Recent Boardgames (Your Last Played Game Volume 2)

[yashima]

We played Game 4 of Clank! Legacy 2 Darkest Magic. This time there was a lot fewer quests and it seems that the amount of character story is alternating between our characters and so it seemed almost pre-ordained that I won. My partner took it with better grace than usual. So I count that as a bonus-win. Maybe we‘ll figure it out.

I have started timing my games with BG Stats. Every game of Clank! Legacy takes us around 3 hours. Normal Clank! is much faster. Legacy has a lot of extra time for putting stickers on things.

Next up a few meditations on A Gentle Rain turns out this plays really badly with a migraine. But overall I have warmed to this very gentle puzzle. I lost twice and won once. I blame the migraine. The game seems to be a good test of where my cognitive ability is for a day.

Lastly, I put myself up to a 25x1 challenge of playing some of my underplayed big solo games and I actually managed to complete one of those tonight and I really don‘t know why 51st State is not in my regular solo rotation. It‘s perfect. Zee Garcia would know. (I haven‘t watched Dice Tower in a while but for a long time it was one of his absolute faves). It took my about 45 minutes and that included a lot of rulebook lookups because I had not played in 2 years. Setup is a breeze, and I just left it on the table. It might be that this is a case of being excited for the big KS edition, loving it but the excitement of new quickly fading and now with some time between me and the KS anticipation, I can actually appreciate the game a bit more. It‘s a simple enough engine builder and unlike most of those (Furnace, Splendor) it has a very good solo mode. Actually it has several solo modes… I played the basic one. Empires of the North is the latest iteration on this design for those who don‘t know.

I am so glad I challenged myself to relearn and replay some of my big solos—if the challenge only serves to remind me how nice this game is it‘s already a win.

[lalunaverde]

Been playing 1862: East Anglia with @pillbox . I hope our plays were enlightening to you. This is pretty much how I play with higher player counts. It’s been interesting to me since with 2 player, I have to be more aggressive on pushing the game once you’ve got the upper hand. On a 4 player game, there will be 3 of us pushing it!

I did spotted a mistake on my last play. I floated 5 companies at incremental cap - I did it because it’s the only way to reach £200 par. This is why I don’t participate on Parliamentary rounds on late game. Only having max £100 par is bad.
Anyway, all 5 corps only got 60% funding and the merging made me unnecessarily lose share value. If I stuck with 3 companies, all at 100% funding, maybe, I would have done better on the last round??? The drawback would be the lack of train type diversity, but that doesn’t seem super when the “X per kind” limit is gone and replace with a flat limit by the time we reach Phase G and Phase H

[pillbox]

I’ve greatly enjoyed my 2-player games of 1862: East Anglian Train Madness. This last game was particularly eye-opening. Influenced mostly by my solitaire locomotive adventures in the Eastern Counties, I clutched onto my precious old companies, sure that the slew of new-fangled railroads my opponent was single-handedly funding into existence would struggle for adequate routes to run their trains, be they many.

Unfortunately, it took only 1 operating round for those companies to lurch into action, gobbling up fists-full of cash as they brought the biggest trains imaginable and ran (literal) circles around my meagre operations.

Not a blow-out win, but I knew after round 2 of 3 that the game was over.

The lesson here is that if you love something, don’t. Drop it and find something shiny and new.

2-player 1862 is so good. I think I prefer it to most of the other experiences I’ve had, outside of possibly 1862 solo. They’re both good, but in different ways.

I can imagine in-person, this game is even better simply by the nature of wry smiles being easier to see.

[RogerBW]

On Monday night with nearby friends: Yokai Septet, the recent small crowdfunded edition, which I think may be destined for a deck box rather than the current false-bottom one…

and one I haven’t played since 2022, Steampunk Rally, including the Fusion cards, but using a BGG-suggested reduced deck so that you don’t get clumping and duplicates. I had forgotten how much fun I found this game, though I think it was harder work than it should have been for the newcomer.

[bort]

How was Yokai Septet? I’ve got the recent kickstarter version as well, haven’t really had time to look at it seriously (I’m lying, I have plenty of time, I’m just lazy…)

[RogerBW]

Third game for me, first with real components. I did very badly but enjoyed it. Still not at all sure how I should try to signal with the three card exchange. One player who tends to take a lot of thinking time did that here, and I think it would be better if it moved faster.

[Phil]

My second game of Hispania went a lot better than the first, but I ran out of time with one region left to secure. One extra turn would have sealed it…

It’s too early to know whether I prefer this to Tetrarchia, but I can say that the changes are very significant – the DNA of the earlier game is plain to see, but they play quite differently to one another.

Some of the notable differences:

• You have 3 generals instead of 4…
• …But you are very mobile around the coastline – locations connected by a chain of roman roads are only one movement point apart! (That’s most of the South coast by default, and you have a handful of extra roads to place where you like.)
• You can allocate additional action points to boost the strength of an attack to shift the dice odds more in your favour (at the cost of doing fewer things that turn).
• Enemy armies won’t leave their home region unless/until it is entirely in revolt…
• …and they have no single destination to head towards.
• There is no “unrest”, just “revolt”…
• …And just 22 of those tokens in total (vs 20+21), but that’s mitigated by…
• …No uprisings! (although a city in revolt can gain up to 3 revolt tokens). This is like removing Outbreaks from Pandemic, so it does take away some of the drama.
• …The turn limit (there’s now a turn limit!) is also tracked with the same tokens – if the game goes the distance there’ll only be 12 tokens available to be placed on the map, so you’d better have most of the map under control!
• Individual cities now have variable strength (1-6) which you need to defeat in battle (siege) to remove revolt, with (as always) some of your attack strength dependent on a die roll…
• …so the strength-boosting garrisons are now as important for eliminating revolt as they are for battling the roaming armies.
• …but you can also now send previously-deployed garrisons back to the reserve, and redeploy them elsewhere later.

Enemy armies actually feel less scary to me in this game, as they’re less prone to charging across the map leaving chaos in their wake (although they’re also less predictable, making it harder to flank them reliably). The rules around revolts and sieges feel like the most significant changes, though. Revolt is both harder and easier to remove – some cities are heavily defended and might resist; but at the same time, with enough garrisons a single general can suppress revolt in many cities in a single turn.

[Captbnut]

Just tried a pure solo at Horizons of Spirit Island

Was going ok until the 4th invader card. There’s a lot of Coastal Lands on a small island.

Didn’t last long from there

[lalunaverde]

Nusfjord - played with 4 players speedy sailors that the game went for slightly over than 1.5 hours. I forgot who won. I was too immersed with the combo building in a rustic Norwegian village.

Deus - old game and it does the card tableau with a shared map than some games that does this.

Elfenroads as part of the club’s Spiel des Jahres challenge, we played Elfenland. 4 players and we bunched up trying to use other people’s transportations until we dont. We end up splitting up and then converge when it’s good for us

Skyteam - it’s okay. Granted we played on the starting scenario so it was a bit easy. Not sure I want to play again especially whem we follow up with…

Dracula vs Van Helsing - tense and fun as always

Dracula vs Van Helsing - played as Vam Helsing this time

Tower Up - been keen to play this and yo! Very good old school game. Keen to play more and see if there’s more in here

Viking See-saw x2 - Knizia dexterity!

Agricola - playing against 3 Gric vets and we played the proper way: drafting. Manage to build a combo with wood gathering, which allows me to grab as much as 5 food in one action. Glad to play it, and also im glad not to own it. I cannot tolerate playing Gric with randoms.

[BertFill]

@Captbnut

There’s a lot of Coastal Lands on a small island.

There should only be three, shouldn’t there?

[Captbnut]

Ah

I had a single board, so assumed anything on the edge was coastal.

That seems a bit more fair!

[RogerBW]

More Steampunk Rally last night, getting my rules knowledge back up to scratch. I’d love to PBF this, but it would take An Age to do all the drafting…

[COMaestro]

Last night we got in two games of Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth. This is the 7 Wonders: Duel successor, and it’s pretty dang good!

Game explanation and comparison with 7 Wonders: Duel

So you still have three ages (Chapters), the card layouts for each are the same as 7W:D, and you still have the overall concepts of the colored cards and wonders. The two main twists are no points, and the military map.

So instead of points for blue cards, you have the Hunt for the Ring track. Blue cards have 1-3 rings on them, moving you that far along the track when you take them. I think it is 14 spaces for either side to get an instant victory.

The military map has seven regions. If at any point you have presence in all seven, you win. If you ever deploy or move units to a region your opponent has units of their own, they eliminate each other on a 1-to-1 basis, until only one side has units left or both are wiped out. Not only can you win instantly on the map, but if you get through all three Chapters without a victory, whoever has presence in the most regions wins, so even if you can’t get everywhere, it is still important to keep up your military might, which IMO gives it more of an impact that the military in original 7W:D.

Red cards let you deploy units to one of two regions, shown on the card. You get a number of units equal to the chapter number and they all have to go in the region your chose. Purple cards show up in the third Chapter, which provide unit movement, allowing you to try to grab the win, or take out your opponent’s units to prevent them from getting it.

Instead of Wonders, this game has Landmarks. In addition to some other beneficial effect, the main reason to get these is it places a fortress on the map in one of the regions. There is one Landmark for each region. The fortresses cannot be eliminated by other units, so it can get you presence in a region where your opponent has units without needing to eliminate them all.

Third method to win instantly is to collect six symbols on green cards, representing the races of Middle-Earth. There are six different symbols, with two cards each throughout all three Chapters. If you collect both for a given race, you get to draw a couple of bonus tokens and choose one to keep. Most of these are ongoing effects, with only the Ents and Wizards in Ch 3 being one-off effects. Additionally, once per game if you have three different symbols, you can take one token from each faction and choose one to keep. One of the tokens is a seventh race symbol, meaning you can miss one of the green card symbols and still win with this method.

I like the tokens in this better than 7W:D because they are all in play, so you know you have a chance at all of them. The subset of five science tokens in the original does help each game be different, but does mean you will miss out on a lot of tactics that the tokens allow since they aren’t in the game.

Money and resources have been simplified. There are just five resources (Skills) and coins only come in values of 1. You can still sell cards from the structure, but now you just get 1 coin in Chapter 1, 2 in 2, and 3 in 3. Additionally, purchasing missing Skills is just 1 coin per icon, so no need to see how many your opponent has and add that to the default cost.

Overall, while there are more components and more symbology to learn, I feel this is a streamlined version of 7W:D and surpasses it. The addition of the military map gives greater weight to red cards over the original game’s tug-of-war, and even if you have a bunch of units in one region, the ability for your opponent to get a fortress there means you can never take it for granted and have to compete there.

Similarly, the Hunt for the Ring track is great, because again you cannot just ignore all the Ring cards or your opponent will win with them. The tokens already provide enough incentive to fight over the green cards, but even moreso than the original game as there are so many possibilities compared to the just five of 7W:D.

And no need for a scoring pad at the end! Just an overall improvement on the original.

First game our kids were being distracting, on top of being our first play, so I was able to grab a military victory halfway through the second Chapter as my wife didn’t notice it.

Second game went all the way to the end of the third Chapter, leaving just one card in the structure after my wife took the one Wizard she needed to get six symbols and the win.

Good game. Hope it becomes one of our regular rotations.

[bort]

MLEM: Space Agency, first play. This is a fairly light dice rolling game, with the theme of cats venturing out into outer space. Sure, why not. Each turn, the current player starts the expedition from the first space. Each space shows what dice are needed to advance. You can use any matching dice, the only rule is that if you take a value, you must take all of that value. You’ll advance the rocket, and then you get to roll again. You always get one die to roll again, but anything you didn’t use on the last roll is also available. If you don’t roll any matching dice, the rocket crashes! Oh noes! But it’s no big deal, your cat astronaut survives to start again. As your rocket progresses, the astronauts can choose to land on either moons or planets. Moons just give points straight up, and have limited spaces. Planets are available for everyone, and are worth points at the end of the game (area majority).

You have eight cats to choose from each turn, with various powers. Like the parachute power, which gives you an opportunity to land even if the rocket crashes. And you can get double points from planets or moons, very handy. You select which of your cats you’re going to use for the current expedition, and the current player goes first and is in charge of rolling. If they land and there are still other cats on the rocket, the next player takes the dice to use.

It was pretty good fun. All push your luck of course. We wondered how lucky you would need to be to actually make it to the end of the track, just takes one or two good rolls I guess. We never managed it – maybe we weren’t committed enough. Good clean family fun.

Dorfromantik, hadn’t played this for a while, but it’s easy enough to get back into. Things didn’t completely go our way, we ended up equaling our score from the last game we played (back in October). We didn’t get thru all of our task tiles, so that was bad – sometimes they just don’t fall the way you want them.

Gachapon Trick, another go at this. I really didn’t like the paper money I used last time, so I bought a poker set from Amazon that had some really nice (for the price) poker chips. Much better, easier to count, more fun to play with.

So Clover!, a bit of cooperative word play. You get a plastic clover and four word cards, which you add randomly to the clover. You then need to write a single word to match each pair of clues. And it’s hard! It’s always entertaining watching the others attempt to match your word. We failed pretty badly, but it was still fun.

Knarr, how good is this game? Only our second play, but we’re really enjoying it. It’s easy to learn – you only have two choices – recruit (add a card to your crew) and explore (discard cards from your crew to take expedition cards). I had lots of possible points on my ship, but needed to get bracelets to enable me to use them. Did it a couple of times but then failed, which let everyone else race ahead. There always seems to be something to try in this game. We ended up with two players on 40 points (neither one was me…), and the tie break is the number of recruits and bracelets you have on your ship.

[Phil]

I played a solo game of Ecosystem: Coral Reef. It’s a simple card-drafting tableau-builder where different creatures want to be in proximity (adjacent, mostly) to specific other creatures.

I’ve played the original Ecosystem with 3-4 players (there were no solo rules included with that version), and it’s a nice little drafting game that way, where you’re always choosing your next card from whatever hand the player next to you gives you. It can be a little A.P.-inducing if you’re not already familiar with the scoring combos, but otherwise it’s quite a nice lightweight game, and you’ll probably be handed something you don’t want at the end of each round and forced to make the best of it.

The solo rules in this version have you trying to make the best tableau for yourself and the worst tableau for an opponent, and you score the difference between the two totals. This (my second) game scored me 119 - 18 = 101 points, which appears to be a very high score (the easy/normal/difficult thresholds being 55, 70, and 80 points). I’d only scored ~50 or so points in my first game, but having observed my mistakes when scoring that game, I found that it all seemed a bit too straightforward in the next one. (I did have good luck with the cards though – especially ending up with three Whales after getting a lot of Krill.) (Edit: I realised I’d both mis-calculated and missed an entire phase of the scoring, so my 85 points is now 101!)

On first impressions I can’t recommend it for solo play using those rules. The random hands will definitely provide some variety, but you also have quite a lot of control (you can see how I was able to discard almost everything I didn’t want to the other tableau in that game) and I felt like I might just wind up doing more or less the same things in most games. I think solo rules for a drafting game are always going to be a challenge to do well, though, and I suspect that multi-handing would be a better approach.

[yashima]

• I played 2 more solos of 51st State (with the base and Winter sets) and then setup the deck for the next game using a different expansion set for the next times. I am quite happy to be back playing this.
• Still playing Sprawlopolis / Naturopolis
• I have returned to playing Fertig! on the app and I am happy that I still know how to sort the files in order before running out of coffee Still would not want to play the physical version of this game.
• I played a 2 handed learning game of Splendor Duel last night and today I lost the first real game against my partner. Yay. I kind of had to force him to make the winning moves on his last few turns. He was quite a bit ahead in points but wasn‘t realizing it until I told him he was winning and he only needed to buy 2 more points somehow. It‘s not like I let him win. He‘s just better at Splendor (in other incarnations of this game he has also won most of our games) than I am but has trouble realizing he is not losing… what to do with that?
• A Gentle Rain has been on my table quite a bit but I have rarely been winning this one last week. One would think it is all too random but when I don‘t have a migraine I usually win 4 out of 5 games and with migraine it is the other way round.

[lalunaverde]

Rise & Fall - yep. Another game of R&F. I’m targeting 5 plays

Azul: Master Chocolatiers

Liars Dice x2

Through the Desert

Trade on the Tigris - this is a pretty good trading game. If you prefer a lighter one than SIdeCon, this is a good one. The decision space is narrower, indeed, where you decide which track you wanna move up: Marduk or Ashur; dictatorship or democracy.

Santiago - brilliant mean game. Should I bring this to AireCon?

Camel Cup + Supercup - full house of 8 players (although Supercup does increase it to 10. That seems excessive even for a party game). Betting racing game that is more jolly and rowdy, but with some amount of thinking. The “unsolvable” aspect of it is better with the Supercup to stop the game from being obvious and push it more towards gambling than calculating.

[COMaestro]

Two games of LotR: DfME today. I won both with a military victory, the first game on the very first card of the third chapter, the second one my first turn of the third chapter. Well, technically my second turn, as I took a Landmark while I had the token that gives me a bonus turn after doing that which I then used to get a purple card to make three moves on the map, which gave me the win!

We also played Lost Cities which I won, and then later Star Wars the Deck Building Game which I lost, by being 1 damage short of my wife’s last base on my turn, and her having more than enough to finish off my base on her turn.

[SteveB_uk]

I played Unmatched Adventures: Tales To Amaze solo (playing Jill Trent and Golden Bat against Mothman, The Blob and Loveland Frog).

I won! Never played any unmatched before and while I know that this co-operative version is slightly different, it’s good fun. I did very well with Golden Bat’s special power of +2 damage if you haven’t manoeuvred, and one spectacular round of moving him to a zone boundary just before his “hit everyone in your zone” card applied to both zones.

The situation moves fast, with some “if you won, do more damage on top” cards from both heroes and enemies. I thought “I’ll let my heroes soak some damage since they’re on max health” and a round later they were LOW on health. It was my first game and for a moment I forgot that purple cards are attack AND defence, and thought that I was very low on attack cards. At the end Golden Bat was on 1 health, Jill Trent on 4 and Daisy was already gone. Only one bridge down though.

Delighted to see Jill Trent in the game, as she is in fact “Jill Trent - Science Sleuth!”, a pulp heroine from 1943-48. In the comics she fights crime with SCIENCE, including “Infra-radiant magnifying specs” and “Electro-Repellant”, and lives with her punchy sidekick Daisy. I love pulp. Also uses indestructible cloth which does appear in the deck, although if I remember it right this is the gadget that she has to be most careful with because it’s dangerously radioactive. Yay 40s science powers.

[mistercrayon]

We played our first game of Tower Up and first couple of games of Fiction.

Fiction is like a duelling Wordle game. One person guesses and the other person chooses the word. The twist is that the word chooser has to respond in the normal Wordle way (full correct, correct letter, wrong) but with precisely one falsehood. The cool bit for the word chooser (which could easily be purely passive and boring and waiting around) is this idea of strategising the lie. It’s fine but there is a lot of waiting around. The game tries to remedy this with a timer aspect.

I think a lot of the allplay stuff is kind of fine? Like max fun level is just okay? Cool production and so on though.

Today we played Tower Up. Two player. I actually really dig this one. I think it itches some of that Azul(1) feeling where you’re trying to lead your opponents into presenting better moves for you. There’s some lovely play where you have to be an arsehole all the while the game is very readable (maybe this is the genre: parsehole). It looks nice too. You have these nice chunky monochrome towers but this splash of neon in each one. I want to play this more.