Had a few friends over today to play some games: Escape Plan, Things in Rings, and Forest Shuffle
Escape Plan is probably my favourite Lacerda game so far (having also played On Mars, and Speakeasy). It’s not quite so fiddly as the others and the theme works well. Still made my brain hurt a bit though!
I had help setting up:
We had an interesting game of Things in Rings - I had to look up whether teeth float in water (they do not).
If people would let me, I’d be trying to do that in virtually every single game :). Tougher to achieve with more players, mind; but it’s the best way to end the game earlier than other players wanted.
This weekend’s game session involved a solo game of Architects of the West Kingdom playing as generic Rudolf against the standard bot Constantine, not wanting anything too tricky for the time and energy I had available. It has been a few years since I last played it and while remembering/relearning the rules was pretty quick, remembering the best solo strategy clearly evaded me, as the final score proved. I started trying to build up a good storage of material resources while Constantine seemed to be acquiring marble regularly and building the cathedral, while occasionally rounding up my workers. I hired two workers including the multiskilled Labourer early and got two buildings constructed but had the feeling that I was always behind the bot’s pace and regularly having to rescue my workers. Silver was never a problem, despite never robbing the tax stand, but my virtue was never high even with a useful Squire and rarely using the black market. At the end, even with constructing 4 buildings and a good scoring combination of workers, Rudolf lost 37 - 43 to Constantine. I let him build too often and obtain too much marble from the King’s Storehouse. Still great fun with quick easy turns, but I need to remember the solo tactics that worked better before the next replay.
Played a 4-player of Near and Far, on the 3rd or 4th map in the book.
I’d never played any Ryan Laukat games (although I’m interested in Sleeping Gods / Skies / whichever is best solo). This worked well, but the endgame scoring surprised everyone - you definitely need to know where the high points come from ahead of time and aim for them.
Also a quick 3 player of Courtisans, never disappoints.
Since the bot rounds up your workers randomly, rather than reactively, it’s best to go hard and go once to each collection site each game. Try to get all your stone in one series of placements, for example, and then never go back.
Surprisingly, this was also super effective against @COMaestro
Had what turned into a gaming weekend! Not structured or planned… just several distinct gaming opportunities came up together and here we are.
Friday night just couldn’t bear to go back to the computer and get more done, so we instead played Foundations of Metropolis and Knarr
After taking too many years of Latin, of course I was interested in Foundations of Rome. But I, like many, wasn’t ready to drop $180 on a filler game. I researched and wrote it off. However, when I had a chance to get Metropolis for 28 smackers I had to check out the box.
The plan was play, experience, confirm its fluffiness, and sell.
But I liked it! Yes, the rules are extremely simple. But it was darn fun (not $180 fun, mind you). The game comes with a nice dollop of countertensions and gotchas that have you questioning your past decisions. And the competition for building plots, along with the ability to swaperoo buildings and do some judo on the population track or against the bonus civic building scores was great.
Dang, I liked it.
Knarr, as always, delivered what it needed to.
Saturday came with family game night - something we are trying to do now that the youngest is almost 3. Concept Kids (animal edition)
Q: What has hooves, is very strong, aggressive, has two legs, and a beak?
A: The peacock (if you ask my almost three year old) (image of her DIALED IN)
If the goal is to leave happy, we did.
After first bed time, then a learning game of New Frontiers - with the goal of getting it into the grown-up family BGA rotation. It’s actually a lot to learn if you have no background in the system, and a LOT to parse when you have that giant Development Market and a 7 World market out of the bag. We got about halfway through. Progress.
Sunday was the planned actual game night, out with friends.
First up, someone’s prized import copy of Eternal Decks. It’s good if you like that sort of thing. That sort of thing being Onirim, Regicide, maybe Pandemic, etc. A really novel system and robust implementation of cards and managed attrition to survive and win.
It’s not my thing. But I enjoyed two rounds nonetheless. It’s really good at what it does.
Next…Survive: Escape from Atlantis
This was exactly what it needed to be. Falling out of the trees to land in a boat. Swimming past a shark because no one can roll it. A dolphin rushing my citizen to the beach just to be eaten by a sea monster as she climbed out of the waves.
The highlight may have been someone jumping on a boat and, after long deliberation, driving it straight into a sea monster just to blow things up (he had no idea which of his people were on it, but he lost a 1 and we both lost 3’s so…)
We were loud. We had fun. I lost 20-19-18
Last, we finished with That’s not a hat. A bit worried, how hard can this be with three people?
How hard can this be?
Oh my gosh, it was a bloodbath. We had a mouse chasing a cat counterclockwise and a tennis racket going the other way. SOMEHOW this cheeseburger stayed in the game. Eventually I had no idea what I had, and no one else did either. When I passed the card with an obviously wrong label, there was the cheeseburger.
The cheeseburger.
We even got into a rhythm where all the cards were going the same direction and we were just passing. After 7 passes or so we messed that up, too.
What an amazing little box. What is wrong with us.
Nothing! Nothing at all!
Seriously, that sounds amazing. 
I’ve been trying to get back into gaming, and last night, out of nowhere, I had some free time and energy, so I grabbed a couple of short-ish card games that I’ve been looking at trying, especially now that I have some snazzy new card racks.
While Fantasy Realms certainly got a lot of early praise, the artwork direction gave me pause. So when they released the Star Trek retheme/reimplementation, I grabbed it pretty quick. And, since it has no official solo mode, I let it sit on shelf for a while.
However, I’ve been seeing it discussed in solo gaming circles. There’s a monthly challenge for a fan-made solo mode. So I figured I’d give it a go.
I can see how Fantasy Realms could be fun and rewarding, like pulling the handle of a slot machine. Maybe Star Trek Missions just has a bit too much more structure than Fantasy Realms. The Mission cards seem stifling and, overall, I just feel that I don’t see enough cards in a game to do anything really interesting.
I played a couple of games last night, but didn’t record scores. I think I scored 12 on the first game and 24 on the second game. Obviously, there are people out there that do better than I; these scores are SUPER low. But looking back at the cards I discarded, I didn’t really miss any opportunities for card synergy- I seem to just have bad luck getting the cards to synergize with the Missions I draw. I return to my suspicion that solo gamers have a tendency to cheat; I’m totally fine with that, but I wish they would be transparent about it when they go and post about the scores they get that are double or triple that of mine. Honestly, it makes me feel as though I’m just not seeing the game the same as them.
I was following this for a while and eventually it went out of stock everywhere. So this past fall when it started popping up available here in North America again, I made sure it was at the top of my wishlist for Christmas. Still nobody bought it for me, so I treated myself to it as a post-Christmas gift.
I think the decisions in the solo game are so tense. The pace and tight action economy of the game are real and instill a sense of (appropriate?) dread.
I thoroughly enjoyed my play last night. I scored 110F, which is the lowest possible score to “win”.
After playing both games, I sat for a minute and contemplated how I was feeling. I realized that while card games are fun and the decisions I made were thematic, I actually wanted more engaging. I realized I am craving a “simulation” of running an inn or… uhh, producing a couple of episodes of Star Trek(?), I’m really not sure what the theme of Star Trek Missions actually is.
So, once I find some more time and energy, I am looking to get some simulation-style games going. High Frontier 4 All seems appealing, but it requires a very large table footprint, and my table is very cluttered with household stuff overflow at the moment.
What other simulation games should I play? The Mechanic: Simulation isn’t very helpful on BGG, and appears to just be a marketing vector.
EDIT: I was browsing Mechanic: Simulation and saw that Bloody Inn is tagged as such. Along with, I believe, every single wargame. What a pointless data point(less)
Leaving Earth!
(I have played a full solo game entirely within a 1500x800mm mat.)
You are very small.
There’s a lot of solo puzzles for this game I know that has boats AND roads.
I second Leaving Earth
It certainly seems like a sensible move on occasion…
The Mechanisms tags are so useless!
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3 Witches - very good 3 player trick taker from Allplay
Kingsburg - played it at 5 players and it was a lot better than my previous play of it at 3. Good old game but I don’t need it
HOOOOOOOOOOT STREEEAAAAAK
Zoo Vadis - it’s been a while and oh man, this is amazing!
Quartermaster General (WW2) - 6 players and I volunteer to be the Italians who are the punching bag of QMG WW2. But I actually did well where we manage to dominate Europe and North Africa for a while and I had good positioning and good cards. But the UK eventually got their shit together and destroyed my Mediterranean Empire. I abandoned all hopes of reclaiming my empire and was firefighting in Europe with Germany between the British landings in France and the Soviet onslaught from the East.
The US player was rather incompetent and so Japan at least manage to dominate Asia. It wasn’t enough and the Allies won after Round 20. Great game!
Innovation 4e - 3 players with people who really want to play Inno so I can’t resist that call to play and teach.
The Number - very fun bluffing game and screwing up other people.
Piece of Cake
Bridges of Shangri-La - masterpiece. MASTERPIECE!
Having bought Undaunted: 2200 Callisto over a year ago, I finally got around to playing it.
I haven’t played any other games in the Undaunted series, not being too keen on WW2 as a theme, so I don’t know how it compares. The setting is essentially a revolution that takes place on a mining colony on Callisto, with the two sides being the government and the miners. We only played the first scenario, which felt quite simplistic and sad for me (the miners) because only the government got any cool mechs! Hopefully the next couple of scenarios are more interesting.
I have also been playing a bit of solo Trailblazers at lunch time. It’s quite a chill game and I am quite bad at it!
Yesterday at the games club I played Inis and Azul: Summer Pavilion. Inis was very close, with two of us meeting one of the victory conditions at the same time and the tie being decided by my having control of a territory that let me steal the Brenn token at the end of the round. Azul 3 is still my favourite Azul, and I did much better than usual this time by remembering to concentrate on completing the end game bonus conditions!
Once one realizes how few cards there are the hybris lessens and results improve… “Oh I am sure I can finish that loop.” becomes “hmm maybe I shouldn’t extend the loop anymore”
I played through the entire campaign with a buddy, and I had a good time overall. There are a few unbalanced scenarios, and I struggled with the “I want to do X, but my faction wants me to do Y, and my cards tell me I can really only do Z…” elements of the game, but that’s not a complaint.
It was a neat system. I hope they release a sequel with more variety and a few more balanced scenarios!
Did a bit of “out with the old, in with the new” with the collection recently, so had a (mostly) new games night this week.
Subtext - I remembered playing this at PAX Unplugged back in 2019, and thinking that it was terribly named, because it is in fact a drawing game! Basically the dealer has a word card, then mixes it up with other word cards and hands them out, so one person has the dealer’s word. Then everybody draws a hint to their word, and everyone guesses whose word matches the dealer’s. The key is subtlety: You want to draw a clue such that only somebody who knows your word (i.e. the dealer) would be able to recognize it from your drawing, because the more people who get it wrong, the more points a correct guess is worth. Case in point, the best play was my wife (who drew a very simple smiling head) and our friend who drew a pyramid. The word was Mona Lisa, and nobody else got it. That’s going to be my go-to example to explain the game now!
It was very fun once we got the idea. It’s cool having a drawing game that goes up to 8 but isn’t really a raucous party game, it’s more think-y and a good opportunity to be clever. Looking forward to more plays!
Red November - You’re gnomes on a submarine and everything is going wrong! Can you last until rescue comes? Well, in this case, no, because the Kraken showed up basically twice in a row. First time we had the Aqualung and Harpoon Gun and shooed it off easy-peasy; second time, we had reshuffled the item deck, and more and more gnomes piled into the item room to dig through the deck to find an Aqualung while more and more of the ship broke and caught on fire. Did we find an Aqualung? No! They were both at the bottom of the deck. Which is pretty hilarious. 6 is too many for this game though, I think 4-5 would be the sweet spot. (Ludicrously, the box says it plays up to 8.)
Magical Athlete - Not new, but who’s going to pass up a chance for a 6-player game of this?
Other new games for next game night:
Remember Our Trip
Sanctuary
Ginkgopolis
I have been on maintenance mode these last two weeks or so.
Which means I played my 3 current faves on rotation:
I also gave my recent acquisition Confusing Lands a few more tries after a confusing initial game. It’s not the best small tile/card layer in my collection. But like Limes it’s one that can serve as variety when I tire of other games.
And since Wednesday I’ve added Red Rising to the mix which is my Fantasy Realms clone of choice. Every game is a new adventure because I have yet to play similar starting hands. The solo is working well, too. A game typically takes me around 30 minutes I think, a bit less when the game is already on the table. I have 6 recent plays and a total of 19 and I am enjoying my plays. Red Rising is also in my 10x10 solo challenge which is performing as I had hoped: bringing games to the table so I can play them enough to really grok them. I wish I had the energy to re-read the books. But it doesn’t matter I enjoy the game even if I don’t remember all the details.
