PM me. I’m happy to sell below market rate
4 Likes
Love the Palace Peninsula!
2 Likes
Played Pandemic: Fall of Rome. I’m not a huge fan of the Pandemic games but I quite enjoyed this - maybe just the theme entranced me because I love the history of Rome. It was brutal - we got the cards to Tyras and Chersonesus come out so many times they just kept exploding each other and running down the Descent tracker SO quickly. Maybe we were just shit.
Scout - I continue to enjoy this game but am really quite rubbish at it.
7 Likes
Some of us here will immediately suggest Tetrarchia 
5 Likes
I will look into that! It is a period of very interesting history!
4 Likes
Because it was still on the table, I played another solo of Dune Uprising. It went badly because I tried very hard to play Gurney Halleck without Fremen. I always go for Fremen strategies and I wanted to test spies with the Beni Gesserit. Since my character was a bad fit… i ttrailed the two bots for a lot of the game and only managed to turn it around on the final round of the game with some intrigue cards and a lucky buy of The Spice Must Flow.
I am still hesitant getting rid of the OG game. But this feels like I want to build an insert which I haven’t done in a good while. And sleeves while I am at it. Especially the Hagal (solo) deck.
8 Likes
We had 8 people last night, so I decided against good sense to go for a 4 v 4 games of Guards of Atlantis 2 when only 3 of us knew how to play.
4v4 was not a sensible teaching game. Absolutely couldn’t have done it without Kate and especially Finn. (I’m still not entirely sure how a push win happens with the dual lane).
It’s chaos - 4 person conversations which start long and basically end up as, ‘I’ll slap him’. 8 people calling out initiative - the tie breaker coin was basically being spun the entire game. There was very little chance of knowing what others could do. @mistercrayon got a raw deal because he stood too near Brogan (who can move and attack). 8 players meant picking up on what others could do was very, very tricky.
Having said that, I loved it!
Probably under 2 hours, 8 people round the table. At the end it came down to kill or be killed (I assume as you get more experience this becomes more tactical with actual dodging and moving!). There was a time when the other team overloaded a lane to win a push, and then we did the same to win the game.
I was rubbish - got killed 3 times! I did a lot of fast travelling.
I think the structure of the game is excellent. At most you have 5 cards to choose from - and you’re generally keeping a defense card in hand. Strategy (at our level) is minimal but the tactics and teamwork are fun; but I’ve played it when I was very distracted and you can plough a lone furrow and get a lot out of the game. The sequencing of actions and the initiative is where I think the game stands; its like Gloomhaven but much, much more interactive. The push between win conditions is a cool trade off - and one where I’m really struggling to stay focused. Every character I’ve played, or played against has a least one card that makes people take notice. I think its a game to grow with (and it does have a built in handicap mechanism).
It feels like fighting, and the fights when they happen are simple - you attack and your opponent either blocks or dies.
I think it satisfies the Cosmic itch, but within a much tighter structure. Its big and exciting, but it flows in a manner that doesn’t spin off the rails and you always have agency.
11 Likes
I decided to cap it at 6 players for now so we always have the one-lane map, therefore, one focus. I tried at 8 and indeed it was chaos. There’s also the problem that there’s 2 lines of conversation going on: right lane and left lane.
Im sure experienced players can think holistically instead of 2 separate theatres but Im too casual for that
6 Likes
I think 2v2 or 3v3 is a better game. But its great to have it as an option if we have 8 people who want to play the same, non party game. Plus one of our regulars hates Cosmic
7 Likes
With some sadness I realized today, that it had been almost a year since I last played Spirit Island. Does it even qualify for my favorite game anymore?
Today, despite migraine, antibiotics and a general shit-week, I managed to play 2 games of Spirit Island to make up for my lack of quality time with my lovely „1 game I‘ll take to a desert island“ island game.
First one was against my old nemesis Brandenburg Prussia (measly level 3, but then I have never played this one higher than 4) with two moderately complex spirits: Hearth Vigil & Towering Roots of the Jungle. I got a series of desert explore/build/ravage which was the lucky break I needed. Because the invaders can explore the same territory all they want if they ravage before they build and the Dahan eliminate them, they don‘t build.
The 2nd one I tried the Habsburg Mining Expedition for the first time. Just against Level 1 as I have never played that opponent before. This time I chose high complexity Spirits: Downpour and Laser-boy (I forget the name). I never even drafted major powers because both of them can repeat powers under certain circumstances and need all the energy to exploit that.
The pic shows the situation before the final turn which I didn‘t execute as I had a card combo that allowed me to get rid of the last city before the event card.
It was really nice to get back to the game and it still qualifies as a favorite that ticks all my boxes. It‘s just a bit of a hassle to set up. For now I‘ve left it on the table though.
15 Likes
So last night I tried out a game I received… I’m going to say in 2019? Vindication, a small KS (note: not small, just small for a KS) game that apparently released in 2018. A buddy got a 2nd copy for some reason, and he gave it to me for free, raving about how good it is.
It has sat in shrink until yesterday, when I tried to watch a tutorial video (which was awful) and then taught myself the game.
It’s got a 7.8 on BGG, and boy howdy is this confirming my personal bias against KS reviews on BGG.
It’s not bad. It’s fine! It’s a solid 6/10.
It’s really a stock-standard cube-pushing Euro with some fantasy trappings. You’ve been tossed overboard because you were such a nasty person!.. along with all the other players… at the same time… but you wash ashore on a magical island filled with magic! And you’re saved by a random stranger who is different for each player, but we’re each awoken by a random stranger… and then you wander around the island discovering hexes (I don’t know why you don’t just set the board up in advance) gaining Honour because you’ve decided to be the Most Honourable, and whoever is the most Honourable wins.
The manual is written badly (not awful, but definitely not by people who write manuals), but at its core the game is you having 3 bowls of energy: Potential, which is useless until you convert it into Influence, Influence, which is kind of like your Action Pool, and Conviction, which you can spend to control parts of the map.
Why does controlling the map gain you Honour? No time to explain! There are cubes to push!
And you can take control of a section of the map from another player (it costs you 2 Conviction to do so), which, as we all know… gains you Honour. Or using somebody else’s part of the map gains THEM Honour, but using your own section of the map doesn’t gain you Honour (let’s not be ridiculous).
sigh
It’s fine. The theme is… nonsensical (and is equal parts Divinity Original Sin and Path of Exile, although done much worse than either of those), but there are glimmers of kind of story? Sort of? But it feels… so mechanical?
Anyway. Going to try it again tonight with two different players who are enthused to give it a stab, because it does have a very high BGG rating. And who knows, maybe I will find the magic tonight, but gosh it’s a lot of squeeze for very little juice.
Afterwards we played Beyond the Sun which continues to be a hellish nightmare to setup and teach, but the moment we actually started playing… wow. So good. Everyone had a fantastic time, and the merging of the theme and mechanics is so good… it was a great contrast to Vindication, which looks joyful but plays biege, whereas Beyond the Sun looks beige and plays joyfully. I ended up losing to both of the new players (57 - 54 - 49) but had a great time.
Tonight, in addition to giving Vindication another stab, I’m going to teach and play Dune Express, an OLD push-your-luck dice game that I had custom made in… 2010? That feels right. I think initially it was a free Print and Play, and it still feels like that, but the copy I had made is quite nice. But I haven’t played it in years, so I’m pulling it out tonight to give it another kick before I move it on to other people’s homes.
I’m purging another 20 games from my collection next weekend (Oathsworn, Ice Cool Wizards, Fog of Love, Tortuga 1667, Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, Undaunted Callisto, Dead of Winter, Dragon Castle, Ankh’Or, Merchants of the Dark Road, Anomaly, Wandering Galaxy, one of the lesser known Game of Thrones card games, Empires of the Void, Coyote, One Deck Dungeon, Spaceteam, and Curious Cargo), so I wanna try a few oldies in my collection to see if they should also leave the collection.
10 Likes
For this reason I’ve written a hingmy which lists my games owned by date of most recent play, and I’m using that to inform what I take to game nights.
3 Likes
The Dark Quarter, first play. This was my hosts game, not mine. They received it a few weeks ago, but the app was delayed, which is pretty frustrating for everyone. This is a cooperative game based in New Orleans in the 1980s. So no mobile phones and the internet. And there is magic, cool. The app does all the real work for you, tracks your location and any items you may have. My character could talk to the dead, but only when he’s drunk. So we got stuck into our first case, a juicy murder. Probably not a game for kids, the murder is described in grisly detail, and there’s a few f-bombs thrown in. All good fun. If you’ve played Chronicles of Crime you’ll find this easy to get into. As you explore new locations are added, along with various characters. You can interact with any characters, and you’ll get a list of questions to ask them, along with options to try to coax them, or intimidate. You have four attributes: talent, combat, arcane, and charisma. Each track has three cubes to track it, and when you roll for an action you get a number of successes. ideally you’ll roll a number high enough for all three cubes to be selected, but of course it’s not that easy in practice.
The Same Game, 2X first play. This is another cooperative guess the word game, but it’s a bit different. You’ll have a number of categories, like price, length, frequency of use etc. The categories are randomly selected according to the difficulty set. We started at the easiest of course. At level one you use the tokens from one thru six. You each draw a random number from the bag, and write that (in secret!) on the player board. That’s your category that you want people to guess. The numbers are then mixed up and assigned to the categories. The current player looks at their word card. and then writes another word on their board. Everyone closes their eyes, and the current player turns over their category number, and then places a cup over each one. Then everyone in turn picks a cup to turn over. If they pick the “trap” category (the one the player chose) it’s a bad thing, you want to choose every other cup for maximum points.
An example: one player had the word gun. She wrote “water pistol”. I think her category to guess was “appearance”. So other categories, like for example “price” would be an obvious pick (since a gun and a water pistol would not be the same price).. It was good fun, there’s a bit of tension when you guess. We didn’t do so well in the first game, but we played again and did a lot better. It’s pretty tricky to select good words to use.
Harmonies, I never seem to do too well at this game, I find it hard to get my head around. As it turned out, I did ok, but still came in third (at 3p).
Gudetama: The Tricky Egg Card Game, first play. A few weeks ago I didn’t even know what Gudetama was (google it, it’s pretty funny). There’s a proper game of it, but I just made up my own, plenty of art online to use. It’s a fairly simple trick taker. No suits, no trumps to worry about. Someone plays a card, you have to either play a card of the same value (or higher), or you have to play your lowest card. The only trick that matters is the last one, because whoever wins that takes their winning card as their score. You don’t want points basically. So you’re trying to dump your high cards as soon as you can, which sometimes works. And if you can save a “1” until the last trick, then EVERYONE takes their played card as their score, which is hilarious.
Quattro Trick Taking, first play. Just got this from a kickstarter. There are four different ways to mark your bid, and you each play one of them in each round. We played at 3p, so there were only three different methods. One is a bid on the total value of your won tricks, another makes you select suits that you WON’T win, and the third one allows you to select the tricks you’ll win and their colour. We all most of our bids, it was a bit tricky. I thought I was winning, but was beaten in the last round by someone who bid zero tricks and managed to pull it off.
Azul, haven’t played this in forever. It’s really a pretty good game, but it can be cruel at times. In a good way. Anyway, I won, so that was cool.
11 Likes
I played a couple of games of Dice Conquest, which is a neat little run-the-gauntlet dice/card-management game (follow that link for a detailed description). (I see there’s a very new Pathfinder Dice Conquest version now, as well, with a variety of differences.)
I played with 4 characters (Thief, Warrior, Wizard, Rogue). I won the first game and I think I managed to not cheat, although there were a couple of rules ambiguities along the way, and I had to re-do a number of turns after realising I’d violated a current restriction. I’m pretty sure I caught myself on everything.
In the second game I introduced a couple of Trap cards into the deck which ended up causing a bunch of damage I didn’t think I could afford, and in one round I ended up drawing six enemy cards instead of the normal three, thanks to one trap and two monsters all causing “draw another card”. That was looking catastrophic, so I burned a bunch of magic items on that round and somehow managed to reduce it all to just one card by the end of the round, so I didn’t take much damage; but it eventually bit me when I couldn’t quite get the win – I defeated the final opponent, but couldn’t prevent my rogue dying in the process of making the final attack, and any character death counts as a defeat. Sadly they also had an unused magic item they’d carried most of the game, which I could have discarded at one of the traps to avoid some critical damage.
So a win and a loss officially; but I remember getting obliterated by this game the last time I played, so I’m counting this as a good session :).
It’s also occurred to me that this game (which I quite enjoy) has some DNA in common with One Deck Dungeon (which I didn’t really enjoy), but it’s too long since I played the latter for me to say exactly why that is.
7 Likes
Bit of a quiet May gaming-wise for me but some winners in there:
Splendor Duel, great little two player game of this where we were both right on the edge of winning by different means! Super tense! I do enjoy having multiple possible winning conditions in this kind of game (love it in 7 Wonders Duel too!) if it’s balanced well and being close to winning one means you probably haven’t focused on the others as much… (Incidently just got my copy of Lord of the Ring: Duel for Middle-earth because it focuses even more on this - so a must buy for me!)
Ra great game of this - Knizia operating at peak auction game on this one (though not the only Knizia auction game I played this month…)
Sea Salt & Paper still excellent. There is one guy among my regular gaming buddies who has struggled to figure this one out. I mean the guy can play Hegemony or Galactic Cruise no worries, and this is the one that escapes him! So strange - though I guess it has a certain subtlety to playing well. The Extra Salt expansion is also great (even though I think the starfish are a bit neglected and I’m not sure the jellyfish is anything other than a largely inferior shark). I also hear there’s another little expansion on its way - keen to try that one 
Dinosaur Island, a gaming buddy brought this one over to try out. I thought it was decent. Not one I’ll be rushing out to buy though I enjoyed our game and wouldn’t say no to playing it again. Also the variability seems pretty substantial from game to game.
Point City, only one game of this this month. Still terrific fun - think I even won this one (which does not happen often).
Arctic Scavengers, I still really like this as a pure deckbuilder even if I’m coming around to ‘card-row’ style deckbuilders, these fixed market ones just have a different vibe that jives with me. Close game this time around only a couple of points in it. I’m still yet to play the Recon expansion - maybe next time!
For Sale, I did okay with winning some important auctions but gosh flopped hard in the second half! I do need to try Autorama, though there’s nothing wrong with this one and it’s so easy to explain and play.
Amun-Re, finally got the requisite 4 players along to break this one out and it was great! It’s not as fast or immediate as Ra but feels like there’s more of considered strategy to the madcap antics of Ra. I won off the back of doing super well in the first half. The second half was defined for me by spending way too much for one province (a nice one, admittedly) and then the following almost as good provinces being snapped up for much cheaper, with me lacking the funds to stop it. It came down to the wire - a one point victory! I’m not sure I like it as much as Ra, though really that’s more of a comment on how much I like Ra, as Amun-Re is an excellent game - would highly recommend. I do not have the deluxe extras but foil cards aside, I think I’m unlikely to get this to the table frequently enough to justify grabbing them. Still very pleased with the purchase.
Dune Imperium x2, so I have an interesting history with this game - a buddy of mine brought it along to a weeknight game session yonks ago and we played with four players, first game for us all. And my overwhelming memory of it was anxiety over how late we were going and that people needed to get home. Fast forward to now, and I was thinking about how much I enjoy Tyrants of the Underdark, despite traditionally not liking card row deck builders - and I was like, ‘oh yeah Dune Imperium did that, I wonder if my view of that one was coloured by that one play experience…’ Well I ended up leading a how to play session at work, and was like - yes I’m pretty sure I’ll like this game more under ideal conditions. And it was on sale.
Needless to say I sold a number of people on buying copies after that session (including myself). And getting it to the table with 3 on a less hurried weeknight - yeah it’s excellent. I get why people love it and turns out I may be among them. I’m restricting myself from buying any expansions until I’ve had a few more games though. I’m not 100% sure which direction I’m leaning in - getting Uprising (though I’m inclined to think I may not like the swinginess of the worms) or sticking with the original and grabbing it’s expansions. I think I’m leaning toward the latter but I would like to try Uprising - cause who knows - apparently my judgement is not always to be trusted with boardgames! Thus ends the lesson…
11 Likes
We played Bloomchasers this afternoon.
Our friends backed it on Kickstarter and bought us a copy as well.
It’s a spatial puzzle with a cool 3D design - you’re places branches on to the tree and then adding your coloured ‘buds’. When a specific card turns up, if you have your buds in particular pattern you grow flowers. We threw in the expansion which added some blocking and double scoring.
I did knock bits off the tree a few times and the box is comically large but it’s an interesting puzzle and very striking to look at.
12 Likes
Earth. Solo. It’s great.
6 Likes
I’ve been mostly losing since then :). Sometimes by small margins, sometimes by large ones.
I had a good win today, but I’d also thought I was coasting to victory, yet in the end it came down to the final round, after a couple of enemy armies appeared late in the game. Most of my wins on hard difficulty have been on the final round, in fact (and I think the only exceptions were during the penultimate one). I’m still finding the hard settings tough in other words. Like Tetrarchia, the game is subject to the whims of the dice; but I feel that Hispania’s addition of a time limit makes it easier to unavoidably lose on the whims of the dice, rather than having time to overcome the random set-backs. (Conversely, without the time limit you can potentially tread water indefinitely in Tetrarchia, which isn’t what you want either.)
I suspect I simply shouldn’t be playing this game on the hardest settings. That’s how I like to play Tetrarchia, but it took me a while to get there with that game, and this one is a different kettle of fish. I’m not sure I want to give myself an extra coin per turn, but there are several lesser settings I can ease back on which might shift the balance enough for me to improve my win rate.
Co-ordinating a three-pronged counter-attack
Breaking out of Ilergetia, the Hispanian army (with a significant +8 support from revolt tokens) chooses to attack Yellow (who has +1 support from Citerior, and then x2 for each of the generals flanking the attacker). The outcome is (4+8) vs ((4+1)x2x2) – 12 vs 20 – defeating the Hispanian army.
3 Likes
Another BGA tournament of A Gest of Robin Hood. This time for my first match I was Robin Hood. A good back and forth match which got all the way to the end of the third ballad, but I pulled off the win with a Justice of 3. Got really lucky twice with events that let me move and Rob, allowing me to intercept two carriages that I otherwise would not have been able to stop.
10 Likes
A couple of weeks ago, before my oldest daughter’s school ended, they had a special event day where every (1st grade) kid brought a game to play.
My daughter really wanted to take the Monopoly: Disney Lilo & Stitch. We advised her that she would not have a chance to play Monopoly, regardless of version, at school because it would simply take too long (among other things).
This is one of two copies of Monopoly in our house. The other copy is Monopoly: Friends – The TV Series, that I got via no-ship math trade last year. Monopoly: Lilo & Stitch, on the other hand, was a gift from one of my partner’s friends to our kids. They know that we like to play games, and this was their best guess – fair enough, it’s actually not such a terrible thing to have an example of Monopoly around to show my kids how some games can be worse than others.
This past weekend, after spending the morning with my oldest at her softball game, we came home and I was going to watch her and the two youngest daughters while my partner took my second-born to a birthday party.
Somehow, I got roped into playing Monopoly: Disney Lilo & Stitch during this time, with only my oldest (lucky!), while my youngest two otherwise entertained themselves (not.. so lucky; turned out okay, I suppose)
First, we played using Iron Clays instead of paper money; my daughter was okay with this as soon as she saw how pretty the Iron Clays are. Her goal during the game became “have at least one of each color of Iron Clay”, rather than actually winning.
This, in the end, was her downfall. Where she was focusing on keeping her $500 chip, I was interested in investing heavily at all times.
I bought every property I landed on, mostly for face-value. I also participated heavily in the auctions for what my daughter didn’t buy outright. I mortgaged properties when needed, though that wasn’t very many.
Unfortunately, as luck would have it, my daughter ended up with all 4 railroads and both utilities (in this edition of the game: spaceships and… uhh, squirt bottles or something like that). And she also ended up in jail for an extended period of time. I thought that surely I would lose.
Eventually, however, I managed to pay off my mortgaged properties and start building hotels. Because of having to watch 2 young children while also playing, I was not being super-aggressive with my property improvement. Rather than incrementing with houses as the money came in, I looked down and saw that I had an extra $750 sitting there, enough to go from nothing-to-hotels on the light blue properties.
My daughter, as luck would have it, would avoid these light blue properties for the entirety of the rest of the game; somehow landing on either side, or on the non-property space in the middle of them (this edition’s version of “Community Chest”, I believe).
My daughter, on the other hand, built one hotel… on the second-cheapest property in the game. Honestly, this was a pretty good move, but ultimately wasn’t enough.
I eventually got hotels on the orange group as well, and had gotten 4 houses each on the red group.
Around that time, my daughter landed on the orange group, and was forced to mortgage most of her properties to pay the rent. I took this picture, thinking it would be the point we called the game in my favor
In reality, my daughter wanted to keep going, though she was severely cash-limited. The game ended on her following turn when she landed on one of the red-group properties and, I think, could have raised enough money, but it would involve selling the properties via auction… and I just don’t know how that would realistically work in a 2-player game (I mean, I could just bid 1 on each of them?). I convinced her to call the game instead.
Playtime: about 2 hours even with using poker chips instead of paper money
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
7 Likes