Your pictures of this look so nice. Is it a ks/deluxe version you’re playing?
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Nope, just the retail version
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Last night with local friends (and @Gus was able to join us):
We started with Sea Salt & Paper, and I scored my second-ever four mermaid victory.
The “Extra Pepper” card that disables mermaid colour bonuses was in play for everyone, and I got a couple in draws and more from the discards. Crabs gave me the final mermaid (I understand more usually it’s the other way round).
Then on to Calico, which I missed when it was cool and trendy but rather enjoyed this time. It’s tile placement, with scoring conditions for arrangements that are often incompatible: a contiguous block of these patterns gets you a cat (a few points), a contiguous block of these colours gets you a button (a few points), and putting the right combination of either colours or patterns (or both!) around a hub tile will get many points.
It’s a bit of a headcracker but I had a good time; as usual for me I had to decide up front which goals I was simply going to ignore in the attempt to manage others, and I didn’t do terribly.
7 Likes
In the Footsteps of Darwin - light weight. Don’t hate it. Nice game.
Hiifuu!! - not one of those Tier 1 trick takers like Nokosu, but this is so simple and pretty fun. I like IELLO’s art on this edition
The Gang x2 - classic. I played it with people who knows how to play and it was great. To the point that this game doesn’t really satisfies at 4 players.
Puerto Banana - introduced this group to the wonderful world of bidding bananas. I noticed some standard numbers that players fall into. Round numbers, of course. 69 is the other one (haha funny number).
HOOOT STREEAAAAK
Seas of Strife - 6 players. This is the way to play Seas of Strife. I annoyed the table by not getting any tricks at all. On the last round, I received some hits, so they are at least satisfied.
Age of Innovation - 5 players. brutal. One player even attacked me, because… I’m a threat apparently 
7 Likes
Momentary elation at a perfect score, almost immediately followed by seeing the illegal tile placement I’d somehow managed to make along the way…
I had another near thing a couple of days earlier, where I’d placed all the wooden pieces, but then the final two water tiles came out in the ‘wrong’ sequence, leaving me unable to place the last one cleanly. (I started trying to memorise some more aspects of the tile distribution after that, because if I’d known that particular tile was still in the stack then I could have avoided the problem. I don’t have it all internalised, but I’ve noted a few things, including that a couple of the tile types are rarer than I’d thought.)
10 Likes
Completely forgot to recount last Wednesday’s round of 2-player games.
The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth - I like this better than the original 7 Wonders. Definitely feels more thematically coherent.
Got to a point where I (playing as Sauron) could either win on green cards or by catching Frodo and Sam, but both the cards I needed were each trapped under one other card. Decided to sacrifice the green card, reasoning that the other card being uncovered would allow me to push my opponent out of some regions on the map and buy me some time.
What I hadn’t banked on was that green card allowing my opponent to grab a bonus that was just enough actions to dominate the map, winning the game.
The Ancient World - A Red Raven game I’ve had for a while but never got round to playing. A decent worker placement game. I didn’t invest enough in military/fighting titans and ended up losing by 10 points.
Kiri-ai: The Duel - A couple of quick games to finish off. I should play this more often so I don’t keep forgetting the (quite simple) rules.
9 Likes
Finally got to play The Bloody Inn, as our local pub group was having a spooky theme. It’s a fun card engine builder and I’ll try to buy it soon.
The person teaching did a terrible job explaining the rules, but basically: either recruit guests to be your accomplices or kill them. If you recruit them you can pay them to help you build an annex which will give you permanent bonuses (and be an extra space to hide the bodies).
If you kill them in their beds instead, the body stays in full sight of any police who are around, (costing you hugely in bribes) unless you bury them in one of those annexes. Successfully burying pays off big-time, but getting enough cards to do it will probably take several rounds, so are enough players invested in getting rid of all the police guests before the next check for bodies? If there’s no police, as many bodies can lie around in the open as you like… until next round.
So you’re gradually getting discounts on recruiting, building, killing or burying, and occasional one-off huge paydays from finishing a burial instead of investing more in your engine.
It’s neat, I like it. Great dark horror art but the game feels balanced and fair and you can see the progress everyone is making.
8 Likes
I didn’t think it was possible! Never seen anyone come close in my plays.
I played Sushi Go Party with the old games gang, and came a respectablely close 4th out of 7. Very light and breezy, but it was the first time I took advantage of the Spoon card to get some combos. I haven’t played any games for a while so was good to get back into it.
6 Likes
Since I have logs, I can say: in 57 plays.
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Reign of Cthulhu X 2. This is a pandemic game (but more fun) set in the Cthulhu universe. You travel around four towns, defeating cultists and Shoggoths, while Old Ones are continually revealed, with their own changes to the game. If you get to Cthulhu, it’s game over. To win, all you need to do is close all the gates. Our first game was over before we knew it, just had some bad luck (we may have missed some rules, it’s been a while since I last played). So we had another game, and things went a bit better, with a win for the good guys.
Crits and Tricks, second play of this, lots of fun. I thought I had it won, but the other players managed to find some extra points they had missed, and I dropped back to last place.
Cozy Stickerville X 3. We only had three years left, and we felt a bit lazy, so we played them all out. All thats left now is to use the other side of the map and go thru it all again. We enjoyed the game a lot, will be a shame when it’s all over.
8 Likes
Finally! :).
(One of the grey cubes has a very long walk back to its house!)
The right-most tile was the final cube. I had four tiles left to try to fill that space, and felt confident that I’d find something to go there, and then (with me not having counted as usual) I found that the next three tiles were all water. I was so relieved when the final tile did actually fit!
I’d intended the top-left house to go in that empty space below, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to work out and I pivoted when a good alternative arose after a fortunate draw had enabled me to close that central ‘loop’ of water.
Making more deliberate use of the reserve tile was the key; I hadn’t been using that nearly as often as I should have.
10 Likes
The first gaming weekend of October and trying to line up five horror-themed games for the month, beginning with a solo session of Last Night on Earth - specifically, the Timber Peak stand-alone version along with Blood in the Forest expansion. It’s not really a solo game but it’s not difficult to assume the zombies will do their worst to the heroes. I choose the “Escape in the Plane” scenario, setting the airfield in the middle of the forest. Lumberjack Ed Baker and pilot Nikki started at the plane in the board centre, with Agent Carter from the FBI starting at the radio tower and reformed nun Sister Ophelia starting at the Ranger’s station. The team had to search for the flight plans and some fuel for the plane, then return to the plane with a living pilot (Nikki or Agent Carter).
The first few turns were quiet, with the heroes searching and finding little until an event card gave Carter a fuel tank - just as the zombies started closing in. Sister Ophelia found the flight plans in Thrasher’s Mill and was joined by Ed and Nikki in time for an epic battle with three zombies, with some great rolls destroying all three shamblers. On the other side of the forest, Carter shot a couple of zombies before his pistol ran out of ammunition. Next turn, more zombies attacked the trio as they tried to return to the airfield, with Nikki losing her signal flare to avoid being wounded, but Sister Ophelia being bitten and becoming infected. Halfway through the sun track, an unfortunate zombie event card led to Carter and Nikki bickering out in the open - while Ed and Sister Ophelia retreated into the airfield office just as two fast moving feral dead entered the arena. Nikki’s disgarded signal flare then set some of the forest alight, producing two flaming zombies to add to the threat level. Having ended their argument, Nikki and Carter reached the escape plane and fended off more advancing zombies, Nikki killing one but breaking her fire axe in the process. Ed and Sister Ophelia joined them at the plane just after the office caught fire. As Carter refueled the plane, and with wound boxes almost depleted, the heroes managed to defeat the zombies around the plane and fly off to escape … but with Sister Ophelia hiding her infection from her fellow passengers …
Last Night on Earth was the first Flying Frog game and much more simple to setup and play than their following titles A Touch of Evil and Fortune and Glory. I’ve had a long-held wish to try to create a super-map scenario using the base box, and the three other expansions I have - the two used above and Growing Hunger - and replicate a Left 4 Dead style mission with four heroes navigating a large town and forest before holding out at a farmhouse until a morning rescue as the relentless undead horde attack. Will take some thought but would be a great adventure to play through.
7 Likes
I’ve actually played a few games in the last month or so. Now that I’m catching back up on the internet, I figured I’d talk about them!
Empire Express –
(2026-09-07)
My oldest daughter keeps asking to play Monopoly because she likes games where you get to paper money. Instead of subjecting myself to 4+ hours of Monopoly (played with the rules-as-written), I opted to look on my shelf for something else:
I won by a lot, but she had fun being the “banker”. Next in her economic games education: 18xx?
Elder Sign –
(2026-09-13)
This is on my list of things to play and figure out if it could stay or if it needed to go in the sell pile. I played true-solo.
I think it’s a sell pile candidate. Too much random, not enough mitigation. I won, but I probably accidentally cheated.
Mechanica –
(2026-09-13)
Another thing from the list of things to play and figure out if it could stay or if it needed to go in the sell pile.
Solo mode, no expansion modules used. I used Iron Clays for money, but cardboard coins for the vaults/banks; and then I counted out final scores by converting everything to Iron Clays.
I squeaked out a win against the solo bot. I really enjoyed the spatial logistics puzzle in this game. I think it’s a keeper.
Sheep & Thief –
(2026-09-20)
Played two-player with my oldest daughter. I remember hearing fun things about this game back when it came out, and nothing since. It’s a neat tile drafting puzzle. I think it’s great. If a new edition were to be made, I suspect it’d be significantly smaller, since that’s the modern trend.
(picture omitted, because I forgot)
My daughter won because she genuinely made better choices 
Honga –
(2026-09-20)
Also two-player against my oldest daughter. I’ve been waiting a long time to try this game. I remember hearing really good things about it; I bought it knowing I wouldn’t realistically be able to play it for a while. But now I have, and I think it’s great. All of the mechanisms seem really balanced and there are always options available, even though it doesn’t seem like it. Perhaps there are too many options? I didn’t struggle with analysis paralysis, like I normally do when playing games with lots of options.
I particularly liked the Honga mechanism, where you have to appease the eponymous Honga each turn or suffer a penalty- a penalty that can be on-going, possibly indefinitely. But the game gives you tools to reset the penalty, giving you chances to feel clever.
My daughter won with a bit of coaching from me to help her grab the victory before I could sprint across the finish line.
Football Highlights 2052 –
(2026-10-05)
I setup the solo game a week ago but struggled to relearn the game from the rulebook. I tried watching the “instructional” video made by the designer, but I got distracted and interrupted so many times, I gave up on it because my ADHD brain was becoming a jumbled mess of half-baked terminology and bad rulebook structure.
Eventually, I buckled down and got the game played- mostly to free up my gaming table for Railways of the Lost Atlas, for which I’m incredibly excited to explore.
I lost 42-28. But I made some mistakes, both in my favor but also massively not-in-my-favor: I put the AI “hand” back on top of the AI deck at the end of the first half, but then remembered that the hand was supposed to stay the same between halves. While grabbing the deck to fix my mistake, I dropped the deck and the cards went everywhere. So, I had no choice but to play the second half against a new random 10 card AI deck. However, seeing the AI cards in the first half and then adapting to that with the mid-game draft is the entire thrust of the solo mode design. I lost by a lot, because the second half deck was completely different from what I expected and what I updated my deck to handle. We went into the second half tied 21-21, and it all went downhill from there.
(no picture, because of the blundered rules)
With NFL back in season, I do want to get this back on my table more this autumn. Perhaps, just perhaps, without critical rules fumbles.
11 Likes
That looks actually delicious. (makes note to look it up on BGG) a spatial puzzle with puzzle pieces… first time I hear of this.
4 Likes
[Elder Sign]
There are games about which I think “when I played that with my good friends X and Y, I had a good time”. But we could have been sitting eating and drinking and chatting and we’d still have had a good time; I must remember that that doesn’t make it a good game, just not a bad one.
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There’s an official Tabletop Simulator mod, if you are interested in such things.
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And without the literal fumbles, surely?
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Despite our Odyssee, I have managed a game each day for the Solotober challenge I am participating in on BGG. (https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/384594/solotober-2026)
- 1: Sprawlopolis
- 2: Food Chain Island
- 3: Naturopolis
- 4: Habitats (only BGA, worst day of the “travel challenge”)
- 5: Casinopolis
- 6: Small Fjords
- 7: TBD
We played a few 2 player games of The “newest” Crew. Titles… pfft.
It is fun and having only one task seems a bit better balanced. Each task though is usually more complex. Seems less impossible than some of the random combinations from iteration 2. The additional wrinkles introduced by the map are kind of nice and having a distinct series of games that completes with each leg (1) of the trip makes it easier to decide how many games to play.
(1) the German word used is Etappe for each map page. Stage seems to be a fine translation as well. But since it is a ttrip across the world, “leg” seems right
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Back to ACWest and back to the Ramada.
Friday
After a smooth trip to Telford we began with two-player dnup. Not ideally the way I’d teach it, but I think this is the best two-player variant of a game I’ve tried. (I.e. of games that need two-player variants because they wouldn’t work by the standard rules.)
On then to Compile: Main 1 (actually a mix of 1 and 2, and if the boxes it came in weren’t so gorgeous I’d put it all in one larger one) which is only a two-player game, which is why I don’t play it as much as I’d like. War and Clarity felt like a good combination, but Ice didn’t synergise well for me.
On to Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition and the first time I’ve played on the Mars track. (And I need to amend the rules to distinguish between “this happens when you enter the space”, “this happens when you end a move on the space” and “this happens if you end your Race Phase on the space”.)
Then Imperium: Horizons which works with anywhere from 2 to 4, but is a bit long for the Monday night neighbourly games so I mostly play it at conventions. (It works solo too, and I should try that again…) I took Celts against Japanese, and won by a single point—which I naturally ascribe to having used Cultural Diversity to carry on with Cattle Raids at least three times after we’d become civilised. (It’s a “re-enactment”, chaps.) Ma, as they say, Coo Noo.
Finally for the evening, Xenon Profiteer in which I managed to grab all three pipelines but for once not completely lose control of my hand.
Saturday
This was the full day of play, and we started with three-player Xia: Legends of a Drift System with one new player. So as not to take too long, we played to ten points, and while I got a solid early lead nobody was more than a point behind me by the end. We had Wormholes; they collapsed. We had Infection (take damage every time you roll a 1, pass it on to another ship when you’re adjacent). We had one player trying to get the Ice Rock Jockey award, killed by the new player who then scooped the award too. Great stuff.
On to Sea Salt & Paper, in which I failed to get a 3-mermaid win.
Then Expo acquisition Gibberers (with the English translation pack), in which you’re trying to convey increasingly complex ideas in an invented language. I’d played this once before at the Oxford Meeples meetup, when my prevailing impression was “fun stress”; this time it was more relaxed, “a party game for people who don’t go to parties”.
Then recent Kickstarter game The Sheep, basically a co-op escort quest as you try to get caravans across the board and defend them from mutant murder sheep (i.e. sheep). I found myself increasingly using lines from Aliens (“I only need to know one thing. Where. They. Are.”, “Is this a stand-up fight, sir, or another lamb hunt”, and “They mostly come at night. Mostly.”) which seemed to fit the ethos. As far as the game itself was concerned, there was an interesting arc of difficulty: it started off fairly easy, got tough in the middle as the caravans spread out, then towards the end as they gathered towards the exit point and left the board we found ourselves all powered up with relatively little to do. Still, good fun if a bit huge; I’ll never buy it, but I’ll play it again if someone has it.
On to King of Tokyo: Godzilla which is more or less the classic game with the actual named monsters—but there are also Evolution cards which give you a unique set of power-ups. I’ve never loved this game but I did have a good time.
Finally for the evening, Steampunk Rally Fusion: Atomic Edition again but on the Paris course, where Ada Lovelace romped to a win.
Sunday
I’d been meaning to try the Red Rains cooperative mode of Ashes (Reborn): Rise of the Phoenixborn and @Lordof1 and I finally got a chance to give it a shot. This feels to me as though it might originally have evolved from a Phoenixborn automatic player, but that may simply be because all the card effects from the rest of the game that are designed to do specific things to other players (not just inflicting damage on them) need to have analogues here. A bit fiddly, but great fun!
A quick game of Rush ‘n’ Crush while we waited for a couple of other players to be available. Lots of mines on the bridge!
Then dnup, which for me is still strictly better than SCOUT, but I can see how one could like both. (Sadly nobody wants my copy of SCOUT.)
And finally Omens, loosely a trick-taker but it’s mostly about the special card powers. I rather liked this and may well pick it up at some point.
10 Likes
FWIW, while I like the puzzle piece bit, there’s not enough of it to really entertain me. And since the drafting and order fulfillment don’t really grab me at all, I end up feeling like there’s not enough to the game and so I hardly ever play it. (So take this with a lump salt; it’s been a couple of years, and my memory may not be very accurate.)
6 Likes