Yesterday got to play Agent Avenue with my wife. We got in five games. I won the first two and she won the second two, so we had a tie breaker game which she won.
Obviously she knows me too well…
8 Likes
Cyclades - Five player game, classic, great fun. Still not interested in trying the new fancy edition. I refuse to accept it’s any better (it might be better, I’m just stubborn).
Dominion - Random pick of kingdom cards which created a very mean difficult game. Flipping love Dominion.
Qwinto - What a solid little roll and write. Been almost a year since we played it last, threw it in the bag to take to along to our local board game cafe today and fitted in a game with our final 15 mins left on the table.
10 Likes
World Wonders: This was my 3rd game I believe. I have already put both the big expansions on my wishlist. I can’t believe I missed out on this before.
Harmonies: I have been playing with the new mini expansion (new animals) but so far haven’t been able to include any in my 2 games.
- I have also had a pretty good run of Small Fjords
- A bunch of Sprawlopolis and Naturopolis
- Some Gentle Rain
- One 2 handed learning game of Toy Battle
At moment though my bandwidth for games is tiny. They are helping me deal with the stress though those tiny solos. I am so looking forward to feeling up to some bigger games again.
11 Likes
Played Skara Brae for the first time in Orkney.
It’s good. The simultaneous play is a nice feature and the dynamic between wanting stuff and creating waste is really interesting. It’s a good game just not sure yet if it will survive the impending kull. Which makes me sad.
Plus we get the bonus of going to Skara Brae tomorrow.
9 Likes
Look at these player colours! The gold one is really nice in person with a metallic-ish finish:
Played some Finspan for the first time. It was great, I think it might be better than Wingspan. Feels a bit like you have no control over what fish you get, which is a little weird, but the mechanics for hatching young fish and creating schools are a weird little layer on top of a nice simple engine builder. Will try again 2 player and see if it still comes out as strong.
8 Likes
Took out New York Zoo for the first time in… two years? Thereabouts. What a lovely, lovely game. A bit fiddly (the birth rules take a minute to fully grok, and it’s just a lot of small components to manipulate), but the game is crunchy and the decision space is super cool.
5 Likes
This weekend’s game session found me wanting something futuristic and space-y but not having too much time I settled on a quick solo of Tiny Epic Galaxies. To refresh my memory I choose the Easy Rogue empire as my opponent, and it proved pretty easy in the end as I was able to advance my fleet and dice pool pretty well whereas the Rogue rolls didn’t help their cause much and their special power wasn’t hurting my resources too much either. I collected a couple of big planets mid game and won with a final score of 22 to 5, so extremely comfortable. May try again midweek with the hard difficulty opponent, but I recall I defeated those forces fairly easily the last time I played it too. Lovely quick game though.
6 Likes
I haven’t played in ages, but I liked Tiny Epic Galaxies. I did find that the only difficulty setting that produced any challenge was the maximum “Epic” level, but that turned out to be an enjoyable challenge. You can also use the manual’s suggestion of giving the enemy a single re-roll of each unusable die, which would make all settings harder.
3 Likes
I was playing with the enemy having a roll for useless dice - but this didn’t help them. The planet cards got into a loop of big cultural planets and their dice kept rolling for energy resources. Dem’s the breaks, I think. The dice in this game often seem to favour me, unlike in, say, Final Girl where I often get shafted by my rolls.
3 Likes
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Container (3p) using luxury containers, trucking companies, and the off-shore bank. We played the ‘short game’ rules (with a smaller pool of containers in the game, meaning you’ll exhaust two colours sooner). We’d used the luxury containers last time as well, but the other two elements were new.
The off-shore bank in particular is another fine way to mess with your brain, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Both that and the trucking companies introduce a ‘slow auction’ to the game, whereby you can place a bid as one of your two actions on your turn, and you win the auction if no one else had outbid you before it’s your turn again. With trucking companies, you’re bidding for ownership of the trucks which transport containers from the factories to the warehouses, such that when a player purchases containers from a factory the owner of the trucks at that factory gets paid for the transport. With the offshore island, there are three lots of money and three lots of containers, and the auction can be for any one of those six lots. If containers are being auctioned, you bid money. If money is being auctioned, you bid containers. The winning bid is then distributed amongst the lots of its type, making each one more desirable. Loan interest payments are also paid to the offshore bank as another way of boosting its value. Containers acquired this way can be left on the offshore island for points at the end of the game, or shipped to Container Island.
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Saboteur (5p). Mostly the classic game, with just the “greedy dwarf” added (who is rather like the saboteur in practice – if they get the gold then no one else does, and if they don’t then they get nothing).
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Rumble Nation (4p). My second time playing this dice-chucking area-control filler, and it’s good fun. Some light strategy, a bunch of luck, a handful of one-time special powers, a fun scoring process, and it’s all over in a jiffy. Not a deep game by any stretch, but a really nice one to fill a little bit of extra time with.
I won all three games! 
Somehow I am two-for-two in Container. I think the scores were $36, $42, $47. I spent almost the entire game with only two containers on the island (very different to the 20+ I ended up with the first time :), and had the good fortune of one of the other players shipping a set of exactly the three colours I didn’t already have towards the end of the game. I barely won that bid ($8 vs $7) and that gave me the full set of colours worth $30 (which was $20 more than the two containers I’d had until then were worth).
Saboteur was just dumb luck, with me being gifted the final space to the gold in the first two rounds. The saboteur actually won the third round, but ended with 5 gold to my 6.
Rumble Nation obviously had a ton of luck as well, but I managed to take good advantage of my personal unique ability in order to control a central space which then led to me controlling a bunch of other valuable spaces later in the sequence, due to my getting reinforcements all over the place. I scored 37 points, which felt like a very good total with four players, when the sum of all the best point tokens on the whole map is 77.
Definitely my night! :).
9 Likes
Last night at Thirsty Meeples in Oxford.
After we tried Hot Streak last month, they’d got in the other new chaotic race game Magical Athlete so we gave that a go. Quite fun; I enjoyed it more than Hot Streak because there was actually something to do during the roll-and-move race phase rather than just waiting for the slot machine to stop spinning. But clearly it would be better with more people (the interaction between powers was the most enjoyable bit) and probably with drunker or more excited people.
(The Mouth wins. The Mouth always wins.)
Then on to what turned out to be another chaotic race game, DC Breakout: Arkham Asylum. The theme of “escape from the asylum” is almost entirely ignored: you take two DC universe villains (they may have made some up, but I’m not going to look up whether “Clock King” and “Condiment King” are canonical). (Yes I am. They are.) Then you put their two standees on the same base, and you have their two special powers to use in the subsequent roll-and-move race.
So in fact it’s very like Magical Athlete, though the track is quite dull: just circles, triangles and squares (from a shuffled set of ten tiles), so that specific powers can say things like “skip all circles this move” or “if you land on a triangle, move two further”. There are also gadget spots; you can cut short your move to land on one, and then get a random one-use power. After the first phase of the race, you get to the “Armoury”: receive more gadgets depending on finishing order, and choose two more of your villains to team up for the second phase.
It makes no sense at all as an actual escape from an actual asylum (except perhaps that everyone is doing what the voices in their head tell them) and I’d love to see a bit more theming of the setting, but considered purely as an abstract game it’s probably my favourite of the three chaotic race games I’ve tried recently.
On to party game Red or Yellow of which the rules go to very great lengths to tell you how wild and wacky it is, which didn’t sit well with cynical old us. The actual game: draw a card with two things on it (e.g. a snake with a knife in its jaws, and a snake with a knife in its tail). Secretly choose one of these things (I assumed “which you think is better”, but it’s not stated). Then place your betting token: in front of you if you think you’ll be the only person to have chosen your option, in the middle of the table if you think it’ll be unanimous, or in front of another player if you think you’ll agree with them but it won’t be unanimous. 1 point for a correct guess, 2 if unanimous, then go on to the next card, first to ten points wins.
Which again is fine in a party setting but to me a good party game is exemplified by something like Flip 7 which is also fun in a small group of sober people.
Finally for the night old favourite Tiny Epic Galaxies. We don’t play this often enough to remember the rules from game to game, and I don’t think any of us likes it enough actually to buy it, but we always have a good time, and so we did this time. (Just one more turn and I’d have had it…)
12 Likes
I played a 2-handed learning game of Fantastique. This plays 2-5 but my suggestion would be to play with a minimum of 3 players.
Observations:
- the cards are very beautiful
- the shape is irrelevant unless you are one of those people who need to sort all the cards right side up after shuffling them … but it’s thematic. so maybe all cards should be trapeze form
There are cards from 1 to 8, i am assuming more 1s than 8s but I haven’t checked
Deal 10 cards to each player.
7 Hands total are played
Before each hand set up 5 stacks of cards: draw from the deck and sort each number into stack for that number, draw until a 5th stack is formed. The last stack always has a single card.
On their turn, everyone plays a unique “fan” : play any number of cards of the same numbered card just don’t play an identical fan as anyone else has already played (same number of cards of the same card). The person with the most cards played wins the hand → on a draw, the higher number wins. The first place gets the gold medal, second place gets a silver medal (no special rules for 2, so play with 3) and with 5 players there is also a bronze medal.
The person who played the highest number gets to choose first from the card stacks setup before the hand and so on.
After everyone has chosen a stack, discard the leftover stacks if playing with less than 5 people.
Set up new card stacks for the next hand
The person who won the gold medal starts the new hand.
After the final hand there is one more step: there are 6 separate game goals you can set. One of these is: who has the most 1,2,3s on their hand after the final hand → whoever wins that overarching goal gets another 20 points, second place gets 10.
I hope I explained it well enough. It does not seem complicated but at two is somewhat deterministic. Both my hands always had to choose between playing a high number to get first choice or playing more cards to win a medal and it was a total ping-pong… neither hand was able to gain a definite advantage during the game (to be fair it is difficult when you see the other players cards because the other player is you as well) and left-hand won by virtue of having decided on the first round that gaining first choice was worth more than the first medal (medals go up in value each turn).
10 Likes
Actually got some gaming in today! Very exciting stuff.
Boss Fighter QR, first play. Ok, if you’re against app driven games this one is not for you. Each player chooses a character (from four) and a class (again, from four), and then (as the title suggests) you go and fight a boss. You play your card by holding it up to the camera on the app. You can attack (of course), support a previously played attack, protect (yourself or another), and other things. At the start of the round you get to see what damage the boss will do, so you’ve got the round to hopefully prevent that from happening. It all works pretty well, all the damage is done by the app. Had a good time with this, we got thru the first two bosses (ok, the first one is just a tutorial).
Light Speed Arena, first play. Another game with an app. There was a earlier version of the game where you have to do all the damage calculations yourself, but the app is so much easier. It’s a timed game, when the timer goes off you pick your next ship card and place it on the game area (you mark out the dimensions). Each ship has an initiative value, which is when they will fire. The later they play, the better the damage, but you run the risk of having been destroyed before it gets to attack. You get points for doing damage to other ships and other bases. After all the ships have been placed, you take a picture of the game area, and then it runs through what happens. Works really well. The time is pretty short to place ships, so you cant spend too long thinking about it. Loved it! And you can play a game in 5-10 minutes. No pics, no time!
Animal Rescue Team, first play. From the designer of Pandemic (Matt Leacock. It’s apparently similar to Thunderbirds, which I have not played. As the title suggests, you have to travel around rescuing various animals, from mice up to horses. Each animal has it’s own size, so you need to have a vehicle capable of taking it. You have to finish missions – if the time marker reaches an unfinished mission, you lose. There are also rescue cards that are added after each players turn. The rescue cards shuffle down, and if an unfinished card gets shuffled off – you’ve lost. To make a rescue, you need to roll against the marked difficulty. You can improve your chance of a rescue by including the correct specialist, or having the required items. There’s a bit to think about. We lost eventually.
And dropped some games at a local buy/sell meetup in the morning, and sold half of them, which was a good result. Didn’t get to see what games were up for sale, but that’s probably for the best, I have too many games.
6 Likes
Ofrenda. It’s a puzzle game very much in the Calico mould, where you’re trying to place each card so that it satisfies the constraints of all of the surrounding cards. In this game you’re creating an altar with offerings to your deceased relatives and, like figuring out the seating arrangements at a Día de los Muertos themed wedding, you’re just trying to make all of their spirits happy so that they will visit you.
The portraits are placed on their dim “unlit” side, and flipped to their colourful “lit” side if their wishes are met. Candles are also placed amidst the portraits and, like the portraits, each candle has its own requirement for lighting it. Marigolds are the last thing you’ll be adding to the altar, and these are also a form of currency in the game when selecting which cards and candles you wish to acquire from the four which are available at any given time.
At the end of the game the unlit things score no points, and the lit things score points based on how many other lit things they are adjacent to.
This was my first solo play, and I really enjoyed it. The cards came out very nicely for me at the end, such that I finished up with only three portraits and two candles unlit, which seems to be a very successful ofrenda. A lovely theme for a lovely puzzle.
Edit: Ooh, I did not score 110 points in that game. I misinterpreted one of the constraints as meaning “at least one adjacent card” when it actually means “all adjacent cards”! That’s less easy :). I believe I actually scored 86 points, with two fewer portraits lit. That’s two rankings lower than I thought I’d managed (which does seem more sensible for a first game :).
6 Likes
El Grande
Propolis
Earth - playing this in real life only confirmed what I thought of on my online game. It’s a meh game in a saturated genre.
HOT STREAK!!!
Camel Up Cards
Puerto Rico - played with the Expansion #2. I didn’t like it. It’s awful.
Templar’s Journey - old school game from Queen Games. Decent with plenty of interactions
Container - glad to play this again. We played base game only with the offshore bank and it solidifying my opinion that the offshore bank made the game less interesting. It’s basically a cushion for players that softens the sharp edges that makes Container really good.
Lotus - awful
DNUP
For Sale
Compile 1 + 2 - wooooo!! I played Compile with Main 2’s protocols. Amazing game!!
Condottiere - I forgot to take a photo!! The old design is so pretty
Hanami - pretty game with Knizian gameplay. So it works as a game I can bring and show to everyone. Highly prefer this over Ra
Rear Window - friend said he prefer this over Mysterium. He is wrong. We won by Day 3.
The Estates - perhaps the most exhilarating game this week of playing. Top 10 material. It’s as great as Chicago Express and Bridges of Shangri-La
8 Likes
Not going to argue with you of course, but for me it’s the one huge deck game (or Turbo CBTB) I’ve actually enjoyed (edit: enough to buy). Definitely face to face only, though.
5 Likes
I can see why. It was light weight so i wasnt whining throughout the game. It’s just incumbency bias when i have played TFM and and Race for the Galaxy first
5 Likes
Damn. That is such a perfect phrase for this effect (affect? Stupid English).
I am going to remember that, thank you for introducing it to me!
4 Likes
My 130-point rocky lizard zoo! Which had to close because everyone went to my wife’s 137-point monkey zoo instead.
10 Likes
Another short gaming session over the weekend saw a reminder solo game of The Castles of Burgundy, the 2019 edition using the solo rules there trying to complete my duchy within 25 rounds. Unsurprisingly I got nowhere close to it, although I’ve only come near to success once with it so wasn’t expecting too much. Unfortunate coincidence with the white dice rolls to start the first three phases removed those mines from the game so victory quickly became highly improbable but I ploughed on. I had some nice monastery tiles, a nice big cattle farm and help from workers but couldn’t connect to the last large area of my duchy board until the final phase. Not a great attempt but a game I enjoy and so will probably get in another run at it one night this week to see if I can do better.
4 Likes