Maryse and I were sick on Wednesday night (indigestion, so quite the crappy night), so we both called in sick to work to rest up. During the rest day, we played a game of Ark Nova.
Friends, it did not go well for me, she destroyed me 75-14. I started well but my engine ground to a halt at some point while hers was getting going. I’m just glad I managed to get in the positive.
Still a great game.
That’s an “it depends”. It depends on map development, who holds what shares, and the composition of the big cubes on the map and bag
It’s true, but the fact that there are only two shares means the floor of how much money you’re going to be making on it is pretty high, especially since the other holder of the share (if there is one) is going to be equally incentivized to build it up. Among experienced players, I would expect the initial auction for it would climb higher than, say, yellow.
It has been years, but I managed to get Catacombs 3rd Edition back on the table! With a full 5 players, no less!
For those of you unfamiliar, Catacombs is basically D&D meets Crokinole. It’s shockingly complicated, with dozens of icons, colours, and rules interactions that make sense eventually, but are not what I would call intuitive.
Let us take the humble “Fireball and Giant Fireball” in the game’s parlance. The Fireball is a medium-sized orange wood piece that is a missile attack but is not a Missile Attack (those are small brown wood pieces, representing arrows or bolts or quarrels). Because it is on an orange piece of wood, the sticker and icon are both orange, with a white fireball logo in the middle.
But the way the game represents effects is with different colours, usually with different colours for the icon. So a Melee attack is a white fist on a black background, but a Fear Melee attack is a black fist on a white background, a Critical Melee attack is a red fist on a black background, and so on. The trouble is that a Critical Fireball attack has its own piece (the “Giant Fireball”, a large piece of orange wood). So how do you represent a Critical Giant Fireball? Or a Chain Attack Giant Fireball?
The answer is “You don’t.” Giant Fireballs have only one gameplay effect: big fireball that does 2 points of damage instead of 1.
Anyways, the game is an All vs 1, and I played the One. The heroes decided to attempt the 2nd easiest dungeon lord from the starter set (the Gorgon), and for heroes, they took Roosan the Chicken Champion, Rais-something the Ice Mage, Aprill the Fire Mage, and Nici-something the Boomerang Hero Who Teleports. A lot of ranged attacks and some interesting monster manipulation, but not a lot of actual damage output… but, they struggled and fought to the Final Boss Fight!
Now, I put in a lot of additional expansions and pieces into my copy of Catacombs (I don’t think I have everything by a long shot, but I have a lot). And one of those pieces is the Magical Gateway you can see near the top of the board here…
Rules for the magical gateway are simple! Whatever type of shot you do through the door, you can do again afterwards. So if you do a Melee Attack (flicking your own hero) through the door and hit a baddie on the other side, you do one damage, but can then immediately do another attack! Very powerful!
So powerful that Roosan the Chicken Champion spent the entire game trying to get through that tiny door. Each of the six maps they played, brave Roosan rushed towards that door…
… but never, ever, through the door. Here we see the Ice Mage firing an Ice Bolt which also did not end up going through the door.
Friends, nothing got through that door at any point during the game.
Now, I have a few complaints with ol’ C3E. The major one is player elimination: the DM wins if all the heroes are killed, and there are few opportunities to resurrect heroes that are slain. As a result, it is possible for one hero to be killed on Stage 3, for example, and be out of the game until Stage 5 (after the Healer). And that’s not fun. And it happened here: stage 3 one of my Sewer Rats inflicted Poison on Roosan, and I pulled a 3 (the way Poison works is if you have more Poison than your starting health, you die, and Roosan has 8). And then next turn I hit him again… and pulled the only 5 Poison in the deck. Whoops!
Thankfully, the Boomerang Hero had a Resurrect spell, so we got to keep going with everyone included.
My usual system is to try and spread out damage evenly… I want all the heroes almost dead by the time they reach the Final Boss…
Anyway, back to the Gorgon. She has 6 health and a Melee Attack that just kills outright, but she’s not very versatile. Her real power is that she has a final dungeon room that is full of powerful, mobile, and aggressive monsters. All the little blue pieces (“Centaurs”) have move-then-shoot-arrows abilities. The Cerberusi (Cerberusix? Cerberapodes?) can move, then melee attack, and then make two ranged attacks (Chain ranged attacks, so I can’t hit the same hero twice). The Minotaurs just move and then attack, but that’s still pretty good, and they’re big pieces that are easier to aim.
Roosan managed to get a couple points on the Gorgon, and then the Boomerang Hero added one more. But then it was my turn, and since I had evenly damaged all the heroes, I was able to kill the Ice Mage with a Minotaur, take out Roosan with a Cerberus, and Nici-something with the Gorgon herself.
Last turn, Aprill on one health remaining, uses the Flame Antient (like an invincible familiar you summon but then each side gets to use… they’re chaotic and powerful, but you have to be careful that the DM doesn’t get as much usage out of them as you do!) to hit the Gorgon for one point of damage, and then casts Giant Fireball, inflicting the last two points of damage for the win!
Right down to the wire, but gosh what a finish.
Stupid game, but I love it. Big fan. I’ll incorporating the last few expansion elements into the box tonight (theoretically): Caverns of Soloth (just more heroes and monsters, plus more loot), and possibly the Monster Riding elements of Wyverns of Wylemuir (I’ve already thrown in everything else).
One complaint: it is impossible to find the icons for the game listed anywhere that is actually complete. One hero got a weapon called the “Halberd,” which includes an icon that looks like three brackets: (((
Could. Not. Find. It. Anywhere. Not in the rulebook, not on the reference cards, not on the updated reference cards from the Red Box, nothin’. The online references are basically useless (if not worse than that).
Eventually it was discovered on Page 8 of the Catacombs and Castles rulebook. Because of course it was?
Other than that, great game.
Thirsty Meeples Oxford last night.
We started with Moon, which two of us had played at Stabcon and wanted to try again. The cardboard tokens turned out to be no less fiddly than the smooth-sided wooden ones we played with then; oh well. (It’s the hearts that are a particular problem. I think I might be very tempted to use other game contage instead.)
Then, since we were a bit gamed-out but not quite to the level of Timeline, I found Parade on the small-games shelf. I haven’t played this much lately because I’ve been playing Piepmatz instead, but I think it still has a lot to offer.
Love Parade. Unfortunately, I left my copy in a holiday let in Italy!
Just played Dune Imperium
2 players; Finn and me and the automata deck
Finn thrashed me. He got his Swordsman a turn earlier than me. Built an alliance with the Fremen and won the big battles - he got control of all 3 zones.
I had lots of Spice and Solari but couldn’t leverage it into points. The battles I won didn’t give me much.
We both really enjoyed it. Played really well without understanding the IP which I think is a good sign.
We both struggled with faction access, those cards seemed few and far between. The action selection was a nice twist on basic deckbuilding
I’m not a fan of variable card markets in deck builders (one of my biggest issues in games), but would definitely play again.
(That review also includes one of my other all-time favourite SUSD camera shots – something complicated, time-consuming, completely unnecessary, and played so casually that I didn’t even think about it the first time I saw it. Every time I’ve seen this video since, I’ve wondered whether they got it in one take or if they needed to do it repeatedly. This episode also includes their Television Debut – so good :).
War Story: Occupied France, our first try at the first of three missions (we had previously played the free tutorial mission). Bit more to do in this one. Felt like we got lost a bit, moving between objectives. We finished up with a big fight where we were completely outnumbered by ze germans. Rather than fight (and most probably die) we elected to run away, ended up partially completing one objective, and totally failing on our second objective. And one of our guys died, so that’s not ideal. Still, we had good fun.
The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, finished missions 47 and 48 without too much fuss, nearly finished.
Lotus. first play. This is a game about growing flowers. Each turn you can play your cards to start or continue flowers. Different flowers require different numbers of cards (petals). If you finish a flower you get to take all the cards as victory points. Then you add up your influence points to see who had the most – they get to either take 5 vps, or take a special ability tile. The special abilities let you increase your hand size, be able to play an extra card, use a special token that gives you more points on a flower, and take a card from an incomplete flower. This last ability screwed me over when I was about to finish and score a flower. You find yourself not wanting to play on a flower unless you can finish it, because you don’t want to make it easy for another player to complete.
Torchlit, cool trick taking game where you move through dungeons and get rewarded for predicting how many tricks you will win.
Harmonies, not a bad thinky little game. Place tiles, try and complete patterns to score.
Heist: One Team, One Mission, as I always say, I’m not sure why this is on BGG, since it’s an electronic game. I guess it has tokens. You have to take or swap tokens as the game says. We still have fun with this.
The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game, we won one chapter but failed on the next. Still good fun.
Knarr, such a great small box game. We all finished only a few points apart. I had a bit of an engine going, but needed to keep getting bracelets (they allow you to trade and use icons from the destination cards).
Rurik: Dawn of Kiev - good game. Highly entangling with the auction-programming system. Not amazing, but enjoyed it.
When I Dream - great! It’s good coming back to this as we once overplayed the not-so-varied deck
Imhotep
Istanbul: Big Box - we only added the Coffee & Baksheesh expansion. It’s good.
Hanabi
Bohnanza
Splendor - really strips nu-Euro to its bare essentials and it’s shit. Not really a wonder as I’m not into nu-Euros
Played a few games tonight with 5 others and some kids joining in:
Monsdrawsity - still a great wee party game that you can play as much or as little of as you want.
Bohnanza - never played this before and realise I’ve bean missing out.m
Cheese Thief - it’s not a great game I’d advocate but as a my first werewolf with Kids it’s good fun.
Overall a really fun games night.
Played some Sky Team with a friend yesterday. It’s a coop dice game where you’re trying to land a plane together by placing dice. I feel like it’s a bit easy, although very fun. We played one of the hard missions and succeeded with some of the trickier modules added.
Will probably pick up the expansion, not sure what sort of bits it adds.
Been taking Pax Renaissance 2e for repeated spins with a friend on BGA.
Not for me.
At least that’s settled.
Hansa Toot - I played with a fast tempo so to rush the game to an end and ruin everyone’s engine-building strategy. Excellent excellent excellent. I hope they all learnt their lesson.
Ahoy - get to play this finally. It’s sub-par. It’s Leder Games attempt to create a light-weight version of Root. But it fails badly because the game lacks an interesting dynamism between players. Basically, 2 factions play area control and two (or one) play as the smuggler on the sidelines. I get what it does but it was an uninteresting dynamic.
Indeed, Root manage to create depth by creating complexity via its various engine-building factions. And so, remove the complexity for Ahoy, you remove the depth.
Cube Rails and Splotters have spoiled me greatly.
The Crew
Old London Bridge
LAMA Party Edition
Tea Garden - same designer as Galileo and SETI. This one is a light nu-Euro. I’ve cooled on SETI and this one doesn’t really impress. I can already see this game being so rote in just one play.
Azul: Master Chocolatiers
Xylotar - played again and it is excellent
Curious how this is done. I couldn’t see any alternative to competing over the +actions.
I controlled the cities around the upgrade areas. Either you give me a lot of points enough to reach 20 or go somewhere else. Going on those upgrades gives me points to, and so, I upgraded my privelege levels which allowed me to solidify control.
The game ended before people could runaway with their 4-actions turns. I only have 3 actions. No one reached 5-actions. It was quick.
Interesting. I also went for a 3 action win, but I probably just didn’t play optimally (first play).
This worked for me, too. Dominating Privilege (and then planting yourself to score if anyone tries to compete) lets you control the board and also score big in final scoring.
Still, I think if people had bitten the bullet and given me those points while upgrading privilege they might have wrested control back. So it’s not a dominant strategy, just an unexpected one.
Sounds like it was probably a lot more fun for you than for anyone else…
There are lots of strategies. Increasing your book of knowledge can give you amazingly good turns moving lots of pieces around on the board, potentially completing empty routes in a single action – especially if you’re gaining extra cubes on the board from opponents displacing the pieces you inconveniently put in their way. With privilege you can dominate control of cities and also repeatedly take advantage of smaller routes, rapidly accelerating the end-game while still increasing your network worth. Occupying desirable routes will tend to push you further ahead on the score track. If you successfully target the bonus route across the map as well, you can end the game very suddenly. With privilege and discs you can get very significant points from the Coellen track. I suspect money bags is a bit underrated, but that can save you a lot of actions over the course of the game, letting you make better use of your actions each turn you have. And the bonus tokens are excellent for doing sneaky things.
