I think you’ve nailed why I didn’t like it.
I played with two relentless optimisers. They both ended up ahead by a large margin, but we’re taking at least twice as long as me to take their turn
4 Likes
Sorry if I’m disparaging the people you play with, but they sound boring and I would avoid playing with them. Arcs or otherwise.
Once I stopped playing with “optimiser” players, my experience with board gaming dramatically got better. Newbies, as usual, will be expected to play slow so that’s alright. Veteran board gamers, on the other hand, should know better
5 Likes
I think that may be the root of Mark Bigney’s assertion that “every game is better with a time limit”.
4 Likes
As someone who is prone to analysis paralysis, I do love a good, long turn full of waffling and relentless if-then-elses.
But that’s what I’ve learned to use solo gaming for.
Multiplayer games are about the shared experience; if you’re spending 10 minutes on your turn, you’re not sharing the same experience; your experience is playing the game, the experience of the other people around the table is that of glaring at you
11 Likes
I’m going to apply the same maxim to board games that I apply to sport:
If you don’t care whether you win or not, you shouldn’t be playing.
If winning is all you care about, you shouldn’t be playing.
6 Likes
Well… all players are different. I play just for the fun of it. I don’t care if I win or lose. Winning is okay but so is losing. So long as you gave it your best effort. I think that can also be applied to sports.
4 Likes
I agree completely. I’m struggling to phrase my maxim clearly, to be honest. You give it your best effort, so within the context of the game, you don’t ‘not care’ - you try to win. You just don’t mind - outside the context of the game - if you don’t win. That’s precisely the healthy attitude I think everyone should bring to games or to sport - and what I’m trying and failing to express in my maxim.
Maybe I shouldn’t go for a career in maxim writing.
4 Likes
Unfortunately the game group has two of these people and the group is such a size that it’s possible, but not always, to avoid a game with them.
I get what you are saying …I play to win. Because what would be the point? But I don’t care much about winning. I do about playing.
Der Weg ist das Ziel.
I do as @pillbox and do the waffling on my solo games. I get impatient at the table with others. I am very good at glaring but I also use words: you are taking too long. Think faster. (obviously words are reserved for my slow friends. not for slow strangers at Spiel)
5 Likes
Black Forest x3! - yes! Three times! This is one of those resource management games where you manage different resources at a time. You need glass? Then you need to grab X. Provisions? Get Y.
The flood of choices with the buildings is what makes this so combotastic - even more than Fields of Arle, I feel. Arle compensates with its worker placement interchanging between Summer and Winter.
I will have to decide between this, Arle, and Nusfjord on which Rosenberg farming games I wanna keep.
Panda Spin x3 - still fun!
Pueblo - Playte’s edition. Kramer and Kiesling game that comes in such a compact box!
Mu and More revised edition - pretty cool. Now I want to try the original
Fischen - New trick taker from Friese. You play tricks as usual, but you keep the cards you’ve won as your personal deck to draw cards from on the next round. So the players who lack cards then draw from the deck that contains bonkers cards. However, we played at 3 players and I thought it was bad. But only because it was 3 players. Post-game talks said that 5 player game went well and they dig through the deck complete.
Slide - played this at SPIEL and my friend bought a copy becuase of it. Good filler fun
MLEM - this is way better than I expected. Heck Meck gives that straightforward and simple Push-YOur-Luck in a compact box, MLEM makes it more extravagant with more interesting choices along the way. Honestly, I’m kinda getting tired on trawling through Knizia’s crap. Amazonia Park was disappointing during SPIEL. So I’m pleased that MLEM is pretty fun.
8 Likes
Easy decision: all of them.
I have yet to acquire Black Forest. Maybe today I‘ll pay my post-SPIEL visit to FLGS. (A hunch says Nusfjord and Kanal though. I like how the little decks completely replace all the buildings and Kanal has the wheel and the decks. I need multiplying sheep though. But AFFO provides those. Even if they are cows and pigs.)
I bought MLEM after we played it at SPIEL last year because Cats in Space. We haven‘t managed to play it since then 
Reminds me to try and bring it to the table at my Post-SPIEL event.
There we played MLEM with one of our friends who likes strict rulesets and numbers to see through and the luck put him off. My partner however enjoyed himself. (One reason I bought it, such games are rare).
Didn‘t try Amazonia. Rebirth looks more interesting. I am still waiting for that one to pop up on reviews 
6 Likes
More which Rosenberg farming game to keep alongside Nusfjord, perhaps. Nusfjord (as well as being great; every home should have one) isn’t really very farmy - you do a bit of forestry, but there are no animals.
3 Likes
I played The Gang at Thirsty Meeples last night, having failed to get a demo at Essen, and we weren’t terribly impressed.
The basic game is: you get two cards, and you have to rank your poker hands low to high without revealing them by taking chips rated from 1 (low) to number of players (high). Then you get three cards, one card and one card into a common area, and after each set of cards you do the ranking again. If after the last card all players’ hands are actually in order, you win that round, otherwise you lose; three of either ends the game.
So basically it’s The Mind with poker hands? (I still haven’t played The Mind.) This certainly wasn’t helped by the highest hand any of us got in four rounds being two pair, and everything else was pairs and high cards. So I know I’ve got rubbish, and you know you’ve got rubbish, but we have no way of determining who’s lower…
Also, though there are some challenge cards to make it harder, the bulk of what’s in the box is a normal 52-card deck. Not even any special art.
Not for me.
7 Likes
Yes. I lumped it with the others. “Farming” isn’t the best word, but rather, the rural bucolic theme of his games. Obviously, Bohnanza is the best Uwe ever
5 Likes
Recent solo plays:
- Spectacular. Tried the solo 3 times now. I won on the 3rd attempt. The solo is really smooth even though the setup is a bit of a hassle. The cute insert with the tuck boxes adds to setup a bit. But it’s not bad. I am just used to Cascadia and Harmonies being lightning fast. And yes this one gets grouped in with those two and I want to believe that there is a permanent space for all 3 in my collection.
- A Gentle Rain: like many of the more meditative and less puzzly solo games, on my first game I thought this was really boring with uninteresting decisions. This was my 4th game. The first one annoyed me because I had a really bad print. 2nd one still bored me even with a better copy of the game. I am still trying to grapple with how little game there is and how random and accidental the tableau builds up. And yet… with a cup of tea this one feels like a good Saturday morning addition. And it’s so small… I am coming to enjoy it a bit more. But I wouldn’t recommend buying it.
- Terraforming Mars (App), a bunch of games on Hellas with just Prelude and no Venus. Winning corporations are Robinson Industries, Thorgate, Helion. The losers are Saturn Systems, Point Luna and Valley Trust. Hellas is the hardest of the 3 maps available on the app. Tharsis of course being the easiest one.
- Level 10: a 2016 Hisashi Hayashi card game about a pixel console game that I picked up at the Matagot booth because the art looked cute.
- You have 5 worlds (rows) in which you have to put increasing numbers from 1 to 8 column by column.
- Each world has a colored suit that you have to match of course.
- You need to finish one column before starting the next.
- Each world can be reset to 0 twice. And each column has to contain one reset.
- To scale difficulty there are up to 3 “pause” cards you can add to the deck that act as jokers.
- It seemed easy enough to solo this with 3 pause cards (I only used one). But I guess it could get more difficult with multiplayer and communication rules and no pause cards. I’ll try again if only for having a cute “patience” style game.
- Better than the Onirim-derivatives I played.
- Everdell Farshore: after selling my big box to our friends, this was my first solo with my new box from the lands of cutesy animal meeples. I really like the changes that were made:
- double cards aren’t discarded but stacked on the market
- Moving into a location for free is now only tied to the color of the location/critter and everyone gets 3 ankers to do that a maximum of 3 times in a game. This seems far less random and is a huge improvement.
- Also there are little round goals that if you play matching cards allow your ship to advance on its track for both points and treasures which can be used as a joker resource or points.
- Contracts are replaced by map tiles which you can claim if you have the right symbols. There is less variability here but more scoring opportunities and the bot almost beat me because of those (maps have values between 0 and two to add to the multiplier what each map is worth).
- Overall very nice. I think I made the right choice (for me) getting this version. Friends have been playing the big box a lot and switching all the expansions and they are loving it. I was just overwhelmed. Now everyone is happy.
- Beacon Patrol with the expansion. So this expansion … is more for the multiplayers than the solos I would say.
- Because there are now 5 ships with special abilities that are each tied to certain tiles.
- You only include the tiles for the ships that are in the game and all the other expansion tiles (even those from the base game mini expansion) are removed from the game.
- Before I played the 1 ship solo mode which was awesome. Now in order to get the variety I would need to multi-hand. Oh well.
- On the bright side, there is a hovercraft (no eels) and the different ship abilities seem fun.
- I played with the easiest one the construction speed boat that can move quite far in a single turn because every time they place a tile they can get one of their movement markers flipped back to active. Still a lovely game and I wouldn’t want to miss the expansion stuff.
- The 2 promo tiles are also really nice: one full sea and one full (four sides) land tile you can place if you ever create a spot where they fit that is already fully surrounded. Especially the latter is nice to fix a broken map
- SETI the solo mode. This took a good long while and a lot more rulebook checks.
- The solo is a tiny-ish automa that comes in a bunch of difficulty levels. I chose first level and won with quite a few points to spare.
- I made a few early mistakes with the bot actions (this always happens and this is why I dislike automas so much. I believe though this is one where I wouldn’t make repeat mistakes).
- The automa scans a lot and I can now see how scanning a little bit can give you some easy extra bonusses and I would probably change how I approach multiplayer next time.
- I had 2 different alien races this time which was also nice.
- Overall: I really like this game. The solo is fine. It is not difficult to handle but each bot turn requires enough attention that I lose focus on my own stuff for a moment. The next level of the bot adds some extra tasks one has to perform during that round, so I am curious to try that soon and see if this annoys me or makes the game more interesting.
13 Likes
My buddy Terry and I attempted Scenario 2 and 3 in Undaunted 2200: Callisto, me playing the noble Breakers and Terry at the helm of the mercenary LFA.
Scenario 2 has a typo on the board which states that the LFA needs to have 5 Control Points to the Breaker’s 7… and I didn’t remember to mention that to him until he seized his 5th point (which, admittedly, is extremely easy… both sides start with 4). I managed to wipe 2 of his units out, and he had no more Stalker Z cards in his deck (but the model isn’t killed until it receives one additional damage), and I missed 4 shots, needing 8, on 2d10. Shockingly unlikely, but it happens… Terry swept his Hades into the zone with the Stalker, and then it and a Corp-Sec proceeded to punch my Survey-Tech and Nailgunner to death, nabbing the victory.
Scenario 3 started off stronger for me (the elevated Blaster was great, but the Disruptor failed to actually disrupt anything for 2 or 3 attempts, despite it having AoE and elevation… I think needing 8s is just difficult for some reason?), but since the LFA only has to break 3 structures, and there are 2 that are almost impossible for the Breakers to defend, and the structures are shockingly easy to break (needing 4s)… Terry handily won again. I managed to save 3 of the 6 civvies, but yeah, nowhere close to stopping him.
The Driller was neat, and I think I underutilized it, but gosh it felt like an uphill battle from the moment we started. The Breakers don’t have any ranged Armour cracking (at least that I’ve seen), and the Disruptor is too easily suppressed, preventing it from doing anything.
I’m still enjoying the game, but that’s 3 losses in a row against Terry. I’m going to have to rethink some (all) of my strategies when I approach Scenario 4.
9 Likes
I’m half way through a solo game of John company. It is not going well. Coming back to it tomorrow but expect I may trash the company to try to make some points agains a crown heavy board.
So far it’s interesting but really really hard to get a broader strategy going. The tokens as negotiation with the AI is pretty effective although the upkeep of having an AI book does make things a bit slow.
9 Likes
Galactic Renaissance -
TLDR: Good game but I’d rather play Inis. It’s cheaper and better.
This is one of the games I’m super keen to try as it is Christian Martinez’ area-control game after Inis. No more of that 3 victory conditions thing that the former game have, we now play with veeps.
So much of its flair comes from inis that it’s inevitable that they will get compared. Indeed, it has the schtick of starting with a small map then proceed to expand into a sprawling map. I’m glad how this was executed. Planets are adjacent to each other via portals, rather than behaving where planets are next to each other as if it’s an area control game set in a terrestrial setting.
The end game VPs where you are sent back to 20 VPs if you didn’t reach 30 VPs for the win is a nice touch as well. This tempers the late game problem that VP-based high-interaction games have.
The game still has the same clever positioning that Inis have. The battles (called in game as ‘Disorder’ where emissaries argue with one another) are also the type of painful ordeal that even the eventual winner have to suffer through. I’m glad it didn’t reverted the “big army - smash!!” philosophy that standard ToaMs have.
But the game was wholesale stymied by the deck-milling gameplay and this bit is central to the whole game. Everyone starts with the SAME deck of cards that dictates what actions they can do, with one starting custom card that they draft at the start of the game. Eventually, players add in more custom cards to colour their deck to their style. Well, not really. The card draws are random so the choices are too tactical. Shit. At least with deck builders I have a choice on what to buy whether it’s Dominion style market or a rolling market.
The deck milling order sounds really cool on paper: after playing cards on your turn, you put your cards at the bottom of the deck strictly on the order you play them. Better than standard deckbuilder where you shuffle cards I guess, but this doesn’t make me happy because of how scoring works. A Senator card exists on each player’s deck, and it is the only card that will make you score on the objectives on the board. Congrats! Your score rate is now based on your deck tempo and your game, esepcially the late game is based on how fast you burn through your deck to grab that Senator card to jump from 20 to 30 VPs and win the game.
Our games of Gal Ren really ended on this lame state where 2 players are racing to get their Senator card to end the game. At least it wasn’t painfully long, but man. And the other players are playing bash-the-leader? Inis’ pretender tokens are much more interesting.
And that’s just scoring. Basically, every action that you can do in this game is dictated by your deck, which is random at first, and you spend the whole game trying to rein it in. Oh what! It makes you long for Concordia’s way more interesting hand management.
Both Gal Ren and Inis exist in such a state that you can choose one or the other. And that’s cool. I’m happy to stick with the Celtic psychedelic game.
If you want my copy, feel free to msg me.
10 Likes
It’s been a slow start to the month due to a bout of flu/Covid
Just prior to getting sick, managed plays of:
Nusfjord, great to get this back to the table. Hopefully it won’t be as long before my next game. Very tight game, I was sure I’d lost due to building none of the C buildings and another player having like 3. But my stockpiling of gold meant we tied in the end for the win! Great fun.
Silver and Gold, always a winner. Still curious when I’ll be able to get my hands on the sequel as that also looks very interesting!
10 Likes
Finished with a win amazingly and kept the company going. I used the easy AI rules to let me trade shares to get myself the chairman role I then got the presidency for all regions making it impossible for the crown to maintain upkeep. It does get easier to understand how to manipulate the AI and it is well implemented if heavy on the rules referencing.
I would definitely play solo again but increase the difficulty for the next time.
8 Likes