Your Last Played Game Volume 3

[lalunaverde]

LobsterCon Day 3

1860: Isle of Wight - 4 player so it was tight. But manage to run 2 companies at a time so i can pilfer the money from one company to another

Still an amazing game

Spring Cleaning - Rikki kept talking about the game to me all weekend and so we played again.

Mongoose - played it again. Still very keen on getting it.

Ra

Infarkt - really stupid party game about staying alive while you keep getting unhealthier and unhealthier.

Kardinal und König - old school Schacht

No thanks! - I havent played with Martin all weekend so I joined him for some old school games.

Auf Teufel Komm Raus - another old game. Push your luck. We were howling in laughter all game.

Reif für die Insel - standard Knizia auction. It’s okay. It’s the company that made it fun

MarraCash - one guy wanted to play so we did. Auctions, shared incentives, and being a dick. Standard LLV game.

Fresh Fish Second Edition - now that Ive been playing 1e with @EnterTheWyvern a few times now. 2e is shit. Awful.

Would you like a new edition of a game but with less decisions?? We got ya!

Mottainai - we close the evening with another game of Mottainai

[mistercrayon]

I was watching a video today and it also has these hatted figures. I wonder if there’s a universe where those are the standard person token rather than meeple?

[yashima]

It’s just until the Conclave is over. Then all the Cardinals will vanish again.

I think they might have been more common before the advent of Carcassonne.

[RogerBW]

@yashima

It’s just until the Conclave is over. Then all the Cardinals will vanish again.

And if they see their shadows, we’ll be six more weeks without a pope.

[lalunaverde]

LobsterCon Day 4

Just like last year, we start the last day of the con with Pax Porfiriana. I was trying for Revolution, but didn’t manage to create an income stream. While one player managed to rack up Outrage. But the winner was the one who swung the regime back to Diaz’s control and won by enforcing the dictator’s iron rule. Long live President Diaz.

Mottainai - of course, we ended the con with 3 plays of Mottainai

[Benkyo]

Golden “Week” games convention turned unexpectedly epic, as people I bumped into from Vietnam, Singapore, Iran, and Thailand enthusiastically requested to play some of my heaviest games, and not one of them tuned out or felt overwhelmed by those games. I just wish they were all local, instead of passing through…

Mottainai x2, while waiting to start…

Stationfall, 4-player game. I took on the role of the revenge-seeking Cyborg, only to find that the bludgeoning spree of my co-conspirators, Astrochimp and Station Chief, was being undermined by Medical patching everyone up. When Medical was taken down, Station Chief betrayed me and started helping everyone get to escape pods. As a last-ditch attempt, I had Stranger throw a firebomb into the aft airlocks, but with helmets, nanogel, and a concerted effort by the other three players, Daredevil, Stowaway, and Counselor got to a pod activated in the last minute. 2 in 3 chance of the station burning up before they launched, but the 1 in 3 chance came through and they all escaped. Stowaway scraped the win, just ahead of Daredevil and Station Chief, by successfully selling the scoop to the news agencies, revealing to the world everything that went down on the station.

Roads & Boat, 4-player game. The Rowing map, with two uneasy alliances forming on either end of the map as we competed to mine the central island. I established early claims by putting down walls everywhere and used the extra space to snowball into a lead. We called the game just as I made my first stock, and a sea invasion to demolish my walls and disrupt my operations was underway.

I mentioned Food Chain Magnate as we were packing up the game, and as a result that got requested for the next day. We all went for ramen dinner to refuel.

Food Chain Magnate, 4-player game. Two players went wide (recruiting), two went tall (training). One of the trainers started the earliest radio advertising blitz I’ve ever seen, and successfully combined that flood of demand with a luxuries manager to pick up some sales of overpriced burgers, but it was the player who got the first two burger cooks who most benefited from the demand, and rode those sales to an early win. The art being praised for looking “like Fallout” made me chuckle.

Innovation Ultimate, 4-player team game. Didn’t play that drastically different from the previous edition this time, but the winning team did pick up the Monument achievement via the new requirement for the win.

Pax Pamir, 5-player game. Started because the woman from Iran who was “new to boardgames” expressed an interest in the Persian-styled font on the box, and was impressed by the look of the game. Her partner laughed at her choice to dive into the deep end, so I was more than a little nervous, but all the players turned out to be rules sponges with sharp backstabbing minds, so we all had a great time betraying each other. She even pulled off a last-minute win as the British alliance collapsed and the new Russian coalition failed to achieve dominance.

Innovation Ultimate, 3-player game. Really felt the changes this time, with some tweaked cards effects playing out very differently, and the Age 1 and 2 achievements getting junked early. Went all the way to Age 10, where chained dogmas lead to a Bioengineering win condition. Federico declared it his new favourite game, and a must-buy.

[RogerBW]

An extended meeting of the local game group on a bank holiday afternoon.

We opened with Flip 7, played at Airecon and bought soon afterwards. It’s very random, but I won, so obviously I am great at it. One visual note: since everyone needs to know who’s still in a round, it’s probably a good idea to turn you cards face down when you leave the round for whatever reason (bust, freeze, pass).

Then a longer game, Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition. I’m very much enjoying rediscovering this; combining the two editions of the game, but with a curated card set as I’ve mentioned before, This time I played as Lise Meitner (from the original game), though I ended up using her power to gain extra cogs much more than to eject red dice. This time all the timing worked out perfectly, including shedding the vast majority of my machine as I crossed the finish line but still having enough movement powers to move a little in the final round. (Won.)

Another beneficiary of my plan to bring back games I haven’t played for a while: Hex Hex (my copy is combined with Hex Hex Next, since I bought them before the combined edition Hex Hex XL came out). It’s not a smart or subtle game; it’s not really a party game, either, because while individual rules aren’t desperately complicated they often interact in unexpected ways. (E.g. “you must stack your cards in order and play the top one each time you get a Hex” combined with “draw a new card”—which we interpreted as “you can insert that card into your stack anywhere you like”.) It’s all very take-that, which is another reason not to play it all the time. But just once in a while, with the right people. (Last place.)

A rather more streamlined party game, Landmarks, the first time I’d played in team mode. And it went very well! Replacing the traps and water constraint with pressure from the other team ended up being much more to my taste, though of course I’ll still play the one-versus-many version. We failed to win by one move.

Finally Skull Queen, played at Airecon and in fact with the same copy, since donated by its former owner (thanks!). This is a tricky one for people to get their heads round (and I’m not completely sure we were playing it correctly), but I found it great fun even as I fell into last place.

[yashima]

Mistborn is definitely my favorite solo deck builder now. Admittedly most of those don’t have solo modes.

Definitely very good deckbildung tough and
a great even if somewhat fixed arc that allows for some really epic turns in the late game.

Probably 9/10 right now. might just be new game if it stays that high also depends a bit on how great the announced expansions will be. but it’s definitely at least an 8/10 long term.

( currently it’s up against Balatro, Blue Prince and a migraine fighting for my attention and definitely holding it’s own)

[mistercrayon]

Got innovation ultimate yesterday and gave half a game a crack before football. I used to have base before but got rid of it for some reason but my partner mentioned it as a game she liked and with the new one probably vanishing as fast I thought it was a hint to get back in.

What an absolutely nutty game. Simultaneously completely inside your own head game and utterly interactive too. Wild and all over the place! Thrilling!

[EnterTheWyvern]

@Benkyo

Really felt the changes this time, with some tweaked cards effects playing out very differently,

How do you see third ed now? Will you keep and play both for variety or is 4th/Ultimate all you’ll play from now on?

[Benkyo]

Too early to tell. Might have an answer after a dozen or so two-player duels.

[lalunaverde]

They added Junk as a mechanism so I’m gonna keep 3e, just in case

[EnterTheWyvern]

Because you don’t like playing with junk?

[yashima]

Yesterday in a surprising turn of events given my lack of even solo-gaming lately, I followed up my Mistborn game from the day before with a 2-handed (re-)learning game of Innovation (Ultimate) which went through Nuclear Fission melting down everyone’s cards to a draw on standard achievements and the inability to fulfill any of the others. It ended when left-hand found Cooperation and managed to snag a win that way. Fun.

As an aside: The card quality is very nice for the new Innovation

Then a sprinkling of Naturopolis losing and winning once each.

Even more surprising, after dinner, I followed up with Dune Imperium Uprising which had been waiting for its first run for quite a while now. It is a good iteration. I would say it feels more complete than the OG base game. And I never quite warmed to the expansions of the original game.

I really like the sandworms, the spies, the improved placement spots. I can’t say much about the cards but I had quite the nice Fremen deck as Muad’Dib.

It makes me a bit … grumpy to see that I have two big boxes of this game that I enjoy but it won’t all fit in one box anymore and I don’t have the big box and I also would like one rounded not-watered-down edition of any game. Don’t get me wrong the OG base game was already very good. Uprising definitely gives the rounder experience. It is a better, more evolved game. Arnak did not get a completely new edition in the same time-frame. I enjoy iterations usually more but you never know if there will be an iteration. The interesting question is then will this move OG base + expansion to my sell pile or what do I do?

[COMaestro]

Despite my two losses in my stage of the tournament for A Gest of Robin Hood, I still finished 2nd (don’t know why, there were four or five of us who had two wins. I don’t know how the Swiss system works), so got to advance to the next round.

This meant I was having a rematch with the player who crushed me in the first Ballad. But this time, I was Sheriff. And I managed to return the favor. Not crushed, but still had 5 Order at the end of the first Ballad, which is the minimum for an instant win.

From here forward it is single elimination, but I am officially in the semi-finals! We’ll see how it goes.

[felix]

Played a couple of games over the weekend!

In between the bigger one we played some Signal, by Jasper Beatrix who I believe is a sort of game design “collective”. It’s a very strange cooperative activity-game, where most players are “experts” trying to communicate with one “alien” player, via some little wooden shapes on a cloth mat. The alien player has some rules for moving pieces that they must follow each round, sort of like an algorithm, and the expert players have infer those rules in order to provide an input that allows the alien’s “algorithm” to produce a known “signal” output.

It feels very inspired by the movie Arrival, or maybe the book it was based on, in which humans and aliens need to figure out how to communicate.

I really liked it outside of a misprinted scenario that was a bit broken, although I’m not sure the other players did. It’s quite experimental and you sort of have to work with it to get a good experience. But I found it super interesting to play a game where we had to make notes and try and remember what we’d seen and deduce in a real way. Can’t wait to play more!

The main event for us was Molly House, which we were very excited for, particularly due to the theme. You play as 18th century people in London as part of what you’d call the “queer community” today. Mostly you move around the board doing some simple card-getting actions until someone puts on a “party” in which you collaboratively put poker-style hands together. Whoever contributes to the hand gets “joy” (points) as well as “reputation” which acts as a kind of danger as well as power for certain actions. Too much reputation puts you at risk of being indicted and potentially hanged at the end of the game, and if that’s the case you can choose to betray the community to potentially avoid a hanging which would cause you to lose. There is also the danger that the community won’t survive unless you can raise the communal joy high enough, thus losing everyone the game.

Super thematic and full of interesting push/pull decision making in which you’re constantly weighing up your own “joy” vs raising the community’s, or putting on a party with grand plans only for someone to come along and outdo your hard work! It’s so interactive and odd that even after having played 2 games I’m still not really sure I understand how you’re “supposed” to play. It can be deeply frustrating if other people don’t want to collaborate with you, and the reputation mechanic is weirdly difficult to grok (is reputation good or bad? Both? Is it good when it gets cleared? Sometimes?)

It’s designed by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle and it feels deeply like a Wehrle game. If you like other Wehrle games I think you’d probably like it and if you don’t like Wehrle games I don’t think you’d like this one. But I’ve never experienced something like the card play which is such a fun mix of cooperative and catty. Hats off to both of them for producing something so unique.

It also looks lovely, although I only managed to get a picture of the scores:

We also played some Quacks of Quedlinberg which is still great.

[RogerBW]

@felix

The alien player has some rules for moving pieces that they must follow each round, sort of like an algorithm, and the expert players have infer those rules in order to provide an input that allows the alien’s “algorithm” to produce a known “signal” output.

Sounds a bit like Zendo. Ever tried that?

[felix]

Oh interesting, no I hadn’t heard of it

I guess one of the differences from a quick look is that Signal can be very fuzzy - it doesn’t actually matter if the experts guess the correct rules, in fact we didn’t guess the exact right rules in maybe any of the 4 rounds? Which is really fun because then you get to find out the rules and your hypothesis like “move one piece to make it symmetrical” is actually misreading something like “move one piece onto a line”. And it’s cooperative, obviously! I’m really interested in more weird-communication games, I hope at some point I can play Gibberers which looks really interesting.

[lalunaverde]

Brass Lancashire

Tigris and Euphrates

Star Wars Rebellion - very fun and thematically immersive (I’m not even a Star Wars fan). It is also simpler than War of the Ring - although, I prefer the latter

Spring Cleaning

Panda Spin - it’s been a while and forgot how fun this is.

Ark Nova - wholesome fun.

Settlers of Catan - yep. We played it!

Dominion 2e (with expansions)

Race for the Galaxy + Gathering Storm + Rebel vs Imperium

The King is Dead 2e

[bort]

Cyclades, hadn’t played this for a while. Actually, I sold it years ago, but recently picked it up on special. Probably on special because there’s a new version (didn’t realise that). On your turn you bid for which god to use. Gods allow you to recruit units, or gather special cards. You can also create buildings, which all help you to build a metropolis. Build two metropolises and you’ve won the game! We probably started a bit cautiously, building up some money before attacking. Eventually I defeated another player, which meant I owned their metropolis. Then on my next turn I grabbed two philosopher cards, which gave me enough to convert them into another metropolis, and the game was mine. I’d like to say I planned it, but not really.

Eternal Decks, we did Stage D on beginner. Another tricky stage, where you had to defeat a Boss. As well as us taking our turns, the Boss had a turn, which places cards on one of the field rows. Mostly the Boss places skull cards, which we then had to play a normal card on top of to do damage to the Boss. We managed to avoid defeat for a while, but eventually we just ran out of time and reached the end of the boss cards.

Vaalbara, first play. A fairly light game. You each have a deck of identical cards, and you choose one to play each turn. The lower the cards initiative, the sooner you get to play it, which can be important. And being first gives you first crack of the land cards. So each turn you take the cards ability, and then choose a land card, which also gives you points. Like I said, it’s pretty light and easy to play.

Creepshow, first play. I was in two minds about playing this, but as soon as my hosts saw it, they went “Creepshow! Let’s play that!”, so what could I do. They have done a good job of making the cards look like the Creepshow movies and tv show. The object of the game is to defeat the major villain, but before you do that you have to make your way thru some minor villains. You have a hand of Story cards, which will be for act 1, 2, or 3. There are path cards which move the story onto the next level. As you play Story cards, you’ll add a Suspense card (facedown). Everyone starts with their own (identical) deck of Suspense cards, with values from 1 to 3, plus a card with -2. A path card gives you two options, so you can play safe, or go for gold. You pick a path, then go through the Suspense cards for that villain and add up the total. Reach the total, and you’ll get points, and move the story onto the next act. Once you get into Act 3 you can choose an Ending card to finish that villain. When I first got the game I wasn’t too sure how it would play out. It turned out to be sort of interesting, but suffered from a vague rulebook, and it probably took too long for a fairly light game.