Manilla is getting the Playte treatment!
National Economy does look good, English language copies are available for ~£45 shipped direct from the publisher. Tempted but can’t quite pull the trigger.
3 Likes
More info on National Economy rather than just my usual one-liners:
It’s standard worker placement where you place workers on those worker spot cards. Then you do the action. You’ve played Agricola and co, you’ve seen it before.
The twist with NatEcon is that the money supply on the “budget box” is limited and when you are extracting cash from the “budget box” you can only get it if the box has enough money. So if the action says “discard 2 cards and get $12 from the budget” you need to make sure the budget has enough. if it’s less, you can’t do the action. So the actions to get money are limited by the money supply.
The money supply is determined by how many workers are there in play from all players because you pay their wages every round and the wages all go to the “budget box” - which I guess abstracts the aggregate disposable income of society, which players then can use on worker spots. So if players keep getting new workers, the money in the budget box expands more and the worker spots that takes money from the budget box becomes more lucrative.
But then you’re a clever person and thought: hang on, if the money supply is fixed and you keep expanding the population, then the ratio skews towards money versus workers. There won’t be enough money in the supply to cover their wages (and their wages increases every round!). That’s where the buildings come in. Buildings you built using cards as payment (not money) and each has a monetary value. These buildings are personal worker spots in your own tableau. And also, you can sell them (for their monetary value) to pay the wages of your workers, which expands the money supply. Sold buildings are then placed in the middle to become common worker spots.
So the cycle keeps going. Players want to gain money and building cards to pay for wages. Players want to build buildings to gain more money and personal worker spots. And then use these workers to gain money and building cards to pay for wages.
6 Likes
This weekend’s game, postponed from the previous weekend, was a much welcome return to the table to Obsession with a solo standard-length game of the House of York taking on the Fitzherberts, an intermediate-difficulty opponent.
My initial objectives prompted a strategy of expanding my Estate facilities, especially as the Fitzherbert estate score was low throughout the game. The first season was spent building my Essentials score for the theme and flipping some of my basic activities including preparing for the upcoming village fairs, and the season ended with a tie on Essentials facilities. Luckily, both seasons two and three rewarded my Estates score and, with an added objective of acquiring the French Garden which was in the available market, I pushed towards building those features out to give me a comfortable advantage going into the final season. The game ended with me picking up a few staff to round out other objectives and, while sadly I couldn’t host some of my larger activities, the final theme of Service was another strong one for the York house. A strong final score of 163 points through meeting some great objectives was pleasing, although I couldn’t quite maximise my reputation to complete the final objective, and resulted in a very comfortable victory over the Fitzherbert’s score of 103 to 132 points, depending on how one choses to add points for buildings/monuments they acquired.
Another fabulous game with a great theme and not too complex, at least as a solo.
10 Likes
Two games of Wondrous Creatures in the book, it plays exactly how I thought it would and I love it. Incredible fun, this has real potential of making it into my top 5.
Shockingly, I lost both games! 
The first, when Maryse was dead tired, was close (8 points). The second, the following afternoon, was more emphatic (40 points).
6 Likes
Had a friend round for some 2-player games yesterday. Hopefully going to make it a regular thing.
Sea Salt & Paper - First time playing. Screwed up by trying a “last chance” call when I had a mermaid, thinking I’d score a nice bonus. Did the same thing a couple of rounds later and lost by a lot.
Roam - Quite a chill game. Really should try it with more players some time to see if it gets more interesting.
Trial of the Temples - Haven’t played this in ages. Would be more bitey with more players as we were mostly neck and neck. Only my last move managed to get me a couple of extra points to pull away for a win.
Skulls of Sedlec - I’ve had this for ages, but never played it (2-3 is an odd player count). Ended in a draw with the tie going to my opponent.
8 Likes
Last night met up with a pair of our more “casual” gamer friends (Albert and Chantal). Chantal recently bought two new games: Cascadia: Alpine… something and Food Truck Race.
The AI artwork on Food Truck Race was a massive turn-off for both me and my partner, so we politely suggested Cascadia. I gave the rules a quick read and figured out most of the differences between it and base Cascadia… for those unaware, in the original you are usually scoring each Animal on specific requirements (ie: every pair of bears unconnected to any other bears), whereas Alpine scores specific types of terrain (ie: every connected group of Glaciers that have 2 of the same animal on it). Then there’s an entire Elevation mechanic that is a little clumsy in some ways, but not cripplingly so, and then there’s a tonne of variations you can choose to add in or not.
We played the base game with no extra bells and whistles, and it was good. Andy won with a final score of 90, I had 87, Chantal had 81 and Albert had 79. The “score the highest animal” mechanic is clumsy, but functional, and the game played relatively quickly. Andy and I both prefer the original, but we don’t play a LOT of Cascadia, and I think if we did Alpine-something might be better?
After that I pulled out Green Team Wins for the first itme, and it was lovely. Nice little trivia-sorta thing, really quick to explain and get to the table, but probably better with more than 4 players. But worked pretty well! Andy ended up winning that one as well, but the scores were much closer.
Now that I’m home, I did a tiny bit of digging into Food Truck Race, and the reviews seem to suggest that we were correct to skip it, but the artist may, actually, be a human who produces remarkably AI-style artwork? I dunno, but if it is a person, it’s unfortunate that I can’t look at that kind of art any more without thinking that it’s slop.
Game apparently sucks, though. So.
3 Likes
I think OG is better but right now because I played OG so much Alpine Lakes is much more fun and also I like the change with the stacking a lot.
However: even without the expansion OG has more interesting patterns. In Alpine Lakes you quickly note that the patterns for all 3 corridor types are just very small variations and I guess the interest comes from the additional scoring cards which I haven’t been using much because I’ve been playing the challenge modes that start without them – scoring 90 points without those 3 other options is HARD. I think Alpine Lakes is more thinky but the OG game is just smarter in the variance. I’d still recommend OG over Alpine Lakes until you’ve played OG so much that you really WANT for more and then AL is just right. Playing with the additional 3 cards provides pull in too many directions. The 5 animals in OG are just perfectly balanced for the amount of thinky this type of game should have in my opinion.
3 Likes
Keep the Heroes Out, first play. The idea seems easy enough – runs thru the Heroes deck twice and you win. So you play various monsters – we used Gnolls, Imps, and Skeletons. On your turn you can play any number of cards from your hand. Actual decks are different for each monster type. Typical actions are move, summon, activate. Moving is pretty straighforward. Summon lets you move guys from your lair to the board. This seemed to be my specialty, I had the most minions (7) and lots of cards that summon more guys. Which also meant when someone had to die it was usually me, cos I figured I would get them back on the board easily enough. Each room of the dungeon has it’s own activation ability. You can gain resources (coins, bones, books, and ummmm…frogs). After the player turn, the Heroes invade! Depending on the difficulty, one or mores Heroes come into the dungeon. Each hero has it’s own special ability, like the Archer will kill a monster in an adjacent room.
What the heroes really want to do is to open chests. If there aren’t enough of them, they will wait around until they have enough people. Chests are never good, and the final chest in the treasure room will lose you the game. Which is what happened. We got thru the deck once and died soon after. But I’m not sure we played the heroes properly every time. It’s a bit confusing, and there’s a flowchart in one of the books. Basically they will stop to kill monsters, and open chests, but otherwise will move towards the treasure room. One of our players was dropping traps every chance she got, so many heroes died to those.
It was a fun game, looking forward to another go.
and this is what you DON’T want to happen…(heroes turning over the chest in the treasure room)
Crits and Tricks, first play. This is a trick taker, with a few extra bits. When you play a card you add one of your six dice to give it a value. Dice are d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20, which you roll at the start of the round. Also, the type of card led sets the rule for winning. If it’s a barbarian trick, you want the highest value. For a rogue, it’s the smallest. As well as playing a card into the trick, you can also play another card for its crit ability. For example, the bard allows you to reroll your die twice, the barbarian lets you add or subtract 3 to your die value. At the start of each round you will draft a set of three quest cards, worth various amounts of money if you complete them. Quest cards can be something like “win zero tricks”, or “win a trick with the barbarian special ability”. It was pretty good fun.
Cosy Stickerville, we continued with year 3. We did realise we weren’t playing properly, we were not looking up things in the story book, oops. So we caught up with that, which gave us a few things to do. Still having fun.
The Gang, a quick game or two of this to finish up.
9 Likes
Played a game of Hallertau for the first time (it took around 2.5 hours after another 1 hour for setup + teach). It’s good! Very brain intensive.
Then we played my copy of Nusfjord, because we hadn’t done enough Uwe Rosenberg. Faster, simpler, but much more reliant on which cards come out. You can only build an engine with what’s there, and the C cards are where the big endgame points are.
The Nusfjord solo mode is brilliant, but 3 players (with no “copy” spaces available) is totally different to solo. Lots of worker placement taking up the only available slot that turn so being 1st player becomes very important. Many of the same Uwe decisions as Hallertau but a fraction of the run time.
11 Likes
Not much gaming this week as I’m swamped.
Container - amazing 5 player game. Us 5 are all having a good time both with the game and the company which is great. Base game without offshore bank + player loans
Manila - betting game. Great fun!
War of the Ring + Lords of Middle Earth - played as Sauron. Did the usual play of putting Saruman out and build up Isengard. Rohan’s border forces at the Ford of Isen were destroyed before they can flee to Helm’s Deep.
Two massive armies invaded Gondor and the whole kingdom fell. The army in Minas Tirith then moved towards Edoras, capurting it. Aragorn died defending the city. Thus, end the House of Elendil. A third army from Mordor slowly marched north and sacked Dale and put the Woodland Realms under siege.
The Fellowship who were still mostly intact (without Aragron, Peregrin, and Meriadoc) by the time they reached Mount Doom. They start dying protecrting Frodo.
Sauron running out of time hastens the war effort. Dol Amroth fell, the last holdout of Gondor. And a determined attack against the allied forces in the Halls of Thranduil and succeeded.
Evil triumphed!!! 
9 Likes
Despite achieving the magnificent score of zero in both games of it I enjoyed this game.
Health and safety really need to look into those automatic doors though and no matter how sick you feel NEVER visit the robodoc.
Also enjoyed this and at least scored higher than zero.
10 Likes
Another unexpectedly busy weekend came and went, forcing me to postponed my planned game and instead get in two quickish rounds of Sprawlopolis. I’m not that good at games like this so wasn’t expecting much with either game, but found a groove in both of them.
The first game was working towards the objectives from The Outskirts (1 point), Go Green (3 points) and Mini-Marts (11 points) for a target score of 15 points. My city design was more than a little chaotic, with only one 4-square park and 3-square commercial district among lots of single disjointed blocks, and one long circular road with a bunch of short disconnected roads around the edge of the map. Those roads hurt me for the first Outskirts objective, and the Go Green target resulted in an underwhelming total despite 15 park squares to just 4 industrial squares. The Mini-Marts goal was more rewarding with 7 such constructions pushing my overall score to 11, just 4 behind the modest goal score.
The following day saw a new game building on objectives Central Perks (7 points), Morning Commute (16 points) and Tourist Traps (17 points) for a high target score of 40 points. It turns out this combination gave me a good focus: build a big central parkland, keep the commercial areas on the perimeter and ensure roads include commercial and residential blocks. This approach seemed to flow much better, overlapping more cards in my city construction to get the park just right. Despite very few other squares of the same type connecting, my 15-square park all in the city interior was a great foundation, combining with the Central Perk objective to effectively double the park space’s value. Seven of my ten roads connected residential and commercial blocks, boosting the Morning Commute objective, and finishing with 17 points from the many commercial blocks on the edges of the map for Tourist Traps gave me a huge surprising final score of 56 points, comfortably beating the target score.
I still don’t really know how that last game came together so well, possibly more because the objectives were fairly complimentary so decision making was easier. It’s not a game I feel comfortable with and doesn’t get a regular look-in outside of time-limited challenge days, but it was relatively cheap - one of the print-and-play titles I bought during the pandemic - so makes for a nice distraction and one I hope to figure out more competently each time.
6 Likes
Anyone attending the World Series of Board Gaming Convention in Las Vegas? https://wsbgvegas.com/ be sure to look me up and say Hi!
3 Likes
The Estates - top notch game
Startups
Tikal - good fun. But I dont need it no more
Scythe - with the expansions
Ukiyo-e
War of the Ring - played as the Free Nations this time.
Isengard struck first against Rohan. Helms Deep was besieged and then fell.
During the journey of the Felllowship, Gandalf died protecting the Fellowship (oh no!) after Sauron found them. He then showed up as Gandalf the White at Fangorn and led the Ents against Isengard and killed Saruman. The Isengardian advance toward Edoras was still successful but was now weaker. A Rohan counter-attack devastated the enemy that they have to retreat back to Helms Deep.
Two Sauron armies were formed and advanced north to attack the Elves. Lothlorien fell. Another Sauron army was raised at Angmar and attacked the Grey Havens and the Shire, and both were sacked.
Elrond tried to keep the Shadow Armies at bay but, alas, Rivendell was besieged and also fell. Only Thranduil’s kingdom was the only Elven realm remaining.
At this point the Fellowship reached Mordor with Merry, Boromir, Sam, and Frodo remaining. Boromir and Merry died protecting Frodo as they climb Mt. Doom. Gollum then joined the ringbearers and led them to the last steps remaining to reach the top and tossed the ring to the lava fire where it belongs before Sauron could capture one more city or stronghold.
Seasons + 2 expansions - 2 players. Whips pretty fast
Rear Window
Spicy - closed today with a bluffing card game
8 Likes
Played Gold Country (2 player). It works 2 player!
Knizia x Cube Rails. You get a secret share, you can sell and buy shares, your builds are determined by a bag pull. It’s great, and I want to try it with more players.
4 Likes
This weekend’s gaming session came early but lasted long as Friday evening saw an epic solo game of Fortune and Glory, lasting over two hours playing as the reclusive novelist Alexander Cartwright confronting the mysterious threat of the Order of the Crimson Hand lead by dark servants The Inquisitor and Sir Benjamin Crowley in an extended game racing to 30 Fortune.
The race began quickly for Cartwright as he acquired the first artifact - The Orb of the Gods - in the adjacent region The Devil’s Reach on the first turn despite the surprise appearance from Angelica Hamilton, the third dark servant of the Crimson Hand, while the Inquisitor was working through the his first quest. Cartwright then crossed the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand to hunt for The Gauntlet of Lost Souls against Sir Crowley, and obtained it after a few scraps with Crowley. While the Inquisitor obtained his second artifact, Cartwright travelled by sea to Cairo to sell his two artifacts, heal up, buy some supplies and acquire a Mechanic as a useful ally.
Onwards to the Ivory Coast to explore The City of Hades temple, defeating two Nazi patrols on way to recovering the temple’s treasure, then off to Moscow to sell the treasure and find a special Lucky Lighter. The Inquisitor continued acquiring artifacts for the Crimson Hand and new Dark Sanctuary bases began appearing around the globe. Cartwright’s next move was to head deep into the Indonesian Jungle to search for The Cup of the Golden Mummy, where he faced his first cliffhanger caught trying to enter a shadowy temple. Despite constant pressure from Hamilton and the Lovecraftian “Dark Creatures”, the Lucky Lighter came in handy for two amazingly fluky rolls to claim the artifact.
Finally the Mechanic succumbed to the power of the Order, stealing some of Cartwright’s Fortune on his way out, leaving Cartwright alone on his way to Japan to quest for The Heart of the Dead. Hamilton reappeared immediately and sneaking past her was impossible but the fight rolls went our hero’s way as did some incredibly fortuitous danger rolls and, with the artifact in hand, Cartwright made it to Tokyo just as the Crimson Hand drew level on the Fortune Track, and selling the two artifacts nearly took our hero to victory.
One last artifact would finish it but the nearest one was two turns away in India, and the stopover in the Himalayas allowed the dark forces to acquire two more artifacts. The hunt for The Shroud of Darkness in India was aided by the new Damsel ally, who came in especially useful against our ongoing nemesis Hamilton - who was knocked out of the quest relatively quickly - and the final challenge saw a remarkable roll to pass the Dark Ritual danger and acquire the Shroud. Despite the Inquisitor claiming another artifact and a final rooftop chase in Hong Kong, Cartwright sold his final artifact for the victory by 31 Fortune to 22!
Almost three hours of gaming including setup and teardown, which is rare for me to get so much time to do, but it is a game I enjoy and the story was racing ahead quickly so it didn’t feel that long. A fun Ameritrash evening’s entertainment without requiring much strategical thought so it was the perfect end game for a busy summer season.
9 Likes
So as mentioned in another thread, Maryse and I are on vacation where I grew up. We’re headed back home tomorrow, so today was spent relaxing and packing.
Part of relaxing was heading down to the hotel lobby to play some games. Decided on Carcassonne. We set up and there was a part of a wedding party there waiting for the bride to finish getting ready. They’re curious, and they apparently love games, so we invite them to play with us.
We didn’t get to finish, but they loved it, so we gave them our copy. Bet they’ll tell the story of the Gatineau couple who gave them that game at their mom’s wedding for years to come.
That was a great moment.
9 Likes
I got a sweet message on BGG that unknowingly I have been in competition with someone for “most plays of Cascadia: Alpine Lakes” 
I have 32 plays right now… oO. The message made me smile.
I have taken a couple of days off from Cascadia though because I may have acquired Cozy Sticker Ville at FLGS yesterday (resisting the Labyrinth+Carcassonne mashup, Wacken Hitster and Turboflitzpiepen 2000) and been binging through that one–already 6 years in. It took me until game 5 to notice there is a grid… oopsie.
9 Likes
This is top of my list to buy!
3 Likes