Last night with local friends who hadn’t played either game before:
Deadly Dowagers, I’m starting to see a way of planning a strategy… but at 4p (and even 3p as over the weekend in Telford) you have to do a lot more adapting to the cards you get. (5 card draft, with 2p if there are three cards I want I can take one and at least one of the other two will come back to me).
Nokosu Dice because I thought it would get inside their heads in just the right way… and it did!
Games meet-up after work tonight:
Thunder Road was pretty lengthy by comparison with the others, but good fun – sound effects were mandatory :).
Hoping to play more TKID soon.
Some recent games:
Jaws of the Lion - Red Guard’s personal mission. This one’s essentially a boss fight against a super-shielded opponent, which is fine with the Red Guard who has a lot of automatic damage-dealing cards. Still, it was a close one, because the boss spawns two Giant Vipers every single round, so you really have to be focusing him hard before you get overwhelmed.
Got quite lucky with one of my Voidwarden cards. It lets you control an enemy to attack another enemy, and the attacking enemy suffers the same amount of damage as the target. Perfect way to get through the boss’s shields, and all the better when I drew the 2x on the attack.
Valley of the Kings - I got this confused with something else Egyptian-themed that I was more interested in (Amun-Re perhaps?). This turned out to be straight deckbuilder (I dislike them and the feeling is mutual). All your starter cards are worth one money, and not many of the cards you can buy in the beginning are worth more than that, and some cards your opponents play can have you discarding cards, and the cards in the ever-changing market get more expensive in the back half of the game. What does this mean? It’s very, very easy to get completely locked out of buying anything new after a certain point. So this one was a waste of time.
Trekking The World - Decent family game where you’re moving around the board, trying to collect a couple different things, and get the right set of cards in your hand at the right location in order to get a big bunch of points. The kicker is that you always have to spend at least one card per turn to move, so you can’t just sit in the place you want and fish for cards. That introduces an interesting little timing wrinkle. We played with the full five, which involved a lot of blocking (can’t move through opponents’ figures on the map), and I won by only two points.
Wilmot’s Warehouse - Enjoyable at pretty much any player count. This time it was at 6. The only complaint I have is the very end, when you’ve finished all the matching. It feels like a waste of time to flip over every single tile, but it also feels odd to be like, “Well, looks good. Congrats us!” without any verification.
Sleuth - 6 is an awkward number for this one, because that leaves 5 public cards shown, which in this case were all pearls (including 3 out of 4 pearl pairs). Cue the laughter when all of my starting clue cards were to do with pearls. Cue even bigger laughter when the missing card turned out to be the final pearl pair.
The one game I’ve played, we flipped over the tiles one by one, reciting our story in an increasingly jubilant and silly chorus. I think we all knew we’d won, but it was fun to be a team for one more victory lap.
Liar’s Dice (Playte edition) - fancy version. I don’t need it, but Playte seems to be smashing it with these small box games. Cups are stored inside the box and fits!
Also Playte either invented this variant or implemented it from somewhere where if you failed your bid. E.g. you bid that there are seven 5’s on the table and there are only four of them, you lose 3 dice!. Regardless on whether they came up with this or not, it’s a big change that made it a perfect filler game (and you can retro it into your own copy of Perudo). My main issue with the original is that it takes way longer than it should.
Ironically, it made us play it 4 times in a row.
Finca - played the new edition of Finca. Didn’t bought it from SPIEL, because it is available in the UK. Very good light Euro of contract fulfilment with twists along the way.
Beacon Patrol + Ships & Shores - 3 players and with the expansion. Now our ships have special abilities. However, we pay for it by reducing our score by 10 pts per player! That’s nuts!
7 Empires - first play and not much to say. Except that it has nuanced shared incentives gameplay that Imperial/Imperial 2030 has. How much depth there is? No idea. It is interesting though that everyone gets a card (aka a share) at the end of each round, but it seems that the decisions aren’t BS because there’s a good score gap between players. More plays required.
A first play of Tuki last night, an Inuit-themed dexterity/ spatial awareness/ speed game in which players build their ‘stones’ (rectangular prisms), supported by various shapes of ‘snow’ blocks into configurations determined by a card plus a die roll. It’s evil, in a thoroughly good way. Very simple in principle, which means one could - and in my case probably would - be whupped by a competent eight-year-old. It’s a chance I’d be prepared to take. Fast-moving and great fun,
We also played Radlands, a post-apocalyptic duelling card-based two-hander, for the second time. I experienced too much resistance from the medium to get any fun out of it, although I do concede that the post-apocalyptic punk pink is very striking.
The King Is Dead and Patchwork with a work colleague this evening. TKID is best at 3p, and I’d tried to arrange that for the evening, but one of the players wasn’t feeling well and stayed home and so I brought in a bunch of 2p options as well, and we ended up playing a couple of different things.
Both games went down well, so calling it a success :).
I keep meaning to try teaching TKID by just starting a throw-away game and explaining things as we go, and I keep ending up explaining the entire thing up-front. I need to work on this. At least there isn’t a whole lot to explain.
Redlands or Radlands? (I’ve only heard of the latter.)
Ta! Bleedin’ autocarrot, mutter mutter…
If it had a color it would be Pinklands 
I think I grokked the system rather better, but my overall feeling was that this doesn’t need to live in a collection that also has Riftforce in it (and Air, Land & Sea and possibly also Compile when that makes it to the UK).
Never heard of Compile and was never in my radar during SPIEL, but a friend during the trip talked about it with praise. Would be keen to try it, rather than buy, as it is a 2 player only.
It wasn’t at SPIEL; it’s not even on boardgameprices UK yet. But Matt released a video raving about it just as SPIEL was starting.
It was at SPIEL. It was at the Greaterthangames booth . I saw it there but it was sold out. A friend had mentioned it to me before the fair… so I checked it out but way too late. It looked quite delicious.
Fair enough, I don’t think I ever even found their booth.
We’re at Handycon this weekend, so we played some games yesterday!
We spent most of the day playing Warlord, which is a war game from the 1970s.
The ruleset is very simple, and combat is resolved by the attacker choosing a value on a d6 up to the strength of their committed forces, and the defender trying to guess the value. If the defender guesses correctly, the attacker loses a piece. If they guess incorrectly, they lose a piece and the attacker gains a nuke 
:
You can stack nukes up to create longer range missiles. When fired, they make the target territory uninhabitable, wipe out everything in adjacent territories, and detonate any adjacent nukes. Since it’s so easy to get nuclear weapons, the game very quickly becomes more about psychology and managing the increasing risk of someone taking out your territory by blowing up your missiles on the ground…
I enjoyed most of the game, but the end condition was for someone to occupy a majority of the cities on the map and after 5 hours we’d reached a bit of a stalemate. Unfortunately there was about an hour between me being Done and everyone else agreeing to stop…
The other highlight was that someone had brought back a copy of Flamme Rouge: Grand Tour from Spiel!
We tried out:
I thought it was a really good expansion. The additions add some significantly different tactical decisions without much extra faff. Definitely staying on my wishlist for when it’s available in the UK 
I met up with the ever delightful @Lordof1 and his partner at my friend’s convention in Plymouth today. Got to introduce my 3 gamer friends from the City to each other which was nice.
We played Obama Llama, which we were not great at
The greatest game of all time, That’s Not a Hat
Zoo Vadis which gets better with every play
Fake Artist which was very good, and nothing to be worried about for this very much fake artist.
Mino Dice which was as nonsense as ever
King of Tokyo which I’ve not played in years and got killed within about 5 minutes.
Had a great afternoon, well worth the 300 miles round trip.
Was very lovey to play with you. I am definitely now a fan of That’s Not a Hat and Zoo Vardis, actually all of them were very fun. We’ll have to do this again sometime!
Liar’s Dice - Playte edition. Full 6 players and losing dice fast is, indeed, way better.
Colt Express - it’s been a while. Good fun!
Living Forest - not sure how to rate. It seems like your standard light weight Euro but the integrated mechanisms is more than meets the eye. It’s not a hidden gem like Noria (I think) but yeah.
High Frontier 4 All - 2 player teaching game with a first time, I uuuhhh… even include the Politics, Terawatts, and Colonization modules. It went alright. He is a Pax Renaissance regular, but it was still pretty heavy.
Yellow built up some factories and colonies in and near Vesta. I colonised good old Mars. And we went off on wildly different targets. I tried to get a Home Bernal near Earth and succeeded. Yellow went towards Saturn and her moons to prospect. Then, the 4 Round game ended.
and then… I went home and solo’d High Frontier 4 All again, with the same expansions. This time with the full 7 rounds (9 on competitive). Now, knowing what an absolute PITA the Van Allen radiation belts are, I made sure to put up a Bernal near Earth as my first main goal. Indeed, the full benefits of having a Bernal started going in. Best of all, I don’t need to worry about radiation.
This led to a series of industrialisation on several locations in the Ceres region. Alas, I think I was very inefficient with it. A 2nd Bernal was made and was towed towards Mars - a staging ground to send in factories towards the Red Planet. Still struggling on fulfilling the objectives on my cards (for pts), I went as far as the moons of Saturn. At that point, I saw my mistakes by not paying attention on getting the cards when they show up.
This inspires me to get HF4A to the table even solo. One day I aspire to be so casual-sounding about this game.
