I woke up with my younger kiddo at 1:30 this morning and only got short naps between requests to start over television shows (every 10 minutes or so) or get him more juice or cereal.
Still better than playing Monopoly.
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Or two hours quality time with his daughter doing something she really wanted to doā¦
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Earth, again. Solo, again. Still great; perhaps even better.
I think I like this game very much indeed.
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Of course. My comment was made in jest. Though my kid was up that early.
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What is it that fascinates you about it?
I would like to hear another angle but my own.
The theory says I should also love this game because it hits a few of my favorite notes: tags, combos, tons of cards, spatial puzzleā¦ I want to like it and yet I donāt seem to click with it.
I have mostly played solos on BGA. I own a cardboard copy but have only played a single game on the actual table.
5 Likes
I think itās simply that the things you mention are present in ways I enjoy (I like the card placement puzzle more than, for example, the polyominoes in Feast for Odin. And the oodles of cards are never overwhelming; nothingās hard to understand once youāve learned the iconography, which doesnāt take long.)
And it looks nice, and I like the theme. And the mechanisms relate sensibly to the theme, which is always good in my view.
I do really like the variability of the island/climate/ecosystem cards - choosing different ones doesnāt change the game in any way, but tweaks the objectives, which can lead to very different focusses from one game to the next.
And the challenge presented is at the right level (for me, for this game) - it rewards effort, but doing well never feels impossible.
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If you were me, I would say āaha, thatās the problemā. Iāve played once on BGA, a multiplayer async game, and it was deadly dull and dreary; I enjoy it vastly more in person. I think the trick may be that you have to retain an overall awareness of your own board; unless youāre taking extensive notes, thereās a subconscious feel that this is my lichen column, that is the bit where Iām doing diagonal conifers, or whatever, and without the constant presence of the board I find that quite hard to do.
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One Games Night! moved from a Wednesday (bad night for me) to Monday (OK night for me). Hurrah!
Freie Fahrt USA flavour, much more entanglement in routes than my previous plays. described at TTR+ by a player. Building a chain of routes on your own leads to no-one using it. Won, so obviously the best game of the night
Loony Quest, dumb fun that doesnāt overstay itās welcome
Torchlit, quite possibly my favourite tricktaker right now.
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Taking place in the timeline before my monopolistic encounter, I did get another play of High Fronter 4 All completed.
This time, it was the Wernerās Star scenario from the High Frontier 4 All Module 1: Terawatt & Futures expansion. Itās really lucky that I picked up Modules 1 and 2 when I bought HF4A; without these addons, I think the game wouldnāt be interesting enough.
In the Wernerās Star scenario, the goal is to obtain a GW Thruster (gigawatt thruster), promote it to the purple side; in this case, a GW Thruster is promoted to a TW Thruster (terrawatt thruster). And then, once you have your TW Thruster, you complete the āfutureā for it; i.e. each card has a different special circumstance that you can achieve. In my case, it was having a Bernal (space station colony, essentially) anchored above adjacent sites (generic term for asteroids, planets, planetoids, comets, etc) that would provide 8+ āhydrationā (a stat in the game that Iām sure is scientific, but it sure sounds like a strange yet effective resource quantification for extraterrestrial resource production)
I won, but again, likely with a considerable * (asterisk) on the whole thing. Looking back, I made many mistakes; some of which were me being indecisive; others me misunderstanding the rules until it was too late, and yet more was me making things more complicated or convoluted than need be.
In the end, Iām going to consider it a massive success; because I did succeed, and I made it extra difficult along the way in doing so.
Next up: New Work Laptop ā¦ wait, what? Oh, yes. I have a laptop refresh that might occupy my gaming spare table for a week or so. But after that? Back to HF4A and, likely, Solo Altruism with M0, M1, and M2.
High Frontier 4 All is definitely going into my ātop solo gamesā list. Honestly, itās a bit refreshing in how un-euro it is.
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I didnāt think High Frontier could even work as a solo game, given that my impression was that it is an auction game with a huge convoluted resolution āphaseā (the rest of the game) bolted onā¦
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The most kid-friendly game of all time, before you even take off the shrink-wrap!
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Apex Legends - itās more board gamey than a miniatures game. I really enjoyed it though, despite not playing the video game and not familiar with the IP. The rules are straight forward. Nice flow. And even the line-of-sight rule is intuitive. One of the best new-to-me.
The big box edition they got from the crowdfunding is literally the largest board game box I have ever seen. No joke.
LOTR Pandemic - wait, what was the actual name of this? Eh. You know what Iām talking about. I donāt want to get into more pandemic titles, but I was thrilled at this game. Feels thematic and it uses the cube movement rules from Pandemic Fall of Rome. I might call this as one of the best Pandemic games.
Beyond the Sun - I drove too close to the sun by overplaying it back then. Played it again and itās stillā¦ okay. Why am I playing this in real life?
Oceans - last I played this was with someone in the club who likes to waste everyoneās time and sullied my experience of it. I got back into it and now appreciate it more. Not as zappy as Evolutions, but I still like the combo-y stuff going on here.
Crazy Corgi - push your luck game where you draw cards with CUTE CORGIS on them. You bust if you draw a card and itās the same number of one of the cards you drew. If you do bust, you give those cards to another player. If you donāt bust, you put the cards on your tableau to make sets. You make sets to score points.
Itās a cute filler game and more approachable than, say, a train-themed card game.
5 Likes
I didnāt, but I now do. Iām really surprised that thereās a game in the series which doesnāt have āPandemicā in the title. (I mean, theyāve already had a āpandemicā of water, so why not this?)
3 Likes
Really, Iād have thought it more appropriate to play the other side: you are the ring-wraiths, moving around to stamp out rebellion whenever it flares up.
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Thats just appeared on BGA too (or was that where you played it?)
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āUgh, another outbreak of Hobbits in Gondor!ā
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Are there many licensed games where you play the baddies? Not a versus mode where one person is the bad faction or there are options for good/evil but a game where everyone plays as the villains from the fiction? I can think of Disneys Villainous but even that doesnāt take place in the canon of a story.
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Iām sure there are plenty where everyone in the fiction is a villain. Like, various games from Games Workshop, for example.
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I think the IP owners are generally very careful about that (āwah, your game taught my little kiddie to be a bad personā) but I was just thinking that it was a much better fit for the Pandemic mechanics.
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In High Frontier 4 All, at least, you replace the Research operation procedure with a solo-specific procedure.
In the normal game, you put up a card for auction. The top card of the deck for each card type it shows as a āsupportā will be included with the auction. For example:
If this
thrusterwas put up for auction, the winner would also get onereactor(the purpleX) and oneradiator(the blue thermometer)If the top (showing) card of the
reactordeck was this, it would still be included, even though itās a different type (combustiontype). This card shows ageneratoricon as its āsupportā requirement; but auctions do not provide chaining supports, so ageneratorcard would not be won as part of the auction.And, for the sake of completeness, youād also receive a
radiatorsupport, such as:
Whoever bid the highest pays the person who started the auction, unless that person had the highest bid, in which case the bank is paid. Ties are broken by choice of the player who started the auction.
In the current solo mode, it works very much the same except thereās no auction and you simply pay 1 per card you take. Itās unclear if you have to take āsupportsā, but I believe itās required.
Please note: My 2020-printed rulebook shows a different rule for the solo Research operation. This is the infamous āliving rulesā of High Frontier.
I believe in editions before 4th, solo play was limited to special scenarios that introduced additional timing constraints to the game. The special scenarios are still included in High Frontier 4 All (or expansions), and there seems to be a trend of them all aligning on how solo research works.
3 Likes