Played an incredible 3p game of Brass: Birmingham on Sunday and hit a personal high score of 152 — which was still not enough to win it. Possibly, if I hadn’t wrecked my last turn by forgetting I didn’t have the card I needed to build the Level 3 Pottery like I wanted to, I could’ve found the 7 extra points somewhere else to win.
This game was odd because I kept building beer as I expected other people to use it, but everyone just built their own to use and I ended up with a surplus — which has never happened before. I ended with one beer building not turned over because I couldn’t use it up. Such a weird game. But still great.
I got my first game of Under Falling Skies in this morning using the beginner setup, and lost by the skin of my teeth—I had focused too much on taking out ships in the early game. While that meant my city was at full health leading up to the final turns, the time crunch meant I had little to no options to mitigate the onslaught if I expected to keep researching.
On the final round, I was able to barely survive the alien deluge with a single HP remaining. I was not, however, able to surmount the final research cost and the mothership reached her goal. I got real, honest-to-god physical anxiety (the good kind) in the final rounds. That kind of investment is astounding to me for a game that’s brief enough to make losses enjoyable.
I’m gonna call it a lazy half hour. I think it’s all going to depend on how deep you want to revel in AP Land, though. I think the dice help keep things from getting too bogged down with math, but there’s still a meaty puzzle to crack and no other players to hustle you along.
This is all before I include any of the (vast) campaign/modular content as well, so I might have a different ballpark after a few games. 30 seems about right for the basic experience though.
Yeah I agree. It’s a fast game, but there’s enough admin that if you rush it’s easy to make a mistake on forgetting to move something. It’s quite pleasing with all the pushing buttons and pulling levers though!
Played three quick games of Flipology last night with my daughter. I must say, behind all the fluffy and cuddly appearance, it can be quite cutthroat. Lost my first and won the next two with a bit too much of “take that” that my daughter didn’t appreciate…
Might have to leave it for playing it at higher numbers. At two is a bit much with some cards.
Yes, I’ve only played it solo (and am currently enjoying it as a way to while away a few minutes now and then, as it’s very quick to play).
Initial thoughts were here:
I don’t imagine it’s going to bowl anyone over, but I don’t think I have another game which fills this particular niche, and it’s also a little box with an appealing theme, so I think I’ll be keeping it.
This was the first time I’ve reached the Village Green of the Year score threshold of 36 points! It’s pretty simple to get a Runner Up score, but not easy to win the top prize. I definitely had some good fortune here.
@Lordof1 talked me into trying Pandemic Legacy Season 1 on TTS – which avoids most of my problems with it being a disposable game. Done January so far. I still don’t love Pandemic but I think that the key to the relative success of PanLeg over the other legacies may well have been that it’s a good solid game underneath.
And what in normal times is the local boardgame group tried out The Crew, missions 1-10. I’m not normally enthused about trick-taking but this worked for me. Though I was a little disappointed after our one failed mission: we had I think green 5 as goal #1, then green 6 as goal #2, which is obviously a particular challenge, but it turned out that this was merely a random effect and when we tried again we got much easier goals.
Some games this evening. Not with our regular RPG group who all cancelled but games with my wife and a friend:
Monopoly Deal, this was requested after I found it at the bottom of one of my shelves. No rules with it but our friend plays it often so she did the teach. It’s still quite random, but it’s also very fast so a lot more tolerable here than in Monopoly. I won by hitting her with two lots of rent from a house and hoteled green set, one of which was doubled, stole most of her stuff while she was sitting with two set-stealing deal-breakers in hand. Not terrible.
Mint Works, first couple of plays of this one. I thought it was good fun, very quick and simple but with a bit of variety via the plan deck and the advanced locations. My wife was less impressed with it - she found it a bit boring, and our friend liked it more than me! So plenty of variety with the opinions on this one for sure! It’s not amazing, but for what it is it’s great, and I’m a sucker for little games so it’ll stick around for sure.
Super Big Boggle, 3 games of this, with decreasing scores from where we started - progressively tougher boards as it turned out, cause that happened for all of us… Word of the night was dildos, after a brief discussion about whether it has an ‘e’ (it does not, to my disappointment)
I knew it was turning out well as the game progressed, but I was pretty startled to realise I had 38 points – things really came together for me in this game. Especially rows 1 and 3, which netted me a crazy 9 and 12 points respectively (for other readers, most award cards give you 6 points at best). If I’d been able to swap out the 1-per-card award on row 2 for that 2-per-card sitting in the market (none of the penalties for the latter applied), I’d have ended up with an astounding 41 points (it had me running to the manual to check whether exchanging an award was one of the village card options, which would still have ended up as 40), but it wasn’t to be. I don’t anticipate another score that good any time soon.
Root with @Whistle_Pig on TTS. It was an excellent scripted mod for a game which is fiddly enough IRL. @Whistle_Pig ruthlessly wiped the Cats off the board, my wife was ambitious in failing with the Eyrie. I scraped through to win as the Riverfolk. Really enjoying this game.
A zoom game of Age of Steam tonight, first play of the Germany map, which has quite a few rule changes from the base map. I think this was the first time we’ve really played it ‘properly’ with some tight auctions and real competition for space. I’m not sure what scores are like on this map, but we were pretty close.
Gaming day today (though most only stuck around for one or two games):
Mint Works I do like this one, it’s interesting how different the game can turn out depending on what plans are up for grabs at the start.
Ride the Rails, my train obsessed bestie had another new train game for us to try. I quite liked it, like most share driven games it’s quite interactive. I managed to win by buying into two early companies that others were pushing hard at the right time and profited a great deal off of other peoples work (there were a few rounds I barely laid any track at all)
Blueprints, we were tied heading into the final round, but then I scored like 3 different awards for the win. Really enjoy this game as a nice little filler.
A Feast for Odin, 2 player game of this plus Norwegians - it was great, my opponent and I pursued very different strategies - he went heavy into hunting and pillaging, I focused more on whaling with some light theft (and ill-considered pig breeding, but lets not go there). We both got occupations that amped up our respective strategies which helped a great deal. I was kicking myself by the end for not claiming one of the additional location boards though - I totally could have filled it decently, instead I had to settle for a longhouse, which was good but missed opportunity for sure. Scores were super close. We both had regrets by the end, which is always good thing - it’s incentive to play again at the least! The new board for 2 is great, though I was missing that second whaling space, and the additional emigrations but I suppose that’s the idea.
Splendor, I won this one without any nobles, which I’m not sure I’ve seen before! Nabbed a couple of big 5 pointer cards and ended with a score of 19.
Through the Desert, it was only like a turn or two into the game when we both realised we’d put our leaders in some very questionable places… Regardless, it was close - in the end decided by him grabbing a few more 3 watering holes, and carving off slightly more of the board than I managed.
I wanted to take a minute to bump my average playtime in Under Falling Skies to 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. I’m learning I really stink at this game so that probably doesn’t help! But 30 seems pretty ambitious now. (Always a bit unexpected when playtime increases with experience).
have you been playing it solo only?