Over here, the Everdell Duo campaign is moving on apace, we just finished chapter 8. We were the most apprehensive before we started playing, but we slaughtered it, finishing at 115 points and meeting the requirements easily. We’re past the half-way point and having a blast. Maryse says she prefers the coop version of Duo to the competitive one and I can’t say I disagree.
Then we broke out Terraforming Mars. I was playing Saturn Systems (one of my favourites) and she had Helion (one of HER favourites), so we both had a lot of fun. I got real lucky in the beginning, getting my cash production up very high very quickly (I finished with an absurd 97 production), which enabled me to just buy a lot of forests and cities, and I also had a lot of points-salad cards, like livestock and pets, along with a lot of space cards that are always fun. Had the media group card that gives you 3 bucks when you play an event and I played a lot of those.
Maryse got a ton of cards I would’ve loved to have, like the defence fleet, and just a ton of heat and plants, which enabled her to get a lot of money thanks to her corp and points by planting lots of forests with the occasional city that took advantage of my placements. She plays that area majority element really well.
In the end, I won 145-141. Really, really good game.
I had a LOT of money production boosting cards. Also built a lot of cities, and it increased anytime a Jupiter badge entered play. There were a lot of those.
Also, we almost always play to elongate the game,so as to maximize the points. The map was FULL at the end, except for one ocean spot. That leaves a lot of time to get ridiculous numbers like that. Maryse finished with 16 plant and 12 energy production, for example.
Since I mostly do the solo challenge which forces me to speed terraform in 12 turns… that is very different . I just played Robinson Industries which gets pretty good production across the board but no 97 money. I have had Tharsis Republic games with tons of cities get a bit ridiculous….
Played a first two games of Spots, which is cute doggo yahtzee. Our second game was fun as 4/6 actions are swapped for new ones each time, and some of the new ones really shake things up.
Then played FlickFleet, which is extremely weird but fun (flick dice off the top of your plastic ship to physically hit other ships, small ship wings get reduced in size larger ships have hit locations). The small intro scenario seemed balanced, it’d be quite a lot of decisions with all the ships on the board.
Also on FlickFleet: a d10 is standard lasers, but a d6 is nukes.
This is because only rolling a 1-6 does damage so lasers have a 7-10 chance of glancing off the armour while nukes are guaranteed to damage, but also d6 are easier to flick in a straight line and so are better weapons. I like the thinking that went into that.
To balance it, only bombers have these d6 nukes and everyone else gets the d10s, so while fighters are circular and can easily move quickly in any direction, bombers are rectangles that can only be flicked from the back end and so aren’t very maneuvrable left-right. Which is also nicely thought out! Insert X-Wing / Y-Wing comparisons etc.
First play. Neat! It’s a pick-up-and-deliver game of being a Galactic Taxi driver. You can normally move a maximum of 3 hexes per turn, but pretty much everything else in the game is a free action, including placing one end of a wormhole at your current position; and once both ends of a wormhole have been placed on the board then moving from one end to the other costs nothing at all. You have a half-dozen wormholes, but you cannot start setting up a new one until you’ve completed the previous one.
You can also use the wormholes placed by other players, but you must pay them a point each time you do so. You’ll definitely be doing that, because it would take far too long to travel everywhere otherwise, and there are valuable bonuses for delivering passengers to most/all of the planets on the map, rather than focusing on a few planets. And of course there’s nothing stopping you from setting up a wormhole of your own at the other end.
You pick up passengers at the central space station or any of the destination planets, and ferry them to where they want to go. You’re blind-drawing the passenger cards at the planets, but any unwanted passenger cards can be discarded face-up at the space station for anyone to pick up, so you always know what you can get from there.
Pretty quick and lightweight. Would happily play again.
The second attempt went relatively poorly, as I found myself in dire straits while facing the penultimate opponent, and I was forced to burn my jokers in consecutive turns just to survive (and only barely had even that opportunity, as I’d also needed to discard my entire hand for damage over those two turns, and it was a fluke that those cards divided evenly into two sets of exactly the right amount). Limping into the final showdown, I didn’t fancy my chances, and in the end I could only knock them down to 16 health.
The third time was the charm, with my team having been bolstered further. The reward for succeeding at this mission is my favourite so far, and I feel more confident looking at the 4th mission than I did when I saw the last one. The variations continue!
Before I tackle that, though, I’ve decided to have another stab at mission 3 without the added help. I came so close the first time, and I want to have another go at winning it unassisted.
Edit: Yay! Did that, and some kinder card draws in the end-game saw me to a strong win without any of the extra help, and needing only one of my jokers.
Oops. I’ve now been beaten up twice by mission 4… I didn’t quite understand how that was going to work until I played it. I was pretty much obliterated the first time. The second one went down to the wire, but I’d forgotten how a particular process was going to play out, and wound up not surviving a situation I’d thought I’d been prepared for.
This mission throws a bunch of new things into the mix (some mission-specific, others just because it’s the first time they’ve come into play), and it really messes with the strategy. The mission-specific parts are also a bit fiddly to manage… I can see why they decided to do it anyway, but hopefully it’s not going to be a common aspect moving forwards.
After my successful re-try of mission 3 I’d eschewed the extra help on my second try of mission 4 – but if I get pummelled too much more I’m sure I’ll change my mind :).
Kemet 1.5 - 4 players and it was all good. All players played in a nice pace. It still took a bit too long for my taste. I combo’d where my Troops can have 7 units max. I have +1 strength when attacking. +1 strength when fighting. And I can teleport from obelisk to obelisk. Aaaaaaaaand I win 4 money when I win a battle. AAAAAAAAND I have the infamous Initiative tile where I kill 2 units before battle is initiated.
I won.
Hot Streak - GET UP YOU IDIOTS! GOBBLERS GETTING AWAY WITH IT!!
Ark Nova - 2 player with a club member whose fave game is AN. It was a nice and pleasant game. It went on a nice pace since we are both experienced with the game.
Calimala - played with the new Alley Cat edition with IOT art! It actually looks okay. The press photos really made it looks busy and ugly. But for real, the board is readable.
Roam - abstract area control game. Probably the only game I liked from Laukat.
Started the day with Cthulhu: Death May Die – Fear of the Unknown. Interesting episode, it involved some dexterity as we flicked a dice to land in a space. We weren’t doing very well at it, and considered house ruling it to make it a bit easier. We eventually did it, with a lot of “practice” attempts. Another part of the episode required someone to gain the “drunk” condition, and i was lucky (or unlucky) enough to be the first player to gain the condition. Unfortunately having the condition also meant you couldn’t use any skills past level 1, which wasn’t a major problem at first, but was a bit later on. I managed to get myself killed, but luckily we had disrupted the ritual by then, and my teammates pulled out the win.
The Same Game, always fun. I’m not sure if I’m providing decent clues. I usually end up doing something like the clue word, which unfortunately matches multiple conditions.
Park Life, a PNP tricktaking game. A couple of things are different here – you don’t have to follow suit, and it’s the lowest value (of the lead suit) that wins. Whatever card you win with adds to your score for the round. And each card shows the number of cards you have to discard if you win with that card. So winning with a “1” is easy, but it only counts for 1 point, but you only have to discard one other card. Obviously people are hanging onto their big cards and hopefully catch people out (you don’t have to follow suit, but you can’t win a trick without following suit). The winner was usually the player who played a couple of mid range cards, rather than one big one at the end. Was good fun. Tricky to tell if people are out of a suit because they can choose not to follow suit.
I should have taken a picture of the game in progress but I did not and by the end it was past 9!
John Company took just under 7 hours which is probably tooo long for a board game. This did include first time (non-board-gamer) players, as well as a couple of tea breaks. And we had to relocate from outside to inside after it started raining in the garden. But what a wild game! We mostly played cooperatively, but I was the only person seeking shares to keep the company afloat, which meant that I didn’t have much opportunity to retire (or pay for retirement) at the end. I did accumulate plenty of power for a bonus but ended in 3rd place, after trading away a powerful blackmail card that allowed someone to steal the win with some enormous retirements at the end.
We did absolutely wreck India by the end; we’d done so well in the first few rounds that keeping the company afloat wasn’t a factor in the last round, with all of us choosing to chase our own money and ignore the company’s needs. Every order in India was closed by the end… Seeing the potential of India for trade at the beginning slowly (then quickly) transform into a sea of black closed orders is both hilarious and uncomfortable.
Out of 3 other players 2 had a great time and the other probably won’t play again but isn’t mad about it. Our group is so slow at these games but it was very fun.
Edit: forgot to mention that we did play a couple rounds of Trio as a warm up, and it’s far more fun than you’d ever expect it to be from the concept.
Wow, 7 hours is slow. I had people thinking 4 hours was long on our first game. But it all seems to depend on how much you talk, and more talking isn’t really a bad thing?
