Your Last Played Game Volume 3

Boardgames
61

Had our friends and some of my wife’s family over yesterday for lunch and we squeezed in some gaming.

We started with Sushi Go, which our friends’ daughter really wanted to play. Her dad sat out due to the player count, and we taught my wife’s cousin. Because our older kid kept demanding attention, though, dad had an opportunity to fill in for my wife a couple times in the first two rounds, and then for me for the entire third round. My wife won with 36, with me in second at 33. Cousin came in last with 18, but it was her first game.

Family left then and daughter wanted to play outside and I got to break out Courtisans for the first time. A quick rules explanation and we were off. For some reason, a couple players kept referencing the rules, so maybe my teach needs some work. I mean, it is a very easy game to play, though not necessarily easy to play well, so there isn’t much to teach rule wise.

In any case, I eked out a win for our first game with 14 points. To my delight, everyone wanted to play again, now that they had an understanding of the game. Despite my best efforts, the Toad family just would not fall from grace, costing me a bonus card and netting everyone else some points. My wife and our friend tied with 18, third had 15, while I came in last with 11.

Unfortunately that wrapped up our day. Would have been nice to play something a bit bigger, but it was nice getting a new game to the table.

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62

This inspired me, over this past weekend, to get my Crokinole board out and learn the rules.

I then worked to teach my older two, 7 and 5, how to play. 3 also wanted to join us, but she couldn’t handle the rules.

As it turns out, 5 is quite talented at the game; not enough to consistently win against me 1-on-1, but if one or both of her sisters are also playing, that can cause enough “noise” in the game that she can claim the W.

I need to find some wax to smooth-out my board. I thought I had some that would work, but it appears to be a “cleaning” style carnauba wax, which can degrade the clearcoat that came on the board.

Gaming Goal 2025 Status

[Cellulose] [Silent Victory] [Spirit Island] [Ashes Reborn] [Crokinole]

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63

My goodness. You are on fire :fire::fire::fire:

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64

I got the EU version of this with mine, and it works well:

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65

Hot Lead last night. Between Knizia designed, Space-Biff promoted, and Bitewing published I figured it would deliver. SpaceBiff is a reasonably hard customer to please.

Closest cognate would be 6 Nimmt. You have a hand of 11 cards and play 10 of them, one at a time. You are “bidding” on a market of cards in the middle, but which card you get, left to right, depends on where your played card is in rank order, low to high. Maybe like competitive “the mind” in that you want to play the third highest card, but you can’t know what exactly other people will play. And you might ALL be trying to play the third highest card this round.

It was pleasant. Didn’t blow me away or truly delight me. On the upside, everyone asked for a third round after the second, so at least we had a good time as a group. And scores were higher each game, and the tension was a bit higher as well, so (as any true Knizia) it may be a game that grows as you really get ahold of the hidden tensions and mindgames.

Last thought, there are a few advanced modules, which put negative cards into the market or wild cards (which accelerate the go-big-or-bust mechanism, which I didn’t explain here) - I reread SpaceBiff and he strongly recommended these so next time they will go in.

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66

I use spray car wax on mine.

But acrylic nail powder is the stuff for a smooth slide

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67

I’m posting tonight just to tell everyone how awful Pampero is. Good night.

I also played Camel Up and Mississippi Queen prior to this. Both give me a better experience. MQ is okay, but Camel Up is a hoot as usual

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68

Tonight I tried out Legacy of Yu. I like it! The barbarians are quite the threat and that flood keeps moving up, often just as you clear the canal card since so many of them destroy townsfolk.

I lost, but I realized right before the end that I made a rules error. I had built an outpost, letting me use white workers in the place of blue ones. My mistake was forgetting that it also meant blue workers could be used as white ones as well! As such, I was struggling to remove canal cards which needed three white workers when I was only getting one a turn! So, had I not forgotten that, I still may not have won, but I would have at least gotten to the fifth canal card.

Oh well, it was still fun, and now I have a slight benefit going into the next game.

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69

Played a two-player con at our club today (TwoCon) and one of those is Compile. I selected Plague as one of my elements of my deck. Plague 3 has a VERY vague card effect. Will have to look on BGG for FAQ.

This is really sloppy of them. Should have seen this on playtesting. I think it’s an awesome game, but if this vagueness isnt sort soon, Im gonna sell my copy

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From the BGG codex:

● CLARIFICATION: The card text reads “Flipeach other face-up card.” This only affects
uncovered cards, since it does not say “all”.

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Which face up card? Both cards from the same column?

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Every face-up card which is uncovered, excluding itself, no matter where it is.

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73

Got it. Seems like a typo where they’re missing an ‘s’, which is vital!!

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74

Harmonies - like I said before, it’s a winner in the bg club, so it’s always in my bag

Azul: Master Chocolatiers - another game from my “fun section” to show to newbies.

San Juan 2e

Tzolkin + Tribes and Prophecies

===================

Does your bg club have TOO MANY FRIENDS and they all want to play together and your 2 player games collect dust like a bunch of historical artifacts?

Presenting: TWOCON!!! You still have the same problem, but now you force people to only play 2 player games!!!

Compile x2 - going hot with Compile as my first game of the con. My opponent and I love Netrunner so this is a small box 2 player card game that does the job in a small package. It’s basically a souped-up Air Land and Sea, The front-loaded drafting of compilers is really fun and the game itself is way more interesting to me than ALS

Schotten Totten 2 x2 - played with my Polish edition, which have lovely production.

Dracula vs Van Helsing

Roma - Stefan Feld game that is surprisingly fun

Hive x2 - another classic

Sky Team - played with Montreal - tutorial airport

I missed out on getting Homeworlds played, but that’s because I chickened out on teaching this rather complicated abstract game.

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The Loop, a cooperative game where you try and finish missions before the nefarious Dr Faux. On each turn the evil doctor chooses an area to attack, and you drop red cubes into a tower which can direct the cubes into one of three areas. If too many red cubes get into an area, it causes a vortex, which is bad. Four vortexes and it’s game over. You’re trying to complete missions, and you need to finish four of them to win the game. Which we have not managed to do before, and today was no exception. We finished two missions, and were doing well on the next two before a vortex destroyed on of them, leaving us with no time to win.

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Wandering Towers, first play. Send your wizards and towers around the board, trying to land them in the black castle Ravenskeep. I know this game gets rave reviews, but there didn’t seem like much to it. It’s all kind of random, and I can’t remember where my wizards are once they’ve been taken prisoner and then moved around. Maybe it needs more people (we played at 3p). Although this would just increase the randomness.

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6 Forces. first play. A new trick taking game. Each player gets their own mini deck of trump cards, and you’ll choose one before the trick taking takes place. You can select a colour to be trump, and there is also a “1” (meaning low numbers win, ignoring suit), and “12” (high numbers win, ignore suit). These are the trumps that are used when you lead the trick. You also have to bid for the number of tricks you think you’ll win. You win points if you hit your bid, or negative points if you don’t. Good fun!

Fantasy Realms, thought we’d have a game of this, hadn’t played for ages. Still fun.

Spectral, this went very badly for me. I mean, like “I want to burn this game” bad. One of the other players said he picked all the curse cards in his first five reveals. Just dumb luck I guess. And he didn’t even win (although he still smashed me).

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Thank You, Santa, first play. Another trick taking game. And again it involves bidding for how many tricks you think you’ll win. The tricky bit (no pun intended) is that you can’t rearrange your hand, because you’ll use the left most and right most cards to be your bid. So maybe you need to plan a bit, playing tricks until the bid cards you want are at the ends. Seemed to go ok.

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Pax Pamir Second Edition

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I think this is probably the game I have that I find hardest to teach… I can’t seem to find a logical order for things, and they all link together with lots of bitty bits to remember. The result is really cool and intricate but teaching it is such a pain for newcomers. Maybe a rolling teach where I just walk people through the first couple turns would be the best option. Might look up how other people have handled it, or a how to play video.
But the game is great! I took a risk and switched by allegiance right at the end which managed to swing the win for me. Could have negotiated more but maybe that’s less necessary with only 3 players.

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77

Played a couple of games of Rolling Heights with my partner this weekend.

This game is a city building game where you push your luck to eke out more building materials to help construct buildings. The mechanism for push your luck is throwing Meeples around like they’re dice and their orientation gifts you materials (eg if they land on their feet you get more than if they are lying down).

The box says an hour but I think this is a lie. No game we’ve played has touched that. Admittedly we didn’t play with the recommendation for planning phase on other players turns. It’s a tricky balance. While planning while others are playing IS more efficient I think it loses a lot of enjoyment. The game becomes more heads down isolated and confusing (as being able to pay attention on who’s turn it is is now much harder).

Broadly speaking the game is very enjoyable for us. The pushing the luck is a fun part of the game and the physicality of the task does enhance it. Aesthetically the game is also really cool you build the city which looks neat but the cost is being able to see important stuff properly. I think it’s a net positive but it’s not wholly smooth.

The game has, outside of in play construction scoring, some end game bits and bobs - these are a mix of player specific and communal. I don’t think I like these - I think they add too many moving parts to a/the game and reduce balance but in an uninteresting way - they don’t really craft narrative or moments but arbitrarily reward certain contexts over others. You can sort of see this in the design choices to have you only choose one of the tiles you want to score at the end - there’s a lack of control in the game that automatically blocks certain scoring by accident and the mitigation is just options.

I think this is a better than average game - a good game - but I think it’s one which is not merely good because it’s smooth but it’s good because it’s wonkily really good and really janky.

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78

A relatively free weekend meant that I had the time to get a few of my newer games out for a first solo playtest: Hamburg, Point City and Witchcraft!. I like them all, although I can see Hamburg getting less table time than the others due to the setup, but hopefully I can get to try it with other people as the solo game seemed to be less of a challenge than many similar games I’ve played. Point City is one that might have some appeal to casual gaming friends and would be easy to teach too, and Witchcraft! was good and can see it being a tough task to get a full victory with.

Hopefully next weekend I can get a couple of other titles out, especially Clans of Caledonia and Hispania.

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79

Played Station to Station yesterday. This game is a very very breezy pick up and delivery game (genuinely you should always be able to deliver something every turn).

The trap of the game is I think it tricks you into its breeziness. Like you can toddle around all game having a great time delivering stuff and suddenly it’s three turns from the game end and you could have zero points. The game has that dominion thing where you can just keep going forever doing your merry thing if you chose but the real viciousness is created by the players and their urgency. If everyone is happy pootling it’s a pootling game but if people grok that points are important suddenly things get sharp and time starts ticking away fast.

I think this one needs another play at a less sedate pace.

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My partner recently had a birthday. Her parents agreed to let 3 of the kids spend the night, and so my partner and I just had the baby with us one night this past weekend, sort of in observance of her birthday.

For her birthday, she said she wanted to play games with me. She was jealous that the weekend before I found time to play Crokinole with the kids.

So I asked if she wanted me to teach her Crokinole. She was reluctant, because she wasn’t sure she wanted to spend the mental energy to learn a new game. I insisted that it was very easy to learn, and we played a quick best-score-after-3-games series. I won, but she grasped the game pretty quick. I hope to get it out again soon and see how she feels about it after having had a bit of experience – I think she might have been concerned that she would not be able to beat me at a dexterity game; she totally could, given the right motivation and confidence.

Afterwards, we got Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries back on our table. This is the first Ticket to Ride game we played and it’s the one that introduced my partner to one of her favorite games(eries).

While I looked down at the empty board, I realized part of why Ticket to Ride isn’t one of my favorite games: the game is more exciting when it starts than at any other moment. Looking down at the empty map is full of possibility – but as soon as the game begins, your opponent can, with very little effort/planning needed, just claim any route they have the cards for.

At first I was thinking to myself, “how is this so much different than 18xx then?” After thinking about it, I realized 18xx games offer a slower and more restrictive pace to blocking out routes and cities – there is the occasional “tragic track” where you can sabotage the final upgrade for a specific tile in a way that ruins your opponent’s plans, but often, it may not be worth doing, either because it limits your own options or there’s simply a better play elsewhere. In our game, I could have just grabbed a 4-length route that my partner very obviously needed-- I had the cards in my hand and didn’t need them for the tickets I was working to solve… but I didn’t.

I still won, but I could have won by more.

The reason we have so many Ticket to Ride games is because my partner loves them, and I need the variety to keep it fresh. Nordic Countries is very good as a 2-player game, though.

Gaming Goal 2025 Status

[Cellulose] [Silent Victory] [Spirit Island] [Ashes Reborn] [Crokinole] [Crokinole] [Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries]

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