In that case you need to simultaneously play base 1861, 1861 with canadian stock market and 1867 straight. Take a turn and move to the next game. Same players in all 3 set ups. Make full use of the 3 sets of 2 games 
3 Likes
Got plays of Hanamikoji, Letter Press, The Shipwreck Arcana and No Thanks in tonight. Thatās a pretty good evening of gaming. Iām hoping to go through a lot of the smaller box games this week, see if thereās anything to add to a pre-Xmas cull.
Not totally sold on Letter Press. I enjoyed the first few plays of it but everytime I play it now I think I could be playing Paperback or Hardback instead. So that might be for the chop, though it wonāt exactly free up much shelf space.
4 Likes
Brain Explosion
2 Likes
Last night my wife and I had a rematch of Concordia. We played after the kids were in bed, so there was a lot less stress and distraction involved. I felt like I was doing rather poorly for most of the game, lacking resources I needed, not spread very far, etc. I managed to turn some of that around by the end of the game, but not enough to win. My wife built her last house, one turn before I could do the same, giving her the Concordia card, the scoring difference of which gave her the win, 127 - 116.
Then today I played the Where Doom Awaits scenario of my Dunwich campaign for Arkham Horror the card game. I started off pretty good, but then monsters started spawning which I could not take out in one turn, and all of them were Hunters, meaning they would follow me around if I tried to just avoid them. Eventually took enough damage that one more attack would defeat me, and after four rounds or so of successful evades, one finally happened, defeating me and ending the campaign! It was not a good ending, in case anyone was wondering. 
4 Likes
āYou accept your fate. You are at peace. Then the chewing starts.ā
5 Likes
Day of gaming with some buddies today:
Kokoro, I won this one - I have no idea how, things were awful from round 2 on. Lots of disjointed paths that I was never able to connect up.
Fox in the Forest, as usual I lost this one. Iām really not very good at trick taking games. Maybe I should take up my wifeās offer to teach me how to do well at themā¦
KLASK, itās great, enough said.
Splendor, couple of games of this one. The first one I won solidly by neglecting one color entirely in a very streamlined push to end it early. The second game was quite close, though a lucky noble grab in the last round was enough for the win.
Suburbia, was reminded just how much I like this game. Shelled out for redevelopment planner in order to snag a casino early on (my private goal was max income, so it was an easy choice). That plus grabbing and then investing in a redistricting office (which takes population from your opponents and gives it to you) gave me a solid lead. Oh I invested in some mountains too, that helped bump my rep up quite a bit. Suburbia Inc is really a must have expansion for fans of the game Iād say. The stuff it adds is great without making the game much more complicated.
Super Big Boggle, my wife got the afternoon off work due to IT issues, so she joined the rest of us for some rounds of Boggle. Had a few mediocre rounds but then a big one with a +40 score, which is really high for us!
Love Letter, this was a longer 4 player game, as we were all pretty close to winning before a victor was crowned (not me)
Hey Thatās My Fish, this one always reminds me of Through the Desert. I think I prefer that one, but HTMF is much quicker, and we were after a quick game before folks had to head off.
3 Likes
Played my second game of Twilight Struggle, and I won!
Well almost! I got to Turn 7, kicked the USSR out of Africa and Central America, held on in Europe and got spanked in Asia. Am I right that scoring cards never leave the deck and that makes Europe the key to victory?
5 Likes
Yes. But winning control of Europe isnt straight forward, of course. I only won once on each side with Europe victory.
3 Likes
Oh, you can lose badly because of any continent!
Europe, Middle East and Asia are in the deck from Early War so doing badly in 2 of them is problematic
SE Asia leaves the deck, the others do not.
The reshuffle opportunities are important. The deck usually gets reshuffled part-way through the deal on Turns 3 and 7, while Mid War cards are added on Turn 4, and Late War on Turn 8.
This means the Early War regions, Europe, Asia, and Middle East, typically get scored 4 times if they come up on Turns 1 or 2, then 3 to 6, then 7 to 10, and final scoring. If one turns up only on Turn 3, halfway through the deal that triggers the reshuffle, it cannot be seen again until the next reshuffle, at the earliest Turn 7.
Edit: the game does indicate some of this, with a marker by a region to indicate it will not score until the next reshuffle.
So the importance of a region can vary significantly, game to game, mostly based on that Turn 3 deal, and also Turn 7.
(If the China Card gets used a lot, and Our Man in Tehran and āAsk Notā¦ā donāt get through many cards, the Turn 7 reshuffle might not happen! So, in an extreme case, you might see Europe discarded on Turn 3 by Five Year Plan, no reshuffle on Turn 7, have it discarded by Five Year
Plan on Turn 9 or something, and only scored once in final scoring!)
4 Likes
Played Exit: The Game. The Pharaohās Tomb or somesuch.
Itās very hard.
5 Likes
After my visit to FLGS I had a new game to try out: Faiyum
This is early in my first solo game. So to āwinā that solo the rulebook suggests you need 150 points. Maybe I did missed a rule or something but I scored 220 points or soā¦
I really need to play this multiplayer, I donāt think the solo-mode is bad but it lacks essential pieces of the game play (interaction and other players blocking spots or building things) and I found it a little too easy.
So itās a card game with a board and the āgimmickā is that you do not have a draw pile but you get to recover cards to your hand from your discard in order of last-in-first-out and you have to pay for every card you want to recover beyond the first three. So this is one of Friedemann Frieseās things he does having you play cards in a certain order so you can optimize their usage. (FĆ¼rstenfeld, Freitag, and Finished all do thisāthose are just the ones I played that come to my mind right now). I ended up with a huge pile of cards the bottom of which was absolutely inaccessible.
There is a market of cards (sorted by numbers, I hear it is heavily inspired by the Power Grid market but my one and only play of that game was more than 10 years ago I think) where you get to buy new and better cards to play.
The map is where the actions of your cards are played out where you harvest resources that you in turn need for build actions. There are settlments and monuments and production buildings. Each hex field of the map is also a worker spot. No player owns the structures on the map. You own the cards in your hand and discard and the resources you get from harvesting.
The rules are simple and there is a comprehensive glossary (in English and German) for every single card. I learned the game in no time at all.
There are a handful of cards in the whole deck that manipulate the discard pile. I wished there were more. My play lacked the āfine movesā or ācascading effectsā. Yes, the cards toward the end of the game are more powerful but in a solo the game lacked an exciting arc and I am reasonably sure this wasnāt a fluke. So I am waiting for my partner to agree to a game (heās not a fan of 2F games).
5 Likes
Hey Thatās My Fish is one of my few 10-rated games simply because of the short burst of intense cut-throat competition that it provides and itās the one game that I know that I can teach no matter how drunk I am.
Onto my own recent playā¦
Rococo: Deluxe Edition is fabulous. So many interesting and consequential decisions in what is actually quite a light, breezy game. I lost pretty badly due to mismanaging my staff and being stuck without the right cards at a critical juncture. A thoroughly enjoyable experience and I canāt wait to try it again.
3 Likes
Last night my wife and I played Ghost Stories. It actually went pretty well and we ended up winning, though twice we did retroactive actions, once to put a ghost on the opposite side of its board, the other to un-haunt a tile with a yin-yang token after rolling the curse die and seeing we would lose from having three haunted tiles. We were tired, so we allowed these. Everything else was legit though.
Hope Killer was the incarnation of Wu-Feng, needing two each of red, blue, yellow and green to defeat. We also had a red tormenter (roll the curse die each round) that was a threat as it could insta-haunt to lose us the game (againā¦). My wife had 6 useful Tao tokens, and was the yellow monk which can take a token for free at the beginning of its turn, bit she would need two turns to get to Wu-Feng.
Luckily, I was near the Temple of the Winds, so my blue monk moved there and used the space to move Wu-Feng adjacent to the yellow monk. Red tormenter rolled a blank on the curse die. My wife used her yin-yang token to un-haunt a tile again (have to roll the curse die after defeating Wu-Feng, so loss was still possible), took another token so she only needed to roll a single green or white result on three dice, and she got a white. Wu-Feng banished back to whatever hell spawned him and our very injured monks breathed a sigh of relief.
One more play of my 10 x 10 done.
6 Likes
Played Versailles 1919 last night. Someone in our group was desperate to play it so used a 2 camera setup over Zoom. He taught the game and ran it, which was a sterling effort!
I enjoyed it, although it was an odd experience.
I think it will prove to be an unusual game because we only had a couple of uprisings and they all came in the last 3 turns. That meant it was easy for my wife to know which overarching strategy card to grab which catapulted her from last to winning.
Itās not an ideal Zoom game but Iād play it again that way. Looking forward to it in real life.
4 Likes
Brass Birmingham, this one is a favourite of one of our RPG groupās members, so we had a game on Thursday in lieu of an actual RPG. Two of us dominated in the canal era, with the game owner coming in third. The fourth member of our group did very poorly and was lagging way behind, before saying āah thatās how it worksā and then proceeding to wipe the floor with us in the railroad era! I did still come in second, which is a lot better than normal. But yeah - that game was something!
7 Likes
Similo , very quick filler game. You choose a secret card, and people try and guess it by eliminating other cards. You have 12 cards in the display, one of which is the target card. Then you play another card, either arranged vertically to indicate the target card is like the clue card in some way, or turned on its side to say that the target card isnt like the clue card. In the first round, the other people have to remove one card, then two in the second, three in the third, four in the fourth, and then (assuming you havenāt lost by removing the target card) you will be left with just two cards. Very simple, family friendly game. You can buy multiple decks of it, we played the Fables themed deck, which has cards out of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood etc. Harmless light fun.
Crystal Palace , another go at this. And again, we didnāt finish. You would think this was a fairly quick playing game, there are five rounds, on each round you place dice, then take actions on those dice in each location. Had new players, so had to explain it all. I think Iāve identified the problem with the game ā itās just not much fun. The dice placement is novel enough (choose your die faces, pay for each pip). Thereās just a lot going on. There are eight boards, plus a black market board, and an administration board. And a player board each of course. You canāt work towards any cards (patent and character cards), because they are all redone at the beginning of the round. Some things just donāt make sense, like your income track moves down after you collect income, forcing you to take actions that increase it again (youāll lose money and points for dropping too much on the income track). Do you like having spaces on your home board that you lose victory points for if you donāt cover them? Youāll love this, you have ten spaces like this. Iāve given this a good go, but Iām giving up, on the sale pile it goes.
3 Likes
Introduced my girlfriend to Lost Cities (card game version, my edition from about 1999). She is very pleased at how evil it is, and airily informed me at the end of round three āOh, I guess Iāll just hold on to this ten you were after thenā. Wanted lots of rematches, big hit.
5 Likes
Twilight Struggle
Three more games, this time playing as the reds.
Game 1
Decided to coup at Defcon 2. I am a winner.
Game 2. USA stole the card I had to lower defcon (Which means makes the number higher 
) Meaning my only option was a card that raised defcon by 1. Cue thermonuclear war.
Game 3. Got to turn 8, tried to control too many things, lost them all.
New learning - Iām triggering too many early events. Why would you ever use āCastoā in early game when itās influence is much more flexible to reuse. Need to keep the deck more stacked in my favour.
3 Likes
Spoiler: next youāll be learning that 3 influence in a key inaccessible Central America battleground is more valuable than a 2 OP card staying in the deck.
3 Likes