Yesterday, we had our friend Yvan come back for our usual triple-header of TTR Rails & Sails. He usually wins, and handily.
Yesterday was MY night. I won all three games. I actually got 322 points in our first one, which MIGHT be our record.
I got incredibly lucky with my tickets pulls and then with the cards for my ports. Which led to massive points.
I mean… I totally out-played them, it was ALL skill and planning, y’all!
So THIS is what winning feels like!
In the library, we played an EPIC game of History of the World Avalon Hill edition from 1991. Seven epochs from the Sumerians and Babylonians to the Qing Dynasty and the British.
The components are just lovely for an old game (but then you can argue that an old game like this can give you so much stuff for such a low price in the world of 2026…). The plastic army units are better than the shiny marble-ly ones from the Z-Man edition (but these are still very pretty) and waaay better than the meeples from Rio Grande Games (booooriiiing). As usual, Rio Grande’s components just feels so cheap.
Epoch 1: Aryans - historical ones, not THOSE Aryans
Epoch 2: Greek City States
Epoch 3: Hsiung-Nu (Xiongnu)
Epoch 4: Tang Dynasty
Epoch 5: Seljuk Turks
Epoch 6: Ottoman Turks
Epoch 7: Britain
I wasn’t competitive until I reach the Turks which allowed me presence on so many places. And then I had first pick on Britain which allowed me to pretty much spread throughout the world, and even monopolised Australia which gave me a lot of points. Still, I was only 4th place.
Amazing! I would love to have a game of the AH edition for like once a month, since this game takes a while to play.
And then we ended it with Magical Athlete. I had the chance to take Huge Baby and I did.
That’s the edition I’ve played. It is lovely. Although I was always given the Assyrians first epoch as I was told I’m an aggressive player. I think it was really because the owner saw me as competition and wanted me to make as many enemies at the table early so I would go out of contention.
I failed to report a few weekends ago I got meet @lalunaverde and 2 others for a rare day of games. We played 2 games of Spirit Island. We used both the non standard board layouts from the wiki and both games were against Sweden at level 4.
I can’t remember all the spirits used but I remember the second game had 3 defensive spirits which made for an interesting flow against the aggressive Swedish invaders. The non standard boards were quite cool but didn’t make the game wildly different.
Then we played a 4 player team game of Battlecon. I was the bugs character and I bumped in to a tough opponent which made the game awkward from my lack of knowledge of the game and character. However I really enjoyed it. Was good to see that it bears up well as a team game. Maybe not the best when the kids had been causing sleep trouble but really glad I have plenty of it. I think it has years of depth
Well, balance has now been restored. I just got crushed by Maryse at Terraformimg Mars, 165-123.
It looked really close on the actual score track until we started counting up the score cards. It was a slaughter.
Wingspan with a bunch of expansions, maybe: it wasn’t as bad as I expected. But yeah, any game where you have to get out a notepad to tally up scores at the end and find out who won just isn’t my thing.
Pax Pamir 2e: great 4-player game, very swingy, tons of backstabbing and allegiance-shifting.
Jump Drive with expansion: it’s kind of like Race for the Galaxy, but not nearly as good. Pretty much as expected, but the ways in which it differed made little sense to me. Hard to see what niche this is supposed to occupy, because it didn’t really seem significantly simpler, just… a lot less interesting.
This is what killed whatever enthusiasm I have for Jump Drive. Too fast but too complicated enough. The City is much simpler. Res Arcana has simplcity (mainly, because most of the game is this micro-actions crap where you swap cubes for cubes) Also, the game is too short for strategies to mature.
I highly recommend not ever playing Mischwald (Shuffle Forest). The scoring in that game is from several hellish circles deeper than Wingspan (but yeah, I don’t disagree about games that have notepads for scoring)
Finally, my big Firefly game day… night… whatever. Sadly player #4 couldn’t attend due to being sick.
But 3 player epic space adventures are still epic.
We played Patience’s War which includes one of the Rim Space expansions.
I also included the cards from Breaking Atmo (I think that is the name)
We watched 3 Episodes of Firefly to accompany the session. One before, 1 during the “dinner break” and one after the game. I had not watched the show in a while and I remembered it was good and loved it but more on principle. But we watched “She is Mrs Reynolds”, “No Air” and “Jayne’s Town” (I don’t think those are the titles) and they were all good. I mean I remembered how funny the episode with Jayne is but… it is much better watching it than remembering it 
I am glad that the cast are so engaged in making more Firefly stories (or so I hear, I know only what was discussed here or what my partner told me. I am not big on watching trailers and youtube these days)
Our friend who traveled several car hours to attend won the game We played too long and let him acquire a big super-crew that breezed through the goals. He had acquired the ship modification that allowed him to have +3 crew or so…
So much fun and I am glad I included some expansions now the game also feels much better with 3 Reaver Cutters and alert tokens.
A side note: I’m not a big fan of score pads, but I do like the Score It app for Android (com.sbgapps.scoreit). I only use its Universal score pad, but whether that’s scoring modes or rounds, it gets the job done and my error rate is quite low. It can also produce a graph showing relative scores over time, which is very popular after something like Flip 7.
Forest Shuffle does have an app that allows you to take pictures of your cards to automate the scoring, but otherwise it is pretty fiddly!
So does Imperium. And the tokens.
Went to a games day yesterday. Some thoughts
Life in/of the Amazonia - Quacks with Cascadia. You draw tokens from a bag and use those tokens to buy terrain (area to place the animals) to place animals (scoring opportunities). Sometime you buy one shot powers or end game scoring. Given there is 8 or 10 animals all with different scoring conditions, see the discussion above about notepad scoring.
Utterly forgettable game with cute pieces
Hansa Teutonica Rather turgid game as I played with two polite players and one person who turned up only wanting to play Indonesia or Sidereal Confluence, so they had a face on. Such a banger, I always forget the best action though, move pieces on the board.
Nucleum, If I’d seen the names on teh box, I’d have noped out. Pretty cool theme and it whips around given you have limited action selection and you are giving up actions to build a network. Wouldn’t say no to playing again.
Quest for El Dorado, great game to end on. The player at the back played well and got their deck down to nine super powered cards and over took us all for the win.
Reasonable selection of games, only one I wouldn’t play again. But the venue had no soft furnishings in the main play space so it was loud! very very loud!
Met up with the usual group for some games last night. I unfortunately had to show up a few hours after everyone else because of taking my partner to the hospital to get her stitches out/cast changed (she broke her foot a while ago).
Gods Love Dinosaurs - Could really do with a reference sheet about what happens on activations. But otherwise a fun game, though my strategy wasn’t great and I ended up having a couple of dinosaurs starve as I lacked some mountains 
Village Pillage - Played this a bunch when it came out and then haven’t brought it out again in the last 6 years. Which is ridiculous, as it’s a really good game. I won neatly by picking up a Ravenmaster card which allowed me to steal from everyone’s bank at once.
Railroad Ink (Blazing Red, but we didn’t use those dice) - Enjoyable, but I still find roll-and-writes pretty bland.
Another busy weekend of work but I found enough time for a game this afternoon. I took a while to decide what to play, and eventually settled on Black Sonata as I didn’t have much time or energy to refresh my mind of the rules of more complex games. Nothing too tricky today, picking an easy path for the Dark Lady but using the normal difficulty rules. I chose to start at St Paul’s - and, luckily, I quickly deduced that the Dark Lady was right next to me, finding her on my first search in turn three. I caught her again twice more by turn 22, having visited all of the locations already so had four clue cards to piece together, which greatly narrowed down the characteristic options. One more clue on turn 26 confirmed the three characteristics, setting up the reveal when I located her again on turn 30. My deduction was correct - something that has sometimes failed me in this game - and revealed the Dark Lady as the musical, amorous, married Jane Davenant. Totting up, my final score was 52 points - best that I can recall scoring - for a Fair Youth ranking and a more enjoyable adventure than I had expected, especially given how tired I was before playing.
For me it’s not really the use of the scorepad that bugs me, it’s the whole premise of totting up scores to find out who won at the end. It gives me parallel-play vibes.
That’s fair enough. I like the puzzle of those sorts of games, but games like Pax Pamir have a very satisfying immediacy
Do not know what game this is
Indonesia 
