I’ll say hello! Lordof1 here.
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I’m on the Codenames app as chipwin, currently glued to it enough that I need to cut back a bit. It’s very tempting to keep queuing up games while waiting for turns!
Over Christmas I played Harvest a couple of times and Sea Salt and Paper like some of the others above. Both great, short card games that I’m fairly sure are more luck-driven than skill-based but are both really really good.
I also played, and would highly recommend, Perspectives, with the family. It’s so rules light it’s basically immediate to jump in and start deducing, as long as everyone is up for trying to solve a mystery together. I’ve played 2 cases so far out of the 3 it comes with and haven’t felt like there’s been any unfair logic so far, and both cases have had their own flavour. The only downside is that it’s completely unreplayable but from memory I don’t think it was particularly expensive, and I’m planning on lending/gifting it after we’re done with the last case.
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I should have added that my parents played another game on their own. My partner and I had needed to spend some time in the kitchen, and I realised that I could teach them Lacuna very quickly and leave them to it. I think I should have taught it by actually playing some dummy rounds and then resetting the game (which takes so little time), but it still worked out ok – and I was close by to answer the handful of questions they had during the game.
It was a close game! The score was 4 vs 3 controlled colours, with the final blue flower on the table (needing the ruler to measure who it belonged to) determining the winner.
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So yesterday, while my wife and her brother went to a movie, leaving me home with the kids, I was able to get The Mandalorian: Adventures to the table. Through a number of interruptions, I was able to play the first mission and would have won it if I had played on Novice difficulty instead of standard. As it was, I had completed the objective, but since you have to finish the event phase, I had to draw two cards. The second one killed IG-11, resulting in a loss.
The game is really simple mechanically, and as a co-op it should be really easy to teach. Looking forward to playing through this.
We had another game of the Star Wars Deck building Game: Clone Wars, and this time I lost horribly as the Separatists. Seemed to be a mixture of all my good cards getting eliminated before I could purchase them, and a dearth of my cards leaving me nothing to purchase other than Outer Rim Pilots. So far, this faction seems to be the trickiest to play of the four across both versions.
We also played Lords of Vegas, which I was able to win, though it was a very close 44 - 40.
Today I won as the Empire in SWtDG, and we followed that up with a game of Ghost Stories on Normal difficulty. We actually won against the Deaths Army incarnation. I was on a hot streak of rolling, and as the yellow monk that got a Tao token at the beginning of each turn, any rolls I didn’t win outright I was able to make up with tokens. I don’t think I failed an exorcism the whole game!
We did have to pause halfway through, though, as our older kiddo wanted to play Mario Party with us, which hasn’t happened in months, so we had to indulge him!
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Transpires that I’m very bad at Codenames
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You just look at things in a different way, that’s all…
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The wrong way!
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Just finished my first non-solo game of 1862: Railway Mania in the Eastern Counties – played 2-players via 18xx.games with @lalunaverde.
I’m not sure about Mr. Luna’s depth or breadth of experience with East Anglican railway mania, but I leveraged many of the same map-development heuristics that I developed during solo play. In some ways, the solo game is much more punishing in closing down map development opportunities – in our 2-player game, some key arterial routes were kept available for the bulk of, if not the entirety of, the game.
I mistimed the end of the game and, as a result of a quick-math-in-head mistake, ended up not getting a friend started to help my last company, FDR, out of the corner of the map – where it ended up running a 9F as a 5F for the entirety of it’s manic existence.
A high-scoring game that could have been much different if either one of us had been more aggressive in tokening. I had a narrow victory (merely 7.6% margin of victory).
I adore this game as a solo experience and now I can affirm that as a 2-player experience, it’s very much the 18xx experience I love. The map development is fairly predictable, but the random mix of permits and tranche-availability of the companies seems to keep things interesting – more interesting for me that something as tight and brutal as Shikoku 1889
Coming off of that enjoyable experience, I signed up for an 1862 async game on 18xx.games with internet randoms… so in 8~9 months when that game concludes, I’ll have something else to discuss on the subject.
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Really enjoyed the 2 player one with the standard train roster. The meta that i used in higher player count couldnt be employed. Basically, the train rush was too fast in that meta that, weirdly, you can predict when it happens and bail out before your trains rust and then float some big companies which you merge into a monster company.
The 2 player game was slow, meaning I have to float some, and end up mistiming when to float my good companies. Instead the initial company was bailed out and continued to prosper.
Im wondering if I should have left NGC and start anew 1 SR prior.
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I think I squeaked by the with win simply because I had more companies; more companies means more shares that increase in price. I also had 3 companies with tokens in London; the Midlands off-board can be almost as good as London, which you showed with the NGC consistently.
In the solo game, you get 2 of each train permit, they get put in a randomized order and each company you float receives the next permit in the sequence – this is a really interesting component of the solo game.
On the other hand, in the multiplayer game, each company receives a random permit and that’s the kind of train it can run – this was a new wrinkle for me to wrangle. I think perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is that the Local permits were either in awkward starting/home locations, or in later tranches. I’m used to having a good balance of the three permit types in solo games, so this was extremely different-- though freights and expresses are usually the more exciting permits, so that was pretty fun.
What you said about the 2 player game being slow really resonated with me; I think that’s one reason I really enjoyed it – it was a contemplative experience that, honestly, didn’t take that long to play.
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Slow, as in, the 2 trains werent bought that quickly. They usually disappear due to more players/more companies
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Slow trains and contemplative gameplay are somewhat linked. But I take your point. The A-rank trains stuck around for a long time – much to my dismay. I’m used to the remaining A-rank trains getting discarded after the first OR in the solo game.
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Cuzco
Coin & Crown - deck builder but with coins. I really like the idea, but it’s okay. I’m not super into deckbuilders
Karawane - camel race with blind bidding on how fast everyone goes. Full player count and it was nuts.
Quo Vadis? - friend owns this copy insisting that this is better than Zoo Vadis. I love QV so I’m still happy to play it. 5 player is the best count and played it with 5. Awesome game still!
Pitchcar x2 - pitchcar returns. We made up the tracks on both races. Great fun!
Las Vegas Royale - Rudiger Dorn game and it was a fun light game of rolling dice and choosing which casino you want to assert control on. The mini games added in this edition by Alea are fun
Middle Ages - designer of Splendor and Majesty: For the Realm. It has good player interaction for a modern Euro. Defo would rather play this over the other two, but that’s a low bar. Good fun.
White Castle - thoughts are the same between this and Salton Sea below. Mediocre Euros that were elevated by Devir with their compact smallish box production.
Salton Sea - same as above but with even less interaction and tighter economics than White Castle or Red Cathedral. This is the game to pick over the three titles if you want a heavy tight combotastic Euro. If I’m more into modern Euros, these three games would be in my collection.
Altay: Dawn of Civilization - woooooo! First play post-Essen SPIEL. Enjoyable. Need more plays as I was too worried on teaching rather than enjoying and diving deep into it. It seems that there are roughly 3 strategic avenues in this game though: military, settlement, technology.
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We have now played 3 games in the new Clank! Legacy campaign Darkest Magic.
I am a little less happy than after the first game.
- I am playing with 1 hand tied behind my back as my partner starts whining when I do something he wanted: “Oh I wanted that quest/artifact/card.” “Please don’t buy more cards I am almost dead” (proceeds to buy cards after he has healed). So I refrain from most moves that could be construed as aggressive and even more because I can never tell what would cause the next “Please don’t…” I guess I need to figure out how to play passive aggressive
as this is Clank! one remaining option is playing for tempo to win by preventing him from getting the 20 point mug.
- Some of the quests are now solo quests which is nice for the player in question because they don’t need to fear interference… but it also means that whoever goes to certain questmarkers first is almost guaranteed those bonusses without any further competition. If we were actually playing competitively this would be nice.
- This campaign seems a little more difficult than the first one although we’ve pretty much finished all available content in each of the 3 games… so maybe it just feels that way.
- Darkest Magic gives the distinct feel that it should be played with a full 4 players because otherwise one would really be missing out on story/content/cards. And that feels a little sad because this is not a game we can both 2-hand like Pandemic.
Overall though the game has some really nice mechanics that feel like they will also still be fun after the campaign finishes. I still like it lots. All my gripes are quite personal.
On a completely different note we played The Gang with varying player counts during the NYE party. Probably 20 hands total or so. It’s such a fun game. I introduced it because one fo the kids seemed to need a distraction and then we kept playing for 2 hours.
- it really shows how rare most higher level hands really are (Balatro skews the sense of probability for actual poker a lot)
- it is insanely difficult to sort 6 hands that are all “High Card”
- even with kids playing who have never played Texas Hold’em (the youngest player was 13) we managed to get better and better with some hilarious misses when someone misjudged their hand
- it really plays with the same kind of magic as The Mind or Hana-Bi but I enjoyed it more than both of those. There is more structure here than The Mind and it is far quicker to play than Hana-Bi and so the learning curve is more fascinating.
- more players is more difficult.
- My partner who has enjoyed playing poker for a long time now said it was very good practice for playing actual poker and getting a feel for the math involved and for judging your hand
- The most fascinating different to poker is that everyone always reveals their hand so you can really see how terrible most hands are
- Also most great hands happen when the shared cards are good so it comes down again to “sorting high cards” for the straight that almost everyone managed to complete.
- I totally see why SUSD felt the need to make a review for this even if they mostly praised it for being easy to introduce to people who knew poker but not boardgames. With us it is the other way round. The kids know boardgames but not poker
Really good, definitely want to play again. Can see this be a filler staple much more than The Mind or Hana-Bi (which I only just reacquired) because it can be played for hand after hand however long you like. A single one doesn’t take all that long and then you want another.
I wasn’t quite convinced by the SUSD review (I had bought the game way before that just never got it tot he table) but the game itself definitely convinced me. The review made it sound like a lukewarm thing for experienced gamers. But it is not just to introduce newbies to games.
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Played THREE games yesterday! Can’t remember the last time that happened!
Cascadia with three players, only one of whom (me) had played it before. Everyone liked it very much.
Forbidden Island with four players. Haven’t played this for years, and we’d forgotten how much fun it is.
And finally Articulate. We got given this for Christmas.
I would never have bought or chosen to play this in a million years. But maybe I should get over myself and not be such a game snob, because everybody (including me) had a whale of a time.
(Have we had a topic along the lines of ‘Mass market rubbish games you can get in the supermarket which you assume will be dreadful and no fun at all but turn out to be not nearly as bad as you expected and can actually be thoroughly enjoyable?’)
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Hmmm, we’re going to have 4p tomorrow at gaming, maybe I should give The Gang another shot
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Games over Christmas this year consisted of:
- 6× 7 Wonders with four players. The traditional Christmas game with my wife’s family. I won two of the games and everyone won at least once. I think I have finally figured out how to play my least favourite wonder of Halikarnassós at least somewhat effectively.
- 3× Railroad Ink Challenge (Green) with my wife. A game with trees (108 - 105 win), a game with trails (111 - 105 win), and a game with neither (81 - 70 loss). A lovely little game that’s great for taking with us when we travel. Three of the four pens it came with have now run out of ink, I definitely feel that we’ve got excellent value for money from this game.
- 1× Marvel Champions LCG with my wife. A second attempt at the finale of the Mutant Genesis campaign, which we lost again. Magneto and the Acolytes are brutal and I think we might move on rather than play it a third time.
- Some× Dobble. Still fun. Going from matching four or five symbols almost instantaneously to everyone sat staring for what seems like ages convinced that none of the symbols match is always fascinating. Brains are weird.
- Through the Ages app vs AI. I’ve managed to win two games in a row against the medium AI, but I don’t feel like I really know what a good strategy looks like yet. Excellent tutorial with all the hallmarks of Vlaada Chvátil’s sense of humour.
- 1× Six Second Scribbles with my wife, my parents, and my brother’s family. You get 60 seconds to draw (up to) 10 of the things on a card which share a theme. Even though the cards are split into difficulty levels there seemed to be massive variation in how hard they were even within supposedly the same level. Still entertaining to see what people can produce with ~six seconds to draw a picture.
- 2× Herd Mentality with the same group as above. Try to predict the majority answer to a question. It’s fine, only elevated by the rule that if someone is taking too long to answer you are encouraged to moo at them, which my nieces, nephew and brother had a great time doing.
Finally, in reference to BertFill’s post, even after we “discovered” modern board games the traditional Articulate still remains in our collection and is regularly chosen to be played even when the group consists entirely of regular board gamers. I think it’s a great game!
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Liar’s Dice - new rules put a big boost on this game to me, as I now keep bringing it. Great fun as usual
Medieval Merchant - beige gaming at its finest! The choice between income or VP on a city is good fun and the game got good ways to attack other players
In the Year of the Dragon - one of the few Felds I like
Teotihuacan
Vegas - We had fun, but this is one of Knizia’s numerous bottom-of-the-barrel games
Sardegna - “why did they change it from Crete? They just change from one Med island to another” someone said on the table. Stefan Dorra area control and it is growing on me. It’s still that tactical and incremental game, but the pacing decisions are pretty tasty. It’s is interesting to see players avoiding the sunk-cost fallacy and advance the game to put themselves in a favourable position
Null und Nichtig - ah this might be one of my fave card games of this year and it’s just the start of the year
Camel Cup Cards - card game version of Camel Cup. There’s more control, but that makes the game thinky and rather dry. I agree with the others that the board game is more thrilling
David and Goliath - another trick taker. Clever game, but I don’t need it
Escape: Curse of the Temple x2 - basic game first and then we changed to trasures and curses. Won on both. Always a great treat. 10/10
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Christmas report.
NaNa lots of NaNa, specifically Christmas flavoured
Some Disney Villains: Order Unknown, with a side of Tower Up
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Festive period games:
- a Nice Cuppa: scored one short of the maximum on my first play, so either I got lucky with the cards or this game is too easy.
- Labyrinth: some childhood nostalgia with a friend on Christmas day.
- For Northwood!: I thought I was doing well until the last couple of turns
- SETI: very brain-burny. I can see how this could take ages if you try and calculate the optimum moves, but luckily I played it with people who lean towards the “what happens if I press this button?” style of play.
- Wondrous Creatures: Kind of like Everdell, but not as fun.
- Heat: played with three, which is a bit meh. We got the expansion for Christmas so I’m looking forward to trying out the new maps.
- Carcassonne
- Hiroba: sudoku, the board game
- Azul
- Brass: Birmingham: I think I still prefer Lancashire, but only by a smidgen
- Sea Salt & Paper
- Wonder Bowling: one of the itten fun brick series. This is a very silly game for when you need to fill 10 minutes.
- It’s a Wonderful World: a neat engine builder, but nothing exceptionally interesting.
Edit: reading back that commentary, it sounds like I don’t really enjoy board games! So, a positive commentary:
- Best games played: SETI, Brass: Brum, Heat. I’d really like to get in some more plays of SETI to explore a bit more.
- I’m enjoying using my newfound enthusiasm for solo PnP games as a non-screen way to chill in the evenings while my husband watches TV
- Everything else was made thoroughly enjoyable by the people I was playing with, whether the game great or just okay
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