Your Last Played Game Volume 3

[Acacia]

Ok, Carson City. As mentioned before, I ended up playing a game with a Belgian and two Poles because no one here was up for it.

Fun fact: The Belgian lives in the same town as Xavier Georges AND knows him passing well AND actually suggested the Sheriff character in the game.

And I beat him. Even after he grabbed his own damn Sheriff in the last round.

So pretty cool on all that.

Carson City was delightful as a solo, with frequent suggestions of what the game is capable of. It was absolutely smashing with real people and delivered on every promise. Even when some people had absolutely no idea what they were doing.

I’m remembering back in 2017 when I was just re-submerging in this hobby and was looking into “fighty worker placement.” The game back then was Lancaster, Carson City, Sons of Anarchy, and Argent. While I eventually got all of them, Carson City was last to the table as it was ranked 3 of 4, and didn’t have the quiet lauding (or $16 price tag) of Sons of Anarchy. And yet, today, we see Argent forgotten, Lancaster turned into a fire-sale big box, and Sons of Anarchy still floundering after two separate reskins. Then there’s Carson City getting new online implementations, new deluxe big boxes… it still lacks the community ratings but somehow it’s quietly keeping on.

Earned.

It has an open sandbox, do whatever you want feel that actually felt Splotter to me. The basic loop is earn money, turn it in for points. But you also need that money to invest in your engine. The overlarge commuter uncomfortably elbowing you in the back as you play is that in round 1, points are $2 each. In round 2, they cost $3. At the end of the game you have to pay $6 for each point. Cashing in early (which I did, in round 2) can get you a comfortable nest egg, but you are literally siphoning the gas out of your own tank.

So interesting bit number one, is when do you cash in?

Then there’s a few different archetypes. Mines go next to mountains, and feed your banks. Ranches go the hell out of town in green (brown) space, and feed your general stores. Saloons go in the middle of town and feed off city growth.

And you have these delightful counters to everything. Someone building ranches? Go ahead and stick a prison on their land. Someone mining? Straight up buy their mountain and kick them out of it. And the most delightful, whoever is making the most money becomes a ripe target for a little posse of cowboys to come through and waltz off with your money.

That was the big difference between solo and group play. Yes, the bot comes after you and there’s logic to hit you where it hurts, but it’s an odd combination of random and predictable. People are devious.

That little round 2 cash in I mentioned? Yeah, so I had a nice ranch empire far enough out of town that no one could build on me. And some general stores raking in money from all those homesteaders. And maybe a 20 point lead from a big, early payday. Guess what happened in the final round?

COWBOYS. Jumping in all my chaps and messing with all my business. And I literally did not have the firepower to keep them out of my general stores, so I watched all my money go to (ahem) the Sheriff and the 5:1 points space that I couldn’t contest.

It breeds this, “do well, but not too well” vibe with a peloton that no one should stick their head out of lest they get shot.

Yes, I did still win. The gap closed a lot in that final round but I had a grocer who funneled some money away from the General Store (full of angry green cowboy) and into my Ranches (each too small a target on its own). Frankly, I should have lost but someone let me keep a spot they shouldn’t have which gave me a few extra points.

I think there’s a lot of people here who would get a kick from this one. Mind you, it’s a “game two” sort of game where the first game feels a bit two dimensional, and it’s not until the second game when you see how different things are playing out that the full space takes shape. But yeah, fans of Splotter, fans of Keyflower, fans of anything open, devious, and aggressive might want to jump on in.

[raged_norm]

Clinic, very solitaire game but decent none the less. I’m happy to have played it but don’t think I’ll be rushing back for a round two.

Hot Streak, lots of serve cards led to lots of carnage.

[Phil]

• Fantasy Realms
• Flip 7
• Moon Colony Bloodbath
• Modern Art

My first plays of the latter two. I enjoyed Modern Art, although I have a sneaking suspicion that High Society is more fun in significantly less time.

Moon Colony Bloodbath was also good, and I’d play it again for sure, but probably not something I’d buy. Lots of optimistic plans which mostly came crashing down when robots insisted on murdering my colonists again :).

The one part of that initial game which niggled at me a bit was that the luck of the draw may give certain players a “perk” bonus every single round of the game, whereas you (or me, in this instance) simply never manage to pick up a card which allows you to introduce one of those personal perks into the shared deck. In the long term, randomness will ensure that you benefit from that as often as anyone else, but in the very short term it felt a bit frustrating seeing other players pick up those bonuses every round.

I’m also not a big fan of engine-building games, so that was another factor, but I’d happily recommend giving this a try if you get a chance. The whole “build up an engine and then watch helplessly as it gets destroyed piece by piece” is pretty funny.

[Phil]

@lalunaverde

I now do open info on Modern Art (because, apparently, people just don’t know how to play the damn game properly)

You mean like how the player ending the game finds themselves choosing between giving themselves some money and also a ton of money to an opponent; or instead playing a different artist and giving two other players lots of cash; and they choose to do the latter because those other players don’t seem like they’ve been doing as well; and then it turns out that they both had enormous amounts of money, and they’re ahead by a landslide?

Because I definitely did that.

[lalunaverde]

Newbies tend to overpay - like a lot - that the obvious strat is to be a seller and not join the silliness. Then they are all surprised on how I win with so much money when I only bought like one or two paintings. This is despite telling them that they are paying someone £27 only to earn £3.

These are board gamers, not people new to the hobby. And people say that board games makes you smarter…

[RogerBW]

When I’ve won Modern Art it was usually because I was sitting immediately after the worst player.

[EnterTheWyvern]

This is why I sold it. Just don’t like it enough to play consistently with a group to get over this hump where the weakest player just hands it always to the player next to them. I feel the same about High Society

[bort]

Not sure if I’ve ever won Modern Art (I’m probably the weakest player).

[yashima]

Over the past week, thanks to being motivated by my 25x1 „rare solos“ challenge, I played a total of 7 solos of Ark Nova. (1 was enough for the challenge, but the purpose of it is to remind me how great some of my big solos are and that worked)

I am addicted to „big stacks of cards“ games. I lost most of the games which is a bit frustrating but makes me just want to try again.

By now I have played a few aquariums and I appreciate what they did with the water animals more. They have some nice synergies. They are often somewhat cheap to play and you can get the 5 spot aquarium with the basic building card as opposed to the reptile or bird houses.

The enhanced action cards are a little less useful than they felt at first. And some are clearly better than others: being able to ignore one of an animal‘s play conditions is incredibly powerful at the start especially.

Being able to get a 2nd worker at a 5 strength „Verband“ action at the cost of doing no other Verband action in the first round is a trap. Getting a partner zoo, university or supporting a project are each far better especially because often that 2nd worker will not be useful in the 2nd round either.

I also just played a zoo plan that would have allowed me to upgrade all action cards as opposed to the normal 4. That didn‘t happen. But I‘ll definitely try that one again.

So yeah, Ark Nova still great. I am reasonably sure I‘ll buy the baby edition coming out around Spiel.

[Phil]

4 hours of madness and hilarity:

Ridiculous. Lengthy. All manner of rules mistakes. Would definitely play again :).

Some of the funniest dice rolling:

• I attack, with my opponent rolling a single white die (0-5). They roll a 1, which I need to beat with either of my two yellow dice (1-6). I roll a pair of 1s.

• I suffer 4 attacks in succession by the same player when they get two turns in a row, with them rolling 2 white dice (0-5) vs my single yellow die (1-6) on each attempt, and they fail every single time, even when they managed to roll a 6 (with a +1 boost) on the 4th attempt.

The best part is that I think I’ve found a new regular game group. I had a really great time, and look forward to future game nights.

[Whistle_Pig]

Appropriately for the weather, we played a 6-player game of Heat last night. We used the Aintree track, which I think is a fan-made one. Our BGA games are obviously paying off, because I only finished a couple of spaces behind the winner, who is a Heat master

We also played Parade, which I’m pretty sure I lost on the first turn, but it’s still great fun!

[lalunaverde]

Finished Light in the Mist

Moving onwards to Emerald Flame

[InkyBloc]

4-player game night with someone who hadn’t played Daybreak!

Daybreak - So much fun. I was Majority World, and thanks to a nice solar donation from USA, I was able to do major replacement of dirty energy with clean energy, and also got a lot a lot a lot of ecological resilience. Unfortunately, my emissions stayed high, and my wife was unable to get ecological resilience, so the temperature bands went high, and then we got THREE ecological-resilience-reduced crises in one go, and lost the game.

So next we played a game of Daybreak, switching seats. This time I was China, and thanks to a nice grid donation from the USA, I was able to do major replacement of dirty energy with clean energy… and also got… a lot… of ecological resilience… hmmmm…

But this time everything went much, much smoother around the world, and we only ever got up to two temperature bands, I don’t think anyone even got any crisis penalties, and we cruised to a victory. Crazy difference!

Then after all that horrible international cooperation and world-bettering, we withdrew into the loving arms of capitalism and played For Sale.

[Marx]

Risky Mum pays out big time!

I can see why people enjoy this game so much…

[raged_norm]

For real, my head says it shouldn’t work.

The cycle of

• Make two bets
• ‘influence’ the outcome (a 5.6% change of the deck
• Watch it happen

Really doesn’t make a game, but it does

[Whistle_Pig]

Handycon day 1:

Moon Colony Bloodbath: I really like this. The aim of the game is to have the most humans left in your colony at the end. You have a shared deck of cards that tells you what happens each turn. It starts with 4 cards that let you do standard actions (build things, produce resources, people etc.), one that adds events to the deck (these are all bad), and one that adds robots (also bad). Good cards can also be added by playing building cards into your tableau.

The play starts out as a standard engine builder, but at some point the game flips from building a nice little moon colony to desperately trying to build anything that will add more people to your colony faster than they are murdered by robots or fall victim to ‘accidents’. The last card in the event deck is called ''instruction manual" and lets you turn off the robots (“fine! I’ll read the manual!”) But we didn’t get that far…

Cuba Libre: Excellent COIN game without the infuriating combat rules in Pendragon that always make me want to throw the game out of the window. It was close, but I won as the Syndicate after the third propaganda card. We played with one COIN newbie, but he picked it up fairly quickly.

Rolling Heights: my brain was tired after Cuba Libre, so this was a nice change of pace. This is a game about building stuff that gets you points in the right configuration to get more points from shared objectives. The fun bit is that you gather resources by rolling a handful of different coloured meeples. Standing = best benefit, side on = smaller benefit, lying down = nothing (perhaps the designer took inspiration from Pass the Pigs). Completing buildings gives you more meeples of different types that lets you build better buildings.

Emberleaf: The box describes this as a ‘card dancing’ game. You build a tableau of cards that give benefits when you play them, but also when you move them. When you move a card you have to move all of them, and they eventually drop out of your tableau and go back into your hand. It seems like an interesting puzzle but I was quite tired by this point and at 5 players had a lot of down time.

[bort]

Did some 2p gaming today, which is unusual for me. We played Paris, which is a building game. Each turn is simple – take a building tile. After placing the building, you can add one of your keys to the same area. If you already have a free key there, you can instead use it to buy a building. After four keys are placed in an area, you do a scoring, which means you have your choice of scoring tiles. If you losing in that area, you can choose the worst one for the winner. If you buy one of the cheaper buildings, you’ll get to move your token along a track – you can move as far as you want, but can never go backwards. Most of the tiles you’ll pick up are end game scoring tiles. It’s a good medium weight game, pretty easy to pick up. Enjoyed it!

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, we came so close. Frodo was at Mt Doom, just couldn’t get the required ring cards to attempt the destruction of the ring. We came so close to losing from running out of shadow troops. Eventually we ran out of hope as the bad guys took over a haven. Still chasing a win with this game, but it’s always been interesting.

[lalunaverde]

@Whistle_Pig

Standing = best benefit, side on = smaller benefit, lying down = nothing (perhaps the designer took inspiration from Pass the Pigs).

No bonus for head stands??

[Griffster77]

Love the board to Paris

[Whistle_Pig]

There should be!