Played Tiny Laser Heist, which was incredibly difficult but had people shouting when they finally managed it.
And then Hot Streak with 8 players, absolute banger, everyone’s favourite new game (no surprise).
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You just cant beat a risky sausage #TeamHurley
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Games!
Magical Athlete, a few plays at two players with two character each, plus one at four players. To be honest, I’m underwhelmed by it. Sure there’s some funny interactions between the characters but everything feels meh, compared to Hot Streak
Sanctuary, perfectly fine tile layer. As another player said, it’s only associated with Ark Nova to sell it. They play nothing alike. Interesting spread of scores, the range was 61 - 141.
Il Iliad (I think), a triangle deck of 3 zeroes, 2 two, 3 threes up to 7 sevens. You have a public card in front of you and are trying to collect five different numbers. On your turn you flip the top card of the deck and ask all other players if they would like it. If anyone says yes you can give it to them or place in front of yourself. If you get two of the same number they cancel and become a bomb, get two bombs and you are eliminated. Zeroes are bombs on their own. Pretty good for a five minute game, and maybe a better use of a Flip7 deck?
Cryptid Spot - Cryptid Spot | Board Game | BoardGameGeek Hidden roles, stock manipulation! You are journalists seeking evidence of various crytpids. One out of four cryptids will score you nothing, unless you are the pretender. Choose a location based on if you want the rumour (stock) or evidence (manipulation). If you visit alone you get the stock, but if multiple people visit you follow the action to manipulate the stock. On a separate track, there is a pretender score track that moves up if no-one visits a location. Stocks can bust if they get too high
Final scores are cryptid values x number of symbols and the pretender scores the final value minus the number of symbols they have.Felt pretty wonky, but I think it’s because we played poorly. You need to spread out if you are the journalists to prevent the cryptid scoring high we we failed to do. Cool art though, and an interesting curio in the vein of Raj/Hols de Geier
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Arkham Horror: the Card Game - 2 players. Finally get to play it! Very good!
Leaders - abstract 2 player game. Not as good as Tash Kalar but easier and faster
HOOOOOT STREAK
The Mind - glad to return to this. Another dumb game that is just great
Piece o’ Cake - more cut-the-cakey game.
Res Arcana - they were planning to play Res and so joined that one rather than Moon Colony Bloodbath
Hansa Teutonica - 4 players and they let me get away with my rush-to-twenty as they are all busy with heads-down gameplay and easily won. When will they learn?
Quartermaster General - full 6 players and I played as Japan. Burst throughout Asia and even took over Australia. The US was too busy prepping cards (and getting beaten). It was the Soviets that took up the baton to fight me off of China. The UK soon followed after securing the Med Sea, Middle East, and India. This allowed Italy and Germany some breathing room to fight the Soviets that they even took Moscow.
However, I run out of steam and gradually lost everything except for the Home Islands. The US didn’t bother invading and instead made me lose cards and VPs. Very good game!
HOOOOOOOT STREEEEAAAAAAK
Auf Achse - trucking all over Germany, Austria, (some of) Benelux, and northern Italy. It’s awful. Most of the game sounds good: contract fulfilment, auctions, load up and then delivery the goods. But the whole roll and move was bad. It’s basically “roll a 6 and win a cookie”. The player on my right kept rolling 1’s in a row and it was hilarious.
Tigris and Euphrates - 3 players. I’m now spoiled. At 1.5 hour duration, I’d rather play several games in my collection instead like Cube Rails or the Estates. I’d also rather play Stephenson’s Rocket instead
Age of Steam: Switzerland - the map sounds really good with all the impassable terrain. But the all-colours cities are just bad. They accept every colour of good and so I ran away with it by monopolising these cities. Not good.
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Last night, in an effort to get at least one more game off my Shelf of Shame before the end of the year, I pulled out Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Jack the Ripper and West End Adventures. I didn’t feel like starting the Ripper campaign, so I went to the fifth case, The Case of Dr. Goldfire.
Did very well, IMO. After visiting 13 locations, I was able to answer all but one of the primary questions and two of the secondary, for 95 points. Of course, since Holmes did it in 6, I lost 35 for a final total of 60 points. Took about an hour.
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Couple of 2 player games with my mum while I’m home for Christmas.
Jaipur and Patchwork which are both games I suggested my parents pick up during lockdown. Quite like the newer edition of Jaipur. Got my highest score ever in Patchwork, with very few empty squares left.
Upwords. Has anyone else played this? It’s a staple for our family and is a twist on Scrabble. Much simpler in that there are no special spaces on the board and every letter is worth 1 point. However, the letter tiles are shaped so you can stack them and build “up”. And your word’s score is based on how many letters are in each stack. So BUILD might become GUILD might become GRILL, with the later words being worth more as they’re built on top.
Super strange game this time as we both played a very tight board that didn’t allow for much stacking at all. And I had far too many vowels. Picture from the mid game.
I’m fairly sure I could have won if I didn’t blunder and allow for a whole pile of points to be scored against me. Had the opportunity to stop it and decided to risk it. But good fun, I think word games are often really accessible and still interesting.
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I’ve never played Upwords, but I certainly remember the TV adverts when it first appeared.
Despite enjoying (and being halfway decent at) many word games, my brain can’t Scrabble, and so seeking out similar games never appealed. I’m curious now, though, as I suspect the differences would all be favourable for me. (I’d probably still be a bit rubbish, but perhaps not to the point of wanting to never play the game again, which is my stance on its predecessor.)
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I’d recommend giving it a go! If there is a large stack of letters you can turn CART into FART and get like 20 points!
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See also Bananagrams.
We never played Scrabble again after we got Bananagrams, and I just wish Bananagrams had been around when I was a kid so I’d never have had to play Scrabble at all.
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The first game of this year is a game called Neuland which is German for… Newland!
This is great. This game is awesome. I’d rather play this than most modern Euros. It is worker placement but there’s logistics to it. So you can put a worker on a woodcutter’s hut to produce wood (which cost time) and then deliver that wood to another part of the map to convert it into paper, which also cost time! The logistics and the blockage of the supply chain makes this a sublime game. More than I expected.
Does that sound like Roads and Boats to you? Cool. Because I’d rather play this than Roads & Boats
We played with 1st edition rules
We ended with Blue Moon City, which is a nice light weight Knizia game. The close scoring that always happens in this game is a bit BS though, truth to be told.
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Got Brass: Lancashire for Christmas, and my mum was generous enough to play with me. It helped having played the Birmingham version a few times, I won the first game. Second game was much closer and ended drawn on points, with the tie breaker going to me. Very clever game, I’m not sure whether the “supply/demand” mechanics are more prevalent here than in Birmingham or if I just understand the systems a bit better having played a few times. The cotton/ports interplay was really interesting, and the familiar mixed feelings of annoyance and satisfaction when your opponent uses your resources but helps flip your tiles is really unique.
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Quartermaster General: Victory or Death - 2 v 2 team game between Sparta and Corinth against Athens and its Delian League allies.
I played as Corinth and I manage to start a new city in Sicily which gives us 3 pts every scoring round. Sparta - being the land-based juggernaut - rolled through the mainland and stopped by the gates of Athens. While Athens kept itself well supplied via sea.
So far so history. The Delians manage to sack Corinth but Athens ran out of cards and lost points. We also had our revenge with the sack and occupation of Athens (3 pts). The Peloponnesian League won!
Amazing. One of the best QMG titles. I did criticise it as being a game that requires more deck mastery than any other QMG titles and so put it below WW1 and WW2. But returning on it, I think this might be the best QMG game ever. All 4 factions got some hot action going on and it’s not like WW1 and WW2 where there are factions that are just punching bags for the opposition (e.g. the Ottomans in WW1, Italy in WW2)
Ticket to Ride: Team Asia = 3 teams, 6 players! The best TTR expansion ever! Tense AF!
HOOOOOOT STREEEAAAAAKK
THAT STUPID FUCKING SAUSAGE 
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I actually had a slightly disappointing game of Hot Streak over the holiday. There was only time to play once, and no one else had played it before. The main problem was that we ended up with no “turn around” cards in the deck, and only one “fall over” (which was for Dangle, who had, like, 3 cards in total). Gobbler meanwhile had 6-7 cards most of which were just charging ahead, and there were ample recovery cards to counter the minimal problem cards. There wasn’t even much swerving on offer. I was hoping the secret cards would spice things up, but if any good cards were dealt out, people didn’t use them. So it ended up being a far more mundane experience than I wanted. Which would be fine if either (a) we’d had time for multiple games, or (b) people had played before and understood that it was anomalous.
All of which has made me decide that I’m going to be seeding the deck with a bit of guaranteed chaos the next time I’m introducing the game. Subsequent games can be fully-randomised, but I need that first game to bring the drama.
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Had an incredibly close game of Quacks of Quedlinburg on New Year’s Day against my wife and her brother. We didn’t use expansion material, and just did a random mix of ingredients.
Brother-in-law was ahead most of the game, with my wife trailing behind. I took a small lead in the last couple rounds, but then had some lousy luck. My wife, meanwhile, had a couple of great tuns, helping her catch up, so that it really was anybody’s game.
Final scores were me in last with 43, my wife in second with 44, and her brother winning with 45. Don’t think we have ever had a game so close between all the players.
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First time playing games with (only) adults in about four months!
Innovation, 2-player, the other guy didn’t like it.
Ahoy, first play, 4-player. I wasn’t impressed. Two of us playing pick up and deliver while two others did area control, and I totally ran away with the game without ever doing anything particularly smart.
Pax Renaissance, first play, 4-player. It was OK. I’m not convinced that having such a huge variety in possible cards fits the finicky win conditions well, or that the ever-expanding tableaus is a great idea. Basically, in every way I can compare the two, Pax Pamir seems better. Still, I would play it again, unlike Ahoy.
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Played The Quest for El Dorado for the first time with my wife and mother at Christmas. Mum sprinted out to an early lead but lack of money cards got her stuck wading through what I can only presume was a densely populated village. My wife clocked how the game worked very quickly and slashed her way through the thick jungle to a comfortable victory. A good time.
My mum wanted to play Cluedo. I did not want to play Cluedo. My father did not want to play Cluedo. My wife did not want to play Cluedo. Anyway, so the way our game of Cluedo went is that we discovered that we played the game incorrectly when we were kids and it goes much faster if you teleport people into the rooms when making accusations as the rules state. I correctly accused Reverend Green (myself), in the conservatory, with the candlestick. My father later admitted that he didn’t understand how the deductions worked. He used to work in the country’s education office.
We played the League of Lexicon, which my father had bought my mother 2 years ago and was still in its shrinkwrap. It’s essentially a quiz game about words, and was a perfectly fine time. Some of the questions were very easy, others were very hard. One of the apparently easy questions was to name all 7 dwarves from Snow White, of which I managed only 6. I did eventually win though, so Sneezy can suck it.
The nieces came round and we played Stomp the Plank. In one game, the 7 year old managed to get all different items to win instantly on her first turn. She was so excited that she couldn’t get her words out, then laughed uncontrollably and was almost sick. Great stuff.
Having noticed a copy while digging out the old Cluedo set, my mum used her psyops to get us to play Mouse Trap with the nieces. The trap built up quite quickly, so it didn’t seem like it was going to be as horrific a time as expected. Then it got to the final bit where you’re just looping around in the hope that someone lands on the crank space while the trap space is occupied. When there’s four players, the chances are high. When there’s only two left, it is agony. Then when it looked to all be over, the trap failed to work. I was asked to check the rules to see if this meant that the game was over. I lied, and the game was over.
My wife and I then played a few games of two-player Quest for El Dorado, and it is so much meaner and tighter than with 3 players. Love it, though have no interest in any expansions (which is lucky, as our new Ravensburger edition isn’t compatible with the Lautapelit expansion boxes anyway).
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Which is why i ended up buying the lautapelit edition as well only to realize the cards may be the same size now. but the card stock doesn’t seem to be identical. have yet to play to figure out if it is relevant
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They are not, its the 57x92 and 59x89 frustration.
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Ooh, the worst thing about Cluedo in my experience is when someone teleports you into some room you absolutely do not care about, possibly a long way from where you’re very much trying to get to (especially if you had been crawling through a corridor for multiple turns, only for someone to zap you back to where you’d started or worse before you could actually reach your intended destination).
I’ve never played it with suggestions not moving the target player’s token, but to be honest that way sounds less aggravating :).
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Didn’t play as many games as I expected over Christmas, but still managed:
- 4× 7 Wonders. I think I came last in three of the games and won the other one. I’m still rubbish at being able to figure out who is doing well or badly at a glance despite the number of games I’ve played.
- 2× Compile (Main 1). Still lots of interesting decisions with the way covering/uncovering/flipping cards works and the Control mechanic. I think this is the first time we’ve played more than one game and the same person has won both.
- Several× Sushi Go with my wife, brother, nieces and nephew. I think this is the copy that I bought them for Christmas one year. Basic but still great. And every time I play I’m reminded to look up the weirdness that is the card art for the German edition of the game.
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