What rules do you play Saboteur with? I picked up a copy and was having a look online and it seems there are numerous variants, with many people saying their rules are the best.
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Donāt know, it was my first time playing. This is the gnome miners Saboteur, we played 4 players with only 1 traitor card.
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Thirsty Meeples Oxford last night.
We started with Knizia classic High Society, in its latest Allplay edition. Youāre auctioning cards and paying for them with fixed denominations of cash. That provides a synthetic friction which is the sort of puzzle one could get oneās teeth into, but I think we all found it hard to love. (I wonder how the same group would feel about For Sale, but itās not in the Thirsty Meeples library.)
Next Switch & Signal, which I remember as a big hotness during the early days of the pandemic. Itās multi-player only by courtesy, but it felt like a very enjoyable optimisation puzzle (you have to collect eight cargo cubes from various cities and deliver them to a destionation, but you have to change points and set signals to allow them to move as you wish, and the actual movement is biased (black trains move faster than brown move faster than grey) but random within that. Also the difficulty was such that on a first play we neither beat the puzzle nor found it completely hopeless. I find myself very tempted to buy this.
Finally, Tax the Rich, an Essen hotness from last year. And I fear we all found it sufficiently like Bridge (even though two of us have never played Bridge) to hold little interest. Great theme, but thereās only one place the theme matters, and you could do that just as well in any trick-taking game by saying āif all the cards in your hand are 3 or below, declare a revolution, lay out your hand, and all the card values are reversedā. I did quite like the art though.
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Played some games recently, Great Western Trail +Rails to the North (amazing) plus some others Iāve forgotten about, but the one I want to ask about is Western Legends. Bought it 2nd hand at Airecon because itās intrigued me for ages. Love the idea of a western sandbox. Foolishly then went online to buy some expansions whilst I waited to get it played.
Then the play. I enjoyed it, kind of, but overall felt massively disappointed. I expected loads of jostling and interaction, and there was none. I tried to arrest someone, but realised I had no justice points so couldnāt. I got the rules wrong on one thing which didnāt help, but the thing that killed it most was the text.
I understand that itās a narrative game, but in my mind, thatās an emergent narrative coming from the mechanics. Instead there was a whole lot of reading of things, which we just skipped over. I think thatās killed it for me. A pity, but an educational one.
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Got Metal Gear Solid to the table this evening. Mission 3 this time, first time having a second character to work with: Meryl.
Started out well, did the (what I thought was bonus) objective of defeating 12 guards while in the holding cells, then got Snake and Meryl to the elevator and moved to the Barracks zone. Here an unlucky noise roll got a guard alerted, who then ran into Meryl on the way to finding Snake and shot her, and the alert brought another guard but they couldnāt shoot through the first guy.
Took them out and moved as far away as I could, but reinforcements showed up and Snake got shot up and ran out of health.
It was at this point I looked at the rules again and saw victory conditions were to eliminate the 12 guards OR escape through the barracks. So I had won 15-20 minutes earlier!
Still getting the rules down for this. I wish the rulebook had a brief blurb about how your attention tokens get removed so that I wouldnāt fruitlessly look for it every time I pull the game out (it happens after a guard reaches them and you do whatever the Guard Reaction card says to do). I did mess up one attack with Meryl, where I later realized I did not have line of sight to the target, but it was a minor mistake and would not have changed the outcome.
Up next, the first boss battle!
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I still havenāt played my Metal Gear Solid. 
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Whitehall Mysteries - I was Jack and I got away with it 
Chartered - reimplementation of Big Boss. The plastic buildings are very nice but alas, it is inferior to Acquire
Paperback
Scythe
Puerto Rico 100% slave-free edition - classic game. Easily prefer this over them 2 hour modern Euros.
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Small Fjords ā a few more games of this. In this last one I might have gotten within 2 points of the maximum possible score had I known just how well the tile draw was ultimately going to go. I ended up with 41 out of a possible 47, but Iād made a sub-optimal play at one point in order to get pieces down sooner rather than later which probably cost me 4, as Iād had still several tiles left to draw after Iād placed all the cubes I could. The snaking coastline which emerged in this game kept the map pleasingly compact!
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Regicide ā I took a couple of new decks for a spin, and managed a gold victory in both games :).
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Some of those landscapes are so nice. I like how they emerge. my faves are when i get to place a village on the coast and get the opposing coastline directly adjacent. they can walk itās just very far.
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Now I had to.
I played a bit too conservative here. 43 points. At least one village has to go on a coast tile for a perfect score I think.
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I have reached 1000+ ELO on Rapid 10 min Chess
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Itās been a while since I had Artengarten on the table. This one didnāt score very high but it was very satisfying to have 3 animal pairs and complete all conservation goals.
Also: A Gentle Rain, Small Fjords, Trailblazers remain regulars.
I have played 2 games of Recall but am not ready to give a longer impression. I like it very much though and it has most excellent rules retention. Iāll hopefully find time on the upcoming 4 day weekend to play again and be more elaborate
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Had a playthrough of Brass Birmingham a couple days ago. It was good! It continues to be very good. I still havenāt reached the level of āStrategyā for the game, but I have reached a point that I can do something useful on almost every one of my turns.
I lost, coincidentally. Not sure why. Probably in no way related to that last sentence there. Thatās just a fluke.
After that we played a game of Dune Imperium Uprising, which I also did very badly at. But thatās okay! One of my regulars commented on not knowing what about Uprising makes it superior to vanilla Dune Imperium, and I think heās curious enough that next time Iāll try to play both back-to-back, see how it goes. I recall liking regular before getting Uprisingā¦ but I havenāt played it since. Gotta fix that.
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A really busy but enjoyable weekend left little time for my gaming challenge, so I managed to find time on Sunday afternoon for a well-known and relatively-quick favourite: original Pandemic. Why not indeed: I mean, itās not as if such events could happen. ā¦ Again. ā¦ Often? Oh? Ah.
A solo four-hander as the Operation Expert, Dispatcher, Researcher and Scientist prepared to cure the spreading disease, starting with the hotspots in Chennai and Karachi - making the black disease to be excessive cricket fanaticism - and Essen - so naturally the blue disease was obsessive boardgame acquisition. I managed to cure the yellow disease first thanks largely to a lucky draw of cards for the Scientist, for which my rapid success was soon punished by the first epidemic centring in Ho Chi Min City followed immediately by its reinfection and the first outbreak. Some clever manoeuvring in the Middle East and Southern Asia led to curing the black disease next, and this was again immediately followed by the second epidemic in Los Angeles - and again it resulted in an immediate outbreak there. Some terrible shuffling on my behalf, clearly. A build up of the red disease made that the next focus, and the Dispatcher and Scientist greatly helped there by positioning other team members around the research station in Bangkok. Annoyingly/unluckily, the fourth epidemic - in Santiago - was also immediately drawn for infection causing another outbreak while I fretted to work out how to cure the final disease, blue, although applying the Resilient Population event card to Essen helped quell any further strife in northern Europe. As the deck approached the last few cards, and while struggling to get the Scientist close to other team members, a fantastic lucky card draw for the Dispatcher left him with 5 blue cards and the final cure for a closer win that Iād hoped for.
A fun game and more of a challenge than usual I found, possibly due to unlucky infection draws and some phaffing the team around the board to meet up and letting too many cities hover close to outbreaks. Iāve two more Pandemics for later in the year - my favourite Iberia, and Fall of Rome - but will space them out a bit, possibly for other manic weekends.
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Got Cubitos back to the table after quite a while. Is a good game but like a lot of games we think it would benefit from regular play to get used to the dice powers. Every time we play it it feels like a refresher and then goes back on the shelf as we rotate into other games. Maybe we should focus on a few repeat plays over the coming weeks!
Also played a couple of lighter bits with the ever fun Spots and an older game called Santo Domingo which is effectively the visual sister game to Port Royal. Quite different mechanically to PR though. Every player gets the same hand of the eight cards each with different powers to gain points, goods or trade goods for points and a few other bits. Every round each player chooses one card to play with all then being revealed and triggering in numeric order with duplicate cards firing at the same time. Points and goods are generally taken from a central pool with a certain amount available each round, so you have to be fairly clever in card choice so thereās likely to be points and goods left in the supply when your card triggers, also trying to remember who has played what so far etc. Itās pretty neat and tidy stuff, quite fun.
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Welcome to the forum @browntownlad !
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Welcome to the forum!
I only played Spots once but really enjoyed it. Light and fun!
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Tournament at Avalon - Was skating by the first couple rounds. Round three I got my shit fully rocked, dropping 235 points at once. Then, to add insult to injury, someone used a godsend to steal my Lancelot power (canāt take shame injury) at the same time someone elseās godsend doubled how much shame injury you get. So there was really no coming back from that one!
Daybreak - A pretty trivial affair because the first global project we got, you could tuck any cards under it and then discard them to reduce crisis effects for everyone. OP in a 4-player game I think.
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Welcome to the forums! Great to have ya.
I played a string of Cubitos to try some of the other maps and dice suggestionsā¦ I was very unimpressed by Scenario 2, but Scenario 3 was almost as good as the initial one. Havenāt tried the others yet, but I do love the game.
I love Spots, just nice and light and generally pretty quick.
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Hi @browntownlad! Lovely to meet ya!
A couple of days ago Maryse (for our new member, thatās my wife, sheās kicking cancerās ass at the moment and she usually, USUALLY kicks mine at games).
This was one of those times, where she beat me at Ark Nova 54-25. Despite the frankly ridiculous scores, the game was actually really tight until it ended. It was great!
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