Played a bit of a game of Fortune And Glory to teach the basics to my partner. She sneaked onto a zeppelin and punched nazis, and declared it was a good time.
Then we played more Crokinole. And some more, until it was quite late. Partner insisted on finishing a best of three despite us having to go to bed, yelling “None shall sleep!”
Crokinole is just as addictive as the reviews say. Also, we’ve only played it for about three days and we’re both noticeably much better at it.
While you were sat down playing Fortune and Glory? Kinda rude for her to not invite you
Sounds like some pretty long turns.
Got in a game of Concordia today with my wife. Felt weird as we blitzed through the card supply a lot faster than usual. As such, we had 6 or 7 houses left in our supplies at game end. Really came down to the wire, but my wife ended the game, getting the 7 point Concordia card, and with it the win, 101 - 96.
It’s a bit of a weird week here: it’s Spring Break, so my older two are home instead of at school. It’s like a screaming, yelling, crying preview of summer break 
Surprising, especially, me last night, I sat down and got another game out on my table. This time, it was Spirit Island. I’ve spent a lot of my spare time lately watching a few different Youtube/streamers play Spirit Island (they make it look so easy!). I decided it was time to not let them have all the fun!
I started off with a totally randomized setup:
Man, I hated Blitz mode, especially with Sun-Bright Whirlwind. I got into a position where I wasn’t really losing, but I also wasn’t winning and the road to victory was just not looking all that fun… so I reset and went in a different direction!
So, I ended up in “Difficulty 0” instead of “Difficulty 1”, technically. I had pretty good control of the game at most times and I managed to get a lot of Thunderspeaker-friendly minors pretty quick – unfortunately, it was a lot of Slow powers. So, then, SKY STRETCHES TO SHORE became the path to victory, though GIFT OF TWINNED DAYS was also pivotal to keeping the Dahan safe by spamming a single Defense, often, multiple times.
Oddly, now I feel like I’m worse at this game than I did before, because I’ve seen Youtubers/streamers play at high levels and yet my Difficulty 0 game was surprisingly uninspired.
I guess I just need to play more.
I’ve been hitting up my old apps. Man, there were some good ones. I feel like the older apps were better than what we get nowadays. Slightly different curation of games, more “classic” and less “hawt” - but also the good ones had a real focus on interface and board state. Today I find a lot of the games have a focus on grafixxx and animations and make it look like a video game and the results are just less boardgamey.
Anyway - Istanbul. Despite @lalunaverde’s ill-hidden contempt for this game, it’s pretty good. If you’re tired of it, definitely throw in the neutral assistant rules - they are incredible. Your own assistant pool is strapped and the routes on the board keep shifting. And if you’ve hit a skill ceiling, just find someone better to play against to shatter the illusion.
Lords of Waterdeep. (Oh, I also played Parks on the table with wife and her sister last weekend so let’s compare.) I’ve had a hard time with Waterdeep, Parks, and Architects. Ostensibly, they are all light worker placement recipe fulfillment games and I don’t need all three. But man if I amn’t stumped on which to cull? Originally I assumed Waterdeep as it is the oldest, barest design. But I kept liking it. So, Parks. I didn’t actually enjoy that one. But other humans I frequently spend time with do, so we play it from time to time. And I’m enjoying it more and more over time. Good games grow on you. So… maybe Architects? I think I’m enjoying that one less and less, but in all fairness the solo mode is exploitable and BGA async ruins the flow of the game, so it might be a medium issue instead of actually being the weakest game.
What makes Waterdeep so compelling? I think it’s three things - fixed rounds, owned building rewards, and quest rewards.
The fixed rounds work so well for worker placement recipe fulfillment (wprf) because you know exactly how many actions you have left. And, theoretically, exactly how much you can do with those actions. This substrate supports the tension of claiming and losing placement spots. You know what you need, what you can take, what alternatives you might have, what you’ve lost… that clarity makes the sizzle.
The owned buildings and owner rewards are a great fork. The game’s valuation is wonderfully simple: 2 orange = 2 black = 1 purple = 1 white = 4 coins. Regular spots give one “unit” of value. Bought buildings give 1.5 or 2, but kickback .5 or 1 unit of value back to the owner. Do I take that building and give the owner a free turn? How much do I need it? How much do they need the thing I’ll give them? Who wins? Or do I use my own building, getting the extra benefit? Then I’ll lose the free kickback (maybe…) and essentially lose a turn? It never gets old.
Lastly, the quest rewards. I love how each quest gives you change, or an exchange. Deciding what quests to take, and what order to complete them, is an extra delight.
Anyway. Good game. Undermountain expansion for sure. And it looks like all three will continue to stick around.
+ Ashes Reborn: The King of Titans
I’ve been wanting to get Ashes back on my table for a while. I have a ton of new content for the solo/co-op PvE mode, Red Rains, and also a ton of the untouched original content.
So I randomly chose a Phoenixborn to play, selecting Xander Heartsblood (Nature/Divine) – who summons dinosaurs?
I also wanted to try out the most recent (to me, second released) chimera opponent, the Frostwild Scourge, along with the new Storm aspect deck.
That was a mistake! Man, this game is deep and I probably needed to custom build a deck to have a chance. In actuality, I gave up after 3 rounds because I was continually falling further behind and I couldn’t keep up with the tricks that the Frostwild Scourge uses – not to mention how nasty the Storm aspect deck is.
As I was setting up, I remembered that I hadn’t actually ever tried the other aspect that came with The Corpse of Viros (the first Chimera released). I think I’ve only played against Fury, leaving Shadow untouched.
I’m unsure where to go from here. Part of me thinks I should go back and focus on Spirit Island a bit. Another part of me thinks I should try another random pairing. And yet another part of me thinks I should try to research and deckbuild my way through the Xander Heartsblood vs Frostwild Scourge/Storm.
I think that last option may require just too much study and devotion; more than I have the energy for at the moment.
Ashes is easier to get on the table, setup, play, and teardown that Spirit Island is… Maybe I’ll just try a new randomly-selected Phoenixborn and go back and play Viros/Shadow.
2 x Akropolis at 2 players. Easy to explain and quick to play. Just played the base game with the base rules since the other person had never played before. Looking forward to trying the Athena expansion next.
MLEM Space Agency: reminds me of a cross between Celestia and Heck Meck. Fun and silly. We inevitably pushed our luck too much and crashed a lot 
And so cuuuuute 
I played some Forks with 5p tonight, and while it works, I think it’s not as good as it is with fewer players. Probably 3-4p is the sweet spot? With 5-6p you can only play 3 rounds instead of 4, and it makes quite a difference. The state after round 1 is relatively arbitrary. The state after round 2 gives you more of a sense of where things are heading, but it’s usually still slight. I think the state at the end of round 3 is where the panic sets in, so you want that 4th round so that people have the opportunity to respond to that, and really lament the awful cards they’ve been handed (and then look in horror at the final state caused by all the panic from round 3).
It was still decent fun, and I can teach the game very quickly now, and it’s nice that it can support the larger player counts; but… I think I’ll reach for something different next time with this player count.
Last night at Thirsty Meeples (Oxford):
I saw Arkham Horror: Lovecraft Letter on the New Arrivals list, and… oh boy, it really is just Lovecraft Letter with some of the names changed, and reskinned with the same old endlessly-recycled Arkham Horror art.
BGG calls this a separate game, but it’s simply a new edition with the same rules except for I think one different card. And Lovecraft Letter isn’t a great game in the first place.
Then on to Quorum, a nominally Roman-themed set collection game. Choose a card, advance a counter, at the end of the game multiply this by that. The theme is entirely irrelevant; the gameplay is quite interesting but not really enough, and the central score wheel is downright fiddly; I ended up using my usual score tracker on the phone instead.
Finally, The Guild of Merchant Explorers, something of a hit from a few years back. It’s a roll and write without the roll or the write: you turn up cards to see what sort of space everyone can explore this turn, then put out “explorer” cubes, and get some sort of benefit from the places they’re in. At the end of each era, all the explorers go away and you start from scratch, except that if you explored all the contiguous spaces of one terrain type you can put in a village that can serve as a base for future exploration. Everything gives you coins, which are one-sided (to keep it secret from other players exactly how much you have), and therefore much more time-consuming to work with than they should be.
This game felt like work. Tiny wooden pieces and cardboard tokens go onto tiny hexes, so every placement needs to be painstaking; the cards are all generic Board Game Beige, with minimal art; and at heart this is a solo game, since each player has their own map. I don’t always mind that sort of game (I mean, Imperium [foo] is largely that unless you have an aggressive civilisation) but it was definitely not a good fit for the mood of the table. I might give this a go on BGA some time, where most games end up feeling like multiplayer solitaire anyway.
Merchant Explorer is way more fun to play solo on BGA. Automated and no pesky Mitspieler to wait for.
Yep, so we did Whistle Mountain last night in person.
The only person on here who I remember reporting on it is @lalunaverde, who, if I recall correctly, gave it roughly a 5 session shelf life. Which, for LLV, makes it a pretty good euro.
It was quite good - and quite unique. You have significant accumulated asymmetry, with modular start powers and upgrades that you choose throughout the game to BYO Synergy.
In the middle of the board, you are all collectively creating and destroying a shared worker placement arena with polyomino scaffolds, different size workers (1x1, 2x1, 3x1), and Buildings which may just be resource collection or may have alternate actions which eventually migrate to the bonkers.
The timer comes because, as you build more and more buildings, you inevitably flood the valley which covers old scaffolding, ruins old buildings, and also drowns your workers. Which aren’t your workers, they are just collateral damage that you are trying to get into scoring positions (hopefully forcing your opponent to score them for you!), your real workers are the blimps and balloons you are landing in this space to activate the buildings.
My power was to land on scaffolds, while others had to land next to them. I tried to flip this into uber-water gathering and an upgrade that made my water resources wild. It worked well, but I lost roughly 156-142 to my opponent who just tried to get his dudes to the top of the tower and rush the game.
The Mandalorian: Adventures, we got a fair way thru the mission, just needed to escape, but then we lost.
Dorfromantik: The Board Game, not a terrible score, but not that great either. Missed out on the Golden Heart by a single point, that was disappointing.
3 Chapters, first play. This game reminds me of Fantasy Realms, which we used to play a lot (should have another go at it). You start by drafting one card at a time, until you have 8 cards. Then you play each card, like a trick taker – but there are no suits, highest number wins. Apart from winning a trick (which gives you a star), you can also gain hearts and gems. It’s all about the points – stars give you two points, hearts are worth one point, and each pair of gems is worth a point as well. Cards earn hearts and gems from conditions on the other cards played in the trick. After the trick taking phase, you take all your cards and score them again. Again, you earn stars, hearts, and gems according to the conditions of each card. Many cards pair up with one particular other card, or give you stuff for matching icons. Have to say, it didn’t really excite me. It’s quick I suppose, but Fantasy Realms is so much better.
Xylotar, first play. The theme is that you are a polar bear trying to play a new musical instrument, which is a combination of a xylophone and a synthesizer. This is part trick taker, part deduction game. Each colour of card has it’s own range of values, and this is on the back of the cards. So red cards are from zero to ten, orange is zero to nine, right down to pink cards, which are from zero to three. And all you’ve got to go on is the back of the card. Each player gets 12 cards, and they organise them by value. Then they pass this hand of cards onto the player on their left, and they arrange their cards face down, so they can only see the back of the cards. So you only know the colour and their relative order. Trick taking is standard, you must follow if you can, but every time you play a card you learn a bit more about your hand. After playing a card to the trick, you can bid – you do this by taking two adjacent cards from your hand and choosing one to be your bid. Each trick you win is worth a point, and if you get your bid you get another five points. It was a bit tricky (I did badly) but good fun, nice twist on trick taking. Takes a bit of room, forget playing this on a small table - each player needs enough room for 12 cards in a line.
VIVO, first play. Another trick taker! This time you’re a teacher at a music school that trains puppies. On each turn you have a song card, which is either a solo, duet, or trio card (at 4p you would also have a quartet). The card specifies the number of suits that will be allowed in the trick. So solo means everyone has to play the same suit, and trio would mean everyone has to play a different suit. If you can’t play a valid card, you can’t score for that trick. Whoever wins the trick takes their card face down, this will be worth two points. But the lowest card scores for it’s rank, so if it’s an eight, you get eight points for that. Good fun!
Dominant Species - 5 players. Good fun, even with AP players. The game seems to lose its sheen to me as I prefer a relatively lighter affair like El Grande or Inis
Dominant Species: Marines - inspired by the OG, he brought along the new one to compare and contrast the experience while it was still fresh in his mind. He prefers the OG but still likes this one.
I played it a number of times now and I now loathe this version. It’s just awful. They say it is streamlined: streamlined my ass. They took out aspects of the game and then proceed to add complications to fill the void. Ergo, the game is still asking more from you with the rules weight and also significant amount of time. Except so many aspects of this game are so tactical.
Specialising on elements seems silly as the trade-off is skewed towards diversity. Whoops! There’s another strategic decision gone. Again, the problem where you just rinse through this pattern of: score action > score action > score action > retrieve action > score action > score action… etc etc. The problem is still there.
Dominant Species Marines turned the OG into just another mediocre area control that will join the blob of forgettable games, as consumers set their eyes on yet another troops-on-a-map kickstarter.
Skyrise - this is my new fave from this year that is NOT a train game!!! (the other ones are Battlecon and Homeworlds
Worms: the board game - damn! Amazing execution! Randomly seed the game. Pick a team randomly. Then start shooting! And before you know it, the game is over. There is this fear that IP based games are awful, but this one retains the spirit of Worms the video game. Party game level fun and flow. Dopamine hits when you shoot at each other. And it doens’t overstay its welcome. I highly recommend to try this out
Wow, non deluxe Skyrise looks like the OG Metropolys. That’s cool.
Imperium [foo] last night, first try with the Cultists. This is indeed a very different game from most civs. My usual strategy is to keep a fairly lean deck, rush to Empire, then acquire cards in the late game and garrison/history them as quickly as possible. But the Cultists have real trouble acquiring cards late on, so they need to garrison a bunch quite early in order to pull them out later for the Ceremony.
Also I played my usual low-Unrest game, but in fact I should have been gathering and garrisoning that too, not only because on the B side each one is +1 point rather than -2, but because some of the persistently available cards require you to spend Unrest to activate them.
Not a faction I’ll want to play every time, but really interesting to see how it integrated a quite different set of demands (a bit like the Martians in the early stages) with the same core game, while keeping it meaningfully interactive.
Yes, I think you really need to know your deck inside out to understand what cards to grab from the exile pile, but I definitely enjoyed trying them.
6 player Robo Rally Anniversary edition. We played a „long“ map which it turns out we didn‘t have enough time for as I had reserved a table at the local brewery for after the game and it took us 45 minutes to start the first turn even though I had already set up the game and 5 of the players were present at the appointed start time (one had announced they would be a little late and not to wait for them and I had programmed their first turn and they arrived during the execution)
There are some biggish changes from the original rules. Mainly:
Other than that: it‘s the same game. We liked the changes. It reduces some of the random in your hands and the damage is more interesting and a bit less punishing. Haywire cards can be „just the thing“ you need in any given turn or the worst. Spam causes you to play random cards from your deck when the register phase comes around and that can be really good or not. But you don‘t have to play Spam cards, you can keep them in your hand and power down at a good moment.
Of course a 6 player free for all on a map with more than a few difficult places caused … us to play through the stack of damage cards about 2.5 times 
one player had actually never played Robo Rally before and it didn‘t go well for them: they saw most of the map but none of the checkpoints. I almost made it to the 2nd checkpoint before we had to call it. The first player would probably have reached the third in another round. 2 players still had not made it to the 1st checkpoint by that time. It‘s Robo Rally. We had good fun, some great shoot-outs and wild turns.
It‘s all as it should be and we decided we really like the new rules.
ps:
Big celebratory Twilight Imperium 4th with Prophecy of Kings (and everything else).
We are playing for the honour of writing our name on the “Chris Schellerdinghoudt TI4 Award,” so named because he is the only player to get his name on the previous trophy 3 times.
Both say “Someday some one will beat me; but it won’t be today, and it won’t be you.”
Galaxy setup started around 11am, finished at noon, at which point I made hamburgers, pulled pork, and coleslaw for everyone for lunch.
I am on the end of the table closest to the camera with Winnu, and to my left it goes Arborec, Embers, Naaz-Rokha, L1Z1X, Xxcha, and the Argent Flight.
Game started off rough. The supernova next to my homeworld meant I was down 2 systems compared to everyone else, and my run to Mecatol Rex went through an empty system on the inner ring.
By turn 3 I had scored 1 point, everyone else was on 4 or 5.
Game ended at 9pm (10 hours), and I had scored 1 more point… Chris managed a win in a very tightly fought endgame. Everyone did well!
Except me…
I love TI4, but man it is hard to try and keep my spirits up through such a prolonged trouncing. I never had enough resources to do anything, or tokens to accomplish anything, or useful tech…
Ah well. 7 players was too many for the table, but otherwise everyone seemed to have fun! Next time 4 players, though.
]
]
]
]
