Your Last Played Game Volume 3

bort · April 13, 2025, 9:15am

Cthulhu: Death May Die Fear of the Unknown X2. The first game went really badly, we weren’t getting anything done (as far as disrupting the ritual), and the first of us died after about an hour. After all the setup, we figured we’d give it another go, and this was a bit more successful. We had one death, but the ritual had been disrupted, so we continued. We gave ourselves relic cards to make it a little easier. And I managed the killing blow, which was very satisfying.

Eternal Decks, of course we had to play this again. We tackled the next stage (B), still at the beginner level. Which is far from being an easy game. There were some points where I thought we were done, but we got through it and managed the win. So satisfying when you’re almost out of cards and about to lose, and then you get an Eternal and a brand new deck of cards to deal with.

Knarr, always fun.

Captbnut · April 13, 2025, 1:55pm

Probably a bit too much communication

GeeBizzle · April 14, 2025, 10:48pm

On the family holiday with the parents and played long shot the dice game a fun roll and write/roll and move/gambling mash up that does get a bit underwhelming as your board becomes filled but is simple and doesn’t overly outstay it’s welcome.

Benkyo · April 15, 2025, 12:38am

Cosmic Encounter three nights running!

We started doing daily family games, with a wall chart to track whose turn it is to choose. I was surprised by the enthusiasm, with only the eldest showing resistance, and Hozumi skipping when too busy or tired.

So we started off easy, with Uno, Monza, Incan Gold being my first three picks, and the kids picking games like Loony Quest, Forbidden Desert, Magical Athlete, Outfoxed!, Dixit, even Hot Potato with a timer I downloaded.

On Saturday, 21 days into the new pattern, I dropped Cosmic Encounter on them, with all the non-encounter cards stripped out, and it went surprisingly well. One of the twins picked it again the next day, and the eldest picked it again yesterday. I especially enjoy letting them trick me when they promise to negotiate then sneak attack.

yashima · April 15, 2025, 6:36am

That sounds awesome and I like your selection of games. I wanted to find Loony Quest for my nephew a while back but somehow didn’t manage.

Maybe I should try Cosmic again on my friends with a reduced card set😉

Benkyo · April 15, 2025, 6:50am

I’m still not sure if it breaks without cards like moebius tubes to recover ships from the warp, and I drew and had to discard an alien whose power was all about scavenging non-encounter cards, and I’m sure there are others that won’t really work, but these issues aren’t bothering anyone yet. Our games are over relatively quickly, before anything can really break down.

lalunaverde · April 16, 2025, 9:55pm

Dominion - what an experience this is when you play it with people who know how to play. Zips pretty fast! Definitely feel slick due to how pure this game is. It doesn’t have the map of Quest for El Dorado or Trains but it shines with its abstract n-dimensional racing game happening inside your head. Why the **** do you wanna play a tedious 2 hour Euro when you can have the same kind of puzzle all packed so densely inside Dominion in just 30 mins?

Compile x2 played it with the Aux 1 expansion Still grand. The new guy had trouble with the interpretation of Plague 3. Some update pack would be great

High Society

For Sale

Haricots - it’s okay.

Spring Cleaning - this… is GOOD!!

GeeBizzle · April 17, 2025, 7:32am

Played Nokosu dice last night seemed to go down well with people getting the concept. Only downside was my wife seemed determined to make me lose my trick bonus every round meaning my score in one of the games was 11 (ooft).

RogerBW · April 17, 2025, 8:18am

In one round I played, everyone made their bids, only to discover that that meant a bonus of zero. That’s a good kind of annoying.

Marx · April 17, 2025, 3:50pm

Played a quick game of War of Whispers.

Man, the game gets max points for style and theme, but the mechanics are somewhat… “lackluster” isn’t quite right, but there is a disconnect between what you want to have happen (backstabbing! Machinations! Wheels within wheels!) and what seems to always happen (one House gets obliterated and everyone dumps them to the lowest possible position).

I used two optional (but should be mandatory) rules: you gain an extra point for every House you still have secret at the end of the game, and each player has a different House in the “best” position at the game start.

The final round saw everyone but me put their agents on the board as Cities for extra points… I was hoping that by maintaining more control of the councils I could punish them for that, but no, not really… it’s really hard to both gain armies and attack with most Houses, so the ebbs and flows of the game are actually pretty slow (which I would usually say is a good thing?).

Anyway. Final scores were pretty close… 36 - 34 - 32 - 29 (me at the bottom), but again, I don’t think it’s really possible for them to not be very close. Maybe instead of secretly assigning everyone a different “best” House, everyone should have a different “worst” House? I dunno. It’s good, but it’s missing something. Maybe the new expansion is what it’s missing. A 5th player would certainly be welcome!

Afterwards we played a quick game of Thunder Road Vendetta, and that was an instant hit with the one player who had never tried before, and pure joy for everyone (including the player who was eliminated… me!). Just a great game. I now own every expansion for it (Devil’s Run and Choppe Shoppe were the last two, and a friend bought them for me for my birthday), but I’m not really sure it needs them except for the ability to play with more people. The game is good at 4, but gosh it sings at 5.

apcshields · April 17, 2025, 4:12pm

I’m slowly coming to the understanding that it’s about the level of the brain-tension I enjoy. Games can allow us to increase that tension to chosen levels—real-life important, brain-demanding decisions often either play out over weeks or are only seconds long, while games let us set fairly arbitrary levels of brain-demand and length-of-problem. I’ve learned that I like high brain-demand but can’t sustain that level continuously for even 30 minutes without discomfort. So spread it out over two hours and give me the resources that I can use to distract myself for periodic breaks, and I’m pretty happy.

SteveB_uk · April 17, 2025, 4:36pm

As far as I can tell, both these are now mandatory rules in the expansion (the cards to choose guaranteed different positions, and points for keeping houses un-revealed).

SteveB_uk · April 17, 2025, 10:14pm

Local pub game night. Played Scout with 5 players which ran very long but I like the game a lot, and then a load of Crokinole. May have convinced the venue owner to buy a board for the pub. Also played Dobble, which instantly broke my brain.

pillbox · April 18, 2025, 2:08am

I have had Endless Winter: Paleoamericans setup on my table for, likely, a month now. But I’m not here to talk about that, because I haven’t played a game of it yet. (Ask me why I’m starting to not like Paul Grogan’s rules videos).

However, I stumbled across a list of Youtube videos that had hit my subscription inbox, but just weren’t, realistically, capable of being fit into my schedule at the time. I’m working back through those now, slowly.

A large number of them, seemingly completely coincidentally, are High Frontier 4 All videos. At the get-go (and even when I added HF4A to my pledge for Pax Viking), I suspected that HF4A was just too heavy to approach; it was an aspirational purchase and one I considered just offloading without playing.

But then I started watching videos; instructional videos, but also playthrough videos. It’s just as I suspected: the “highest”-“weight” strategy board game is really just a system of smaller parts that work together, mostly predictably. The most complex thing about the whole this is that the designer has very fluid “living” rules, where your printed rulebook may vary wildly from the intended rules; and if you go asking “Hey, what changed?” you’ll get a bunch of people on BGG laughing, and then telling you how to use open-source software to compare different print-to-pdf editions of the living rules (because they are hosted on a site where you can’t actually download them).

Well, since Endless Winter is still crowding my table, I popped open the Tabletop Simulator mod (the community one with the added UI components, which I saw featured in some of the videos I watched), and played through a few sun cycles… twice.

But here, again, I find TTS is partly rewarding, but ultimately frustrating. High Frontier is a large play area with sparse components (the map is big, but there’s not much on it; it demands most of the virtual table, but mostly serves to just get in the way).

On the first play, I eventually figured out a plan, but it was almost 40 turns into the 84 turn game I was playing (choosing Core+M0+M1+M2, with futures = 7 sun cycles = 84 turns), and my eventual plan ended up being “go to the moon, and do other things,” which, as it turns out, I could have done years prior, if I had just paid attention.

So, reset and start over. Great, my crew have a built-in dirt thruster that’ll make some things quite a bit easier; but then tragedy strikes and somehow I lose the refinery I had bought and boosted… not sure where it went; maybe the game put it back in the deck – or maybe I never actually bought it! Either way, it caused my plan to crumble. Tracking game-state in TTS can be made easier, but it’s still easy to lose track of things.

I gave up.

Long story short, I’m going to rush to get Endless Winter played and see if I want it to stick around, or if I can list it in the upcoming no-ship math trade; but then High Frontier 4 All will be on my table (possibly for another month before I can get around to playing it).

bort · April 18, 2025, 9:41am

Rebirth, another quick game of this

Test Match, I remember playing this as a wee nipper, don’t think I ever owned it. We played two teams of two with a T20, scores ended up 33 to 16. The bowling is different to what I remember – when I played it there was a long groove that you would roll the ball down. Here it’s a spring loaded action, and you can adjust the height that you can release at. Most of the balls come out as beamers, pretty sure you wouldn’t get away with that in a real game. Batting was difficult, the batsman has a trigger, and it was hard to get any real force into the shot. Most of the scoring was from behind the batsman. A fun diversion, and a pleasant trip down memory lane.

Eternal Decks, our first game at 4p, and our first at standard mode (Stage A). So we had one new player, but it’s not hard to explain. We were soooooo close to winning, two of us were trying to figure how to get the 159 jewel combo (which would have given us our last star). Just couldn’t get the 1 – we needed to get another Eternal for that. Still a very enjoyable game, and it was fun to introduce it to a new player.

Cthulhu: Death May Die – Fear of the Unknown, another run at episode 1. It’s more fun at 4p, so that was cool. I disrupted the ritual myself, ending up in the space with Azerthoth, 2 cultists, and a monster (I had run through them, no stealth). Somehow I managed to survive them all, but was nearly dead. Figured I was done for, so just unloaded on the Elder One, and rolled pretty badly, but had no rerolls to use. We thought we had lost by the thinnest of margins (a single health point), but the last player realised he had misplayed his insanity card and should have done more damage. So we pulled off the win! Exciting, as games of DMD often are.

Come Sail Away, first play. You are on a cruise ship, trying to send passengers to their preferred tile. It’s a mancala mechanism. So you have a choice of two cards, each of which show from two to four passengers in various colours. You can play a card either from left to right or from right to left. You can start in any space you want, and then drop off one passenger per tile, without doubling back. You each work on your own tableau of tiles, with five cabin tiles showing the various colours. There are various facility tiles, but for the first game they recommend the first five numbered tiles. Cabin tiles are easy, they show three spaces in each colour. Facilities are different, they have their own rules, like placing two pairs of different colours. As you fill the tiles, they are turned over to reveal game end points. And now you can’t use that tile, or even move through it (well, you can move through it but that passenger will join the disgruntled passenger tile, worth negative points. On each card you play, there is a luggage icon on one of the figures shown – if you can drop that passenger off in a cabin tile, you move up on the luggage track, which gives you various abilities (allowing you to place more passengers) and eventually end game victory points. It’s a pretty quick game, only 12 rounds. Good fun! Pretty much MPS (Multiplayer Solitaire). Although from the two cards you get, you’ll play one and pass the other to the player on your left. So I guess you can try and dump cards that may be less useful for them.

lalunaverde · April 19, 2025, 11:09pm

Splendour: Duel

Cyclades - people want to play it and so I brought it again. I have included the Creatures and Heroes miniature pack that I bought separately

Race for the Galaxy + Gathering Storm + Rebel vs Imperium I prefer Chudyk’s nowadays, but this is still solid

Calimala - reminder on what a solid game this is.

Sounds Fishy

Heisse Ware - prefer this over Sheriff of Nottingham

Modern Art

mistercrayon · April 20, 2025, 9:02pm

Played a few games of Change Horses with my sister.

It’s a 2-5 player racing game with a hidden loyalty to one of the horses. Everyone plays cards to the board with the horses moving step based on the number cards played of that colour by all the players. The twist to movement is that if an even number of cards are visible then that colour doesn’t move at all.

You also want your horse to come last.

Interestingly on BGG there is a vague undercurrent that perhaps for a hidden loyalty game it works most well at 2 (for various reason)

If I was going to put a hypothesis for this I think it’s because while the loyalty does play a part actually your decisions in the whole game are important and at the end you can see how your choices have lead to your ruin.

yashima · April 21, 2025, 9:54am

Finally some games. We visited friends for a 2 day Easter-game-retreat

Dropolter was quite the success. I did not exactly expect our friends to enjoy but they did. Also suprising despite having had a nice aperitif, I won. It helps taking your time and snatching up bells and NOT losing them again.

A full game of Terraforming Mars on the extra-long Amazonis map with 5 players and ALL the expansions. Someone threw Deimos on my head and likely cost me a possible victory. Parliament only managed to serve up one crisis after another and so once again as usual I could not guide Phobolog (orwhatevertheyarecalled) to their deserved victory. But it was a good game and it was my first time playing multiplayer with all expansions.

I know why I love this game so much. It was just a nice adventure. With all the expansions and the extra long map it felt like there was a lot of exploration possible. Most of us came in quite close in scores except for my partner who lagged behind by about 10 points. But he did suprisingly well considering he has played this game maybe 3 or 4 times and the rest of us dozens (I am well over 100 solos on the app alone). He says it helped that he went inside during scoring and didn’t learn how he scored at all. He is usually super frustrated when he learns how badly he did compared to others and is then unwilling to consider the mitigating factors so maybe we just need to do exactly that: score without him.

After dinner, I first brought out Link City. It was new to only one player at the table and our first city we managed a pretty good score of 41. We played 3 subsequent games across both days and scored abysmally. In 2 games we didn’t even manage to crack the 30 point winning condition. But it is fun even when losing. The discussions where to build or where something should be built… great. Highly recommend this if you are in the market for a low-rules, quick, cooperative experience that helps start or close a game night. Note: The youngest person we played with was 13 at the time and the age-gap showed clearly in that game.

Next up: So Clover. Again one of the people did not know or remember the game. It was a good success as on all previous occasions. We all agree that Just One is just a bit better but this is the close runner-up from the Repos Line of partygames. Everyone was quite engaged, swearing about difficult clues, laughing about misread words… good times. Was also played on both days.

For the best times however… I brought out The Gang. I wasn’t sure about this one. I had played it with my partner and one of the family before but I had my doubts about it because poker and cooperative games felt so out of their usual fare. To my huge surprise it was the biggest success story of the week-end. We only play hand after hand with just the chips and a deck of cards (my partner brought one from our collection for the purpose). We never played with the Sonderkarten or the actual heist part of the game yet, because we enjoying just playing hands and learning to read each other so much. We had some incredible rounds where we managed to sort a bunch of High-Cards and had some wibbly wobbly back and forth between what turned out to be absolutely identical hands… this is greatness. Games that cause high-fives at the table are the very best.

On day 2 after some rounds of the Gang with 6 players, everyone was keen to see if we learned anything about Texas Hold’em we then brought out some colored dice to use as money and played a few rounds of actual poker. I lost big time to a bluff and then went all in on a hunch that wasn’t a bluff. Oh well… I’ll spare you the analysis. But fun was had and hitting a 2-8 Full House on the flop made the daughter’s night.

For the final game I asked if they were willing to try Zoo Vadis which has languished for almost a year on my unplayed shelf. Unsurprisingly I had to read or rather translate the rules because despite reading them several times before hand without being able to actually play I had a hard time retaining them. But luckily this is a game of few rules and since I had managed to bring 3 previous games that have almost no rules at all, teaching a new one from the manual was acceptable. I more or less handed my partner the victory on a silver platter when I tried to help him out so he wasn’t too frustrated. But it’s okay. One player tried to block the easy routes up and then failed to make any deals with other players and never made it to the star exhibition. He was quite frustrated by the game. Overall I think this was the wrong group to play with. They have played negotiation games before (notably lots of Bohnanza and they are the only ones still playing Catan) but this is too freestyle and doesn’t really allow for any unengaged strategies. Still: I enjoyed it but I now realize except for it being a very pretty game, I wouldn’t have needed it in my collection. Now that I have it, it stays.

I know that a lot of you here like it. And I wish I was playing at tables more regularly where Zoo Vadis was as smashing a hit as The Gang. But I am not playing at these tables. And the table that might enjoy it more is now once again fixated on Robo Rally. On a sidenote: I saw a first edition on the shelves this week-end

bort · April 21, 2025, 10:15am

I feel like I’m the only person who doesn’t like The Gang. I love the idea of it, it’s easy to play, but it just seems like we’re trying to rank our shitty pairs.Even when we get it right it doesn’t seem very exciting.

yashima · April 21, 2025, 12:22pm

Sometimes games just work for a group and sometimes they don’t. We find it quite exciting to sort our shitty hands. My partner loves Texas Hold’em that surely helps.

I can’t quite tell you what it is. First the excitement of getting a new hand that is just like actual poker. Seeing what comes up in the flop, still same… but minus the bluffing and chip hoarding I am so bad at in actual poker. You simply get to play every hand. It’s fun. (It certainly helps that I have made a return to Balatro recently and have played a ton of that on my tablet)

Playing with six figuring out why the hell your holding the 6-star chip with your unsuited Queen plus 4 hand… is just funny? I think this game is way more difficult and way more fun to play with a full complement of six when you just have to deal with “apparently I have the best hand”.
Situations where someone consistently grabs the 1-star or 2-star until the final card comes up and suddenly they quickly grab the 6-star… because they hit the street at last… look around seeing someone look super-smug, realizing the other player got a Flush and quickly switching to the 5-star…
maybe we’re playing it wrong but there is a certain magic to flip-flopping chips with someone else for 4 chips only to realize you both hold Ace and Four. One time this happened, the other player said to me “I really think our hands must be very close together” and, while the others were still figuring out the 4 lower chips, we showed each other our hands and fell over laughing.
on one hand I hit the triple on the last card and I had been on the 5 star chip before because both me and the player next to me knew he had the higher pair from the way things had … developed. I couldn’t be 100% sure that he didn’t have something better than a pair but we looked at each other for 5 seconds and then I grabbed the 6 star chip from him. That was just such a good moment.

And The Gang has provided these moments in plenty at both “tables” we brought it to consistently. We’ve always played at high player-counts either 5 or 6. It is harder but more fun.

This is on a smaller scale what Hana-Bi does. The pay-off is smaller but you can hit the high more often because a round plays so much faster.
And it is very similar to The Mind as well. How long do you wait before grabbing that 5-star?

And it takes maybe a dozen hands for a group to find their communication improve. And then sorting 3 hands in a row perfectly only to hilariously mix it up on the next one. This game needs you to play a lot of hands though. On a fresh table the first few hands are … meh.

I highly recommend playing with max player-count and just playing hand after hand and ignoring the heist thing We might try some of the Sonderkarten if we ever get bored of just sorting bad hands (because really most hands are terrible and so many rounds end with just high cards or at best pairs).