Your Last Played Game Volume 3

[SteveB_uk]

Just had an epic, hours long 2-handed solo game of Marvel Champions, with Daredevil and Echo against the final boss of the campaign, Kingpin.

It was very hard. You are constantly given enemies, with penalties if there isn’t one, Kingpin has enormous health and an attachment which adds more (which came out twice). He’s probably in the top 5 most difficult bosses, you need to be able to do a ton of damage.

“Into the fray” saved me a couple of times (6 damage to a minion + overkill) along with Daredevil and Echo’s amazing team up card (which Echo can then play again using her power).

I did not expect a long game which ended in such a narrow win (Daredevil on 1hp!)

This was (as always) on normal difficulty, I have no idea how anyone ever wins on Expert.

[Marx]

Played Harmonies for the first time. Is alright. Cascadia meets Azul. Final scores: 68 - 68 - 67 - 67.

Neat!

Introduced two friends to Hot Streak. Mum had fully half the cards, but was shockingly inconsistent. Which is great! Final scores: 36 - 34 - 32 - 31.

Played the deluxe version of The Gang. Fantastic. Absolutely worth getting the upgrade. We won! A bunch!

Put Containers on the table for the first time. What a neat game! Final scores were 79 - 53 - 31 - Negative 2. I think my partner (who came in third) might be willing to try it again, but I thought it was great!

Finished off with a couple rounds of Things in Rings, which we won.

Good times had by all!

[EnterTheWyvern]

Yesterday we started with Happy Pigs. It was a blast and @lalunaverde won quite handily. The bonuses are wild but I think I like that arbitrary swinginess and I think they might mess with what would otherwise be strategy on rails. Presentation remains excellent and I was pleased how well the gameplay held up on the second play. Will look forward to playing again.

Next up as we were a 4 we played Guards of Atlantis II. It was close. I was on a silly one and missed the win for no good reason before losing in the next round. It remains a game with so much going on from a light rule set. Really excellent and it’s still a shame that I keep missing the crowd funding for financial reasons.

Last game up was PitchCar and as ever it was fun. The bridge is such a great addition and I think I’m set with extensions 1 & 2.

Lastly the kids were having fun in the garden and were ok with not messing the games up. So I think I might get another session in before the end of the year as I don’t need to feel bad about abandoning my wife with the kids for a day to play games. Also @lalunaverde was excellent with the older one particularly and was super patient being told what everything in the garden was in the eyes of a 2 year old. Well done!

[mistercrayon]

Played

1. gold country (2 player). I think like possibly any economy game it rewards sensibleness rather than funny moves and short term “cleverness” I quite enjoyed it but my partner was less so. I agree with raged norm that it surprisingly does work at two player , I can see it being better with more though. I being limited in move choices is a double edged sword I think. Sometimes it’s fun and sometimes it’s annoyinging.
2. enchanted Ivy. I don’t normally play games solo. And I think some of enchanted Ivy makes a good case why. I think a game benefits from being a solo game if it is designed as a solo game. There are a few design choices which I think help enchanted Ivy be a game I want to get out (and some which make me not). For one there’s zero maintenance or replicating some other player. For some reason I don’t like the gap between my turns to be filled with drudge. In. Multiplayer games I fill the gap between turns with either nothing or something interesting. In a modified solo games I have no choice but to fill the time with slight concentration actions. It’s seems like a fun puzzle. I’m not 100 percent good at it and I wonder if the game is a bit too contingent on good draw order. Nevertheless I like the choices on each turn. the small allplay box is terrible for getting the game out and setting up a game.
3. mountain goats legacy 2p. I like mountain goats and my partner likes mountain goats we like this. I think it’s an interesting thing to take a really simple game and sequentially modify it. I think it makes it a better game for gamers but I think that makes it less mountain goats. Three games in and the game is on the edge of something not mountain goats (eg dice roll mitigation) but it’s toeing the line reasonably well. Like with enchanted ivy, particularly with deluxe pieces, the box is a pain in the bum, but there’s a chance this will loosen as the legacy elements remove extra cardboard from the game.

[raged_norm]

Finished off the Fable game for Power Grid, card 15 was hilarious (reveal when card 10, 12 or 14 is revealed and players use more uranium then the resupply). It was an interesting experience to cap a year of Power Grid.

Followed up with a 4 player Gold Country, much better at 4.

Then some Bridgerton: Love Letter. Some grit in the roles are the TV characters, but we just referred to everything by the number anyway.

[lalunaverde]

@EnterTheWyvern

Yesterday we started with Happy Pigs. It was a blast and @lalunaverde won quite handily.

This is hilarious because I look so miserable at the end of the game. And then we tallied up: “wait… I won?!”

[Simfers]

Played a couple of games of The Guild of Merchant Adventurers. It’s really great, guys. Simple but thinky. Lots of replayability too, with four different maps with six possible objectives each and 28 special action cards (you only see three each game per player). Really solid purchase, turns out!

Only thing I would change is that the cardboard coins that represent the points are all the same size and colour and the numbers (1, 5, 10, 50) are only printed on one side, I guess so score isn’t immediately apparent, which can make it annoying when you’re looking for a certain demomination and they’re not all the right side up.

But when you’re down to complaining about details like that..

[bruitist]

Had the same friend round for games again. Well one game.

Decided to pull out Ashes Reborn for the first time in ages and finally have a go at the Red Rains - The Corpse of Viros expansion.

My friend played the deck the came in the expansion with Coal Roarkwin as the phoenixborn. I used the Jericho, Reborn deck.

Took a lot longer than it should’ve thanks to rules confusion and checking things a lot (neither of the rulebooks are very clear about how everything works for 2 players). And my friend struggled to get a hang of how his deck was meant to work.

But we enjoyed it and managed to win. Although thinking back on it now, I definitely made a rules mistake that made things easier on me.

Think I’ll have to try again solo and try and properly learn how everything’s meant to work.

[Phil]

• Calimala (4p) – first time playing, and first impressions were excellent.

  It does something I really enjoy, which is to shuffle the sequence in which regions of the board are going to be scored (think of The King Is Dead, if you’ve played that), such that where you want to get points next at each stage of the game will vary from one game to the next; and that in turn means that your strategic focuses are never the same from one game to the next (because the different regions require different kinds of actions to get you points, and each region is only scored once in the course of the game.

  On top of that, the action selection system is really fun (and is also randomised – aside from the central spot, the layout of the action grid is different in every game). You take actions by placing (permanently) one of your family member tiles in between two actions on the grid, and then you get to do both of those things. Then the owners of the 1-2 tiles below yours in that same position on the grid also get to do both things (and if you own either/both of those tiles, then you still get the bonus actions per tile). The stack can only be a maximum of 3 tiles high, but you can still place a new tile on top in that situation, in which case the bottom-most tile of the stack is transferred to the square representing the next unscored region, and triggers the scoring for that region (as soon as the current round is finished). So no regions are scored until an action position somewhere on the grid acquires its 4th tile; and once a position has 3 tiles on, every new tile placed there triggers the scoring for the next region.

  You must be able to perform at least one of the two actions to place a tile, but if you can only perform one of the two then you get to draw a card from a deck instead, which may give you extra benefits. We also played with what I gather is “advanced” rules, whereby every player has a unique ability, and the majority of the abilities seemed really valuable. After the game we read through the ones we didn’t use this time, and they mostly sounded really appealing to play.

  The teach was pretty easy, too – it squeezes a lot of variety out of a reasonably lightweight rules set.

  I am extremely keen to play more of this.

  

  
  

  

• Small Fjords – I’ve played a few games of this in the past few days, and I am still hunting for my first perfect score. Just one tile shy in this instance, as I’ve been on a few occasions now. I thought I did well here given that the first three water tiles were the spikey ones on the lower edge of the ‘lake’ where the water touches only two edges, and I just had to hope that I’d manage to join them all up.

  

[lalunaverde]

Calimala is good fun. Manage to be elegant in the age of complex machinery.

Happy Pigs this is really fun. The hidden bid action selection is fun and makes for miserable play!

Guards of Atlantis - top class. Idk when the last time we played this and we picked up the game so easily! And the exploration of character strategy is amazing. Amazing game

PiiiiitchCaaaar!!!

Root - owner only have the base game. 3 players. We all know the rules so the experience felt great! Duration was just over an hour

Pow! - Knizia. Reimplementation of a Pickomino spin-off. Eh.

Llama llama - allplay small box. It’s cute and it’s alright.

Trendy! - played multiple times. Great fun!

Whale Riders - full 6 players!

DNUP

Tulip Bubble disappointing game. Waste on such a great theme and great art and production

[SteveB_uk]

Helped to run a 1-day convention here in Crystal Palace for about 40 people.
I managed to teach and be dealer for 3 games of Hot Streak over the day, which did exactly what I wanted them to do in terms of getting people yelling.
Introduced several groups to Courtisans and they went off and played it again themselves afterwards.
Finally played Sushi Go Party, it’s ridiculous that I haven’t up to now.
Played Spots to keep some of the more energetic young uns entertained.

(I was helping others rather than sitting down for long games but a 5-hour Fury of Dracula happened on one of the tables and some Scythe).

[Phil]

A couple of solo constraint-satisfaction puzzles (outside, on the first really glorious day of spring).

• Ofrenda
  
  
• Harmonies
  
  

I got almost the same score in each (94 and 95). Which is decent for Ofrenda, but I don’t think it’s very good in Harmonies :).

I don’t love the solo maintenance in Harmonies. In multiplayer games 3 discs are replaced each turn, and you might only have to do it after your own turn. In solo play you’re replacing 9 discs each turn (after discarding the 6 you didn’t use), and they’re fiddly. With square tiles, like Azul, you can just drop the right number on each spot and they tend to stay where you drop them. Conversely, the thick circular discs in Harmonies are liable to roll if they land on their edge, and so you have to be far more careful, and replacing 3 sets of 3 every turn is just a wee bit annoying. Not terrible, but not ideal. Maybe three small bowls (and one large one) would fix it.

[bort]

Played Bordeaux from a pnp version, I was a little lost. This is a game all about making wine. On each turn the current player sets either where wine can be produced, or a resource (casks, vines, trellises). Then you assign your three workers to making a wine or a resource. Some wines require a cask to produce. You can assign several values to a worker, but it means they’ll be tied up for future years and cannot be used. I’m pretty sure I didn’t play properly.

Keep the Heroes Out!, another play of this. We came so close to winning, were on our last two cards when our treasure room was invaded. We were doing pretty well, even when two heroes were coming in per player turn. There’s a few things we need to do better, like more traps, buying cards, and putting down portals.

Pollen, first play. Another Knizia game, so that’s good. It’s a re-implementation of Samurai: The Card Game, which of course was based around Samurai. I’ve played the original Samurai a few times. It’s a fairly simple game to learn and play. You have five cards in your hand, and on your turn you will place a card next to a pollination token, which will show up to three different types – butterflies, bees, and junebugs. Each of your cards will show one of these types, and a star for a wildcard. Once a pollination token is surrounded it is scored, and the winning player will take a token of that insect type. And at the end if anyone scored more than one type they just win. Otherwise they count their other token types. At the start of the game I was just looking for easy points, not concentrating on any particular types. Then halfway thru the game I was way behind in all but one type and couldn’t catch up. Still, it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the play. Looking forward to future games.

Cozy Stickerville, played out two years, still having a good time with this.

[Benkyo]

Rhino Hero, 3-player

Innovation, 3-player: one of those rare games that both got to final ages and didn’t end immediately, so there were lots of crazy swings and state changes. I had my entire tableau destroyed and only two achievements, but had a huge hand I was able to dump into my score pile just before ending the game.

Indonesia, 3-player: very very close game, about a 15 rupiah difference with final scores of 1660-ish. Tons of aggressive mergers.

Res Arcana, 4-player: seemed to go down well.

[yashima]

We went on our long-awaited week-end with friends. We were 24 people this time around, with 5 kids and 4 teenagers, the rest adults. Games that I brought along were a bunch but only 5 of sixteen got played.

Other games were brought by others as well, there were games of Mischwald, Hana-Bi, Set, Carcassonne and more that I may not have noticed…

From my collection we played:

• Take Time: 4 player first 3 clock faces and 1 attempt on #4. Was good fun with players enjoying this very much, especially those that like Hana-Bi
• New Crew: (Not in the picture) - Treasure Hunting. You now play a series of games to complete a single task and then take steps on a map with each Etappe needing a bunch of steps and each tasks giving a variable number depending on difficulty and playercount. Seems fun. Had to teach trick-taking to one of the kids which felt weird, because they are supposed to know from playing Skat. But apparently they weren’t taught… very weird.
• Just One … there is always some one wanting to play. I managed one really good clue where the others were at first going “what why?” but it ended up being the thing that helped finalize the guess. So yay. This game is very beloved in the group. The kids have been playing it since they were barely old enough to participate. My copy is old, I cannot even get the standups clean anymore. The pens are shot… I keep finding new ones and … oh well.
• Hot Streak with me as the announcer for 5 crazy kids. My voice was challenged by the last game … it went very well even with the 5 youngest (I think the two youngest are in 2nd grade). My copy is English though so I couldn’t let them play on their own. They also adored my play mat which I had brought to protect my precious stuff…

(People are clamoring to buy Hot Streak and Take Time now. Last year I brought Bomb Busters and now 3 more copies are distributed amongst the participants)

But the highlight of the week-end and long-awaited premiere of a game that I have previously played here: Blood on the Clocktower and my first non-forum game and first time game master!

First game had 13 players:

• Team Red: Imp, Baron, Poisoner, Scarlet Woman (I am afraid of having to run the Spy I admit)
• Team Outsiders: Drunk (Fortuneteller), Recluse (placed next to team Red oO), Butler
• Team Townsfolk: Chef, Undertaker, Soldier, Investigator, Virgin, Empath, Washerwoman

The game explanation took quite some time. I had forgotten to bring German handouts which was not great because not all of my friends are that fluent in English. And it’s no longer the teenagers … * The Imp was one of the older teenagers. He did quite well playing dumb, like he didn’t grasp the game, that only works once, but it worked.

• My friend who hates roleplaying and has been protesting for many years that she never ever would, ended up on team evil and stirred up so much trouble, it was a joy to watch…
• The girl who was the poisoner was also deliciously evil

In general Team Red had it easy when Team Blue had no clue how to profit of the Virgin being present or that Investigator and Chef should have shared their info early. Instead the drunk Fortuneteller claimed to also be the virgin which led to a nomination which revealed exactly nothing to the blue team. The Investigator had not realized they had been shown the Recluse and promptly forgot the role and so the Chef’s information was really extremely off, because the Recluse was sitting next to two evil players…

The Recluse didn’t understand their role either and was very very jetlagged anyway, the player almost fell asleep the first night.

The Undertaker said on the first day that they knew for sure that an Undertaker was present and the Imp promptly killed that player (my partner who besides me was the only person who knew the rules before we played).

Team Blue kept executing their own people … it was hilarious how despite spending so much time discussing in corners and the group they never found ways to verify any of the information they had or find trust in each other.

In the end Team Red easily took this one home, not because they coordinated but because 2 of their number (Baron and Poisoner) managed to sow an incredible amount of confusion among Team Blue because of their total lack of trust in anyone.

The Fortuneteller died by execution the first day by the way and so i never got to give them false information. Which was really trule too bad.

And the discussions afterwards… hilarious. Especially when Team Blue members were repeatedly saying how easy Team Red had it and that they were slated to win and Team Blue by definition had no chance. So much fun to give them ideas how to play better…

And the next evening we played a second game with 10 players.

• Team Red: Imp (same player oopsie), Scarlet Woman (also previously Team Red), Poisoner
• Team Blue: Empath, Washerwoman, Ravenskeeper, Mayor, Slayer, Chef, Fortuneteller

It was a bit sad that Team Red had 2 players that were on the same team the night before and the same player as Imp. He did not pull it off again. And the other player was also a bit tired of being evil I thought. I made quite a few mistakes as game master this game as well. Overall though the biggest change from game one was that Team Blue had learned a few things. Chef immediately announced they were Chef and knew there was 1 pair of evil players. The Washerwoman got lucky when she told one of the two players that she knew something aboutb them, that player told her their role and they matched and immediately knew they could trust each other. The Fortune Teller pointed at the demon the first night and another player and due to the meta from the night before they figured out the setup very fast…

This time Team Red had almost no chance although the Imp would have had a few good plays. He pretended to be the Monk which isn’t too bad, but he should have either killed himself at some point or pointed at an already dead player and coordinated better with his poisoner to get the others off his tail. But at 17 yo … he just wanted to kill other players as fast has he could Also this time the voting pattern of Team Red was too obvious.

Overall great fun was had. So many discussions and so many ideas for good plays. People could NOT stop talking about the two games.

I was asked by several people when we could play again, including a few people I would never have thought would enjoy this kind of game.

The teenagers really loved it … I suppose I might get to play this more often?

In the discussions after I learned one thing I need to beware in future games: I need to make sure the nights remain as long as they started even when there are fewer players to wake up.

[Simfers]

We had our friend Yvan over recently. We usually only play Ticket to Ride Rails and Sails, because his capacity for concentration is just FRIED later in the day so we stick to the familiar, but he came over during the afternoon, so we could try a new game. Maryse had this notion that there was some commonality between TTR and another game that involves laying down trains and building networks, so we proposed to try it.

That game was Brass: Birmingham.

Now.

You may be thinking “That’s a hell of a leap, complexity-wise. TTR is somewhere in the low 2s on BGG, while Brass is in the high 3s”. And you’d be right. There was a lot to wrap his brain around. Our first game took 3 hours. That’s a LOT of Brass. Then we played a second one. It took 2. That’s STILL a lot of Brass.

But you know what? He loved it. And he did DAMN good. First game ended 123 (Maryse), 119 (me) , 117 (Yvan), and the second was 133 (me), 132 (Maryse) and 121 (Yvan).

He’s quite keen to play again, and 3-player Brass is a MUCH different beat than 2-player Brass.

[gmwhite999]

Another really busy weekend with a big music concert to setup and get through, so I saved my shortest game especially for Sunday and had three quick games of Bandido. Luckily, all three games were successful wins after a fair few turns, so involved a nice amount of contingency planning to block the bandit’s escape routes. I find that it’s quite a swingy game in that some games can be over in 10-15 cards if you get lucky, and some get dragged out into sprawling maps until you realise that you’ve used all the blocked exits already, but these three games fell nicely in the middle. A nice quick filler but after a manic 72 or so hours, it was just right.

[lalunaverde]

No Thanks! x2

DNUP

National Economy - played it again. We used the Progress deck this time. Our table hired a lot of workers and built a lot of buildings so the money supply was huge. You can scoop a bunch up!

Note: you can see my combo on the lower left

[COMaestro]

Yesterday evening, the guy we’ve been meeting up with for gaming actually came to our place for a couple of hours. My wife wasn’t feeling the best, so she just rested in the bedroom, so the two of us played his copy of Fort, which I had not played before.

It’s a deckbuilder with the theme of building your fort with your friends by collecting pizza and toys. You add a friend to your deck each turn, but you can also lose friends, as any unspent friends from your turn get placed in your “yard” where they are available to be taken by your opponent, and only go to your discard at the beginning of your next turn. Cute little game, a little different than other deckbuilders I’ve played, but didn’t wow me.

I won the game, 40 to 48.

After that we played my somewhat newish copy of Rattlesnake, a card game which plays out an Old West duel between a couple of ne’er-do-well gunslingers. This one was pretty cool, and wraps up in 15 minutes or less.

Both players have an identical deck of cards. Cards are valued from 1 to 5, and each has a special ability on it. Each player also gets four HIT cards which is their life. A side saloon deck has more cards to purchase, same 1 - 5 values but the numbers have different abilities is set to the side. Mixed into this deck are events which change the rules for the rest of the game. Five cards are placed face up, then you make two decks of four cards and shuffle two event cards into each, then stack them up on top of the last event card.

After shuffling their decks, players flip the top card and the higher valued card goes first. Both players draw five cards. The active player can then perform up to two distinct actions in any order. They can discard two cards to purchase a new card from the saloon. This new card goes directly into hand and can be used immediately.

The other action is attack. The attacker uses any number of their cards and places them face down on the table, and then the defender has the ability to place their own cards down to defend. Cards are revealed and the players have to make the best hand they can. Sets (all the same value card) beat Runs (sequential values) which beats High card. However, a higher number of cards in the Set/Run will beat out a lower number of cards, so a Run of 4 will beat a Set of 3. If the attacker wins, the defender puts a HIT card into their discard pile. If the defender wins, nothing happens.

However, each card has a special ability that can be played at any time, which can affect the results of the attack. So the starter 5 card is Disarm, which discards one of your opponent’s cards from their attack at random. So it can weaken a Set or break up a Run. The starter 2 card is Scout, which lets you draw 2 cards then place 1 back on the deck, meaning you could try playing it before putting attacking/defending to try to get a better card to work with.

Cards played in this way are removed from the game.

Once one player is out of HITS, they lose. We played this twice and I lost both times.

It was a good evening.

[Marx]

Last night I managed to get my brand new copy of Tales of the Arabian Nights to the table. It’s really nice! Great book quality, lovely art… the board should be bigger (or the Baghdad space at least needs to be much larger), but it went well!

Four player game, and I warned everyone as we headed into it that TotAN isn’t a game you win. Somebody will win eventually, yes, but you don’t plan on winning, you just sorta… do. Or don’t.

It was good! The new stories are a lot shorter than I remember them being, and I forgot how binary most of them are (“Do you have Acting? No? Okay, bad things happen.”). And a few of the skills actively hindered you (like, if you picked “No Skill” something kinda good would happen, but if you picked “Piety” you lost a bunch of money and everyone laughed at you).

In the end, Eric managed to win with Aladdin, who had been sold into slavery, then became a Vizier, then murdered the Sultan to become Sultan, then gave up being Sultan to travel to the underwater kingdom where he convinced one of the sultans there to attack his neighbours, but he was soundly defeated on the field of battle due to limited understanding of 3D tactics, but then returned to Baghdad full of treasure and stories.

It was good!