It looks like it’s on Tabletopia, if you fancied an async game?
2 Likes
Here here and so say all of us
3 Likes
Mottainai - I am now forming the opinion that I prefer Glory to Rome due to its longer duration. The longer duration allows strategy to mature more, I feel. But this is like choosing between your twins. Both are alright.
Mascarade 2nd edition - Mascarade by Faidutti. Pretty much the same as the old one.
Orbit - good Knizia fun in sub-hour duration. It’s a racing game where you travel to every planet on the system. So, classic travelling salesman problem. Problem: the planets move…
Glad to try it and it was good fun, but I wasnt super hot about it. EGO (aka Beowulf) was more compelling. And I bet SILOS (aka Municipium) would be the same as well. I’m predicting this to be the weaker Knizia from this publisher’s trilogy.
HOT STREAK!!!
Space Base
Heimlich & co. - part of the SDJ challenge. A game with secret identities. Maybe the table was just being a bit silly, but they pretty much revealed themselves too early. It has really cool ideas, but found it a bit underbaked. There are things I would like players to have agency on, other than a silly dice roll.
Daytona 500 - another Wolfgang Kramer racing game like Downforce. Not impressed. Since you deal out the entire deck, the auction then becomes really unimpressive. Think about it: if most of the strong blue cards went to you, you’ll be the only one who would bid strongly for the blue racer. the fact that the game limited us 3 players on 2 racers pretty much sealed this problem so deeply in to the design.
7 Likes
it was a children’s game in the 80s. what did you expect 
? I have some nostalgia for it but I doubt I would want to play again
4 Likes
Ah no expectations. It’s from the 80s so I wasn’t expecting anything huge.
We also played with the basic. Maybe the variant where you score points for guessing other players might incentivise hiding your identity much more
3 Likes
Moon Colony Bloodbath x2. My second (w/5p) and third (w/4p) games of this.
In the first game I got myself an Organ Bank which let me completely ignore “Accidents” (of many varying kinds, but consistently killing exactly 3 of your colonists in normal circumstances). All I needed to do was load it up with Boxes and spend one for each Accident, and I had cards to get bonus boxes. I had so many boxes. Which was good, because there were So Many Accidents. I finished in second place with 18 colonists, and my Organ Bank was definitely my MVP.
In the next game, I managed to get a Farming engine going early on, such that after a short while I never needed to go Mining again because I could make better money from Farming apples. By the end of the game, taking a Farm action would get me 8 money, 5 colonists, and still leave me with 2 apples (which I didn’t need very many of because, for a lot of the game, my buildings were immune from Hunger). I saved enough money to build a Dome containing 20 colonists which protected me from losing my other buildings as early as I might have; and in the end game I built a Bunker which gave me 14 colonists along with the thoroughly evil side effect of introducing a new Robot into the deck. This was pretty catastrophic to everyone else, and once one of the players crashed out I found myself with 38 colonists left, which turned out to be a solid win.
I’ve no idea about overall balance – I’ve built buildings with wildly different effects from game to game – but given that I’m generally very ho-hum on engine builders, I’m surprised at just how much I’m enjoying this. It helps that I love the theme, admittedly.
It’s just funny. When 4 Tourists arrive at your colony and the very next thing that happens is an accident which kills 3 people, you can’t help but imagine “Hello, and welcome to the colony… OH MY GOD!”
I managed to do very well both times today, of course, which is certainly more enjoyable than being crushed; but even in my first game – where I came last – I could only appreciate that the game makes all the carnage funny, and even though your colony is burning to the ground, everyone at the table is sharing in the suffering to some extent. I think there’s some smart game design in that.
My winning state, with my surviving buildings containing 34 colonists (plus another 4).
10 Likes
2 teams of 2 on Crokinole
Courtisans with 5 players which was very popular
Followed immediately by Courtisans with 4 players, which worked great too.
7 Likes
Finished our first game of Honey Buzz last night after our first attempt was disrupted by children failing to fall asleep and in-laws failing to execute basic common sense in managing their health. THAT was a long night.
Well, we’ve played it now. Impression? Fantastic. This game was so much more than I expected. And yesterday I also officially listed White Castle (bgg rank 82, 7.99, vs Honey Buzz at 455, 7.52). Quite the contrast.
White Castle is everything new about the hobby. Variable starting resources, lots of cards, combos, efficiency. I loved my second and third game of it. By 4 it was all resolving into a boring consistency. Experts say that you have to scrutinize the board for the “efficient loops,” which may change during the game, and then exploit them. Maybe so, that doesn’t sound “fun” to me.
Honey Buzz has you placing bees for hive tiles. Each tile has an action on it, but you don’t take that action until said tile forms part of a complete hex in your hive (and each tile may, eventually, be part of three such rings and so each action may trigger three times). The tension was palpable throughout where, like Barenpark, you’re racing for everything at once. Get the best price in the market before prior sales depress value. Grab nectar hexes before they all disappear. Complete objectives for a juicy 20 point payoff.
And the spatial puzzle is real. At the start of the game you want a lot of baby bees. Later you want more market and production actions. But tile placement also dictates what kind of honey you can make, and of course whether an action triggers at all, and the other hives are breathing down your neck to make that thing happen now.
I don’t want to turn into a full review. Anyway, I heard that the base game was a bit light without the expansion modules (a la Tiefenthal) but I was utterly delighted with the vanilla experience. Hard at every step, exciting, competitively interactive, and with a puzzle that asks wildly different questions on turn 1 and turn 20.
10 Likes
Damn you
I’ve been thinking about Honey Buzz off and on for ages. It sounds great
7 Likes
So last night we had two “self-identifying” gamers over.
That is to say people who consider themselves gamers compared to the masses, but who I would consider very light gamers compared to my usual gaming group. Nice people though, and they love games like Carcassonne and Just One, so I figured I had a fair number of games I could safely (and enjoyably!) introduce to them.
First up was my first official play of Cascadia, and it’s good. Not great, but a perfectly Spiel-weight Spiel winner. The rules explanation took a little longer than I expected due to some unexpected nuance with how the animals scored, but whatever. It was fun, and breezy, and the scores were pretty close for the most part (Chantal scored 101, then 89, 87, and 85 for everyone else).
Then we dove into The Gang and it continues to be just a riot. Three full rounds of it, increasing in difficulty as we went. Also scored a Full House for the first time ever… Aces over 9s. Good times!
Then we played a handful of rounds of Team3, and learned that the IRL software developer sucks at the Administrator role (the one that can’t talk and has to use hand gestures to communicate to the manager). Just unbelievably bad at communicating useful information (he spent 30sec trying to get the manager to understand “Going from left to right”… which she didn’t understand, but more importantly… she didn’t need to understand? Like, rather than trying to communicate that concept… just do it?). It was hilariously bad. The rest of us were very good at it, though, and Albert didn’t seem to take it too personally that nobody had any idea what he was trying to gesture. He was very good at the assembling with his eyes shut, though.
Then we played a few rounds of Dro Polter, which was a lovely, silly way to finish off the evening.
All in all, good times. And a nice excuse to get my lighter games out on the table, which I don’t do as often these days.
7 Likes
Honey Buzz is indeed fantastic. We got it back in 2022, the same year we got Everdell, and it was the only game that challenged it for our top spot. And you all KNOW my deep and abiding, bordering on unreasonable, love for all things Everdell, so that anything could challenge it is a serious statement.
Now, you mentioned there were expansions? I was unaware!
5 Likes
Same, it’s never left my “if I see it and it’s even slightly cheaper…” list.
3 Likes
It’s called “Fall Flavors” and, as mentioned, it’s a box of modules that can be used in any combination.
The most interesting one, I think, is the retirement board. Each time you recall workers you can retire one bee by permanently putting it on the board, claiming one bonus for yourself. Yet another juicy game of cat and mouse where you want to be the first to claim the prizes but no one knows when the first person will break and start retiring.
There’s replacement tiles with leaves on the empty squares, paired with another Queen’s goal, asking you to complete another spatial puzzle during play.
Nectar caps is kind of like the bee retirement, but you can cap your nectar for big points while losing access to that honey.
And then there’s a whole thing with fruit replacing honey. I don’t recall the details on that one.
Bee retirement is certainly the first one we’ll try.
5 Likes
Played Trajan today – my favourite Feld game. Sure, it’s a point salad, almost everything gets you points, but you still need to get the most points. It was a pretty close game for most of the time, we were all split pretty evenly on the military and construction areas. Missed the demands in the first couple of quarters, so that didn’t help me much. My last couple of turns were a bit so so, couldnt eek out any final points. And missed two demands in that last quarter. I didn’t get any end game points from bonus tiles, that didn’t help. Still my favourite Feld, it’s always good.
Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, and we lost again. I thought we started out well, quickly got our first objective, but then got bogged down fighting in the middle of the map. Frodo didn’t make it to Mt Doom. So, Sauron wins again I guess.
Finished the day with a couple of rounds of No Loose Ends, a tricktaker.
9 Likes
Finally dove into Regicide Legacy mission 3.
It was going so well that I actually started to feel confident, with my two jokers still in store right up to the final opponent (who was an absolute terror); but then a 50/50 call went against me at a bad moment, and things went south in a hurry. In the end I got them down to TWO health with my final card, but that was all I could do. Maybe if I’d played my jokers differently… I don’t know. Gutted to fail by such a small margin, but I now find myself with a bit of extra help for my next attempt, so fingers crossed for a more favourable outcome. This one really is quite brutal, though; I can imagine it taking a few tries!
7 Likes
Played some Roll for the galaxy, Rumble nation and Tokyo Highway with @Captbnut today.
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Leaning into my shelf of shame/ opportunity
I think Rumble Nation was my favourite. Like a punchy cross between Can’t Stop and El Grande. Really enjoyed it.
Roll for the Galaxy is good, but imo it adds fiddle to the amazing design of Race for the Galaxy.
Tokyo Highway is fun.
14 Likes
It’s the noise of dice in cups that ruins it for me 
I’ll take nice, quiet cards please!
7 Likes
Kardinal und Konig
El Paso - aaahhhh… the GWT experience in 1 hour duration. It’s a nice game. I haaaaaaaate Great Western Trail
Concordia - 5 players with the Imperium map. I went for Farmer (Minerva) + Mars combo. I used to be amazing in the game and it seems that that skill is coming back slowly. Nice.
Popcorn
6 Likes
We’ve been playing a ton of Slay the Spire recently (love being able to save our run in between acts). Tonight we did Act III on our run of Defect (with a strong lightning build) and Silent (with a strong poison build).
Final boss was Donu & Deca, and boy are they tough cookies. Luckily we both had a power to prevent all incoming damage several times, so we were able to focus on scaling up our engines and dealing out our own damage.
Came down to Deca, who was going to do a powerful hit, and we were one block short to be able to prevent both of us from dying. So we decided to see if we could finish him off if we didn’t bother blocking at all. I popped my dark orb for a little more damage, my wife used all of her energy to put five poison on him, and after all we could do, he ended up with 15 health remaining, and 15 poison exactly to finish him off before we met our doom.
10 Likes