Your Last Played Game Volume 3

[Marx]

That’s tricky, due to the 2-player, thinky nature of the game.

Over 7 weeks (Rounds), each player will get a total of 14 turns (2 per week). Each turn allows you to activate 1, 3, or all your stacks of troops depending on if you spend 0, 1, or 2 cards from your hand. But your cards also are required to activate your troops in battle, so you need to balance out doing stuff with the impact it will have on your ability to fight.

Including the teach, we finished the game in under two and a half hours, but I’m not sure if it will get much faster than that. Maybe 2 hours is a reasonable estimate… there aren’t a tonne of things you can do, but they’re all impactful, so even for a “from-the-hip” player like me there tends to be a bit of “If I do this, then that, but then not this…” to each decision.

Long way of saying “Not a long game, but perhaps more prone to analysis-paralysis than most.” I think with reasonable players 2 to 3 hours is a safe estimate.

[mistercrayon]

We played more Tag Team over the weekend and it’s 100 percent inexplicable to me why this game doesn’t feel like a pointless total random number generator.

I think adding just a hint of decision making which is both reactive and proactive might be critical to this EVEN if the results of decisions remain unpredictable.

there was a card my partner played which meant she won if she lost on that card turn. And it worked.

There was perhaps some kind of in the ether like planning. You can’t say why you do X but there’s just a right feeling to each choice. broadly if something works the reaction is positive (naturally) but if it doesn’t the reaction is closer to “oof well played” rather than “what a load of cobblers”. (At least for now)

[Acacia]

@Captbnut

I use them with Orleans. They’re fantastic

I want to, but the cardboard chits fit perfectly in the bead organizer I got and I just…can’t…disrupt that.

@COMaestro

I use them for Quacks.

I want to, but the cardboard chits fit perfectly in the folded space organizer I got and I just…

I’m seeing a pattern.

I DID get capsules for Zoo Vadis rather than paying out the nose for their clays. Just needed the clackclackclack…clackclackclack… as negotiations played out.

[Acacia]

@Captbnut

What is the game length for Sekigahara?

Been tempted for a long time

Iiiiittt’s ooooonnn Yucataaaa…

And I haven’t had a chance to try it either.

[Acacia]

Bit of a catch up.

We did a starters game of Food Chain Magnate online. a) Seems good. b) It’s very much a game of “build your setup, then let the grande pachinko machine play out.” Like Libertalia. Which makes it hard online, async. You’re very involved in that setup, playing your staff, etc. Then you log back in and you see that a bunch of food has disappeared, and shown up on the board, and you have some money…

Like Libertalia, you really need to trawl the log to understand the second half of the workings of the game. I didn’t do that very well and left interested but befuddled. I won by a lot so I’m assuming I speak for all four of us.

Knarr on the table. Lost. Still like this game.

Parks 2e online. I just kinda assumed it was a reskin and reprint after they professionally lynched the company’s founder and lost the deal with 59 Parks but noooo. The game has been heavily re-worked. And I’ll be darned if 2e isn’t a definitively better game. The changes are subtle, like if you know 1e you could sit down and shift with just a few questions asked along the way, but the tensions and balances in the game are so re-calibrated that I may have to swap boxes on my shelf.

Or not. Parks only stays around because other people like it. Maybe I don’t need Parks at all. But dang 2e.

Feast for Odin online. I’ve spent years not exactly bagging on Odin, but definitely asserting it was definitively less than Rosenberg’s top tier. Less than Agricola, Le Havre, Arle. But I also kind of knew I hadn’t given it a fair shake. It was always juxtaposed with Agricola and claimed to be better than Agricola and it was just so not Agricola. Playing it again with a fresh palatte and enjoying what it is. It’s rising a lot in my esteem.

[Marx]

I wonder if it would work remotely… I mean, mechanically, fine. But the core of the game hinges on a bluffing mechanic, or more accurately the ability to “read” the person sitting across from you.

How many cards does he have? How many blocks? How many of those blocks are daimyo? Does he open with a card he has no support for, or does he play his last-card-of-a-suit last, hoping that Loyalty cards have already been pulled by that point?

I guess Social Deduction games online have been successful, but there are mechanical elements to them that Sekigahara doesn’t have, and “Bluffing” and “Social Deduction” aren’t really synonymous…

Ramble, ramble, ramble. I’d be very curious to see if it works.

… having just checked the Yucata page for Sekigahara, the variations are interesting. The one about not having to display the blocks or card (for Mustering or Loyalty challenges) is interesting, because by revealing those pieces of information a savvy player can learn potentially useful stuff (ie: the three blocks deployed to Osaka include two Calvary and a 3-block all of Ukita, or the card you show doesn’t have a Special Attack sword… or whatever)… less information means the game will be more luck driven… again, really curious if this would work.

[Acacia]

Yeah - there are games you can learn online and others that you can only play online, once you know the guts reasonably well. And then of course those that never work online at all.

[Captbnut]

I think I’ll pass, but thank you for the temptation

[DJCT]

@Acacia

Like Libertalia, you really need to trawl the log to understand the second half of the workings of the game. I didn’t do that very well and left interested but befuddled. I won by a lot so I’m assuming I speak for all four of us.

Yep. I lost by a lot but could not work out why I was not making money. Like a lot of games much easier to understand when you have to work through the mechanisms yourself

[pillbox]

@DJCT

Like a lot of games much easier to understand when you have to work through the mechanisms yourself

My biggest issue with online boardgaming. I definitely learn better watching the machinations at work rather than having a number spat out at me after the fact.

[COMaestro]

I note you omitted our game of The Wolves.

[Acacia]

Moved some wolves. Howled at some moons. Lost to @comaestro. Business as usual.

[lalunaverde]

A Message From the Stars - another word game but this is rather intense and I wont suggest this to non-gamers. Surprising that it requires a healthy about of logical deduction! The alien player was glad I’m around for giving logical assumptions - that’s the perks of doing coding as a job, I guess.

Junk Art Revolution -

“Junk” “Art”

This is my first tine playing this or the OG. Very fun!!

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor - same as the old Mischwald, but perhaps more fine-tuned than the OG. Verdict is also the same as the OG. Play it for the cute cosy theme. Otherwise, play RFTG or any Chudyk game.

Bamboo another “mid-to-heavy game in a small box” Devir game. Not as good as Red Cathedral or White Castle. If you want a third one, get Salton Sea

L’oaf - okay this is more clever than I thought. There’s some game here but not good enough for me to keep. Will sell now.

Fearless - Friedemann Friese trick taker. I really like this one! I would love to play it more to see if there’s some heuristics we can pick up

[Captbnut]

@lalunaverde

L’oaf - okay this is more clever than I thought. There’s some game here but not good enough for me to keep. Will sell now.

I’ll buy it. For my friend called Loaf

[Acacia]

So it turns out we are about an hour from one of the largest Ginkgo Biloba groves in North America. About 80 years ago, someone wanted to study them and so planted a grove of ~300 trees. They grow so slowly that he died before he got his answers, but the “Experimental Farm” lives on to this day.

I knew Ginkos were one of, if not the, slowest growing trees in the world with the hardest wood. And yes, slapping one is like slapping a granite boulder.

I also assumed they were South American, as Biloba sounds Portuguese to me. But no, it’s bi-loba for the two lobed leaves. And they were extant (and global) with the dinosaurs, but today are only native to Asia. Learning!

Had a lovely picnic:

And then of course at the end of the day I gave everyone exactly zero choice about what would happen.

I like the ginkgos.

[Acacia]

[raged_norm]

Games Night

MarraCash, for a game about buying shops. I did not buy shops and did very badly

Glass Road, I did not make much glass

Gang of Dice, YOLO’d it and won

Skulls of Sedlec, I did not stack skulls well.

[RogerBW]

Thirsty Meeples last night, and first, a game rejected by me at Essen, Railroad Tiles (mostly because the box is quite large and it wasn’t immediately compelling).

The Railroad Ink DNA is certainly present, but remixed: you draft a set of tiles each round (same mix of roads and rails, but no edges, instead a few “dead end” tiles), then add them to your layout. Taking more tiles puts you later in the next round’s turn order. Then you add cars, locomotives and “travellers” to get increasing numbers of points for your routes; the resource I found most scarce was the placement spots for these.

I found it quite fun, though fiddly—but alas, rather than instilling in me a desire to play it again or to buy it, it caused me to think of the coffin-box of Railroad Ink I already have, and why don’t I play that more? (Well, because some of my regular gaming friends don’t get on with it, but that might well be true of this too. And the original is on BGA.)

On to Moonshine, which I’ve heard a few people talking about recently. One person rolls the dice and perhaps rerolls, everybody tries to use them.

My arc of enjoyment here was very much like the reroll symbol ↷. I started off feeling fairly confused, worked out what was going on (in particular that the moon tokens you need to pay for some cards come off the activation spaces you’ve already used), and by the end was wondering whether that was it. Quite fun, and I’ll try it once more, but the game has absolutely nothing to do with the theme or the art, and that doesn’t help me enthuse about it. (Also on BGA.)

Next, Roughly, a party game with one gimmick, but it’s a good one. Each card asks you to estimate a numerical value… in terms of something else. (E.g. “What is the longest distance ever danced in a conga line, in rolls of linoleum.”) In spite of this it’s agreeable at least for the length of the game, and we might try this again as an end of evening possibility since we’ve rather burned out on Timeline.

Finally, a deliberately random game, Done I Am, in which you’re trying to put out three goal cards but plenty of other cards can upset the whole thing. It feels as though it’s in the same sort of space as Fluxx, but this game was over before it had time to pall, which is my biggest objection to Fluxx.

[COMaestro]

@RogerBW

Finally, a deliberately random game, Done I Am

Designed by Yoda, I assume?

[Marx]

Last night was supposed to be our bi-monthly TTRPG Wildsea evening (which I am enjoying running, but it’s a lot of work compared to DnD… which is unfair, because DnD isn’t a lot of work because there are 10,000 modules which I have read and played and just kinda “know”, whereas Wildsea I’m kinda discovering along with my players? Anyway, I digress) but one player had to cancel.

So instead we played a big ol’ game of Thunder Road Vendetta, specifically the Carnival of Chaos expansion where it becomes an arena-battler. It was okay! Not bad. It was pretty close for the most part… Andy got eliminated on the 5th (of max 6) rounds, ending the game a little early, but the final scores (21, 19, 13, 11) were relatively close-ish.

The 11 score was my fault (I got 19), because on Turn 1, Terry was happily trying to drive his small car into the arena and I spawned my large car behind him and immediately sent his car careening into the canyon walls and death. On his first turn.

I think including the variable Leaders and Chop Shop stuff was probably overkill. But otherwise, still good fun. But I like the race-version much better. But the arena version was good.

And then we pulled out a quick race of Cubitos, marking the first time I have ever played any map other than the first. This is probably my 5th game? Always with a new group, always with the default loadout of dice… and this time we tried Map 2 with Loadout 2!

And it kinda sucked? The dice just weren’t as interesting by a long shot, and a lot of them tied into having other active colours in your pool to work (so the purple dice was 2 Movement, +2 if you had an active red die, and another +1 if you had an active orange die… instead of the basic version of the Rollosaurus which is just 4 movement). Also, I won by a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

And then we played the “How can I fit all of Twilight Imperium 4th Edition plus both Expansions in a box” game. The answer? Smaller boxes.

Seriously. Today I’m going to the FLGS I used to work at to buy 9 100-count UltraPro storage deck boxes (clear plastic) to try and save about 1.1" on each box of coloured plastic so the lid lift will drop from 1.7" to about 0.4" (much more reasonable). I had to get rid of the 24 plastic boxes I had for the factions (tokens, cards, etc) and bag all of those instead, which fits much better but feels less awesome (I liked just handing people a box, plus it was really easy to see what race was in each box), but I just didn’t have room for 30 plastic boxes of stuff in the TI4 box.