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Last night a buddy came over to try and teach me Warhammer Spearhead, which is… interesting.
As a general point of opinion, I find GW makes really solid “Off-Main” games (Blackstone Fortress, Cursed City, Space Hulk…) and really awful “main” games (40K, AoS, Classic Fantasy). I have mixed feelings about Necromunda and Mordheim (interesting concepts, but too variable in the dice-heavy homework phase).
But my trip to Adepticon got me a free copy of Skaventide, which is two Spearheads (Skaven and Stormcast) and all the bits and bobs you need to play… for free! Which is usually the price point I am willing to pay for it…
Great minis. Say what you will about GW’s rules, but they know how to make great minis. As for the game… eh. It’s okay? Really random… my guys were hitting on 3+, wounding on 3+, Terry’s guys made their armour saves at 6+, and then I had to inflict 12 damage.
So a full squad of my hammer boys is rolling 10 dice, so about 7 of those should hit. Of those, 3 or 4 will wound, and on average Terry will save 1 of those for a total of 2-3 actual wounds. Then Terry gets to hit back, and his Giant-Guy (Ogre? Gargant? Whatever they were, looked like ogres to me but I’m sure GW calls them something copywriteable) has 4 attacks that hit on 4+ but wound on 2+ and then I was saving on 5+… let’s run the numbers… 2 attacks should hit and then both should wound for a total of (his guys hit for between 2 to 4 wounds per blow) 6-ish wounds. But then my guys could also have 5+ “Ward” saves (back in my 40K days they were called “Invulnerable Saves,” but apparently they’re called “No Pain” saves these days?) which means I would take 4-ish wounds.
Anyway, all this to say that a few spikes in dice results in a LOT of variation on the table. On the last turn I managed to pull off the win by using some high mobility flying troops and Terry flubbing a few attack rolls, but it was close (18 to 17 victory points or objective points or whatever they call it).
It seems… okay. If it wasn’t free, definitely not, but the opportunity cost of keeping my box of Skaventide is about $250 (which is what I can flip it for). And I’m not sure I liked it that much… but that just might be me trying to justify that I don’t have enough time for the mini games I already own? I dunno, I’ll try it again see if my mind changes.
Then we put Courtisans on the table for 3 players (Andy joined us), and that was neat. Started feeling very random, but by the end it was quite clever and tense. Andy won. Had to wait a year to get a copy, so I’m glad it’s such an elegant little system. I’ll have to try it a few more times!
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Finished a game of Indonesia with Ben and Zak. Damn. What an amazing game! Game 2 in progress.
Feast for Odin 2 player. Very good time. I like it. First time playing 2 with the Norwegians and it really change things up.
El Grande - showed some newbies some classic El Grande
Stephens - an interactive game that felt like it came from the mid to late noughties (see “The Euro” topic). Not quite Old German, but more interactive than nu-Euro. It’s pretty fun
Nokosu Dice - sold most of my trick takers. This one stayed. Very tricky game
The Gang
Frodo’s Crew
Xylotar - amazing. Stunning.
Iki - played the new edition and it’s a very good game (I can see why it’s one of @EnterTheWyvern 's faves). Tough decisions on the turn order and how far you move on the rondel. Manage to build the fuck-off building which gave me 26? pts. I grabbed some pipe and tobacco but didn’t really exploited the pipe’s 2x bonus.
Eminent Domain - subpar Race for the Galaxy. Imagine RFTG with deck building. It’s fine. I’m happy to play it more to see if I was just tired
12 Likes
Played a second game of station to station tonight this time with @Captbnut. It’s more interesting with more than two players. I think it was a lot tighter this time (I just about won by a point or two which probably a moral loss given I brought the game :D)
One thing I didn’t really appreciate the first time is how silently it moves everyone from calm separation and draws them together into annoying and niggly little confrontations. Cute.
I think timing the game is really difficult. I think all of us were plus or minus a turn from winning. It’s kind like a game of judging how much fuel to put in in F1 so that you run out of fuel at exactly the right moment - underfuelling = obviously bad, over fuelling = bad weight management.
9 Likes
I enjoyed it
I described it as though it was designed in a competition to make another game using the Ticket to Ride board.
There was a lot of swearing (from me) about unintentional blocking.
And I agree, the endgame felt really interesting; I wanted us all to have one fewer turn because I’d completely run out of steam; the other player wanted a longer game because he’d built an efficient engine (so many train puns!).
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Not a super long list from me this month due to real life intruding… Nevertheless got some games played including a few that were new to me.
My Island x3, this one has been an epic - we’re one envelope away from the finish - I’m curious how it’ll all end. But it’s been fun for sure!
Spots x4, had a week where I recommended this game to a couple of shoppers in my new job helping out in a bg shop! Which is awesome fun. Though I have learnt that I have a lot to learn about TCG’s , sleeves and binders, but do pretty well recommending boardgames to shoppers. Anyway, Mum heard me talk about it and as a dog fanatic - she had to learn it , hence plays here.
Cafe - neat little spacial tableau builder and action efficiency game. Sadly discovered that it is not very colour blind friendly. Was enjoyed though, despite that!
Babylonia x2, great little puzzle of this game. Our winners won through very different approaches - though a good network really matters.
Blueprints, fun little filler in a tiny little box. Still great fun!
River of Gold, I enjoyed this one but the theme is incredibly loose. Going up tracks and building buildings is what its all about, and then sailing a boat to activate them. It was fun, but I wouldn’t rush out to get a copy or anything.
Critter Kitchen, I was a bit hesitant about this one when they described it as being like Grimm Forrest. I found Grimm Forrest to be a mean unpredictable mess of a game. But pleasantly surprised! Yes you can have a bad turn where you do very little, but it tends to be your greed that leads to that… Crazily overproduced, I assume our copy was the kickstarter version but. Yeah I’d play it again for sure. Much more interesting than Grimm Forrest.
Chimera great little ladder climbing, card shedding game with shifting alliances. It’s great fun, but the given 400 point limit can take awhile. We went with 300 and it was still a full evenings entertainment!
Bamboo what a deceptive little game this is - I forget how long it can go! With 3 of us it took like 2-2 1/2 hours ish! It’s pretty fun, just not a great contender for a weeknight. I think I spent too many actions fulfilling weak but easy goals, when going for the big scorers early and making them happen was the right call for this play at least - and indeed our winner was all about that. Terrific game but far heftier than it’s size would indicate.
El Grande this was a big one - two of us were neck and neck after the second scoring but I had a bad couple of rounds right near the end that cost me a lot of points, leaving me in a distant second. Great fun though - but it’s definitely a game for folks who can handle some meanness!
8 Likes
Finally got to play the Lord of the Rings Duel game. It’s a lot of fun. And very slickly designed! It feels like an extremely well-oiled machine, but in a good way. We enjoyed it a lot.
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Played my second game of Legacy of Yu. Also got my second loss, but it was so close. If I could have defeated just one more barbarian, I would have had the win. I built every canal, though the flood marker moved to the last space when I did so. Through a lot of finagling I managed to defeat three of the six barbarians shown, but unfortunately with the last canal built, they place four which overran me. I also only had one card left in my Ready/Exhausted piles after the last attack.
Maybe with the advantage I got from this loss, the next game will be a win!
11 Likes
Eternal Decks, first play. I was pretty excited to get this one to the table, very positive reports of it. And, have to say, it’s pretty damn good. It’s a cooperative game where you play cards over a series of stages (from A to F). And each stage can be attempted at various difficulty settings. We obviously started with Stage A at beginner level. The object of the game is to get four stars (there are six on the board). You all start with cards one thru five in your player colour. On your turn you can play a card, generate a jewel (I’ll explain that in a sec), or give a card to a teammate.
When you play a card, it goes to one of the field rows, with some placement rules. You can’t have two cards of the same colour or the same value. There are also field cards that give more conditions for playing to that row. Like the Mountain card, where you have to play in descending order from nine down to one. At the end of each field row are the Eternals, and the player who places the last card on the row gets to pick from one of the three Eternals. Each Eternal has it’s own mini deck of cards which get added to your cards. The Eternal deck can be cards of any colour, and also includes a special ability card. You want to share the Eternals, because if anyone can’t take an action, everyone loses.
As you get Eternals, they are moved to another part of the board, together with their curse, which limits what can be played in the field. So maybe you can’t play a “1” card anymore. The only way to break the curse is to generate a jewel and then place it on that Eternal. You get a jewel by playing cards into the river, which is at the bottom of the board. Anything can be played to the river, there are no placement rules and curses don’t affect them.
It’s easy enough at the start to track peoples cards, since everyone starts with the same deck of their colour. But it gets more complicated when people starting adding new decks. Communication is limited – you can’t say anything about the colour or value of the cards in your hand. But you can discuss anything on the board, and you get two communication tokens which can be placed at any time onto spaces on the board.
So, in conclusion – it’s good. It’s really good. Love it, want to play more of it.
Project ELITE, our old favourite! Love this game so much! We totally failed at our mission – even at easy difficulty, things are never that easy. But we happily killed hordes of aliens and were satisfied.
Infiltraitors, first play. This is a cooperative deduction game. You have suspect cards, which you have to deduce the value of. A player can take a suspect, look at it secretly, and then play cards to give information about it’s value and colour. And other people can also play cards for you to do this. Any cards you add are either placed vertically or horizontally. Vertical means some thing on the new cards matches the suspect – this can be because it’s the same colour, or if it’s value is a factor or a multiple of the suspects value. If it’s place horizontally, there are no matches, and this means you can cross off that colour and any of it’s values. We enjoyed this.
6 Likes
Hol’s der Geier
Nyakuza - new version of Orongo. Still a very good auction game from Knizia.
Ponzi Scheme - 3 of us crashed in the end leaving 1 survivor as the default winner. Hilarious and tense.
Indonesia - 4 players. Im now thinking it’s this or The Great Zimbabwe as my no. 1 game of all time.
Scout
Small World
8 Likes
Yesterday, we played probably our highest-scoring game of Ticket To Ride Rails & Sails ever: 354 (Maryse) - 331 (Yvan) - 301 (guess). 
Our second game was cut short by an unfortunate bout of indigestion from Maryse, but it was still a very fun evening.
She’s all better now, BTW.
10 Likes
Played Village for the first time in ages. Very pleased to find I still really like it!
This was the first outing for the new Big Box, which I had absolutely no intention of buying but then someone was prepared to pay me more for my old edition version than this cost brand new - and this has not only three expansions but also a solo mode!
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(The Big Box is MUCH TOO BIG, mind. It’s daft.)
2 Likes
Yeah, I prefer the new art but the box looks daft.
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So played Black Forest this weekend and really liked it.
It’s a neat game with some excellent decision making and interesting combo of mechanics.
The setup is a bit of an undertaking to place all the buildings. The teach is relatively simple (once you get your head round the wheels) and the mechanics reveal themselves well once you get into the game. Definitely be playing this one again over the next few weeks.
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I like the new art too. My instinctive reaction when I first saw it was to dislike it because it was different. But it’s really rather nice. And it doesn’t look like almost every other eurogame.
2 Likes
Don’t. I did and it gets worse, not better.
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Roundup:
Flamme Rouge w/ Peloton: There’s been a ton of Heat lately since it is online, but we got this one out. I was absolutely DESTROYED by the cobblestones. It was a painful game for many of us with a lot of lost movement. So it was awesome.
Through the Desert: First play, and we didn’t get to finish. I had high hopes. But by halfway through I was wondering if Blue Lagoon isn’t the better game? I won’t call that until I’ve at least played one full game, of course, and with more adroit players. But following the board state with three players and five camel colors was a bit of a chore and the simple forking of “you can’t block me everywhere” is the sort of “five fires and four buckets” problem that I find annoying rather than fun. Blue Lagoon, on the other hand, has one color per player. The race for the high-scoring goods is real but the other scoring areas keep you from overfocusing.
Not a fair comparison as I have maybe 6 plays of Blue Lagoon (and I was ready to cull it after one play, but it gets much better on repeat play when everyone has played before).
That said, I need to cull SOMETHING as I have TtD, Blue Lagoon, Babylonia, Samurai, and Caesar. With Babylonia being the missing link that connects those two wings.
Pirates of Maracaibo: Hey, it’s Maracaibo lite. I haven’t played Maracaibo. Following on our Euro discussion, this is textbook Mechanic Soup design of the NuEuro era. You’ve got your ship and its upgrades, the map of the carribean, explore mechanics, raid mechanics, treasure burying mechanics, retirement mechanics, personal quests, etc. I wouldn’t buy it but it’s quite fun and I’d recommend giving it a go.
One player just tried to rush it and thought he’d snookered us but he got veritably buried by our end game scoring. Still, I was worried due to my assumption that Pfister doesn’t ever quite balance his games.
Distilled: Another one I quite enjoyed. Quite solitary but the game of building out your distillery and trying to brew something that’s just a bit unlikely but you might hit gold… I’m tempted by this one but I’ll give it some time and some more cycles on BGA. Likely will end up being like Pirates above, good fun but don’t need it.
Dracula vs Van Helsing: I haven’t seen the SUSD review so apologies if this is repetitive. I’ve been watching this one for a long time, first it was a trick taker and then no it wasn’t. What it is is Cabo turned into a lane battler.
My first thought was… why?
Silver does a great job of putting meat onto the Cabo model, and I’ve frequently said it does it very well. I already have Air Land & Sea and Schotten Totten 1&2 for excellent lane battling, and I’m going to get Compile once the second edition comes out. I don’t think I have any need or interest in DvVH.
I think it’s a good game. If we were stuck on a boat and you told me all we had to do until the Coast Guard arrived was play DvVH, I’d be reasonably happy. No doubt it gets better with repeat match-ups.But I can’t shake the feeling of “Silver does this better, AL&S does that better, Silver does this better” with every card.
Key Flow: So I did the mock solo and it was good. We did the 3p and it was great. Is it a better game than Keyflower? No. Is it the better choice for many occasions? Heck yes. The lighter teach, shorter play, and gentler presentation of your own failure makes it the right game for most settings. Keyflower gets the trophy, Key Flow will get the table. At least for this season of life.
10 Likes
Now that’s just balls out crazy.
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