Waddle, Waddle, or Waddle Waddle?
“Penguins” doesn’t narrow it down :).
4 Likes
This new one from Allplay
6 Likes
What LLV said
3 Likes
We finished the neXt Evolution campaign for Marvel Champions.
The good: both heroes, Cable and Domino, and their preconstructed decks that come in the box were lots of fun. The early scenarios were also very enjoyable. The bad: the bonuses that are awarded for doing well in the campaign are maybe a bit too good, which meant that we crushed the villain in the final scenario in something like six turns and it didn’t feel even remotely close. But perhaps that is unfair, there is an expert difficulty that we weren’t using. Perhaps we should have been… but the previous campaign box on normal difficulty got the better of us twice!
Overall, I think this is one of the better campaign expansions that I’ve played. It did feel a bit like it had a lot of challenges that Cable was very well equipped to solve, so using a different hero might be another way to up the difficulty.
Next up is Age of Apocalypse, and then perhaps a break to play something else. I think Marvel Champions has been our most regularly played game over the past couple of years.
7 Likes
Played Santiago again.
5 players, all new apart from me (I was comfortably last). It’s an old school heavy interaction thing with God awful art.
I like that it’s an auction and a negotiation with rails on; it keeps the game moving forward and it’s short enough to not out stay it’s welcome.
Easy to teach and simple to play (really badly).
The palm trees didn’t change much from playing without.
I like it.
6 Likes
Was this my copy? EDIT: Nope
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This has become quite the priority for me.
Outside of 2 player settings, I just don’t have the patience for a lengthy teach these days.
There are a few exceptions of games that I know well enough to be able to teach them from memory but that’s less than a handful right now.
5 Likes
HOT STREAK - we opened with the banger
Take Time - 2nd time playing and this is very fun. I’ll be keeping it with Harmonies and other Libellud party games
Challengers - part of the SDJ Challenge. 6 players. Great fun!
Hanging Gardens - card tableau game hot from SPIEL. You arrange the cards into a pyramid formation. You score N for putting these together. You score X for this. Etc. It’s pedestrian. But it went for sub 1 hour.
Norsewind - another pedestrian card tableau from SPIEL. Like Hanging Gardens, it’s okay game that goes under an hour.
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Somebody posted this on Reddit, and it brought me both joy and rage in approximately equal measure:
One of my regulars was convinced for a few moments that it meant Hot Streak was getting an expansion… 
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I pendantly corrected their mistakes
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One of CMYK pointed out this was an AI post in the comments, without which I wouldn’t have noticed. But I went through the account’s comment history and you can see the AI speech patterns repeated. It makes me wonder… why? Who’s running this bot account that has exclusively posted on r/boardgames. I imagine it’s building up a comment history for a later purpose but it’s just weird.
Dead internet theory I suppose.
6 Likes
I know a game that has “I think not!” cards…
4 Likes
Last night had a good evening of gaming with some welterweight friends.
Opened by playing a round of Faraway, which is a beautiful game with somewhat weird scoring? I don’t like the way the game scores, but after playing it once and scoring it very wrong, it was still an okay game. Great art, didn’t overstay its welcome too much.
After that we played a quick game of Kingdomino, which was great, and then four rounds of Magic Maze which I love but my partner hates (she really struggles with the colours and iconography on the tiles, which, in her defence, there is a lot of). We managed to win 3 of the 4 rounds. I really don’t like the “everyone pass your movement tile to the left” mechanic, though. That’s just messy.
Then we played a bunch of Pick n’ Packers, which was weird in a very fun kinda way. A semi-coop dexterity game with little presents you have to balance on a piece of wood (a “drone”) and pilot with two players only able to use one finger each!? A riot.
Is it as good as Dro Polter? No. But it is good, and the competitive element interlocked with the sorta coop element is neat. It’s staying in the collection.
7 Likes
River of Gold, first play. Roll your dice, either move down the river or build. Building gives you points to move down a track, as well as other things. A building gives benefits to any one who stops there along the river. As well as something for the owner. You are also collecting resources to fulfill customer cards.All went fairly smoothly, nothing too compelling.
Space Alert, finally we got thru the tutorial mission! And even blew up one of the enemy (the others escaped).
Ghost Stories, we had 4 players, which I thought might have given us an advantage…nope, lost again. I’m sensing that it might be time to ease off on this game for a while. And maybe read some stuff on strategy.
Escape: The Curse of the Temple, manic dice rolling at its best.
Five by Five, a quick game. On your turn you play a card, which are either colours or abilities. If you play a colour, you roll that colour die and add it to the (five by five) board. Ability cards allow you to do stuff like swapping two dice, or rerolling one. This is all to do objectives, which can be something like “have a line of odd dice” or “have an even die in a corner”. Objectives give various points. I started with very high point objectives, which were going nowhere, so I discarded them for new ones. Good, simple dice game.
Soda Jerk, nice quick filler to finish up.
10 Likes
Zoo Vadis - 4 players. still great. Still awesome
The Great Zimbabwe - same as ZV. 4 players. Still great. Still awesome
Scythe 5 players with the base factions. Light weight Euro with some area control. This remains a very good Efficiency game despite its shorfalls. It’s pros works well to me: simple enough for hobbyists to pick up while the objectives scoring remains tense.
Impulse 2e - showed this Chudyk game to a regular in our club who likes Chudyk as well, YET have never played Impulse!!
Oddland - simple rules. Interaction. Cursing at each other. Charming production. Standard Allplay!
March of the Ants: Evolved Edition - got to play this. Seems more streamlined than the original. I like this enough. Charming theme with light weight 4x gameplay. But I don’t see incentives to interact. The game funnels you towards min-maxing points, which is a shame, otherwise I would like this game more.
We played twice because someone really wants to play it but was playing Sweetlands for literally hours. We played again with her.
9 Likes
I returned to my Regicide Legacy campaign after a hiatus, and knocked off mission 7 which I’d previously failed at (once or twice; I can’t remember). I was worried that I’d have forgotten what my mistakes/learnings were from last time, but it all came back to me, and my tactics worked out.
I had a rather low-scoring game of Beacon Patrol earlier today (in which I think I’d shuffled the tiles very badly, given how clumped together some things were), which at one point suffered from an immense terrifying sea monster which ripped the very sea scape apart by lying on it and purring.
And the other day I had a really great game of Tetrarchia. I’d secured half the borders quite early, but then had an absolute bear of a time dealing with barbarians and uprisings, with lots of swings back and forth, and by the time I’d finally secured the second half of the map, the first half was almost entirely in revolt – I had only two revolt tokens left in supply at the end of the game. Usually if I’m running out of tokens, it’s not mostly on account of the regions that I’ve already secured, but things really escalated while my attentions were elsewhere. Good fun.
9 Likes
Played two games each of Shelfie Stacker and Sanctuary.
Shelfie Stacker is a sort of Azul ish type game but you draft the order of collections of bits. The draft order has the added benefit that you get to play powers that help you out. It’s a goodish game with pretty decent production for the price. It might be a bit too luck based though. I don’t normally like house rules but I may introduce one to this.
I really liked Sanctuary. It’s basically calico + + + with a lot of contextual variety in the tiles rather than merely colours and patterns. It’s quite intense and maybe has too much going on for me to play it well but I do like trying my best in it.
6 Likes
You really have to lean into roles. Like, one person sits at the temple and just swaps which color gets the discount. Assign two people to fight ghosts and two to stick exclusively to support. I forget which two. Definitely don’t roll dice unless you only need one die…
These are memories of 5 years ago when I won two rounds. Something like this.
5 Likes
Separately, I had an urge to play Yellow & Yangtze. On the app. I had to review the rules, as I still hadn’t internalized the new war rules (who wins ties, how points are awarded, how casualties are calculated, etc.)
My epiphany: more rules, fewer consequences.
And I think that might be the pithiest summation of old vs nu I’ve yet articulated.
Y&Y is a good game. But just double the rules of T&E and half the consequences of any action. And I mean that as flavor, not pejorative.
Stands for Brass as well, Birmingham has 10% more rules and 15% fewer consequences. Pipeline vs. Nucleum.
6 Likes
Sounds like a plan! I’ll give it a go, but I think we need a break from it for a little while…
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