Your Last Played Game Volume 3

[Phil]

• Ethnos (5p)
• Moon Colony Bloodbath (3p)
• Spots (3p)

The game of Spots was me wanting to play a quick game at the end of the session because I had some time to kill before my train, and the other two players realising that they had a shared interest in an unrelated topic, and spending most of the game talking about that; so I have no idea whether they even enjoyed the game. Hopefully they did.

Ethnos is always a good time.

MCB is an engine builder which has won me over despite my dislike for engine-builders. I’ve played 4-5 games now, and can see myself buying it at some point.

[RogerBW]

Airecon West at Telford last weekend…

Lots of Tinderblox, Project L and Sea Salt & Paper as fillers. A few Compiles. (I’m never going to make it the only game I play, to get competitive, but I do enjoy it.) Ashes, which I haven’t played for a while and would love to get back into.

Bigger games: The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31 which is very much in the Shadows over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica hybrid social deduction and cooperative style. Fun, but I still prefer purer social deduction when I can find people who want to play.

Imperium [foo], just one game, Olmecs vs Polynesians vs Arthurians. I think I need to make Notes on the Arthurians: many cards interlock with others.

Flash Point Fire Rescue, still loving it.

Steampunk Rally, great fun as always. It seems intimidating but new players pick it up quickly, and we had a close finish.

[InkyBloc]

Full 5-player game of Hansa Teutonica. One player got 3/4 corner cities and was shooting up the point track but only had 2 actions for quite a while. I decided to go for the big-points circles by getting discs and privilege, but I only managed to get the first two before another player (who had maxed out on actions) decided she liked the look of that and took the better two. She ended up taking first over me by three points.

Then we played Letter Jam. Best clue of the night was FISTICUFFS. Worst clue of the night was SOFTFOOT, for obvious reasons.

[BertFill]

@Phil

I have no idea whether they even enjoyed the game.

They enjoyed it. How could they not? It’s Spots.

[InkyBloc]

Targi with my wife. Felt like a very well-matched game, and it ended just before the last raid. I had two full rows of Well cards and an all-different row (also worth 4 thanks to a card), thanks to a clutch last play where a card allowed me to use a gold to pay for two different cards. The game was a squeaker too: I won 42-41.

[lalunaverde]

South African Railroads - need another play. I screwed up the rules. The rulebook is genuinely shit and have to find the errata online

Scout

Merv - a lot more fun than my previous plays of it. Very good Lopiano game. I talk crap about Euros nowadays but I like Lopiano’s designs. However, still have foundational problems associated with Euros: on-rails strategies. I went mainly on the mosque track. Euro Beast went for scrolls. Etc etc. However, the game incentivises spread wide to some extent which is nice.

MEGA VILLAGE - Village + Inn + Port - good fun. I’m the aggressive one on killing my family members quickly. Inn cards are so fun but they are incredibly swingy. Port is okay. We prefer the old land travelling. Goal cards are nice.

HOT STREAK

Battle Line: Medieval

Then a friend and I went for several plays of Netrunner and Compile

[Phil]

• Lancaster (Yay!)
• Tiny Epic Game of Thrones (Erm…)

I don’t own a copy of Lancaster, but I wish I did. I’ve been hanging out to play it again since the last time I had the opportunity, which was probably about a decade ago?! Really, really good. For a brief moment in the final scoring I was in the lead, before ending in a resounding last place thanks to my miserable failure to gain the favour of most of the lords…

Enjoyed it so much I forgot to take any photos.

Things went somewhat downhill from there, with our host being eager to try out Tiny Epic Game of Thrones. I have a distinct feeling that Tiny Epic Galaxies will remain the only game in that series that I will like enough to be interested in repeat plays. True to my impression of other games in the series, Game of Thrones proved to be super-fiddly to play and to get to grips with. We played through a couple of rounds, and called it a night. It might well be a decent game, but I couldn’t really tell. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve neither read the books nor watched the TV show, so I have no ingrained enthusiasm for the setting.

That Lancaster, though. Good stuff.

[Acacia]

@Phil

I don’t own a copy of Lancaster, but I wish I did.

I own a copy and not sure I want it? It’s competing with Keyflower and Carson City (and Argent and Wise Guys, but those first two are the incumbents). I did like it when I played it 8 years ago. It seems a game where you need the same group to play over and over and then it turns into a gem.

In other news:

Azure: The new Bitewing kickstarter, and they put it on BGA. I really like it. It’s 1v1 and is very interactive without being confrontational. I’m going to get some more cycles in.

London: This is the game I can’t win. But last night I won. The Mrs. drew an obscene number of paupers while I was flushed in cash. So some of it was really skewed draws. But also she tried to run two sets of street lamps and after an ill-advised opening spent the game drowning in poverty. So some luck and some skill factored in. In the end I lapped her on the scoreboard and got our highest score ever. Just a convergence of factors. I plan on losing the next 5, per usual.

[SteveB_uk]

I have London 2nd ed and must play it soon! Only tried a solo years ago.

[Acacia]

It really grows on you. The cards’ uses aren’t immediately obvious (Kew Gardens? Shops?) but there are a lot of incremental aha moments and each one opens up the strategic space in the game.

[RogerBW]

Thirsty Meeples last night, first trip for several months due to various problems.

With just two of us, I’d asked that we try Star Trek: Captain’s Chair, which is for a maximum of two. And it rapidly became clear while reading the rulebook that this is basically Imperium, my current favourite game, given a Star Trek coat of paint and a few tweaks. You have a starter deck, and every time you reshuffle you include a card off another deck, and when you run out of those you have more cards that you can pay to develop. There’s a market of cards, and at the end of each turn you put a one-point token on one of them. There are -2 point cards which you add to your deck when you’ve overreached yourself a bit and try to get rid of later (but if the deck empties, the game ends at once). It’s all very familiar.

But there are some innovations, and some of them work well. You’re not playing a faction, but rather an individual captain (Picard, Shran, Sisko, etc.) — though you can still end up with multiple ships. There’s a series of Locations up for grabs, which you get by putting more Away Teams on them than your opponent can manage. The main decks are People, Cargo, Ships and Allies. The main game timer is a series of “stardate cards”; each one has a certain number of Glory tokens, and when they’re exhausted the next one comes into play, or one the last one is gone the game ends. You have three skill tracks (military, influence and engineering) and advancing these will give you a higher score for related cards at the end of the game.

I enjoyed it mechanically, but I felt it wasn’t a great match for the theme. How do I, an Andorian captain, also get control of the Enterprise-C and a K’tinga battlecruiser? Why is Admiral Necheyev working for me? How do I have hand phasers when the Federation apparently doesn’t? Imperium makes the common cards relatively generic (“tyranny”, “river valley”, “priesthood”) except for the tributary peoples (how did Alexander the Great conquer the Carolingian Kingdom?), but presumably a Star Trek game has to use the rich trove of sixty years of accumulated Star Trek lore.

As with Imperium, there’s very little you can do unless you have a card that lets you do it. And while I can see the virtue of that, it gets frustrating when a thing you can’t do is “send another away team to a planet”; thematically, you could be doing that all the time.

Would I play it again? Certainly. Would I buy it? Almost certainly not. (Especially since there’s already another six-captain box, and an expansion with three more, abd being me I would want all of them.)

[Marx]

Last night a buddy wanted to try a full game of Dinosaur Island which I agreed to because I’m a good person and I’m willing to play bad games to let people realize they’re bad. I’ve played Dinosaur Island a few times, and it’s weak… not awful, but typical KS-bloat.

Turns out that I haven’t played Dinosaur Island! I’ve played the thematically identical Dinogenics! What a relief! I can go into this new game with open heart and mind!

… and it turns out it’s pretty crap. It’s not awful, but there’s a lot of rules bloat and the core loop isn’t all that interesting? Plus the amount of plastic is ridiculous and unnecessary?

To take one example: there are 3 types of Dinosaurs: Herbivores (all worth 2 excitement and 1 danger), Small Carnivores (3 excitement, 2 danger), and Large Carnivores (4 excitement, 2 danger). But you can only ever see one of each at a time, and they don’t cycle unless somebody buys one… which is important, because each Herbivore (each of which has the same mechanical in-game stats) requires a slightly different allotment of DNA to generate (there are 3 basic DNAs and 3 Advanced DNAs, and you can make Advanced from Basic at a 2-to-1 ratio). But that means if the Large Carnivore needs Red Advanced DNA and I already have a Red Advanced DNA Carnivore, I don’t want it because all my Red DNA is already spoken for… but the only way it changes is if somebody else buys it…

And so on, and so forth. It was fine, I won by a significant margin, and I think that’s part of my problem. I’m suspicious of any game I win the first time.

Afterwards, it was about 10pm, so we only had a few hours… so we played a quick game of Xia Legends of a Drift System.

I don’t know how my stars have aligned that I’ve played 3 games of Xia in the last 3 weeks, but gosh it continues to impress. I decided to go Full Aggro this time around and loaded out the Ghoststalker with guns, engines, and shields (which was a mistake, I shouldn’t have bothered with shields, ironically… shields are for when you are attacked, not for when you are an attacker… or if you’re going to be a miner or a smuggler and need to mitigate damage from asteroids, planetary shields, and excavations). Anyway, I drew an early mission that rewarded me for destroying the Merchant (perfect!), but then by the end of the game I had only done 13 of the required 15 damage to destroy him.

I managed to upgrade to a Level 2 ship before the game ended by a lot of exploration (2 Explore Tokens are either 1 FP or 2 Monies), but then the guy who was winning suggested we stop so we did (at 7 FP). Great game… and worked surprisingly well to play relatively quickly with a group that all knew the rules. Very impressed.

[RogerBW]

I’m tending to go basic engine, GTS, basic shield, enviro-shield (8 spaces), for my initial setup. I should try different approaches.

[Marx]

The Ghoststalker only has 9 spaces… that would leave a whopping 1 space for cargo. Which means you’d have to mine 1 thing, fly to sell it, mine 1 thing…

If there was a nearby Ember-field, yeah, that would definitely work.

[RogerBW]

Yeah, I probably wouldn’t do this with Ghost Stalker. Ideally I find something to mine (etc.) and somewhere to sell it.

[malkav11]

We have been playing Jurassic World: Legacy of Isla Nublar and while I wouldn’t describe it as a perfect or indeed terrifically deep game, for me at least it much better addresses what I want from a dinosaur park game. Which is to say, you do get to do a little bit of light park design between scenarios, and there’s a research mechanic that lets you mess with the dinos you have a little bit, but in practice you are individual people trying to get objectives done in a park that is inevitably full of rampaging dinos causing chaos. You will do your best to contain them, but it is simply not possible to keep any of the dinos corraled for 5 entire rounds even if the power stays on the whole time, and it also definitely will not. And that’s before you get to the Jurassic World scenarios and our good buddy Henry Wu starts putting new exciting DNA in the buggers. (Which is a kind of brilliant mechanic. you are mandated to pick these DNA upgrades, which have an associated animal and bonus budget amount…but the actual mechanical effect you have to scratch off once you have permanently added it to the dino. )

[lalunaverde]

Had a quick pizza and 2 player session with a friend. We played Paco Ŝako. It’s standard Chess rules but it adds a twist: instead of capturing pieces, the two enemy pieces will merge into a union or “dance”. With these two pieces merged, both players can move this union based on the movement rules of their pieces.

Really shakes up the heuristics you know about Chess and now you’re thinking of Chain Reactions more. Very fun and very clever!

[Captbnut]

Been playing some fairly intense acync Decrypto with @RogerBW @InkyBloc @Acacia @lalunaverde and @DJCT .

Some nice across the pond cultural references and some really cool deduction moments. Having time to think made clue giving much easier for me - although I find that part stressful (not wanting to let the team down when the opposition is on to you).

And ‘Barrack’ is a ridiculous word

For future plays - I’m sure I’ve heard its ok to clue from previous clues, rather than the original key word. Am I making that up?

[DJCT]

It was great fun. The last game went long and certainly I was not near any of the clues!

Would happily play again

[COMaestro]

Is Inky playing on both teams? Seems like cheating to me…