That’s mentioned in the rules. It is a sequel to the same designers’ I Am Done and apparently can be combined with it.
3 Likes
Rebirth, lost pretty badly, need to work on my castles for points. Such a quick game – you draw a piece, play it. No choices to make about what sort of token you want to play, you get what you’re given. Classic Knizia!
Project ELITE, always a blast! Unfortunately we lost, we only had a boss to go, so every alien movement die was making him move, and he got away from us and reached the start point, losing us the game. I don’t think we’ve ever had a boss reach that area before. Surprised us a bit. Still fun!
Dungeon Rummy, we won. For some reason this took forever to play (compared to our last game). So this is Rummy, but you have characters and are defeating enemies. No idea how Rummy is played. You’re playing cards to each others areas, and you do damage equal to the number of cards you play.
Deus, hadn’t played this for a while, still a cool game, Came second, so could have been worse. Tried to do my third temple at the end, but couldn’t make it happen. Even if I had, I don’t think I would have won.
9 Likes
Seeing really good reviews for Rebirth, and simple rules mean I might get played at pub meetups - a couple of folks on here have played it, how is it?
4 Likes
Today we played All Bridges Burning, which is another installment in the COIN series set during the Finnish civil war (1917-1918). Unusually, this is a 3-player COIN game. The Reds and the Senate are the main belligerant factions, with the Moderates being a mostly political faction.
This is the third COIN game that I’ve played (the others being Cuba Libre and Pendragon). There were similarities between both - notably two distinct phases to the game like in Pendragon - but enough differences to feel distinct. I think Cuba Libre is better by some margin - the interplay between the factions seems more intersting than in ABB. I’d probably rank this above Pendragon though because the combat system doesn’t make me want to flip the table 
9 Likes
I havent played a COIN better than Cuba Libre
3 Likes
How do you rate Fire in the Lake?
4 Likes
Today 2 friends visited for games. We started out with my new copy of Happy Pigs. For a first play really enjoyed it. An economic game with simultaneous action selection, a really tight number of actions in the game and a very cutesy presentation. First blush is it might have legs or be a five and done. Remains to be seen how it develops buy a very promising first play. My game got derailed when my eldest woke up and started playing along with me. As he’s not yet 2 the input was pure distraction. This derailing did at least prove how tight the action efficiency is.
Bext we played 3 rounds of A.I.pokalypse. 3 games shows how much we enjoyed it. As a coop it’s combotastic, breezy and fun.
8 Likes
We have one of those trees in the garden. It’s huge now. It makes very stinky fruit and my dad hates the fruit but since my mom planted it…
5 Likes
A lot of chrome. I haven’t played Cuba Libre, but I suspect less is more.
5 Likes
Been up to Nottingham to see Seth this weekend.
We were playing Perudo last night and ended up with me, Seth and Fin with one dice each and Kate still had 5!!!
*Note this is not atypical, Kate is absurd at Perudo.
The boys colluded in a comedy way and she lost a die.
Without missing a beat, Seth said, “if she can bleed, she can die”.
And then we all fell about laughing. I love my family
12 Likes
For the first time in … ages I played some games on a table. It was my yearly NachSPIEL event even though I didn’t go to SPIEL this year. Lots of people were sick and had to miss out so we were only 6 people.
We started out with a round of My Favorite Things people started out a bit skeptical but it turned out quite hilarious as people thought they had given out good categories that they would be able to gauge well but… failure ensued. It’s a trick taker where everyone get’s a fixed set of cards numbered 1-5 and “broken heart” and you play 5 tricks with those cards with the trick lead simply moving around the table. Low cards beat high cards (favorites ranking from 1 as best) but if anyone played a 1 into the trick the 
beats everything. Also if 2 of the same number are played the first one played beats the other.
The thing is you do not know which number you are playing because the number is hidden behind the 2nd card in the sleeve. You are not playing totally blind.
Before a round starts, everyone chooses a category and hands their cards and the category to their neighbor. The neighbor than chooses their favorite items in the category and writes them down on the 2nd (front) card-- ranked according to the hidden number. There is a list of categories to choose from but you can make up your own: boardgames, metalbands, languages, explosives, colors on them and one they dislike.
Then the cards are handed back to the person who gave you the category with the numbers hidden. Now I gave my partner the category metal bands so I could easily tell which card was the #1 (Opeth) which the #2 (Jinjer) and which was the (Excrementory Grindfuckers). But someone had given the student at the table the category “Lectures” and they had no idea which lectures he actually enjoyed. This is not a game one would play lots and lots of rounds of but it was one where everyone was laughing at the weird mix of cards we played into each trick.
To determine the trick winner numbers are revealed. So it pays to remember which numbers have gone for each category. But while there is a bit of strategy I think it’s mostly for the weird categories you could give to people and to see how Jinjer manages to draw out 2 because people thought it might be my partner’s #1 (of course they didnt know I was still holding the Opeth card)
Next up someone requested Let’s Go to Japan and that only plays 4 so we set up the other half of the table with Shinjuku. Our table–surprisingly–fit both!
4 people had quickly decided which game to join. And I told the remaining 2 that they were each suited better to the 1 game more than the other. I was right: those two won their respective games 
My partner enjoyed Let’s Go To Japan (and won). I could hear them talk about their trips and how thematic it was. But there were some complaints about analysis paralysis because there is so much optimization potential.
I badly lost Shinjuku. I think the first move someone took in the game may have been the same action twice as they claimed both the central “shops” next to the one line already built. This is not a legal move. A player’s 2 actions have to be different. But I am not sure that is what happend. The game was very opaque for me and I think I built too many and the wrong tracks and not enough shops. The others had 6 and 7 sets of customers and I only had 4. I overlooked a rule that would have helped me a bit that cards from districts where you have a shop count as jokers. The Kaiju might have helped me, too, but it appeared very late. We played with CEOs and I have no idea how one would play without having the occasional extra joker. I would definitely want to play again, I think I would know a bit better what to do. There is some card luck and I barely ever got any “central” cards but always the outside districts at the border of the map and I feel like that disadvantaged me but I also know I played badly. While the others were learning the rules, I was teaching “Let’s Go to Japan” and even having played a learning game a while ago didn’t help me remember details.
My partner insisted showing the others One Piece: Nakama and it turns out the game is no good at larger player counts. As I re-heated the Dal I made for dinner, they played and discussed and optimized and largely got nowhere. It’s a cute game that is very lovely at 2 players and any other playercount is just… not great. After a while I got so hungry I told them to quit it (they had previously discussed ending the game early)
Then we had dinner. After that my partner had requested we play Cubitos. We had not played in a while so rules explanation took a while and I botched or rather German markets botched: we have the base game in German and the expansion in English. The German rules are less clear than some of the English ones and the rules in general omit some stuff in German (and English is also not really well described when “Now” actions take place. The set of powers I selected for the dice was from the rulebook but I mistranslated a couple of them and so it was a really weird set of cards.
I fixed all that now by writing my own errata into the rulebook. So next time we can play it should be quicker and fewer edge cases or translation errors. People had fun with the race but all the times the cards were unclear or we didn’t quite know how to handle something and I had to look up things in the rulebook grated on everyone. Still I think right now I would want to play again with a better set of cards and more clarity on the rules.
For the finale I asked everyone to play a few hands of The Gang with me. 2 players didn’t know the game yet and one said he disliked poker. After the first hand 2 of the players who know the game best got into a heated discussion because “they took the wrong chip” … as expected over a few rounds we found our communication improved and we finally got a really good one:
(The cards is the Stormlight Archive deck which everyone thought was very pretty)
I hit the flush on the last card with my 2 and 6. I love this game with 6 players. I have never had it fail to work its magic.
13 Likes
Glad you went for the (unofficial) bit where you talk about your own trips while scoring. Makes it better, otherwise, you wouldnt care about their game at all!
6 Likes
Had a great weekend at Age of Steam Con UK from Friday to Sunday. That’s right. It’s Age of Steam all day for 3 days!!
Cheshire - 4 players. I showed up at around 1pm and found myself with a starting table with JC Lawrence map. The BGG entry doesn’t state the designer but it’s JCL’s. No big rules change. Indeed, the paper only contains one line and it’s the cost of the rail tunnel between Liverpool and Birkenhead - reminds me of OG Brass (not Lancashire!! - with the special tedious rule between the same two locations.
So yeah, standard AOS, but the map is fun!
Note: I only took a photo after they removed the player stones.
Mediterranean - 5 players and sheesh very brutal with the fight for land spaces. The map is large but that is misleading. You can’t have train tracks on the Med itself, but you can construct ferries (as you can see on the photo) once per turn. The land spaces are rather tight and full of bottlenecks. Eeep!! And with 5 players, we end up sharing tracks due to this.
Rust Belt - ahhh El Clasico. 6 players on Rust Belt so you know it’s brutal and bloody and indeed it was. I got screwed over on Round 1 and was pretty much fighting to keep myself afloat. I was last - surprise! No one went bankrupt!
France 2078 - looks like a nuked out France in the not-so-far-future. There’s a large swath of radiated lands that can only be scrubbed, 2 hex at a time, by the last player at the end of each round. It was fun but eh.
Bahia 1808 - A map with more chrome than I would like, but the changes are fun. The decision at the start of the game of how many shares you can issue max for the whole game is hard. The upgraded actions are also fun. I prefer this over France and some I will talk about below
London - We played this cuz it’s Lahndahn, innit!? Also, it has Tottenham (the place I grew up on) and Isleworth (where I live) so I already love this map. It’s also a JC Lawrence map. The track building is way more expensive - unless you take the Engineer action. What makes this a 10/10 map is due to the instant production mechanism that eliminates whatever randomness left in AOS. This also opens up more layers of decision-making and planning.
I will be printing this map (and Sun: below) to have this player regularly. This is easily one of the best maps I’ve played. The rules also aren’t overbearing (unlike some). This is how I wanted Age of Steam to be.
Sun - basically the other side of the London map. More rules change than London but the rules change basically puts Age of Steam into a different level of mindfuck, opaqueness, and pure asshole dickery. The theme is that we are extracting solar flares and the “cities” are extraction stations. So, this means that these cities can move around the map by the players just to completely mess with everyone’s heads. And towns are automatic the moment you upgrade a track. Another layer of mindfuck that screws people over. Another 10/10 map. Oh and loans give you less money than the standard. And tracks cost more. Fun.
Scotland - one of the 2 player maps I’ve played with the con host.
Zimbabwe - this is well-regarded by people from what I hear, but I wasn’t really impressed with it. The escalating cost of track means that the tracks aren’t worth that much. So the idea of Zimbabwe is to build a lot of tracks while they are cheap during early game, establish a network for you to transport long range goods, and also have some spare ones once waves of nationalisation happens. Then by late game, you just transport goods because tracks are stupidly expensive. I’ll give it one more try as I ran away with it, but I wasn’t hot about this.
13 Likes
The sun???
2 Likes
I mean there is abstraction and then there is whatever the hell this is a map of …
7 Likes
Can confirm, travelling between these two is costly. However you do it.
There’s also a map of the body…
2 Likes
I was tempted to ask “where’s Page 3” but I kept my mouth shut
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Saturday I managed to get in a game of Star Trek Ascendancy with 3 players. Went Old Skool: Federation, Romulan, and Klingons.
I took the Federation, Mike took the Klingons, and Ben handled the Romulans. We also but in a “Low Threat” Borg (no starting system, but both Transwarp Conduits and a bunch of the event cards).
The game started out pretty standard, but on TURN 2, on the first unsafe system Ben encountered a Borg Cube. And that was basically it for the Romulans… they managed to hold off the threat for 2 turns by sacrificing a few warbirds to slow the cube down, but that was it.
Thankfully, Ben is a good sport and gleefully took control of the Collective (dealt 3 cards, picked 1 for the cube) and he turned his attention on Earth. I managed to pump an enormous amount of research into Weapons, which was barely enough to hold the Cube off long enough for me to build a bigger fleet with even BETTER weapons (+3!) which I then used to destroy the Cube.
Of course, by then the Spire on Romulus had spawned another Cube, but when Ben sent it flying into Federation space again, the Klingons swept in and seized Romulus, and then their second fleet took Earth. I witnessed my first ever Supremacy Victory in ST:A!
It continues to be an enjoyable game, and this time I played on the suggested 3’ x 3’ map (usually I have the home systems about 30" apart, but we only had 4 hours so I figured a more constrained playing surface was in order). Good fun.
And then we played Hot Streak. Ben did exceptionally well ($71!) for his first game and won handily.
6 Likes
Got a rare tabletop event in last night and you know what that means:
Lacerdaaaaaaa!
Dude, Kanban EV. What a masterwork.
I mean, the game is pretty much as simple as this:
Action 1: Take some design tiles, each of which has a unique combo of car color and car part
Action 2: Fill warehouse with car parts and claim parts into your supply
Action 3: Place parts from (2) onto the assembly line to build cars
Action 4: a) Discard a tile from (1) to take a car finished in (3), color=color. Or b) discard a part from (2) to upgrade a tile from (1), part=part.
That is seriously (nearly) the entirety of this 4+ weight Lacerda. All the weight is emergent from the subtle interconnections.
For instance, only certain actions will give you speech bubbles, which are the currency you can spend to score goal points at meetings (such as, have upgraded a certain kind of car part or have claimed a certain color of car - final or intermediate states for Actions 1-4).
Then there’s Sandra the bitch boss who moves through the same action spaces you all are using, taking points from anyone who hasn’t spent enough time in that department (action).
There’s just this subtle timing interplay in terms of what order you choose your actions, what order you take your actions - like if I build a car in (3) then am I setting up someone else to grab it in (4)? I want to go to this department, but if I go there instead I can send Sandra forward, accelerating the game or maybe punishing someone before they can get ready for her inspection, etc. etc. etc.
The four actions you can do are pretty easy to grasp. How everything fits together tends to coalesce by the end of the first in-game week. And then optimizing everything to score points, avoid penalties, and capitalize on the opportunities left by your opponents while leaving them none… that’s going to be a long mountain to climb.
3 out of 4 agreed it is really something special. 1 out of 4 was past his bedtime.
Also:
Fairy - This is just the game where you look at a card from a 21 card deck and everyone guesses if the next card will be higher, lower, same color, or one of the 3 fairies. Featherweight but we all got a smile and a laugh out of it so it carries itself.
That’s not a Hat - We played for less than 5 minutes. The guy who was past his bedtime crumbled three gifts in and we called it. But it was enough to go from “maybe we should do the advanced variant where we each have two gifts” to “oh shoot this isn’t a cactus I gave the cactus away what the fart am I sitting on here?” This was my first time and I’m excited to play more.
Tindahan - Even though it was late I had no trouble convincing my half-Filipino compatriot to try this game called Tindahan. We did just two hands, enough to get the flavor, and it’s good. My first time getting this out of the box as well. Just… trying to win tricks (a), trying to control markets (b), and trying to rush the game to avoid penalties and leave everyone else with cards in hand (c) is really well strung up. First hand, I rushed the game and won tricks but left the 5-point stalls to my opponents and lost on points. Second round I went more balanced but grew alarmed when I had a lot more cards than another player. I switched trump to keep someone from taking over my stalls (by forcing them to lead a card instead, knowing no one else could lead the color I was trying to protect) and then trumped the subsequent trick. The game let you do some interesting stuff and zig and zag based on how the hand develops. Clever stuff.
8 Likes
Games night
7 Wonders perfectly adequate, 5 player so probably at the top end of the best player count.
Lords of Vegas It was OK. The group didn’t really get into the trading and jockeying part of it.
Waddle Interesting small box area control. Fluffed a rule about making groups until about halfway through a player pointed out every group of penguins would score, not just the largest. Still fun though.
For Sale, one of the best short games ever.
8 Likes