games that were easy to learn and quick to play, while showing off a bit of variety. Overall a success, I think our guests enjoyed each of them very much.

[Brattyjedi]

Played Concordia with my husband today using the 2-player partners vs Contrarius bot setup from the solitaire mini expansion. First time playing solo stuff in any way and we barely won with our averaged score at 203 vs the bot’s 196.

Then I helped my husband’s mother with some stuff for over an hour while my husband apparently played Disney Villainous with some online buddies via a tabletop simulator mod. This is largely only noteworthy because I love Villainous and my husband hates it and will basically never play it with me. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more betrayed.

[yashima]

I played a round of newly acquired SETI with my partner.

Here are some thoughts.

• I like the rulebook. It was easy to go through it to learn the game. Also all the edgecases I could find were annotated and thought of. This seems to have seen some thorough playtesting. Yay! (Example: “Can I take free actions during my pass turn to move my probes and deliver samples?” “Yes you can!”)
• The turning pieces of the board seemed gimmicky to me and I was very hesitant about the game because of it. I don’t like games with gimmicks. Turns out this is not only well produced (you could possibly light the sun with a small LED) but a well integrated central mechanism that I enjoyed a lot during the game. Yay again!
• Another thing: this game has a lot of stuff on the table. But once you learned the rules, it doesn’t seem that much anymore. Especially the per player area remains pretty neat and doesn’t take up too much space. I also like that the dual layer player boards are just foded boards stuck together which probably prevents warping and also is much cheaper to produce for CGE. Those are nice. Table hog but not overly so.
• Rules retention / mistakes: we consulted the rulebook twice during our game. One was the example above about free actions in passing turns and the other was also about the passing turn when to turn rotate the board. Except for one minor setup mistake with one of the technologies, we didn’t have any blunders.
• There are neat folding player aids that explain all the icons and we almost didn’t need them. But it’s nice they exist and thanks to the folding they don’t clutter the table.
• Everything fits into the box. No needless amounts of air. Just enough that one could build an insert which might be useful to have at least a little box thing for the techs which have to be sorted just so for every game.

That I have to mention some of these speaks to the level of quality that I have had on my table in recent years. CGE seem to have made a well-produced and well-developed game here.

Now, how to play:

• You win by points. On a tie the biggest Carl Sagan fan wins.
• The goal of the game is to discover up to 2 alien races (randomly chosen and hidden at the start) and research them by scanning the skies or sending out probes and processing the data you get to piece everything together.
• You gain points during the game from various sources and at the end for milestones and some cards you might have played.
• The game plays 1-4 players who play 5 rounds, taking turns until everyone has passed for a round.
• On your turn you take 1 action and as many free actions as you want. Possible main actions are:
  • Launch a probe,
  • Turn a probe into an orbiter,
  • Turn a probe into a lander,
  • Research Tech,
  • Process data in your computer,
  • Scan for signs of aliens,
  • pay and play a card.
  • Pass (rotate board, choose a card from round stack, gain income)
• Free actions include discarding cards for resources, spending energy to move probes. Fulfilling missions on cards. Placing acquired data in your computer.
• Resources are: money (used for cards, probes, scanning), energy (used for probes/scanning), publicity (mostly turns into tech), data (used to feed the computer)
• Cards are multi-use:
  • discarding them gives you a resource or movement or VP.
  • They are also assigned a sector for scanning purposes
  • They have an income type associated
  • Plus of course an actual action.
  • Some cards stay in play for final VP
  • Some cards have missions to fulfill (go to Venus, scan a sector etc)

On the player boards you have 3 sections:

• space for tech to improve your probes
• space for tech to improve your scanning
• the computer which contains spaces to insert tech to improve the computer
• You purchase tech with “Publicity” which you gain from cards or from visiting planets or comets with your probes. Whenever someone purchases tech a section of the board rotates. It’s always inner ring, then middle ring, then outer ring and back to inner. It is really hard to explain how this elevates the game but it really does.

Each section / tech type is associated with a color (red/yellow/blue), there are sectors also in these colors plus dark sectors and the discoveries that allow you to find and research the aliens also come in three colors.

• You gain yellow discoveries through probes either as landers or orbiters
• You gain red discoveries through scanning sectors
• You gain blue discoveries from processing data in the computer

To discover the aliens you need one of each type of discovery (I think that is the term used please forgive if not, I am writing from memory) per alien race. Once all 3 are filled (there are automations in place for lower player counts) around halfway through the game, the alien board is flipped, you get out the rules sheet and the cards for the aliens and a lot more opportunities for interesting discoveries. The alien cards are pretty strong and interacting with them is what brought me a decisive victory.

Also for having discovered them in the first place the players who made those discoveries start with some alien cards right away. So one should really try and get those discoveries done.

There is opportunity for tempo here and managing to do as much as you can on your turn. We both struggled with how few resources we had initially. We were both so low on money that it seemed impossible to get anything done.

On later turns I had some really nice action chaining with free actions helping me along to move my probe here, play a card to land my probe (main action) to pick up a sample (which turns into kind of a probe). Gain bonusses for landing. Move the sample to deliver it, gain some bonusses that allowed me to do something else and …

The cards themselves do not have tags like Terraforming Mars or Ark Nova. But it is a big stack of options. And with each card having up to 5 uses there is a lot of stuff you can do with them. If only to hoard them and exchange them for other stuff (handlimit at round end is 4 though).

All in all it plays fluently. A lot of turns I only did my main action. But sometimes it is worth considering which of the three rings will turn next and check where your probes will end up and if it is advisable to move now or later. This is a lot of fun trying to desperately trigger a rotation of the inner ring to align Earth (where probes start) with Mars and Jupiter just so…

My partner was frustrated because I won by a lot of points. Why did I win?

• I concentrated on probes.
• I had all 8 available probes on the board by the end of the game
• I had snagged the first spot in the probe milestone
• I had used the probes to interact with both alien races and obtained and used quite a lot of the alien cards
• I never once used a scan action until the last round of the game when it was the only thing left to do for a few points.
• I got the perfect tech first (accidentally, it allowed me to save energy on landing probes)
• I realized that the data analysis in the computer is not a primary thing to do. Because you get data only from scanning or landing probes and so I only pushed the computer later when I needed blue discoveries.

He on the other hand went for scanning. I am unsure if he could have done better. Scanning is a bit more of a group effort it seems and with 2 players and one of them ignoring this part of the game completely it might have been what cost him the most. This would be a sad thing because the game seems so balanced otherwise.

He didn’t concentrate on scanning either. He bought different techs from all 3 types. And while he pulled ahead initially because he went for an orbiter to gain additional income, it seems the lander bonusses (discoveries) end up being more powerful in the long run.

So I am looking forward to playing again. Even to teaching. This seems like long but easy teach. There is a lot to explain but with an excellent rulebook and a good player aid it seems doable. There is a solo mode included that I want to check out.

I highly recommend checking this out. Preliminary giving this 8/10 with a tendency to rise to a 9.

I would also like to note that Tomas Holek is a first time designer who went to Essen with 3 games this year (SETI, Galileo Galilei and Tea Garden) two of which are topping the Essen buzz list. Also Min & Elwen (Arnak) are listed on the development team for SETI.

PS: I can alredy see the expansions: more cards, more aliens, more milestones, different sectors. And we already got the Pluto promo card Because Pluto is not on the board

[BertFill]

Have had a second go at Ezra and Nehemiah.

I won again (again not by much), so I’m thinking the bot on the easy side of the board is - well, a bit on the easy side.

Which is literally pleasing.

I shall try it on the harder side next time.

What did impress me was that this game went completely differently to the first one. I ended up concentrating on things I’d virtually ignored last time, and not going anywhere near things I’d previously done lots of. So it looks like plays aren’t going to be too samey. Even the bot seemed to have a different focus, somehow.

It’s a very good game. I like it. But I’m not sure yet whether I love it.

[Simfers]

This sounds really cool. Thanks for the detailed overview!

[Whistle_Pig]

Introduced some non-gaming friends to Mariposas at the weekend. They’d heard about our epic 12-hour game of Europa Universalis so I think they were a little apprehensive . Thankfully, Mariposas turned out to be just thinky enough to be interesting but also easily explainable

[yashima]

Tonight I played a solo of SETI against the bot. It‘s an automa. But simple enough.

• It starts with 4 cards that have action priorities on them.
• Actions are mostly the same as the player with slight variations.
• Publicity and data works like for the player.
• Technology is taken but used as one time bonusses on certain actions.
• Credits/Cards/Energy go into a progress meter and every time that fills up the bot gets an advanced card added to the deck.
• When the alien races are discovered the bot replaces the one of the basic cards with the alien specific one. There are solo rules for all aliens.

I am not a huge fan of automas. But I could possibly learn the cards and some stuff you can just see coming: bot has enough data it will probably soon do that action. I has enough publicity, it will take a tech. You can even anticipate which one it is likely to take.

From level 2 onwards there are also some objectives for the player to complete, I will try and play with those next time.

Other observations:

• Most likely mistake to make: forget to take whatever bonus you get from an income card when you add it to your income splay. I forgot this the whole game… and that was 6 resources I didn‘t have. Some of them far more valuable than others… credits/energy > publicity/data. There are more sources to get the latter. Normally publicity/data aren‘t available as income, those were alien cards.
• Even a few scans can help get valuable publicity and with the tech that allows the launching of probes with a scan one can save an action and get ahead… but this needs a lot of energy income. I should have gone with my first hunch to optimize on energy.
• The different aliens are different. But not completely different. Similarities remain. But this game energy was the most valuable resource.
• Terraforming Mars cards that cost 30 credits are epic. Here all the cards cost between 0 and 4 credits as far as I can tell. It is hard to figure out which are the epic cards though a cost of 3 credits already feels like a major commitment for a round… I think it is the alien cards that are the most epic I guess.
• Today, I had a card for the Arecibo Observatory

[RogerBW]

@yashima

Today, I had a card for the Arecibo Observatory

Is Vera C/ Rubin / LSST in there? I have a friend who worked on it.

[Phil]

I made it to a games night for the first time in ages, and played two new-to-me games:

• Harmonies – which feels a lot like Cascadia
• Project L – which I’ve been meaning to try for years

I wasn’t sure I liked the card art style of Harmonies until I noticed just how clearly the pictures of the goal arrangement discs at the bottom of each card popped out at you visually, while also not seeming discordant against the depicted scene. Good stuff.

Both games were fun. I’m not sure if I need to own either of them, but I’d happily play either of them again. Project L felt like a version of Splendor that I can actually get along with, because rather than being a pure exercise in failing at engine building, I get to fit shapes inside of other shapes while I do it :).

“The year has been a good one for the Society. Our members have put more shapes inside of other shapes than ever before. But, I should warn you, this is no time for complacency. No. There are still many shapes, and I cannot emphasise this too strongly, not inside of other shapes. I myself, on my way here this evening, saw a shape which was not inside of another shape in any way.”

“Shame! Shame!”

[SteveB_uk]

The components in Harmonies look satisfying in a very Cascadia way.

[Captbnut]

We played Arcs last night. 3 player game, all of us new to it. 20 minute teach and we finished in about 2 hours with the game going to the end.

I thought it was interesting; there is a trick taking mechanic where you are playing a card that allows you to take actions, but it also can do about 4 other things (which is where the AP comes in), and you can also play it face down.

The board felt tight, there were some interesting battles and the decisions felt meaningful and crunchy. Kate was able to plan ahead, as she does and it took Joe and I playing semi cooperatively (which still feels a bit grubby) to stop her winning in the 4th turn

I would probably play it again (but only with the same group as last night), there is content in the base box to add individual goals (without the campaign) and Joe backed the non campaign expansion.

However, like other Cole Wehrle games, I didn’t love it. It didn’t feel overly thematic last night, which is weird for him. My 2 biggest issues were that Joe won because he rolled 3 dice and the result gave a 22 point swing from me to him (he won with 46). A lot of Wehrle games seem to feel like there is a lot of decision making, strategy and tactics but then come down to the roll of a dice.

And then there is the AP. Each round you play 6 ‘quasi’ tricks. You account for the suit (there are 4), which determines what type of actions you can play, you account for the power (if you follow suit, you must play higher) and the highest in suit gets to lead the next round. So you have to decide whether to play on suit or off suit. The lower value cards give you more action pips, so you have to decide whether you want initiative or actions. The first player can set their card to a zero, which means they can activate scoring for the round (there are 6 things that can score, and only 3 happen each round; it’s really important). However, to activate a certain type of scoring, you have to lead a card of the correct face value! And you have to have the initiative to do this. You can choose to play off suit if you want a specific action, but you only get 1 action point. Or you can play a card face down to get 1 action pip of the lead suit. And in any of these you can play a second card (face down) to steal the initiative. Plus, in the prelude phase youu can spend resources (which you need for scoring) to change your actions or give additional actions. And you can’t start making these decisions until the player with the initiative has led the trick.

It is maddening to play. You can have a great plan, but not get the cards. Or you can play good actions, but not get the initiative to activate the correct scoring.

We were quick because a) we don’t hang around in any game and b) we didn’t fully (Kate did) appreciate our choices. And we allowed take backs

The potential for AP is insane. Game breakingly so IMO.

I would be very, very wary about playing this again because as interesting as the systems are, I really don’t like games where every decision takes minutes.

[Captbnut]

Typing that has made me so angry!

There are people that I game with that I love dearly, but I would rather shut my balls in a door than play Arcs with them.

PS If anyone lifts that into the quotes thread, I’m fully on board with that.

[yashima]

@Captbnut

There are people that I game with that I love dearly, but I would rather shut my balls in a door than play Arcs with them.

I recently told a friend I was willing to play Hex Azul two player with her but not 4 player when she and my partner were included. They are the AP monsters on our table. And Hex Azul is on the harmless side.

I need to include AP potential in my Ontology, thanks

[Lordof1]

@Captbnut

but I would rather shut my balls in a door than play Arcs with them.

Now I understand your online nickname.