We played Fate of the Fellowship
It’s an absolute banger (I’m a big fan of Pandemic).
It’s pretty thematic, interesting decisions and tense to the end. Lots of dice rolls, but with a reasonable amount of ways to mitigate getting boned.
There’s variability with both the characters and the missions. Cool game
Chess - we played 10 min Rapid Chess. Yes.
Toy Battle
Age of Innovation - 4 players. Top Tier Euro game
Through the Ages - 3 players today. Couldn’t get any strategy done and went straight for points marathon Went for 2nd place
3 Witches - 3 player only trick taker. Very interesting. Keen to play more!
Skyrise
Inis - Inis ALL-IN!! Base game + Seasons + Nemeds.
Cabo - yep. In my Top New-To-Me this year. Make sure you play with the 2e rules
Played Sanctuary for the first time. The gist of it is very simple - pick a tile, play a tile, score points - but it has all these small wrinkles that you have to get your head around to play well. It’s both crunchy and quite sedate at the same time, and we really enjoyed it. My pride and joy was a cable car that soared high above two tiny thorny devils, a small snake, and a man looking at some rocks. I make the best zoos.
I played Spirit Island against Scotland Level 1 and I got the major power 1 round too late to prevent Scotland from building their 5th city. I was playing with Ember Eyed Behemoth (Moderate, Nature Incarnate) and Wandering Voice keens Delirium (High, Nature Incarnate) who both have Incarna and I was too keen on upgrading the Incarna.
I neglected expanding my presence and so Scotland was able to build up their presence. For round 4 I was able to isolate that land up there and prevent spillage. But back to back Ravage and Build on that land is what cost me. Often having the same land twice in a row can be beneficial when you manage to eradicate the invaders during the ravage but this time… not so much. My mistake. I was unable to eliminate even one of the starting cities despite Ember being a direct damage dealing spirit.
Too busy to write before, but I did manage two more quick games on Saturday evening. Watching the recent SUSD review of Railroad Tiles lead me to getting out Railroad Ink again, the Lush Green edition although I only played the base game and left the Forest/Trails dice out. A rather haphazard first game lead to a score of 50 but never it felt like I got a network going. A higher score of 59 on the second game, with a larger, more complete network built and completing the solo goals in good time. Seems a low score but it had been a while. This coming weekend should give me more time to get a longer game to the table.
Hot Streak (8p) – too many people? The draft took too long for my liking, and the “snake draft” effect won’t vary much across the 3 races for most players at this count*. Our races were delightfully chaotic, but the game didn’t seem quite right on the whole. Maybe fine at that player count if most of the players know the game already? (we had 6 newcomers). I’ll put some blame on me as well, as I don’t think I have the teach down for this yet.
(*) Perhaps it would be better to shift the start player multiple places at a time with more players?
Propolis (4p) – this was quite nice. I was worried when it was described to me as Splendor-like (as I don’t like Splendor), but it really didn’t feel like that to me – I felt they were more different than similar. It felt like there were always decisions to make, and if someone took the spot I wanted there were always other worthwhile options available. It’s a lightweight game, but the turns are suitably snappy, and it felt really smooth. I reckon we were done in around about the 30 minutes on the box too, so it didn’t outstay its welcome. I’d happily play this one again.
Space Base (4p) – The main game of the evening. I’d never played this and always had the feeling it wasn’t a game I’d like very much, but I’m usually willing to at least try things. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy it. A lot of that was unfortunate circumstances, granted – the biggest problem was that the player before me almost immediately got a card which let them buy two cards each round instead of one, so long as someone had rolled a 2 at some point in the round. With 4 players, though, that was statistically likely to happen, and I think there were only 1-2 rounds where it didn’t. So almost every single turn they bought two cards. And consequently they ended up with loads of money to spend each turn, which meant they could also look at the more expensive cards every turn, which meant they had far more options to consider. So their turns were painfully slow, almost every round (and they didn’t even have the good manners to win :). I think they came in 3rd. I can’t blame them, though – I’m confident I would have been slow in their shoes too). My knee-jerk reaction from this single play is that I’d limit it to 3p and purge the “buy two cards” card from the box.
That aside, I appreciated some aspects of it, but it’s very much a “buy stuff so you can buy stuff so you can buy stuff” game, and those don’t tend to do it for me. (In that respect, this was probably more like Splendor than Propolis was!)
There’s a 8+ variant in the rulebook. Never tried it!
D’oh. I remembered there being a “lots of players” option, but didn’t check the rule book because in my head that was for 10+.
Absolutely, yes. My house rule is to move the 1st player along by 2-3 each round. It plays great at 8 then.
It’s 9+ !
I haven’t tried it, but instead of money and tickets each player just writes down their bet for 1) a mascot and 2) the side bet, at the same time. Sounds good!
I think the consensus on BGG was to move the draft along by 3 players each time at 8 players. I imagine works well!
The designer, Jon Perry, was on the Space-Biff podcast where he discussed how the game is quite robust, in that it will still work well if people forget a rule or mess it up a little, just not quite as well. I imagine the draft is the same, where it probably works best if you tweak it at higher player counts but will work OK as written as well. I’d recommend the podcast episode, it’s quite an interesting listen and gets into Perry’s video game designs as well.
Spirit Island at 2 player. Level 4 Sweden invaded an island protected by Ocean’s Hungry Grasp and Starlight Seeks it’s Form.
The thing I like about Sweden as an adversary is it feels like the base game but more difficult so we won in the last fast phase. Double victory sort of as the last City getting cleared out earned the last fear card.
I played Starlight and it’s not that complex. I think their labelling of it as very high complexity is way off. Unless you fail to take a reclaim option it’s very playable. In this game I had to do the heavy lifting as we got very little by way of the coastal explores which was problematic with Ocean’s reach being coastal. I went for a lot of major’s. We had lost a lot of Dahan to Sweden’s extra strength and escalation so I kept drawing dahan centric majors which limited the selection somewhat but I ended up in a strong combo which got rinsed and repeated for the last 2 turns ensuring victory.
I like Sweden as Adversary. I have not played Starlight in a while….
Yeah, I reckon you’d ideally want to bump it as many people as possible for the player count without wrapping around?
With player count P the start player moves by N people between each race, such that in race 3 the player who’d started the draft in the 1st race will be either last or one-from-last:
P: 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
N: 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4
3: 3 3 5 5 7 7 9 9
The game needs a theme-appropriate start player token. Maybe a picture of the gambler receiving a phone call with a hot tip for the race. Except the tip just tells you how many places to move the token along for the next race, depending on the player count :).
@Acacia have we had “start player tokens” as a topic of the week yet? I played Bus the other day and it has a lovely chunky bus. Would be cool to see some others. And see if anyone has any suggested starting tokens where they’d be useful like it Hot Streak.
I think it came up tangentially here:
But that was more on mode of selection. Uwe’s Moose is always top of mind!
I am reminded of Rob Seater’s Loopin’ Louie tournament rules.
Chicken Caesar (6p) – A second game after last week’s (and consequently it was faster). Every bit as enjoyable this time around. Not least because I surprised myself by winning (by a single point). I didn’t think I’d done nearly as well as that!
I managed to occupy the Praetor and Consul offices for a lot of the game. Mostly with the same chickens, which was a problem (it makes it difficult to profit from the award tokens you gain each time you survive a round, vs having each chicken occupying as many different offices as possible throughout the game); but constantly being in the Consul office enabled me to grant myself some of those additional tokens, and constantly being in the Praetor office enabled me to keep my own chickens alive (it’s awful when you have no say in the Praetor actions! :).
With one point in it, almost anything could have made the difference. The thing which springs to mind was about half way through the game, when I’d put myself into the Aedile for the first time. I now had three chickens on the board and I wanted them all to survive, so I was angling to keep taxes as low as possible to limit the number of foxes on the prowl, and hopefully ensure that I gained awards for each of my chickens. However, as with literally every preceding round, I was also a Praetor, and in that role I had been attacking the Aedile mercilessly to this point. This round I wanted to protect them, though, and to this end I was in the process of playing a face-down protection card to them when another of the Aedile, not having absorbed the fact that I was now one of them, hurridly stopped me and offered me two coins to play a protection card. I happily agreed to the deal (which was worth two points to me) and, to the general amusement of the players, flipped over the card I’d been playing anyway, to reveal it as protection :).
Chicken Caesar only has a 6.6 rating on BGG, and that feels really low to me. It won’t be for everyone, and the rules explanation is fiddly (frankly I had very little understanding until the first game was well under way and things started to click), but I’ve really enjoyed my first two games and wouldn’t turn it down in future.
Light Speed Arena (4p) – We had some time after C.C. so I got out my new toy and we played some space battles!
Saboteur 2 (6p) – I think we’d all played Saboteur, but not with the expansion, so we were continually passing the rules sheets around to check what everything was. I hadn’t played the original for ages, but it’s something I always quite enjoyed (or rather, started to really enjoy once I realised that the non-saboteurs should not be treating it like a co-op game), and tonight was no different. It can be slightly frustrating at times, but it goes quickly enough that it’s not a big issue, and the twists and turns are usually fun.
Pax Renaissance - 3 players and I’m on the backseat. Turns out it’s exhausting talking about your moves and the reasons. Also, talking about what makes these cards really good in what context. But both enjoyed it. They certainly prefer it over Pax Porfiriana
Mykerinos - OG game and it’s pretty spicy. I remember liking it when I played it years ago. Still like it.
Dover Patrol - 2 player Stratego-style game that my friend found in a charity shop. And yeah it is Stratego. Good fun, actually.
Texas Showdown (known today as Seas of Strife) - maaaaan, did I just fell out of love with trick takers? This is shit. Maybe, TS/SoS isn’t that good. I would rather play something like (in order of preference) Stick em/Sticheln, Nokosu Dice, Schadenfreude, Mu. And in terms of fillers, the wealth of choices is endless. Like, Coup?
Puerto Banana - I thought this game’s cool when I played it last year. But I slept on it. Never again! I’ll keep playing Puerto Banana repeatedly in the following weeks. I think this is better than Q.E.
Biddle - better than any of Knizia’s dice rolling filler games. I have to get this from Germany.
Rafter 5 - good Oink
Las Vegas - this compact edition is better than the deluxe crap with bolt-on special abilities that made a great filler game into a longer and dragging light weight game. By entering that territory, I’d rather play something else, like train games.
This is excellent. Even at 3, it was fine. It does devolve into the rather degenerate 2 vs 1 affair, but since it’s about rolling dice and swear vengeance on your opponents, it was a good time.
Toy Battle x3 - we played best 2 out of 3. This game is awesome. Finally played the swimming pool map for the first time. It was fun.
So far, I’ve played this, basic map, and “Rainbow Road” (it’s not but I called it that)
Dirt & Dust - rally racing game but it’s solitaire optimisation puzzle. I actually had a good time since it’s all simultaneous - therefore, it wasn’t boring. You all play the round. Then you score and do admin. Rinse and repeat. There’s nothing more boring in today’s modern board gaming than watching 3 other people make moves that you couldn’t care less about before you could finally have the permission to move again.
Draft and Write Records - I hate roll and writes. I hate drafting. They concoct a game that exists to just ragebait me.
I’m working through the swimming pool as well. We did the graveyard before which was an interesting twist. The bases let you re-draw tiles from your discard.