Your Last Played Game Volume 3

Boardgames
1042

Stabcon over the weekend, in Stockport.

Friday

There had been some very light snow overnight, but the roads were clear, and I made it in very good time.

The festivities began with Sea Salt & Paper, a first game for the other player so I didn’t include Extra Pepper. He won anyway.

On to General Orders: World War II, which I enjoyed (while utterly losing) but which seemed oddly flavourless. (They’ve produced another version of this, set in Warring States-period Japan, and it’s sufficiently abstracted that I can see quite readily how that might be done.)

Then Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition which I always have a good time playing, even when it’s being frustrating. This time I managed to do a pair of full machine flushes (i.e. taking enough damage that I was back to my starting cards) and still tied for the win. (“Drive it like you’re the only one who understands how it works.”)

In the evening, I played a scenario for the Space: 1999 game, the first time I’ve used the Cubicle 7 2d20 system. Interesting: the scenario was very much in keeping with the better bits of the show (obviously you have to ignore a whole lot of reality just to watch it at all, but I still have a soft spot for it)—but as a result, there wasn’t actually a whole lot for us to do with our various skills. “Fly over it six inches off the deck, nuclear engines at full throttle. That should get a reaction.”

Saturday

More role-playing this morning with @MichaelCule 's game to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his first RPG; a UNIT team investigated an anomaly near Ellesmere Island—which turned out to be the nuclear-powered icebreaker Leon Trotsky. This was mildly frustrating for me because my character was the one who couldn’t spout nuclear icebreaker trivia, but that shouldn’t be a problem for normal players, and apart from that I had a very good time. Perhaps a little on rails? Yeah, but it’s a convention scenario, so that’s forgivable.

Then back to the board games, with Flash Point: Fire Rescue. This time we tried the submarine board, one I hadn’t played before—and we actually found it not too hard. I think the key was probably to run it as two separate teams, one in each half of the board. I took Captain and Generalist, with CAFS and Suppression Specialist on the other side of the table.

Having enjoyed that, we went on to the airfield map, which turned out to be rather more of a challenge—even with quite large spaces that can be allowed to flare up without doing any damage. This time I had Generalist and Hazmat, shifting the latter to Paramedic once we had things under control, still with CAFS and Suppression across the board. The time never felt right for the Rescue Dog, alas.

On to Tavarua, the best (only) game I’ve played about surfing. I have no idea how authentic it may be, but it certainly feels like a passion project, in a good way.

Then VOLT. This is one of those odd games for me: I learned to play on yucata.de, where the other players are really very good; so when I play with normal people I do disconcertingly well. Miniatures painted by Scribbs and I’m very happy with them.

I was getting pretty tired by this point but we did get in one more game, of Flip 7. Don’t be greedy. Be less greedy than that.

Sunday

With snow forecast for the afternoon, we got an early start on Xia: Legends of a Drift System and played to 10 Fame, which is about as low as I like to take it.

Mostly we managed to avoid serious space hazards; I don’t think there was any ice damage that wasn’t fixed on the same turn, and while one of us repeatedly took on the Scoundrel we didn’t interfere with each other.

Bizarrely, nobody blind-jumped into the sun; I found myself at the end of a move with plenty of energy to spare, so I thought I might as well perform a scan before continuing, and presto there it was.

There was some trade, and some mission work (I’d really like to try to do more of this, but the ones with specific locations often aren’t possible until quite late in the game), and I got the winning point by proceeding from a solid goods sale to a last lorn exploration token to pair with the one I already had.

Then back to the Soft South as the snow started; there was a mini-blizzard on the way out of Stockport, but after that it was sunny all the way home.

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1043

Glad you got to break out the painted VOLT figures.

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1044

So I have a question.

I have house-ruled that mission cards are divided into Peaceful and Hostile piles, and whenever you draw, you can choose however many from whichever pile you want up to your total draw. This seems to take a fair amount of the sting of getting inappropriate missions away. The only catch is there are missions that require flipping the mission deck to determine some things (ie: flip 3 cards, and look at how many Hostile missions you get). I just tell people to roll a die and declare evens or odds instead.

I suspect that this is not a common house rule. Do you have thoughts on it? I value your opinion.

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1045

I would argue that a longer game of Cluedo is always more aggravating.

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1046

A competitive field, this…

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1047

Over the end of last year and the beginning of this one, we’ve wound up playing through our top 5 bigger games, though not in order:

  1. Brass Birmingham. Always a pleasure and it always does my head in. This is the only game I can only play one game of. No idea why, we have bigger, more complex games, but this one always kills me. Maryse won 135-105, and I was damn proud of my score (anytime I get over 100 is a good game).

  2. Ark Nova. Man, I thought I was doing so well, got off to a roaring start, and then I just… Stalled out. Couldn’t get the cards I needed and Maryse got BOTH elephants, so she had multiple end-game scoring cards to my one. It hurt. I got stomped into the ground here, I think she wound up winning by 40-50 points.

  3. Terraforming Mars. I was playing Credicor (somehow for the first time), Maryse was playing Inventrix. Got lots of resources early, got started with cities, while she used Livestock, Predators and Small Animals to get a lot of points. I had Tardigrades and Pets. It ended in a draw, 93-93. We never count tie-breakers because draws are rarer and funnier. But she would’ve won.

  4. Great Western Trail. What a WEIRD game! We didn’t have a single cowboy for the first two thirds of the game, and no 3-value cows for about the same time. Maryse at some point paid $24 for TWO cows she needed for an objective. She played lots of buildings while I focused on the top half of the board (we were playing with Rails Of The North). To my detriment, it turns out, as I didn’t get the points I thought I’d be able to get from there and lost, 155-125.

  5. Everdell. Like in Ark Nova, I got a killer first turn, managing to get the entire Farm chain (Farm, Greenhouse, Wife and Husband), along with the University and the Locomotive, in the first season. Then I just couldn’t get the cards I needed for the longest time and Maryse’s engine, which took its sweet time, eventually got going and she took it 109-77. Ouch.

We also got some Sea Salt & Paper in there, along with three games of Pandemic. Two of those were our by-now usual trouncing of the game, the other was a giant case study of Murphy’s Law and felt like a cosmic joke, LOL.

While I was visiting family over the Holidays, I also played Splendor Kids with my sister and her son (it was his Christmas gift from his coolest uncle). It’s solid, simple enough but requiring planning. You know exactly what you need to do to progress, everything’s laid out on the board, no randomness at all. I can see players getting kinda bored with the deterministic style, and there’s advanced rules there for that, but we didn’t look at them since it was the first game.

There, that’s pretty much it for the last few weeks.

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1048

Didn’t know you had an Instagram for your paintings - I like looking at them so consider yourself followed!

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1049

Puerto Bannana, everyone gets it after the first round.

Kingdom Builder, spaffed some Christmas money on a ‘friends and family’ version for like £20. Smaller, with cubes. Played 3 player and lost very badly.

Robo Rally, Avalon Hill rules. One board, despite doing the robot dance I couldn’t get the programming right and was eventually shunted off the board to hand the win to someone else

Welcome To, perfectly fine Roll and Write with close socres at the end

Soda Jerk, play fast and loose and it’s lots of fun, run away winner got 51 points in the last round to my 41 total

Jungo, cool little climber. Simpler than many, but that’s how I like these games generally.

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To be fair, most of what I post on Insta is the same as the painting thread here, albeit with a few different view points. But thanks for the follow.

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1051

I don’t see any problem with it. The thing that feels as though it’s standing in the way of my doing more missions is “go to sector X, then sector Y” and at least one of those hasn’t been found yet. I suspect the answer is to haunt a cluster of mission points and keep picking up cards until I find one that’s actually on-map.

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1052

Base is really for kids and people who are just coming off Catan.

The app is in beta - I didn’t particularly like Jurassic as it’s just moar attack and moar defense - though it may grow interesting up the learning curve if both the cat and mouse know what they are doing. Flight, however, was fascinating as it brought in some Oceans mentality without the Oceans fiddle. There’s extra food and population if you can migrate (by feeding your species first) and a lot of other population explosion options. It really upped the puzzle of which way to grow your species and what order to do your feeding vs. the other ecosystems at the table. Flight is what sold me.

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1053

I left similar on this. I played 3-4 games and got far enough in that I could see a good game might be there at the top of the learning curve… but the learning curve was too much of a grind and I wasn’t sold that the resulting game would be worth the work.

As with other Pax’s I’ve played, you can never do what you want, and the core skill is reading the market to see in advance what you WILL be able to do or what your opponent’s WON’T be able to do, and nudging the game state accordingly before you get there.

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1054

Finally got Panda Spin to the table - it had been languishing waiting for a table of 3-5 players but I discovered it was recommended at two. And boy is it ever.

I love (LOVE) climbing games, ever since I got hooked on The Great Dalmuti. Tichu remains the king. But they tend to require a larger table - you can work it at 3, but it shines at 4 (with the Dalmuti/President style games shining at 5+). Let’s run down the two player climbing games (in ascending order, which I guess is running up?):

5-3-5 / Oh Meow Bow: This plays at 2 the same it plays at more. It’s an uncontrollable game where the shape of a hand can change on a whim (we’re doing pairs… now it’s triplets! We’re going up, oh, now it’s a run and we’re going down!).

This works at 2 for the same reason it works at 4 - it’s just a fun ride with twists of fate and funny moments. But that also keeps it from being great, as you can never be too clever.

Haggis: Hmm. This is supposed to be the king. Many people say Panda Spin is good but Haggis is still better. I fully intend to give this game more time, and fully expect it to rise in my esteem, but so far it hasn’t. You’ve got a relatively small hand, and every hand you have a JQK, which can be used as wildcards or combined into bombs (i.e., a trump play that beats anything but a bigger bomb). With this easy access to wilds and bombs, it is relatively easy to create big combinations, and you’ll pretty much always be able to play out in 3 or 4 plays.

The game, then, really becomes a singular decision on when you hit the nitro. How long do you hold back and when do you deploy those face cards for a killing blow? Getting it right gets you the victory. Getting it wrong leaves you toothless for the counterstrike.

Then, of course, there’s the scoring rules which can highly contextualize this decision.

So…it’s interesting. But it also felt a bit euchre, just rapid fire hands deal-resolve-deal-resolve and it didn’t have the pageantry or the roller coaster of fortune that I’ve loved from Dalmuti and Tichu. We’ll see.

Scout: This is closest to a climbing game. And the two player variant is quite different from the 3+ rules and quite good. I love here that the hands resolve into aggro/midrange/control archetypes like a TCG and that there’s an evolution to your strategy as the hand progresses. Like Haggis, there’s also a timing for the killing blow and you never know if it’s enough to kill the player across from you. In short, it’s just quite good.

Panda Spin: Now we go from good to spectacular. Yes, it is recommended at 2. Yes, it… just yes.

Here’s the basic premise of the game - you get dealt cards that follow a typical Big 2 rubric. 3-A, 2 high. If you win a hand, you clear all the cards you played per standard climbing. If you LOSE a hand, you take your cards back but flip them upside down to the blue side. THE BLUE SIDE. Which is essentially when your cards go from Jekyll to Hyde. A white 3 might become a pair of K, or a high 2. And the blue side also features suit-specific symbols like water, which counts as a wildcard, or fire, which lets you immediately discard an unwanted card from your hand.

Here’s how a hand opens. She leads a pair of 3’s. And I immediately don’t know what to do. If I dump my pair of unwanted 4’s, she’ll just pass, spin her cards, and suddenly have an AA K water bamboo sitting at the top of her hand. Or I can let the pair of 3’s ride to deny her the BLUE SIDE - in which case she’ll retain the lead and dump her single 5, just giving me the same awful decision after slightly inching toward victory.

I will, of course dump my 4’s, give her the blue cards, take the lead, and use it to shove the same decision back on her. This is the obvious move, and you do it over and over - UNTIL YOU DON’T. Which is like running a post on the first down, when the smart move is a run up the middle. It’s hugely upsetting to suddenly win the hand and lose your blue cards, and everyone wonders what’s up.

Yes, this is just the first play of the first hand.

Here’s what works at 2:

  • Nothing is zero sum. It’s not just a struggle for supremacy, to play the best cards at the right time and wrest control of the lead back and forth. Choosing when to lose is one of those gems that makes good trick takers work, and here choosing when to lose also makes climbing work. At two players, it gives each play subtlety, and after each move and countermove each player has something to show for it - maybe what they wanted, maybe not. But the landscape has changed and everyone has something new to chew on.
  • The game has an arc. Yeah, you start with a set of cards and an idea of how to play. But with each play you either get closer to victory or get a stronger hand. At the midpoint you’ll both have a reduced set of mixed white/blue cards and a new equation, as you’ve hacked through the pleasantries and are considering the endgame. In contrast to Haggis with it’s competitive fencing ideal of swackswackLUNGE, this has a theatrical pirate fight aesthetic where there is going to be some swinging from ropes, some swashbuckling, and even some pauses for pregnant dialog and characterization between sword thrusts.

I’m looking forward to more of this.

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1055

Is it? Is it really?

I’m neither of those and I like it.

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1056

Ha! Fair!

Dominic (designer) was a competitive Magic player and intended the base to capture that back and forth tableau combat. So it might also be for people who understand card dueling much better than I do and don’t need migrating birds to muddy up the core :slight_smile:

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1057

I very much doubt that I understand card duelling better than you. Or indeed than anyone!

I’ve never played (or wanted to play) Magic. I also really want the Flight module. But I do enjoy Nature base game as is.

(I’m probably an outlier though. I usually am with regard to board games and the whole culture surrounding them)

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1058

Monday night with nearby friends:

We started with FUSE and it went… poorly. Two of us got locked into cards which needed quite specific dice, and we went several rounds with no progress at all. Still good fun though!

Then Royal Palace, a Xavier Georges design from 2008. There’s worker placement and majority (it only gets you a small bonus, but this is the sort of game in which 3 can be much more than 2), and a very neat mechanism of discounts which means that money gradually becomes less useful even though you can get more of it. It’s the sort of game at which I do terribly, and I did, but it was fascinating to see the mechanisms working.

(I said at the end of the rules explanation “I am going to get last place”, and I did, by a fair old margin. This was generally my experience with classic low-luck Eurogames, and it’s why I largely didn’t get into boardgaming in the early 2000s.)

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1059

OK, folks. Toy Battle. Anyone heard of it?

It was on Bitewing’s top games of 2025 list. I remembered seeing the name on BGA. It’s a Mori, so…

First game was meh. But now I’m four games in and HOOKED.

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1060

I remember seeing some reviews of it and it looked really good.

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1061

Finished Ministry of Lost Things: Case 1 - very enjoyable. The puzzles are fun. I like the story (and the more whimsical tone) of this game.

Been playing a couple of plays of the Bridges of Shangri-La in boardtogether.games. Rraaahhh!! This is so good :fire::fire::fire::fire:

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