I keep confusing Dune: Imperium with OG Dune-the-boardgame. And I really shouldn’t, considering I’m way more interested in actually trying Imperium. (I can respect the brilliance of the original, but it’s too many players for my group and too reliant on bluffing and such.)
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Happy to see PP2e resonating with so many people. I think it gets many interesting dynamics just right.
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Sounds like @Snobbydolphin has an interested group, too. Repeat plays with the same gang is fantastic for a game like Pamir 2.
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Dredd vs Death, rounds three and four…
Round three…
I opted to ignore the fragments entirely, and see whether I could eliminate all of the Dark Judges. With luck on my side things might have gone well, as I was in a position to potentially take out one or other of the judges on multiple occasions. Sadly, I’ve learned that when I’m actually using the correct rules, they tend to defend rather more frequently than one would hope! I never seemed to be able to coordinate enough extra firepower to compensate, so I just chipped away and soon enough ended up on the defensive, at which point things went south pretty quickly.
Round four…
A down-to-the-wire win for the Judges! My first while playing correctly, and an interesting path to victory (which requires six fragments, with each defeated Dark Judge doubling your current count).
The initial random set-up looked hugely in my favour, but that didn’t last long – I suspect I could have played this much better than I did, though. I pursued a less-extreme strategy this time, grabbing an opportunistic fragment early, but then looking to take best advantage of combat opportunities rather than racing for extra fragments; and especially trying to take maximum advantage of Judge Anderson’s unblockable psi attacks whenever I could. I defeated Judge Fear early to double my fragments to two, and then things got pretty bogged down, with the Dark Judges again frustrating several of my attacks, and closing in. Mean Machine, Hershey, and Giant all succumbed to the Dark Judges next. While Dredd made a bee-line for a fragment, Anderson finally finished off Mortis to double my fragments to four – before she too was killed, leaving only Dredd remaining vs Fire and Death. Thankfully the cards were kind – just barely keeping out of the clutches of Death, Dredd was able to grab the fifth fragment and then make a run for the sixth. Death managed to move into Dredd’s sector at the end, but Dredd defended long enough to secure a sixth and final fragment for the win.
A scrappy path to victory to be sure, but I kinda like that this seemingly less-efficient approach was the one which actually succeeded. (Albeit barely – with Fire and Death both almost at full health, and the likelihood of fewer useful cards to come, my luck was not going to hold much longer…)
With a proper win finally under my belt, I think I’ll break out one of the other teams next time (Sláine, Nikolai Dante, or Strontium Dog).
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Played San Juan, which I’ve just got in the UK Maths Trade. I didn’t realise it was exactly the same as Race For The Galaxy (although typing that I think I probably did know).
It’s clever, every resource in the game is cards - into your hand for money, or face down into the tableau for goods. The first to 12 cards in their tableau ends the game. It’s an excellent push/ pull between high value cards that are expensive (and therefore slow) or quick, cheap cards. Also clever is that its an action selection game, but all players get to take the action.
It was good, not sure which I prefer. I think I will 10x10 it/ them next year. 5 games of each and then trade the one we like least.
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I squeezed in a quick solo game of Wild Space this morning before the baby woke up. The bot beat me 58-50 on normal difficulty, thanks in large part to a disastrous collection of simian cards that netted them 25 points before anything else got counted. All in all this is a nice, thinky filler game, but it feels like it could have been tuned to be quicker, considering how Tame this Space ultimately is. This one’s on thin ice.
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Choosing phases simultaneously is a big difference, resulting in a different flow and feel to each game. I decided I prefer RftG, but YMMV, and you might find room for both.
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We put our older kiddo down for a morning nap, and used the partial quiet to play a couple of games. First was game 3 of our 12 Games of Christmas, Takenoko.
We were very even throughout the whole game. I lucked into a couple of plot objectives that I was able to play immediately (we don’t use the house rule to bury these and draw new cards), so I completed 9 objectives first. Final scores were 40 - 34, but really could have gone either way.
As could have Azul which we played next. Game lasted a long 7 rounds, at which point we ended on the same score, and we both had 2 rows and 2 complete colors, but Inhad managed 3 columns to her 2, so I won by 7 points, 121 - 114.
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I am surprised on how much I like Rurik: Dawn of Kiev! Quick light area-control/worker placement hybrid. The WP board is interesting as we jostle over the action spaces because a worker has a number (ranging from 1 to 5) and that number is both its strength and its initiative. So a #1 worker will go first on resolving its action but will easily be pushed around by more powerful workers - so they often end up at the bottom of the action column where you take the most awful type of action (say, it’s a build action. Now you have to pay money to build one building). Whips pretty fast. It’s the type of game that made me like Scythe and Inis where it’s a hybrid game where the spatial map is important and combat is not the main attraction. I would go as far as saying I would rather play this than Cyclades
Panic Lab - forgot to report this game from months ago as I forgot the name. And what I fool I was since I love this game. It’s a type of game that is very similar to Ghost Blitz - another fantastic game. But I think I would highly prefer this over GB. Panic Lab got different difficulty levels and has different setup so it’s not as repetitive as Ghost Blitz’s deck of cards.
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My winning streak of Sprawlopolis is holding! I’ve now won 3 games in a row.
Anyway, this morning I sat down with a cup of tea and decided it was time for some farming…
This is the lovely solo-setup for Hallertau. Doesn’t it look clean? I think it does.
Some notes on the game
I kind of already knew the rules from a playthrough I watched nevertheless Rosenberg’s designs have just gotten cleaner over the years and the rulebook is well written and has a good easy to follow structure that didn’t make me go from page 5 to 2 and 3 and 5 and 7 and back to 2 to learn the game or figure out setup. There are 10 easy to follow phases (may seem a lot but it’s way more precise than the next game I played). The solo mode is a beat 100 points or your own highscore. Well, I made it out with 50 points. I have no idea how to win that game. But I had relaxed, thinky fun.
One neat thing that has little to do with the game was the fact that all the player specific materials are cardboard and they were printed on two folded sheets per player. So you could simply get out the cardboard for 1 player if you never planned to play with more than 1 and leave the rest in the box forever.
I also appreciate that of the 4 decks you need for the game, 2 come with 4 variants each to guarantee variability. The solo-mode is just the same as the 2 and 3 player mode.
There is one aspect where you have to worry about “feeding”… but it is not very harsh in my opinion. Sheep bought in the first three rounds may die if you don’t take care of them by “moving” them. But this never happened to me as I prevented it by am bringing them to the butcher 
I agree with the critique form the German video I saw that there is way too little hops and beer in the game. Hops is just one of the resources and you never actually get to produce beer.
But no matter the lack of beer or points, I enjoyed the game.
After that I played the other game I was keen to see at Spiel: CloudAge (by Alexander Pfister and some other guy whose name I don’t remember right now) and saw first-hand what a difference a good manual makes. (It should have been published in October, my bet is the delay was caused by the clouds, see below)
The setting is a world where a bunch of eco terrorists burned all the oil-fields and we’re now living on airships above a barrent wasteland where cities are ruled by violent clans. The airships may look a bit steampunk but those things on top are EMP cannons… so not quite steam.
This game has one of the most chaotic manuals I've studied in a while.
It took me a good 2 hours to figure out setup and rules for this. It has a solo mode but unlike Hallertau this has extra rules and so to make it easier on myself I played two handed. So this is a two player setup for the first chapter of the campaign or intro game.
Biggest disappointment: the clouds.
One of the two major actions is resource gathering (the others are building and planting stuff) and the resource gathering happens in the cities and the city cards are beneath cloud cover and you can only catch glimpses of what is in them. Those cloud covers are stickers on a few standard card sleeves and I did not have a good time getting those stickers on the sleeves. A stack of city cards is then put in each sleeve and three of those are displayed on the resource gathering plan.
Once one gets the hang of the game, it does flow nicely. But as the first chapter feels more like a demo version of the game, so I hesitate to talk much about this. One of three major actions missing possibly changes the game quite a bit. I’ll post again when I have played chapter two.
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I have heard many good things of Rurik, glad to hear it being endorsed by you. I am sort of into game hybrids like that.
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A fair few games were played on a busy weekend, with office do, work BBQ and Game Geeks Guild Christmas party yesterday from 13.00 to 22.00 yesterday.
Saturday night after returning with the children from the BBQ, I played a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe with my eldest daughter after a failed attempt at playing Monopoly Deal the Card Game with my partner (she hated it, btw, compressed or not, she had enough of Monopoly when working in the youth centre). Managed a really large score by sheer luck of having two of my short tickets included in my long one (Lisbon to Danzig). I even threw two stations in the mix (I tend to avoid using them on one on ones) to reach an extra ticket to Copenhagen. Both of us ended up on the 100s, but I think I did achieve a personal record at 136. We did both enjoy, even my 4 yo daughter also, coming and sorting out our trains off the board in line while we were playing.
Yesterday we had three games in 8 hours (minus a Secret Santa break), so you can imagine the scale of the first two: A Feast for Odin between 4, and Cthulu Death May Die between 5. to top it with a final game between 4 of Arboretum.
Enjoyed Feast, but I found it a bit dry. I must admit my first few turns I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of different placements available for my workers. I ended up last (my first ever play) as expected, the top three being really disputed (all three scores on 4 points difference 83-79). Would definitely play again, but being so long, I don’t know how often that will happen.
Cthulu DMD was amazing, though. We learned it on the go, and I found it really easy to play, if the set up took us a bit to work out amongst us. We did struggle, but only one character died of its wounds after Cthulu was awakened, another 2 went totally mad, and I managed to survive with my British lord with a shotgun and a pipe that at the end was dealing heaps of damage from two rooms away. Rasputin, Fire Child and Girl with an Axe were the victims, with Indiana Jones-like guy surviving the final blow to the Deep One by one point away from total madness. It was a ton of fun, I like how the game levels you up at a cost of your madness. The only thing we found awkward was how easy it was to kill monsters being a Cthulu game, but hey, it is fun to blast Fire Vampires to oblivion, even if they keep coming back at you.
Arboretum brought some peace and quiet to the table, after two massive table hogs. Finished third (my Cassias got blocked by the winner) with 19 points, with the win at 26.
A really good session.
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A quick game of Air Land & Sea with my partner tonight, who did not want to say die… and it cost her. I took 12VP after two swift rounds. I was pretty close to withdrawing early in the second round, but saw her leaning heavily in the theatre I was going to be ignoring, so pushed anyway. The main fracas took place in the center but I was able to pull some adjacency shenanigans and pull off the win there. As it turned out, she needed to ignore my secondary theatre as well, so that was an easy win there for the game.
I’ll take it while I can. There’s a lot in common with Lost Cities in terms of the decision space, so once she’s really clicked with the game my winning days are all over. I’m going to need to work on my bluffing already.
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My wife and I played a game of Jaipur today. First round was really close and came down to the 5 point camel bonus, which I got, so I won the round 78 - 73.
The second round ended up being a blow out in my favor. I just got lucky draws into a lot of the precious goods, and we sold so many items in sets of 3 that we ran out of those bonus tokens. Final score was 79 - 56, and won me the overall game.
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Yes that was the name of the game I couldn’t remember.
The principle is the same.
I think the feel of the catapulting is nicer than the twang of the rubber band.
Got Tokyo Metro to the internet table yesterday with @lalunaverde . Still like this game. The worker placement aspect is a bit novel and avoids being a drag. The investments aren’t always obvious and the shared board is genuinely shared in terms of player interaction/positioning. Nice to play it again and nice TTS mod from the game designer themselves.
Prior to that had another bash at Little Town. Again, still like it. Quick, fun and brutal. Quite enjoy the random bonus cards for lightening the whole thing. Stops it getting too deterministic and tense.
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Over the last two nights, a TTS Whitehall Mystery with @Lordof1. I’ve never played the “full” Letters from Whitechapel, but I do rather like this small constrained hidden-movement setup, particularly the way each quadrant has a different flavour.
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Really enjoyed it. Very keen on playing it again. And it comes in a small box!
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I sold Letters because Whitehall Mystery delivers almost everything good about Letters but with half the rules, a third of the playtime, and a fraction of the setup.
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Played The King is Dead with my support bubbled mum.
It’s a bit good isn’t it? Tough choices in all the way through. Ended at 1 game each.
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