Your Last Played Game Volume 3

Boardgames
1262

This week’s games summary:

  • Small Fjords x13 (I fell 2 points short of the maximum score of 47 in my last game). Does not mean I have now solved it. But I am getting better at the basic strategy except when I mess up.
  • Fellowship Trick Taking Game Chapters 1-4 with my partner. It’s very crewy. But nice art and a bit more thematic than The Crew. Since there are no trumps except the 1 Ring, it makes for a neat twist on the formula. I like it fine at 2 (the 2 player mode is similar to The Crew Deep Sea where there are a bunch of cards out in the open and others hidden from the simulated 3rd character’s hand). My solo attempt ended at chapter 3 and then I reset the game because I didn’t think it made for fun decisions. Northwood remains the only solo trick taker I would play again. And even that is not something I put on the table often.
  • Wingspan Asia Solo in Duel Mode x1. Meh. So many rules for such a small box. I like Wingspan but the Wingspan automas are a big part of my general Automa dislike. Soooo fiddly. I like the Duel Mode just fine. Just not against the automa.
  • Sprawlopolis x1 because everyonce in a while I need to build a city.
  • Let’s Go To Japan x3, I really still want to travel to Japan one day in the meantime I’ll make do with simulated trips. My only issue with this solo is the huge table footprint. I find it quite unexpectedly fun otherwise. I pointedly did not back this in crowdfunding because I thought it all sounded very silly. And then I ignored it at SPIEL because: who wants that game? Well, turns out I want that game. I even ordered the 2 small expansions that were included with the crowdfunding. Set collection is not a mechanic I go out of my way to have a lot of in my collection. But this is such a nice take on it and the theme is really present in the cards (also card quality is very nice, helps with shuffling the 2 big stacks of cards after each game)
  • Kokeshi x2: I think I already wrote about that. Needs more plays to find out if the solo really is to my liking and if there really is a good game in those tiled tracks. As stated in my first write-up I find this a bit opaque still.
  • One Piece Nakama: I used to full stack of opponents this time + 3 bosses. I like this one.
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Acquire: 60th Anniversary Edition - the poker chips are very nice here. Nice light game from the 1960s. The players were surprised that the game was from that era.

Azul: Master Chocolatiers

12 Rivers - very cute and novel. Eye catching even. But thats it. The novelty wears off if you play this often.

Get on Board: Paris & Roma - used to be Let’s Make a Bus Route. It’s a roll and write that doesnt suck. Very nice!

No Thanks! x3 - classic filler that we played it 3 times

Taj Mahal

Cat in the Box

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1264

More plays. Stress now leads to me playing more games? In any case, the solo games really help me deal by pointing my focus on something else. Also tile laying games in particular: when a tile just fits into a spot really nicely, the joy this produces seems good for me and I’d much rather be relying on tile laying games than chocolate :wink:

So more recent games:

  • Small Fjords x2: because hexagons are bestagons.
  • Leviathan Wilds: I had it set up on the table a day earlier… but already when I returned to the table I didn’t feel like playing. And maybe I shouldn’t have because it was such a disappointment. I had really wanted to like it when I got it and played 4 games back then. But not only did I have to relearn the setup, it feels just too procedural. The decisions: not interesting and for most of the game I just wanted it to be over. Which it was, when I lost after 3 rounds (each round has 5 turns). I know it got so many rave reviews from SUSD, to NPI and Space Biff. But in truth I’d rather be playing Pandemic Iberia or The Loop. Maybe all those tile layers I play all the time are to blame?
  • Beacon Patrol with Ships and Shores x4: I am trying to play through all the various ships because I tend to go to the same two over and over and I want to see the other abilities. The Yellow Submarine was kind of fun. I hope I played it right :slight_smile: But buying back discarded tiles seems like a nice thing to get a complete map.
  • Spirit Island: I haven’t played it as much recently because I barely have the bandwidth. So today I played in a mode that fit that: 1 Spirit “Sunbright Whirlwind” from Horizons and no opponent, just barebones. I won in an easy 5 rounds. It was good fun :slight_smile: I’ve left it on the table with the next Horizon’s spirit. But I’ll probably only get to play at the end of next week, because I’ll be at a conference for two days.

I logged my 3000th play today (in BGStats). It was the 2nd game of Small Fjords. Because hexagons … :innocent: (Those plays are made up of 469 unique games–BGG says I have 645 games as ‘played’)
edit: and now that 3000 stat is meaningless because I discovered I could import old plays or backlogged ones from BGG and so there were 327 plays I logged pre-BG Stats :wink:

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1265

We have someone from our gaming group looking after our cat while we’re at Airecon next weekend, so today he came over for cat-sitting instructions and some board games:

  • Age of Steam: the Switzerland map. Track is worth double points but there are so many impassable hexes and boundaries that it’s a pain to get them on the board!
  • Taluva: an unusually destructive game. The island was very volcanically active, to the detriment of our settlements…
  • Mega-Inis: still to play with the nemed expansion, but enjoying the hefty metal tokens that came with the fancy-pants version. It does make flipping the turn order token a bit risky though!
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The hefty metal coins also mean that you have a wild projectile when the Brenn flips the Flight of Crows coin

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Finished our campaign of cosy sticker ville. It’s good. Not sure if we will play the second time but I think there is enough surprise left.

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1268

Everdell
Base game only. I won! 54 to 47 / 44. I got no events at all but cleaned up on Prosperity cards for points at the end of the game.

Castles of Burgundy special edition
It was the £100+ edition not the even fancier ones, but still a stunning production. I don’t think I’ve played CoB before, I can see why it’s a classic.

The 2003 ish polystone edition of Cathedral world, which I drew on my first play and won on my second.

And then I won my first play of A place for all my books, 59 to 48. Cozy theme, quite demanding gameplay, lots of options at all times.

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Twilight Imperium 4th Edition with Prophecy and some elements of Thunder’s Edge!

Woo!

Twice in as many weeks… gosh, a blessing for sure. 4 players again, but organized by a different friend and with different people (which is good, since I will likely never play with the cheating-adjacent guy again from the last game… life’s too short).

Preset map, which I am okay with. Two of the players (Mike and Doug) had only played a few times years ago, while Ben (the organizer) and I are more experienced. Mike took the Barony of Letnev (curses! I love the Barony, weird thought they are), Ben took the Empyrean, Doug tried the Universities of Jol-Nar, and I took the Hacan. Gosh I love the Hacan… broken AF, but always engaging with the other players, wheeling and dealing, always interesting things to do. And who else can often build a Warsun, if not two, on Trade Goods alone!? So strong…

Early game was pretty calm, although the Universities and Barony butted heads once or twice in the skies above Primor (the Barony nabbed it pretty quick, the Universities were able to take out the Barony’s fleet, but they didn’t bring enough troops to land and take the world from them). Meanwhile the Empyrean managed to surge to an early lead (4 points to the rest of our 1), and then with a lucky action card managed to nab 3 more points while the rest of us scored one or two.

The Action Card let them hold onto their Strategy Cards (Imperial and Leadership), meaning they could immediately score another Public Objective and the point for Metacol before anyone (me, specifically) could swoop in to dislodge them from the throne world. Which I did immediately afterwards, but too little, too late.

The next turn the Empyrean were able to close it out, but at least we were able to put up a bit of a fight. Final scores: Empyrean 10, Hacan 8, Universities and Barony 5. Took from 10am until 5:30pm, but that included (re)teaching Doug how the game was played (which Ben insisted on doing, against my offer to teach him in under 5 minutes…).

It was really nice. Only 8 more times this year to hit my goal!

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1270

I think it really means “am I approaching this game the same way every time.” Not to say that I’m getting the max possible score, but I’m in some kind of cul-de-sac where I’m bored.

Sometimes you can get out by losing to someone better than you who is doing things you never thought of. Sometimes it’s just the nature of the game that it presents a similar puzzle with similar problems in a way that doesn’t require adaptation. This happened to me with The White Castle, for instance.

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1271

That is a good way to describe what my partner said about Rosenberg games. ( I disagree with him about those but I see where he is coming from )

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Blob Party as people arrived. It’s such a fun little game to get everybody all thinking together (although our playdoh has dried out). Everybody but my wife matched on Jug for Instrument+Bottle, but we brought her into full blob mode with the next clue (Travel+Money=Euro).

Magical Athlete - Ridiculous races, especially Scoocher and Copycat copying off each other over and over (until reaching an infinite loop on the Move Back 4 space).

New York Slice - Had the lead on 5s and 7s until the last round when I lost everything and had to go into pizza debt.

The Game - Just some neat numbers! My friend kept thinking we were doomed but we did pull out the win.

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@lalunaverde asked for a die roll:
Twilight Struggle - taught someone their first game. I don’t play this often now. And given the choice I’d rather try exploring Napoleon’s Triumph

Commands & Colours: Medieval - the Battle of the Utus between the Byzantines and the Huns (feat Attila). The Eastern Romans decided to stop paying tribute to Attila and so he sent his forces south to the Balkans. Most of the Byzantine forces are in Sicily fighting the Vandals. Whoops.

I played as the Romans again and my same opponent from last week played as the Huns.

The battle began with the Hunnic left flank/Roman right flank. The game added more rules on top of a rule set that is pretty much like C&C: Ancients, such as evasion, which works so well now that we have nomadic horse archers like the Huns (and horse archers from the Sassanids). And indeed, it was like that. Hunnic cavalry evaded close combat.

Roman auxilia infantry in left, centre, and right marched to pelt the Huns as much as possible. Not much damage was done and the battle remain inconclusive. Attila then commited the centre and destroyed much of my auxilia. Roman heavy infanty on both left and right were commited to counter, which manage to push back the weaker Hunnic infantry. The cavalry simply evaded our slow infantry when charged.

Then, the worst have happened. Attila and all other leaders have charge their heavy cavalry against the Roman centre and wiped out the legions. Without the famed legions, the Byzantines were doomed. Arnegisclus rallied whatever cavalry were left to tried to stem the charging Huns, only to be killed.

Attila would then remained a scourge to both halves of the empire.

Medici the Card Game

Can’t Stop

Attila - what a coincidence! This one is a pseudo stock holding game where you have 6 invading tribes invading Rome (e.g. Goths, Franks, Slavs). You then gain influence on these tribes. Good game.

Reibach and co.

HOT STREAK

Bootleggers - so far, this is my favourite new-to-me game of this year. Open negotiation game where we are mobsters set in the Prohibition Era in the US. You make crates of beer and then you sell them to Speakeasies. There’s dealing and dastardly moves in the game and this is what I am looking for. I would say that this is rather similar in vibe to John Company but with less player entanglement and more take-thats. This one is rather straightforward in rules though and only works with more players. While JoCo, I think, works enough at 3 due to the player entanglement right at the very start of the game.

History of the World (Z-Man edition) - light weight dice rolling where you take on several civilisations throughout history. I really much prefer this over Small World. Small World is too dry and deterministic without the depth that I needed. Its biggest mechanism - the decline mechanism - is rather straightfoward on when to take. So you have a game that is dry but rather boring. HotW is just random beer-and-pretzel fun.

I had:

Epoch I: Sumerians
Epoch II: Persians + Mayans
Epoch III: Byzantines + Siam
Epoch IV: Turks (from Central Asia)
Epoch V: Germans

In Epoch IV I regret passing on the Vikings which would have worked for me better. I would be very keen to play this again

20260311_221249
20260311_2212494000×3000 4.94 MB

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Ok, so I’ve started out trying The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring Trick Taking Game. Solo.

I’ve played the first three chapters, all of which I have sailed through, winning them easily.

I reckon there are three possibilities:

  1. The game’s just really easy. Too easy.
  2. The game starts off easy, getting harder.
  3. I’m doing something wrong.

My money’s on it being 2 or 3 (highly likely; I nearly always muck things up first go). Or a combination of 2 and 3.
I hope so, because while I’m quite enjoying it, I’m going to lose interest quite quickly if it actually is as easy as it seems so far.

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Silly me, I forgot possibility 4 - that I’m just a genius…

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  1. the solo mode specifically, as above. i suspect a perusal of BGG might help narrow it down.
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Having perused BGG, I’m now optimistic that it won’t stay this easy as it goes on.

I promise not to moan when it inevitably gets too hard very quickly!

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1278

Whining is what this forum is for

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1279

I played the first few chapters solo as well and quit because of the non existent difficulty level. It gets a bit trickier (no pun intended) with two. But we have only played the first 4 chapters so far.

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1280

I’ll certainly try a at least a few more chapters, give it a chance to pose a bit more challenge. It’s pleasant enough and pretty enough that I’m probably more than happy to play through it all at least once in any case.

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1281

Another Friday night gaming round this weekend, and inspired by seeing the new Special Edition due for release next year, I decided to play Concordia solo against Contrarius using the Britannia map for the first time and settled in for a nice longer game with the aim of building all of my trading houses throughout the isles. An early goal to build in all the cloth cities and buy the Weaver card, but Contrarius collected it just before I could get the required resources, but I was able to monopolise all of the tool cities early and build widely in most of the regions, while collecting a few more cards. Contrarius didn’t seem to be building much early but was moving steadily up the victory point track and acquiring more cards than I was. As the end game approached, Contrarius also had an advantage of colonists on the board, and I was left with the choice of taking the last two cards or building my last house, but the cards proved the quicker and safer option so I grabbed them and collected the Concordia card. Final scoring was close but I scrapped out a win by 167 points to 160. A higher score than my previous two games, although in those I was focusing more on racing through the card collection rather than building. Still a great game for me, and I still have the Roma/Sicilia expansion and extras from the Salsa expansion to test out.

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