So sea salt and pepper and particularly flip7 have been the games of the holiday. Trailblazers was not a hit. Also the flip7 score app is highly recommended.
10 Likes
Had the pleasure of seeing @lalunaverde and one other friend today. We started out with the hottest of the hotness and played Hot Streak 
. Yeah, itās really very good. We played twice. Betting racing one nice package and I was lucky enough to wind in the board at the end. Marvellous stuff however me and Dangle have fallen out.
Next we tried out Uchronia. I can see why itās unpopular with Glory to Rome fans. We had I think a bad run of buildings where the shuffle just served up all doubles of very few colours. Itās just not as interactive as GtR and not as wild. However I wonāt be dumping it out as I think there might still be a little something in to for days when a multi player solitaire vibe is prevalent. Itās not quite the full MPS mind. Nice pictures but the graphic design leaves a little to be desired.
Lastly we played 2 bouts of BattleCon. Itās still very cool. Maybe we should have stuck with the same characters for both games but novelty and exploration called for a total switch up each time. The first game had more gear grinding in the noggin for me to try and get my character doing stuff without being exposed and the second game the opponent over reached with their character complexity so I turned them to stone far too easily. Still the baby didnāt ruin any components while they played as I played so thatās the bigger win.
8 Likes
A fairly light gaming June for me (though better than May - still trying to reconcile my weekend shifts at the boardgame store with actual gaming with folks that work during the week):
Point City x3, still going strong and frequently requested as an end of night filler. I probably like it more than Splendor at this point - thereās not much more happening but enough to give it a different vibe.
Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-Earth x3, loving this one - so far Iāve had two wins on the ring track, one win from the alliances. But itās always felt tight. Itās just straight up better than 7 Wonders Duel imo (at least without the expansions - though Iām curious if this one will get some expansion action)
Nut x2, decent little filler, one of the better Pack oā Game games. Glad itās got a proper reprint, rather than being relegated to Kickstarter bonus game.
Fantastic Factories, terrific game of this, thought I had it due to having heaps of goods tiles, but lost out due to the winner having nabbed a few more point buildings than Iād realised. Great simple fun.
Harmonies, might be overtaking Cascadia in the realm of satisfying animal/terrain puzzle games. Itās a little more puzzley. Easy to teach but still enough depth. The only real downside is the possibility of flipping cards that just perfectly fit someones strategy and hand them the win. Though I havenāt seen that happen heaps, so not a huge issue.
Biblios, weird game of this - lots of coins in the auction and very little anything else. Turns out one of the players had secured the win in the first half by pocketing point cards. Iād never thought this one was fragile but, yeah, weird game.
Sea Salt and Paper still one of my preferred small box fillers, though the scoring is marginally more complicated to explain than Iād like. Iām looking forward to trying the new expansion for sure!
QE, it was a small group for this one at 3 - it still worked and was fun, though none of us went too extreme with bidding. Our clear leader was a clear loser for the back half of the game so I snuck in a win. Would like to try it with a bigger crowd sometime.
Above and Below Haunted x2, a rare instaback on Gamefound for me. I really enjoy the original and this one is a great sequel. Youāve gotta like the story telling though (one of our players did not - he liked the gameplay but the adventures werenāt quite his speed). From these two games I think theyāve improved the writing in the adventure book as well as the economic town management side of things. And itās great having clarity about when youāll get bonus rewards and what youāll actually need to succeed before diving into the adventures. Itās a little easier to predict rewards from adventuring too whereas the first could feel a little random. Thereās certainly more stories in the first one though (particularly with the expansion), so I could see that being an issue with a lot of plays. The name not only reflects the new ghost mechanic but the stories are very much ghost heavy, whereas I liked the wider variety in the encounters in the original.
Above and Below, solo game of this with the new solo mode - itās a little rough, I had a few unanswered questions as to how a few things worked. But it does function and was enjoyable. And Iām still very much going to keep this one along with Haunted.
9 Likes
Iāve thought that the track should the opposite way round, so rather than folding the track over you wind it in as the race progresses. Iām sure thereās a reason they didnāt do that.
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Killing guardians at 5 per is pretty powerful. And building your deck can net you another 20 points. Iāve always diversified. I feel like rushing the temple just isnāt efficient as it doesnāt give you the kickbacks. Exploring a site, killing a guardian and using the āchangeā to advance on the temple should get you more in total, right?
And this is where I repeat it is a great game in its own right. Seriously. Try it and be surprised.
I need to play it again, itās been a decade at least.
3 Likes
Iām up to five plays of White Castle and I might be done with it. I found online that I didnāt want to take my turns. And after the last game I had a fleeting thought that Iād rather play Tiletum (a game I culled) and that speaks volumes.
Two issues emerging: first, you only have nine turns so each turn has to be a big megaturn. Itās just a lot of pressure on each move and sometimes I donāt want each decision to carry that much binary weight on the outcome of the game. Myers Briggs P? I want to feel things out and correct as I go?
Second, the games really do feel the same. Yow, youāve got a deck of cards and variable setup and dice that could be all high or all low and affect whatās good in a round, but it all nets out to the same basic things. And the palace is always a Terminal action so if you want your megaturn you want to start with farmers or warriors and combo into the palace. Farmers will always require coins to trigger a main action and warriors tend to require a seal to comboā¦
Iāve read similar complaints online that the game gets static. Iāve also read that the Matcha expansion properly āexpandsā the game into something more interesting. Iām not feeling motivated to āfixā this one.
Shame. Not culling just yet as I believe some people I play with may like it and that is worth a lot when you donāt have eager gamers to play with. But yeah. White Castle.
On the other hand, Trails. I got this for my daughter when she turned 5. Itās like the kids version of Parks. And itās actually kind of fire. I mean, win one, she loves it and asks to play every day. Iāve omitted a few rules to keep things simple but she gets what Iāve laid out for her and is starting to plan more and more. And Iām just deeply impressed that this game may be better than White Castle?
Youāre just going back and forth on a 7 card trail, collecting three types of tokens to pay for points cards at either endpoint of the trail. Like Waterdeep - place, collect, fulfill. You can only move one or two spaces each turn (though once per circuit you can flip your canteen to move as far as you wantā¦weāre not playing with that yet). And just this simple calculus of do I go slow and get lots of stuff to get the big card or do I hurry and snatch something before someone else, do I go to the bear, which I donāt need, to get something extra or do I stick to the plan? I mean, itās a bit tense and exciting. Itās satisfying. I did NOT expect to enjoy this little 1.84 complexity, watered down version of a game I barely liked in the first place. Better than Parks? Maybe. Better than it has any right to be? Definitely.
Likely going to pick up a second copy of the 59 parks versions for when they are older, as this copy will inevitably get folded, ripped, and spilled on.
7 Likes
Risk 2210 is probably the 2nd best version of Risk I have ever played, making it a solidā¦ 6.5/10? Maybe a 7? Thereās abouts. It is good enough that if somebody were to suggest a game of it, Iād play with them, but I donāt feel the need to include it in my collection.
Risk Legacy is better, IMO, but YMMV. Also, I think they just released an expansion to Risk 2210 likeā¦ 4 months ago? And obviously I havenāt tried that. But yeah, 2210 is a legit neat upgrade over vanilla Risk in just about every way. I had it for years.
āConvincingā guardians that you are super cool is definitely good (āHey, look at this really awesome revolver I have!ā āOH WOW! Thatās so cool! We should be friends!ā), but itās hard to visit as many sites as it is to hammer on down that Research trackā¦ to put it differently, I think the upper limit to the number of Guardians you can reasonably befriend is around 6-8? The absolute maximum would be 10, but I think thatās actually impossible (youād need 6 explore tokens on Turn 1 without using either of your Explorersā¦ oh, I suppose your first Explorer could find a location that gave a bunch of Explore tokens, so maybe?). Letās say you manage to befriend 7 Guardiansā¦ thatās 35 points. Thatās really good! But going into the temple three times gets you 33 points, and no Fear, and has a diversified resource cost (like, you donāt need a tonne of one thing, you can pull the lever with gems or arrows or other stuff) meaning that if you get a little of everything you can do it multiple times.
Anyway. I agree with you. I think a balanced approach to the game will do betterā¦ or perhaps the issue is that Iām ignoring what the other players want to do and therefore not blocking them? I dunno. But I love the game, and I think Mike and Justin are wrong to say thereās only one strategy but Iām not sure.
3 Likes
Glad you see the majesty of a risky sausage.
Iām sorry that your Dangle have fallen out
Yeah. I wasnāt enamoured with Uchronia but sure will be keen to try again.
BattleCon is lit af as usual
8 Likes
Hot Streak, bloody Gobbler
St Petersburg, should have spent more time at the libraries I built. Almost got lapped on points
Billabong, itās good but it aināt Hot Streak
Nyakuza, the player colours suck
Courtisans I won!
6 Likes
Yeah. This one is more of an abstract game with a racing theme trappings on it, than a game like Camel Up or Hot Streak
2 Likes
I finally got round to playing Blood on the Clocktower last week, with two different groups, all of which were reasonably experienced. I can understand why they like it, but I would happily never play it again.
We played 4 games over two evenings. I was on the good team twice (won 1, lost 1) and the evil team twice (won 1, lost 1). On both occasions when the good team won, it was for the wrong reasons (the deduction was incorrect but landed on the demon anyway by chance). I did have a lovely time as the demon though and won on that occasion.
My main issue is that the game deceives you into thinking you can make solid deductions, but you really canāt unless you get very lucky. The info is handed out in such a piecemeal way and there is so much misinformation/disonformation in the game, that it just seems like a pointless endeavour. It occurred to me afterwards that in each game we played (10 players), only 50% of the info available to the good team was reliable, but to make a solid deduction you need to piece together maybe 3 or 4 bits of information - and they all need to be accurate. Even if I only need 3 bits of accurate information, thatās still only a 12.5% chance of being correct. Thatās a much lower probability of killing an evil player than if we choose at random, so why bother? Why all these extra rules, setup time and play time when itās going to be down to vibes anyway?
I also noticed that many of the roles give the storyteller quite a lot of flexibility in how helpful/unhelpful they can be to each team. This annoyed me a bit because on the few occasions where we were making progress, the storyteller (we had 2 over the 4 games) gave us info that would be deliberately unhelpful. So again, why bother? Why spend all this energy and deal with all these extra rules when youāre unlikely to be rewarded for it?
Anyway, the people I played with seemed to really love the chaos of it. If you donāt mind the things I mentioned above and love the theatre of it, then I can understand why itās some peopleās favourite game, because otherwise it is endlessly replayable. I can totally imagine a situation when you do finally get all the correct information you need and you nail it as the good team, and it feels greatā¦ but that didnāt happen in 4 games, so Iām happy to not keep chasing that game.
Sidenote: Just to caveat this, I will say that most of the people I played with didnāt seem particularly good at the game despite loving it and having played it a lot. Many of them seemed to think of it as a solvable puzzle, which by design it isnāt (unless the good team get very lucky with the setup and have a sympathetic storyteller). They seemed to struggle with the idea that scenarios which would be unlikely by chance alone arenāt so unlikely when you have malicious actors making decisions (evil team/storyteller). They would routinely say there were only 1 or 2 possibilities when there were really a dozen possibilities if they ignored their assumptions. And then thereās the usual folks who believe they can tell when people are lying when they really canāt. So just bear that in mind - it might just be very group dependent.
10 Likes
I wonder if thereās a correlation between liking BotC and liking Mascarade? Which Iād characterise as ādeduction, but you have no actual information, and nor do the people youāre trying to readā.
Back to the Masonic Hall in Stockport for a damp and muggy weekend The games got started with Hanabi, which I havenāt played for a while. Good fun for one game, but I wouldnāt want to go back to it sa a regular thing.
On to The Climbers, at which point it became clear that I was more tired than I thought. Good fun even so! Then Xenon Profiteer, in which I got a full set of pipelines at the cost of achieving basically anything else. My Expo copy of Kabuto Sumo: Sakura Slam (now there are corner posts!)
And finally Tinderblox Sunset, possibly the highest Iāve seen it go.
A role-playing session on Saturday morning, which as usual didnāt produce much in the way of photographs. The Blade Runner system seems interesting; not sure it has much to say in terms of raw mechanics, but it does have some good ideas for side notes (e.g. the way you get a lab result back is āwait till end of shiftā).
I continued to do quite badly in Xia: Legends of a Drift System, a huge sprawling game that was nonetheless great fun. On to Kluster, which I played once a while ago (and more recently with a very old set). The trick, I think, is to use your magnetic stone as a probe without causing too much disruption belowā¦ One of us had bought Square One, by one of the designers of Project L and sharing some of the visual grammar. It loses the shape element completely; you can use pieces to fill the top row on a card, which you have to complete all at once, and the idea of a master action is still there from Project L. White-backed cards now only give you pieces, black-backed cards only give you score, and if you use a master action to finish two or more tiles at once you get a bonus. I enjoyed it, and Iād like to play it again, but itās so very close to Project L that I wasnāt sure I could justify owning bothl and to test that theory we went on to play Project Lā¦ which ended up feeling not at all the same. I enjoyed this more, but is that simply because I know it better? I do like the shape element. (No pictures for this one.)
On to Nova Luna, where we suffered from a very poorly laid-out rulebook (I have now written a better one and added it to my Pocketmod page). An enjoyable game even so, but Iām in no hurry to play again. One of my current favourite light games, Flip 7, in which each of us had the lead for at least one round. And the last one for the evening, SCOUT, in which I fell apart comprehensively. (No photos.)
Just the one game on Sunday morning, Imperium: Horizons, with Taino, Vikings and Egyptians. I thought I was doing fairly well, but evidently not. Still had a great time though, as I always do with this.
Next Stabcon is 2-4 January.
7 Likes
A really nice game which I greatly enjoyed. I was playing against my friend Ant so needless to say I lost
7 Likes
Metropolys - production from Ystari could have been better, but hey, this was from the old Noughties.
This is way better than Skyrise though. Glad that Skyrise still has Metropolysā old foundations, but they made it convoluted and āmodernā
Root - Vagabond, Rats (Lord of Hundreds), Otters (me), Cats, and Moles. Moles steamed ahead. Rats and Otters got punched early and so lagged behind. Moles and Cats got beaten up as a result but Vagabond got away with a few scratches and therefore is the winner. Basically, we donāt play Vagabond for so long that we forgot how dangerous it is
10 Likes
Made it to a games meet-up tonight, and it was excellent. Quite a few more people than usual (myself included; Iāve not made it for a while), which might well be a post-Wellycon effect.
I was at a table of six, and we stayed together the whole evening, playing:
- Ethnos
- Courtisans x 2
- Planepita
- Mantis x 2
- Flip 7
Details
Ethnos is so good. Iāve not had a chance to play it in ages, and Iād forgotten just how slick it is. We played with Merfolk, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, Winged folk, and Skeletons. So just the one additional component in use (the Merfolk tracker) meaning the teach was quite simple. We found ourselves with a pair of very high-value regions (4,8,8 and 4,10,10) on the map, and in both the 2nd and 3rd eras of the game I managed to be dominating one of those two regions and tied for the lead in the other (making use of the merfolk bonus tokens to enhance my standing in each); so I took a lot of points from those regions alone. On top of that I managed to play a couple of 6-card bands worth 15 points each, and in the end these advantages were enough to secure me the win.
Courtisans was next. I forgot it was for 2-5 players until half-way through the teach. When I realised, I decided to carry on and sit it out. Fortunately one of the others said that it didnāt sound like the game would break if we just played with 6, so we decided to try that andā¦ it was fine! When the draw deck was getting low, I counted the remaining cards so that I could discard whatever was necessary to ensure that we had an exact amount for the final round, andā¦ just as for 5, full deck is already an exact multiple for 6 players! With 90 cards there are 30 individual player turns, which can be either 6 rounds with 5 players, or 5 rounds with 6 players. Iām surprised that they donāt advertise it for up to 6, as the game still works. I got trounced in both games of this, failing 3/4 of my secret goals!
Planepita then got its very first outing, and my goodness Iām very happy with that purchase! Itās exactly what I hoped it would be. In three of the four rounds we had a tie for control in one of the scoring zones, meaning that those points arenāt scored and the zone in question is worth more in the following round. I managed to scoop the two most valuable cases of that for 5+5 and 4+4 points respectively, which won me the game. Unfortunately not everyone had understood how that worked (very much my fault; I clearly failed to make certain that everyone knew the value of each zone at the start of each round), which meant Iād had an unfair advantage over some of them in knowing what to prioritise. Easily fixed for next time. The only significant issue I noticed was that one player was disadvantaged by their position at the table, which I didnāt recognise until well through the game. This wouldnāt have been a problem with fewer players or a smaller table. I think I shall house rule that partially-off-the-board discs get moved so theyāre not leaning on the table, and that will ensure that players can rotate the board for best access to their assigned portion of the circumference, if necessary. Despite those little issues, everyone seemed to really enjoy the game (I think partly because itās unusual, and partly because itās very good at what it does).
Mantis was next, and looking at the last time I played it Iām wondering whether we played a rule differently. Tonight we played that if you fail in an attempt to steal, the card goes to the person you were trying to steal from. I think last time we played that the player who fails to do a thing always gets the card. I imagine that one way is better than the other, but it was nevertheless fun both times. I snuck a win in the second game after someone talked me out of attempting to steal from them in favour of trying to bank my own cards ā they managed to convince me, and I succeeded in banking 3 cards, and the following round I managed to bank the additional 2 I needed to win the game :).
The final game of the night was Flip 7, which is another small push-your-luck card game Iāve seen mentioned here several times recently. Itās fun :). The game couldnāt be much simpler ā the deck contains cards numbered from 1 to 12, and the number on the card is also the quantity of those cards in the deck (1x1, ā¦, 12x12). Each turn you choose whether to bank your points for the round (the sum of the card numbers in front of you), orā¦ draw a card! If you draw a number you already have, you bust and get no points. There are some special cards as well (with āDraw 3 cardsā being the most notorious, especially as you choose who has to do it), but thatās the guts of it, and itās just funny. Everyone starts with one card. In the first round I started with a 9. I drew a card. It was a 9. I continued to go bust in round 2, 3, and 4 without drawing more than 2 cards in any of those rounds. Has a similar vibe to No Thanks and 6 nimmt. Fast and funny! (Personally I feel that gambling for anything of real worth saps every ounce of fun out of a game ā but when you remove any real stakes, gambling becomes the funniest mechanic in all of gaming?)
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Yes, I think Flip 7 is one of those games like Tinderblox which are blatantly unfairāand if you accept that often the best player wonāt win, thatās fine, but some players including me like to know it in advance.
5 Likes
Oh thatās good to know! Might end up picking it up if thatās the case, thanks!
2 Likes
Last night had 6 players for a game of 2nd edition Robo Rally.
I crushed everyone. It wasnāt even close. It was so not-close that I removed one of the flags because I was so far ahead there was no point. Still a neat game, but it wasnāt asā¦ chaotic/silly as I remember? But itās old now, and design has come a long way. Still good olā fashioned fun.
Then we played the sublime Gravwell, also 2nd edition, albeit with the old rule of everyone starting in the middle and trying to get out (the new rules has half the players at the outside gate rushing in, while the other half are at the inside gate rushing out). I jumped to an early lead but then stalled out and couldnāt cross the finish lineā¦ eventually Mike accidentally used a multipoint repulsor and pushed Jusitn out of the gate for the win. Dang good time.
Then we played Captain Sonar with 3 per side, and our team managed one loss and one win. Neither games were blowouts, though, and despite my inability to remember to both move AND charge a system, the captain on the other team had exactly the same problem. Good times.
Then we played The Gang with 6 players, which was a first for meā¦ and we pulled it off! 3 wins, 2 losses, and the losses were both very close (Somebody with an Ace - 5 pocket bid lower than somebody with an Ace - 4). As much as I like The Gang (and I do, to be clear), the major draw is how simple it is to teach and play, and how immediate the game feels like a game. Everyone kinda groks it pretty quick, with the one exception that people always underestimate the value of their hands until they play a few times. We had somebody with pocket Kings bid for the 1 star because it was āonlyā a pair, despite the fact that they had by far the best hand out of anyone at the table.
Then 2 of our players had to go (it was midnight, to be fair), so we played a quick game of Skull (damn, what a game) which Mike won on a very risky 4-out-of-5 bid, and then a quick game of Railroad Ink, which I lost on tiebreakers.
Now I am going to be spending the next umpteen million hours trying to learn Davinci Resolve to shoot some silly stop motion animation videos for Battletech. Fun!
8 Likes
I think Robo Rally can be really chaotic and silly if everyone is bad at it but despite how it appears thereās quite a bit of skill involved and someone who is good at it will just dominate. I am terrible at it, but the hostās son at the gaming meetup where I played all my RoboRally was very good at it indeed and won like 90% of the time.
7 Likes
I agree. At my table there is one player who regularly wins Robo Rally and has been winning for years no matter how well everyone else does the robo dance, heās just better (unless I push him into a hole). Heās also better than everyone else at Quake 3 Arena all these years laterā¦ maybe there is a connection?
In any case, small tight maps are better suited for chaos. Easier ones as well. If the map is large and difficult the skilled player has more chances to extricate themselves from the mob.
7 Likes