Your Last Played Game Volume 3

[lalunaverde]

Moonrakers - fun negotiation game. But - again - Cosmic Encounter is just the trashiest

Dominant Species - it’s been a while since and I have fallen out of love with it. The constant recalc for dominance is annoying for everyone.

And for 3 hour game, I’d rather play something trashy like Cosmic Encounter if we want Ameritrash or show Indonesia/the Great Zimbabwe if we want a serious game. DS is in that awkward middle where it combines luck and skill for what I’d like. Either we play a serious game or a wild game.

So far, only Chudyk’s card games I can seem to like this mix.

[yashima]

Niece’s birthday and as it happens, she got Rhino Hero Super Battle from someone who might have heard about it here. I have given it as a present before but today was the first time I got to play. We got quite a few levels before my partner crashed the building to the delight of nephew who had just acquired–via dad help–the winning medal.

Tonight–probably inspired by the Spirit Island Discussion thread–I set up a game of that for me and myself.
I decided to go for a pair of spirits that I previously played together: Shroud of Silent Mist (high complexity) and Many Minds Move as One (moderate complexity). Played against Level 1 England. No idea when I previously played that but what a bunch of meanies… building in empty lands when adjacent to 2 or more villages or cities? WTF. No fair.

As it turns out though… Shroud and Many Minds are both quite good at fear generation and somehow Shroud got a pair of monstrous major powers:

And then Many Minds got a card that gave energy to Shroud and … I played Exaltation twice (not quite back to back, I had to gather a bit more energy but I think I played it both on turn 4 and turn 6 and then Pent-up Calamity destroyed the last city which was already overrun by Many Minds’ beasts tokens…

There was also some luck involved: my fear cards really gave me some good advantages today (usually means my difficulty level was okay, because when they fizzle a lot, the game is probably too easy). I got mostly events where the positive things were triggered… the negative ones also triggered but with England building so much placing a few additional villages here and there wasn’t so bad. Also neither stage 1 nor stage 2 of the invader cards had mountains and while I couldn’t know that I had parked a few useful invaders in the mountains… and the fear card that skipped one Explore and postponed it to the next turn probably shortened the game by a full turn at least.

[Assussanni]

Managed to spend a Saturday afternoon mostly playing games with a large group for the first time in a long while.

• Flip 7. Very enjoyable as a push your luck filler game while waiting for other people to arrive. While it says “up to 18 players”, this would be far too slow to be fun. We played with six and it felt about right - it could probably support a couple more and still be good.
• Rebirth. We split into two groups, and I played in a four-player game of all new players. I really liked the way the game felt so open at the start but claustrophobic at the end. The game plays fast but is still long enough that it felt like I’d accomplished something by the end. The castles in particular give it a really nice table presence. I won by a single point. The slightly weird, but presumably thematic, tie-breaking rules meant that if the second placed had got an extra point then the third place player would have won because they controlled Stirling Castle. Would happily play again.
• Dying Message. You have to make your own message to point towards one of six suspects by arranging up to 15 cards that have symbols on them. My summary would be that it’s a much quick and more portable, but significantly worse, version of Mysterium. Would not choose to play again.
• Tacta. Card laying game where you are trying to place and protect dots on your cards while covering other people’s dots subject to placement rules surrounding lines on the cards. The game itself is fun and fairly fast… up until you have to do scoring at the end, where you are trying to count how many dots you have. All the dots are white, with the background colour determining who the dot belongs to, and when each of the six players has ~40-60 dots it’s tough to not lose count. It might actually be quicker to keep a running tally and update it after every move. Or create an app that gives you the final score from a photo.

[RogerBW]

More gaming with nearby friends last night.

The warm-up game was Faraway, which I continue to enjoy: slightly strange art that doesn’t distract from the business of playing the game, and while in something like Terraforming Mars I detest the early decisions to commit to a particular strategy that it may or may not be possible to follow later, when as here it’s basically the whole game I find I object rather less.

Then on to Automobiles oi the Monza track, one of my favourites because it demands a balanced car setup rather than just going as fast as possible. (Not that I won or anything.)

In both cases my feeling was that I enjoyed that and want to play it more. Clearly I need to play more games. BoardGameArena isn’t really a good substitute; the physicality is important to me.

[lalunaverde]

I enjoyed Automobiles but only played online. And yes, pulling cubes out of the bag is certainly more enjoyable than playing it online.

[RogerBW]

It’s a thing I noticed in myself in 2020: I enjoy any game much more (a) if chatting to people at the same time and (b) if there are physical bits to manipulate rather than just a screen. If I still enjoy a game I play on BGA, especially solo or without much chat, I’m going to love it in the real world. (Thus Sea Salt & Paper.)

(I’ve seen someone’s customised copy of Automobiles with printed cards instead of cubes. Which makes it possible for someone colour-blind to play it, but I think the owner just prefers cards.)

[EnterTheWyvern]

I really like automobiles. I got it late for no good reason of missing it the first time around and I’m quite sad about the impossibility of getting the expansion.

I’m a little jealous of your play but couldn’t agree more about the physicality and the chatting. The no chatting is a big part of why I don’t like solo games or online games.

[RogerBW]

I found the expansion on BGG’s geekmarket (the later Automobiles-only version, not the three-in-one, though I think the content is the same). I haven’t had a chance to play a campaign game, but I do use the new component cards and tracks.
I bought the original box from the publisher’s stand at Essen, and as a bonus they gave me an additional bag. Which is basically useless in the game, since there’s no way to play with six. On the other hand that meant that when one of the 1 Player Guild people got a copy with a missing bag I could pass it on to her.

[yashima]

I played a few solo games recently

• Sprawlopolis 2x: because after 106 plays it remains good. My average score is 3.99. Todays game scored 2. My win quota is 71%
• Cascadia 3x the DDDDD/80points scenario: I won all three. I have 80 plays of Cascadia now and my average score is 96,58. But since I play some difficult scenarios sometimes, I have a winning quota of only 66%
• Grove: had not played that in a while. I didn’t reach the goal card score. So a loss. Of 19 plays I won 12 times. (scores are all over the place because unlike Sprawlopolis I didn’t score against the goal cards consistently). I like the puzzle and it really takes up no space at all. Sufficiently different from *-polis.
• Mass Transit: I had not played since 2021 when I bought it on a SUSD suggestion. I was initially enthusiastic, then figured out how easy it is. It was fine today. Easy but fine. Not really a keeper. But my sellpile isn’t getting sold.
• Fairy Trails: 2plays, a tiny solo-able Rosenberg that is still adorable 5 years later. I have only played a total of 12 times. But it keeps coming back every once in a while and I like knowing it is there.
• Chomp: one of the square all-play boxes. I dismissed it immediately after receiving it in 2024. This was my 3rd play total. I compared it to Sprawlopolis and of course it came up short. Todays play was fine. I am willing to give it another chance.

I have a few more neglected solos I mean to pull out of the dusty corners of my shelves…

[lalunaverde]

Harmonies - 2 player while waiting for people to show up

Dutch Intercity - another Cube Rails banger. But, my god, the production is so bare. Can we have IOT do all the Cube Rail games please. This one is “Cube Rails on a Phone Booth”. The Netherlands is small indeed and the rails get gobble up pretty quickly. When there’s a clash, you do a blind auction between those two (or three) companies.

The auction is wild as well.

All in all, I really hate the RGG production that I end up nearly “ship of Theseus’d” my copy so I might as well sell it and do a pnp.

Seasons - someone bought Seasons and they know I like it so I played it with them. Only the base but we did drafting. Great fun!

Ticket to Ride: Europe - we forgot the stations and honestly, I might not add them next time??? thoughts???

Cabo - nice 10 min card game. Potential Top New-to-Me game.

Lords of Worlds - a Kramer and Kiesling game. Mid af. Which in my ratings: it’s shit.

Cross Clues

Condottiere

Age of Dirt - light weight game. I would have called this awful and forgettable, but the Shogun-style resolving where you drop some meeples on a dice tower and see which ones show up is pretty fun.

Puerto Rico - 3 player with the speedy bois. I doubt that we even reach 1.5 hours. Very good game.

Koinobori - Cute card game from Devir about Japanese fish kites. Area control with stock speculation. I really like it. I’m keeping it but that means I have to kick a game out.

Intarsia - very nice and cute. You race for the goals on the board which grants you points. I still prefer OG Azul but this is nice and I will say yes to a game of it.

[Phil]

Hot Streak (6p) – The return of the chaos. Mum charges out of the gate in all three races. She has a heap of cards, but they include a turn around and a fall over, and so some gamblers suffer doubts. She breaks the tape in 4 cards flat, to the astonishment of even those who picked her to win. Dangle comes second, despite only having one card in the shared set. Gobbler comes 4th in every single race. One player ends the game with the same money they started with, which feels like an achievement.

Chicken Caesar (6p) – Half way through the rules explanation I realise it’s a negotiation game. I’m terrible at negotiation games, so it felt like a minor miracle that I came 3rd (and only one point behind 2nd), but I put this more down to luck than to the shrewd negotiation powers that I do not have. The winner was well ahead, but no one but them had realised that they’d secured the lead (and they very much kept that information to themselves), so we all let them get away with it. It was fun! Would play again. Is it “good”? No idea. I never really know what’s going on in a negotiation game :). It was pretty funny though, once we figured out roughly what we were doing, and we all had a good time which is all that really matters.

There are four offices and the position of Caesar. The Aedile determine the taxation rate, which provides them and Caesar with money, but no one else. Each office has 2-3 cards played to it, and the Praetors alone determine which cards go where. The cards are either protection or foxes. If there are more foxes than protection, then at least one of the chickens in that office is going to die. If any chicken dies, Caesar is also killed. Higher taxation means more foxes, so the current Caesar wants low taxes to survive, but high taxes to get money. Caesar can survive a maximum of two consecutive terms regardless (no Caesar made it to a second term in our game). Who dies when there are too many foxes usually comes down to voting, and after chickens have died there is more voting to decide which chickens get promoted to a higher office to fill the gaps. Higher offices are worth more points if you can survive them. Someone will likely be promoted to Caesar, which is more or less a death sentence, but might get them some juicy points before it happens. The Censor is able to send a chicken of their choosing into exile before the foxes arrive, but that chicken does not get any points for that round… unless the Censor exiles themself in which case they get to grab the points on their way out (and maybe avoid being eaten). Even in death, your dearly-departed can earn you more points, so long as you can convince the Consul to accept an “offering” of money in their honour. And as mentioned, it’s a negotiation game, so bribing everyone (and especially the current voters) is par for the course.

[SteveB_uk]

Managed to play both the games I brought to the local pub meetup, which were:

Azul Summer Pavilion - I bought this years ago before playing the original Azul, and tonight was only my 2nd play of SP. It’s MUCH more complex than the original, but a team who played Azul last week really enjoyed taking it to the next level.

Hot Streak - with 7 players. Just great fun in a pub as always. The final round for double points on one of your bets always raises the temperature, especially when Mum, who has been winning, falls down on the first card. Glorious.

[yashima]

Played my second game of Tesseract a year after acquisition. Oops.
Its nice enough. I suspect it is more fun with two players instead of playing 2 characters solo. Not very difficult at all. Last year was a bad year for games here. Maybe I will get my partner to try it with me this year.

But overall it is more of a gimmick and the gameplay is fine but not especially exciting.

Do three actions on your turn. Deconstruct the central mountain of dice. Collect sets. Don’t explode.

[Marx]

Last night we tried our first game of Warhammer Quest: Darkwater, which was… good. It was good.

Here’s my problem: years and years ago (2018-ish?) Games Workshop released the sublime Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress, a WH40K dungeon-delver that was really, really good.

It wasn’t perfect by any extent. The difficulty curve of the game was all over the place, the heroes and villains weren’t balanced, and critically there was no “progression” for the heroes themselves. Each hero had two states: Base, or Leveled Up, and at the start of each mission you always reset to Base. No skill tree, no increasing HP, no improved attacks… there was random loot that you could keep, but there was nothing that stopped you getting a really lucky draw at the start of the game and getting the best equipment right from hop, or never getting anything good.

Anyway. The game was really good. Years later (202…1?) they released a spiritual sequel in Warhammer Quest: Cursed City which was inferior in absolutely every way except that they now included skill trees and character progression. A definite step forward… except as mentioned, everything else was worse. The quest structure was 50x as grindy, there were fewer enemies that did less interesting things, combat was simplified almost to the point of irrelevance, and the game hinged on artificial timers (“Get here before turn two! Push that button before turn 5!”) to try and add any sense of excitement into the game.

Nice models, though. Anyway, a big leap backwards in almost every respect. All I wanted was the core game of Blackstone Fortress (or a fantasy version of it if they wanted) with hero levels.

Cue Warhammer Quest: Darkwater which is… hmm. Better than Cursed City, but still worse than BSF by a fair margin. They improved combat a bit (still not as satisfying as BSF, but better), your heroes still don’t have any sense of progression or skill (or almost none, like the original BSF), BUT they did make the scenario system a lot better than Cursed City and, while less varied than BSF, it is a neat evolution of that design with some interesting evolution.

A lateral step from BSF. Which… okay. Fine. Importantly, BSF was improved slightly but subsequent expansion releases, while Cursed City never received any (I think they knew right from the hop that they had stumbled in the design), and Darkwater has already started getting a few expansions… small ones, but there is a huge amount of potential there.

Anyway. We played for about 4 hours and managed to clear Act 1 (of 3), unlocking new heroes and some new random loot. One of the scenarios we played was a little bit of a dud, but the other 5 or 6 we played were all very good. Overall, I am happy that we tried it, and I’m looking forward to playing it again.

In the meantime, I’ve also played one game of Talon with the noble and glorious @RogerBW which I managed to win. The game does an interesting job with asymmetry of the sides, with the Terrans having better, more well-rounded armour while the Talons have huge front armour but weak sides and rear, and the Terrans having guaranteed hits at close range but the Talons have guaranteed hits for more damage at long range BUT they can be shot down.

It’s neat! It’s not as good as Star Wars Armada, but then again, what is? I am really glad to be giving it a few kicks, see how it plays, and the decisions it presents always feel interesting.

[yashima]

I played a game of 20 Strong Tanglewood Red. I had to watch a video to remind myself of the rules. The rulebooks are so fiddly and the rules just don’t stick. I had also hoped for just a tiny amount of strategy advice. Meh. The BGG forums are also thin on that, only stating that Red is the hardest deck. Meh again. I played with another character this time (not Red which the deck suggests): Thumbelina whose ability saved me at least twice.

I got to the end and faced the Big Bad Wolf. I may or may not have won that final fight, the rules for the endboss are still not quite clear to me.

I also cheated on the die rolls in frustration.
I may give the Yellow and Silver decks a chance before ditching the game/-system.
My feeling that Chip Theory and me are not a good fit remains.

Due to our SI discussion, I now think that might be because I tend to approach getting better at things by slowly raising the difficulty not by banging my head against the wall until it falls down. But 20 Strong starts at a difficulty level that is already requiring me to really know what I am doing and how to optimize and I don’t really learn well through punishment.

Why did I even play this? I knew ahead of time I was going to be frustrated and it was almost guaranteed that I would reroll dice if the rolls were all misses.

But after a recent evening where I pulled out some older solos I had not played in a while, I logged my games and saw a page named “Insights” on the BG Stats app. And it said I had played 4% of my base games since Januar 1st. And somehow that challenged me to raise that number this year. I am up to 5% now… BG Stats is more hones about the number of games that I own than I am really… raising that number is a challenge either way

I am also still on a streak of playing every day (the occasional app or BGA play filling in for two or three days where I didn’t manage to sit down at my table) since Christmas.

I played so little last year, it really feels like catching up to my collection and right now it’s fun going through all those games (it may or may not keep me from buying new ones…)

[bort]

Burgle Bros 3: Future Flip, first play. Game was still in shrink when I arrived, which was not a positive start. Still, we had played the earlier versions, so figured it would be ok. And there are a lot of similarities between this and the other games. It took a bit longer than we thought – box says one hour, it took us three hours. But it was entertaining enough, even if we did lose. Rather than tiles being on the board face down (in the other games), in this one each tile has a side, which can change depending on certain conditions. Hence the title “Future Flip”.

Spokes, first play. New game from Kickstarter. Easy enough to play , the gameplay rules are only one page of the rules. The board is made up of points, which are connected by coloured pieces. You have a player board, and on your turn you move a piece around your board, and then take the coloured piece, replacing it on the main board, and then moving your bicycle piece along all the links of the same colour (as the piece you’ve just put down). The object is to finish three laps. I thought it was going to be a long (ish) game, but it gets faster and faster, since all the links from the first lap can be used again for subsequent laps. Well, that’s the idea anyway, it seemed to work ok for the winner of the game (which was not me). Keen to give this one another play.

The Lost Code. I usually do pretty badly at this game, but I started well, passed my first test. And then lost the next eight. Despite falling back on the score track, I was actually doing ok at the deduction. So my last five tests were on the single value dial (which give the maximum points). Sadly, luck was not with me, and I failed at four out of the five tests. Even if failing helped me in my deductions. Ending up getting five out of six numbers correct (was one off in one of them). So, even tho I finished last, I felt I was a little unlucky. Probably pissed off the other players, because I was always in last place I always rolled the dice, and had first choice of the dials. Definitely annoyed the second place player who wanted that five point dial for himself.

The Same Game, such a good co-op game. Harder than it looks.

[mistercrayon]

I didn’t realise there was a third burgle bros.

[bort]

Neither did I!

[yashima]

Following up on me going through my collection… I played my 2nd game of Flatiron since acquisition:

Mistakes were made handling the VP for the bot on the first few turns, so my win by 4 points stands on somewhat shaky legs. It’s really a neat game and the engine-building has a certain unique appeal. On your playerboard you have the 4 streets and each street represents a set of actions you can activate and you can extend the actions through up to 3 cards you add to the slot. Those actions have to be acquired first and in the meantime the bot is adding parts of the building rather quickly… it takes a few turns though to get an engine going.

This is actually a game for 2 players. I think it would be kind of nice because players would start out on more even footing and the tempo would be more controlled … as usual in these situations the bot is a high-tempo player forcing me to adapt.

The ruleset and number of symbols is rather large for a game of this length and complexity. It took me quite a bit to relearn the rules and there are too many tables of symbols in the rulebook: The newspapers, the cards, the floors, the floor bonuses, the city hall decrees… they are all vaguely similar but it is impossible to remember them all. I would say that is the biggest weakness of the game.

Recommended only if you have a specific thematic interest in the building or architecture.

I also tried the solo included in the latest Mischwald extension for the first time. I only found out that this was included recently when going through the geeklist for top solo games…

I played with all 3 expansions and tried the first challenge included in the solo-mode (the bot really only removes or reveals cards randomly, it does not get a score). The challenge was that I had to have 6 Bats in my forest. Turns out there are a lot of points to be made from bats and moskitoes. I scored a total of 405 points. Or I think I did. Counting points is the biggest drawback to playing Mischwald.

Overall I really enjoyed a very cozy play of this game which was much more fun than previous plays at higher player counts. (I like it fine at two. Just not with more than 3)

Definitely recommend the solomode Mischwald is a good game.

[mistercrayon]

Played our first game of “river of goal”. It’s a bit of a looker with shiny gold accents across the board. I like it but my partner is less convinced. I quite like how sharp each turn is but I suppose this can be felt as abrupt and “is that it”. Like the room for combos in a turn is very low.