Played a 2 player (with a random 3rd pile) of Hot Streak to show it to my partner. She loved it, and took it far too seriously immediately, declaring her love for Dangle based on how goofy he is. She also made the most money and was very smug.
(I found out after that there is a 2 player mode in the back of the book, but we basically didn’t miss anything).
Another 2 player game night:
Empires of the Void II - Another Red Raven game I’ve had for ages but never got round to playing. Now that I have, I’m pleased with making it my choice for Big Space Game That Doesn’t Take A Whole Day.
Bit fiddly at times with lost of stuff to track, but the action selection makes things more straightforward. Would probably be better with more players, but it was definitely a good idea to learn it between us before introducing it to our more AP-prone friends.
Bizarre that it has a VP track that only goes up to 20, as we got to 3-4 times that.
Played Cozy Stickerville. It is very good if you are at all a fan of whimsy.
My partner is rejecting having residents on our land, or roads, or buildings, in favour of filling it up with flowers to attract BEES and maybe a squirrel.
Had a first go at River Valley Glassworks, solo. It’s a bit crunchier than the vibes suggest, in an Azul way.
You fill from the left of your board and both rows and columns get you points. However, columns on the right are much more valuable, so the best plan would be to fill your left with rarer colours so that the rightmost columns fill higher with more common colours.
Rows only count up to the first gap though, and if your leftmost column is a gap the entire rest of the row isn’t counted, so you can’t go TOO rare on that first column.
And there’s the inevitable gaining of rares you don’t want in the endgame which makes your leftmost column go too high anyway and loses you all those points you would have got on the right. Curses!
Lovely components, lovely art, might be quite different in multiplayer. Plays quick but quite satisfying.
or: School-night 18xx with a solo mode?
Railways of the Lost Atlas was originally on Kickstarter a couple of years ago, and at the time I was very interested; unfortunately, it didn’t include a solo mode at that time, and I knew I just couldn’t justify another 18xx game, because there was hardly enough shelf space and dust to go around for the rest of my non-soloable 18xx collection. I reluctantly passed on it.
But, as I’m subscribed on BGG to all 18xx games, I noticed when one of the designers started working on a solo mode. I also noticed when the Landmarks expansion went on Kickstarter. Again, interested, but without knowing much about the solo mode (I never bothered to actually read much of the BGG thread where it was being worked on), I passed- I can always buy a copy later, I told myself.
Now that Landmarks of the Lost Atlas crowdfunding project has been fulfilled, I noticed some more activity, specifically people showing the solo gameplay. So, I decided I would go all-in, without really knowing too much about it.
Railways of the Lost Atlas comes without a fixed board and, instead, features modular 3-hex map tiles that you assemble into a custom map each game (when not using a pre-determined map, I guess).
Here’s mine from my first solo playthrough:
You can see some track already on the board: the solo bot is created by randomly selecting one of the Minor companies available (in this case, Tunneling) and then the player chooses one of the remaining Minor companies to join with the first to create the Major that the solo AI will control for the game. You then create the most efficient path between the companies, picking up revenue locations along the way if possible. The initial revenue along the connected route will determine the “difficulty”. In this case, it was 70, which made this “medium” difficulty.
The solo bot uses a deck of its minors as an action deck; a normal share triggers a normal action, while a president’s share triggers a special action. The special action is different per minor. Most of them feature the “breakthrough” special action, which allows the bot to do a tile upgrade to bridge into a player-created network. Neither of the minors used here (Tunnel, Northern Port) have breakthrough, so that was not something I had to deal with.
In fact, I was able to shoulder out the AI from my network for most of the game. I decided to start Spacious (printed grey hex, north-easternish) as well as the Suburban (pink icon to the SE of Spacious). Unfortunately, I intentionally stayed in Yellow through the end of OR2 of the first cycle to avoid the AI picking up the Resourceful Minor (center of map, brown-ish color), because I wished to start that Minor next. In a Merger Round, the AI will absorb an unstarted Minor that it is attached to. In my game, I managed to fend off that from ever happening, but probably to my detriment, because I wasn’t pushing trains like I probably should have.
Later, after starting both Expansive and Resourceful, I merged both neighboring pairs into two Majors. I probably should have merged Suburban to Resourceful and Spacious to Expansive, but I don’t think it mattered that much.
I made the mistake of starting a 5th Minor, Agricultural. That was a huge mistake. If not pushing the trains was my biggest mistake, opening a 5th minor was second (and I might even waffle on swapping those two). Agricultural, south side of the board was running for 100 at the end of the game, unable to break out of it’s southern spur into the broader network (because Minors don’t have Hub tokens to put down (except Expansive))
Four cycles is so short (8 ORs). In the solo game, the AI becomes the train export (once per OR) rather than the end of OR2 triggering one. I somehow managed to have Permanent 3 trains, and that was likely the crux of my issue. I lost, 2556 to 3444.
I’m definitely going to play with Railways of the Lost Atlas: Landmarks of the Lost Atlas expansion next. It’s a modular expansion, and only one of the modules can’t be used in solo play. It adds new Minors, the eponymous Landmarks (tiles with special abilities), an option to launch a Minor direct to Major, and probably something else I’m forgetting.
This weekend’s game was a first play of Carnival Zombie: 2nd Edition, which I’ve had for two years or so now but never got to the table, despite having read through the rules in previous attempts. A quick test run on Saturday was truncated by work, although I got quite a bit of that playthrough wrong anyway so, after watching a couple of gameplay videos, I tried it again properly today. I just used the introductory scenario Plague in Venice on easy difficulty (with starting item cards, assuming that’s allowed?) to get a gentler shortened introduction and go through the basic rules properly.
The first day and night ran through okay, placing the initial barricades and fending off the initial night of the zombie minion horde without bosses. The stress built up a bit but all was okay heading into the second morning. With the last barricades placed during the day and a few useful items salvaged, all that was left was to survive the final night. I prepared the defenses and positioned the team ready for the arrival of the Martyr and the Mistress with their cohorts. Luckily, the combination of items, Captain’s orders and stress-burning gave me lots of extra actions, so much so that by the end of the first hour my Engineer had killed the Mistress with his new grenade launcher and the Sniper had hit the Martyr so often that he was left with only one wound while still in the second ring. In the second hour, the martyr was dispatched but the undead forces were circling quickly. In the final hour, the Commando had managed to make good headway for the team’s escape, and come dawn, the team managed to fight the remaining zombies to the east and escape, rescuing a survivor for good measure.
Overall: quite good, I thought. I’m not sure that I fully understand the rules about stress and terror, and it seemed quite brutal at times with the waves of attacking zombie minions. I would have been in real trouble without a few of the items the team found, but I can see how over a normal length game, there may be more time to rest up during the extra daylight periods. I initially worried about the complexity of running six characters all game, however it is much easier to do here than in, say, Zombicide. If I get time over the next week, I’ll try it again with the normal full game, albeit possibly still at easy difficulty, until my tactics are more honed.
Or, maybe not a school-night 18xx? I played solo again last night and started right around 9pm. I finished totally up the scores at 1:30 this morning.
This time, I played with some content from Railways of the Lost Atlas: Landmarks of the Lost Atlas Expansion, a curiously long title for an expansion.
Included this time:
I randomly selected 8 of the available 16 Minors (base + expansion) and 2 landmarks. Then I thouroughly shuffled the stack using multiple rounds of dice-based pile shuffling. But when building the map, I ended up pulling several off-board and map-boundaries early, and the two landmark tiles were literally the last two tiles in the stack.
I started out with an idea to create a circuitous map with some bottlenecking possibilities:
But once it became clear that the landmarks were coming out dead-last, I pivoted (read: cheated) into something more interesting to play, rather than just dangling the landmarks on the periphery
In play:
The Conglomerate randomly started with Suburban and I opted to pair it with Agriculture, hopeful that I could box it out along the south side of the map. Unfortunately, that meant it started very close to a Capital (the hex with a 
) as well as the open side of the Northern Port home, giving it a base revenue of 90- this also meant that it was running first in every OR round.
I managed to start all 6 remaining Minors, and fought hard to stay competitive. I made some tough choices about which shares to buy, and mostly got it right. I don’t know if I stood a chance, due to the AI starting position, but I feel like I did pretty well even though it was ranked a “Medium” difficulty.
Final scores:
In my next game, I’m going to look at some of the variants to make the tile stack a little less random, and hopefully have a better chance of making a good map.
I feel like this game would make a good candidate for monthly solo challenges… maybe someday I’ll be up for organizing something like that- but it seems like a lot of work.
Another game of Twilight Imperium 4th Edition with Prophecy of Kings and Thunder’s Edge.
I played the Winnu for the first time in a while… they continue to be good. Not great, but I sat on Mecatol Rex with a modest fleet (Dreadnaught, Carrier, 6 fighters, 2 PDS) and felt pretty secure there. The whole +2 in combat on Mecatol or Legendary Worlds is pretty massive… allowed me to take out 3 enemy Dreadnaughts orbiting Thunder’s Edge.
Chris played the Nomad (and eventually won), Greg played the Argent Flight (but refused to take an appropriate colour for his faction… people are weird…) and Ben took the Crimson Rebellion and didn’t do super well. Can’t say anything in particular went wrong for him, and he got War Suns (and an economy to BUILD War Suns) pretty quickly, but he failed to score many points.
We’ve all had those games.
Anyway, game ended on Turn 5 after I was outmaneuvered by Chris twice (once to take Imperial away from me, but I still had a chance, but then he and Ben both attacked systems I needed to hold… and by the time I retook them, and I did… I no longer had enough tokens to make the moves I needed to get other fleets to edge sectors… and the second time was him scoring his 10th point before the Status Phase due to a lucky Secret Objective draw).
This also marks the first time I have ever played without a single Secret Objective. Not “Failed to score 1”, but on Turn 1 I burned my initial Objective to launch a mission to Thunder’s Edge, and then I never managed to draw one for the rest of the game. Very, very weird.
Anyway! Solid game, and a lot of fun.
There are many things on that table!
I have delusional ambitions about many things, often even boardgame-related… But I have no delusions of playing a game like this!
Yes, I do still have delusions of playing 18OE… Why do you ask? 
Win, lose, banana.
12th birthday party, some players under 6. They even added an apple sub rule where you could swap your card with someone else if no one caught you.
complete nonsense, enjoyed by all.
Another solo game of Railways of the Lost Atlas.
I’ve realized that I’ve been playing two rules wrong.
As a result of these two things, all of my prior plays are *'s. Good news! All of those were losses, so I don’t feel bad whatsoever 
In fact, I’m delighted by the potential for the solo bot to rush the trains a bit more. I was struggling to push the trains hard enough to get decent scores while also not running out of money (it’s an incremental capitalization game, so there’s not much “free money” available).
The starting map:
Final map:
Scores were:
Me- 2074
Conglomerate- 2656
I got to teach Hansa Teutonica to more newbies today. More good times; more new fans.
Hit Railways of the Lost Atlas again solo last night.
Playing by the official, now-understood rules meant that the solo bot broke out of containment early and proceeded to absolutely eviscerate me, operationally. My only recourse was to buy up to 40% of the bot’s company to try to fight for parity (the company ran really well, and so instead of letting it get 60% of the revenue and stock increase over me, I bought up 4 shares to drop that down to, merely, 20% revenue delta. In the final Operating Round, the solo bot ran for 83 per share and the final market value for it was 250.
There’s something I’m missing in this game where I just can’t find the edge needed to eek out a win against the solo mode.
Final scores were 3950 (me) to 4232 (bot).
I may take a break from RotLA for a bit. I’m contemplating getting 1862 or High Frontier 4 All back on my table. I know I have new games to explore (Imperium Classics, Everdell Silverfrost just to name a couple of the most recent), but I’m not sure I’m quite ready to learn a new system yet. RotLA was actually a bit of a “free” self-teach, since picking up one 18xx is pretty easy once you already know the common mechanism ingredients in the design.
I also wonder if RotLA’s solo mode could be applied to other 18xx games; specifically, merger games (1861/67, 18Ireland perhaps?) I have many 18xx games unplayed so far because they do not feature solo modes.
I am participating in the Solotober challenge over on BGG and I have managed a different solo every day of the month. (https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/384594/solotober-2026?page=3 my entry is Small Fjords somewhere on page 3 of the challenge)
It’s a fun challenge and because playing a solo every day is what I have been doing since last Christmas… I decided it had to be not just 31 days of playing Small Fjords but a different game every day.
Today’s entry is newly arrived Night At the Zoo–a new game I was supposed to look at during SPIEL by the same designer as SETI. It caught my eye because the mechanics list has “programmed movement” which is what Robo Rally is all about. But because I was almost not going to SPIEL this year (and now I am)… I bought some games that normally I would have delayed until SPIEL or after. The programmed movement in this game… is … not the same as robo rally. I need to play more to figure out if it will hold my interest. First game was okay. Rules are not difficult to understand, rulebook is okay enough, retention is likely good, so the game has good chances to see my table again.
Yesterday, we visited our friends’ daughter in her new apartment or I should probably say one of our teenager friends 
We played 3 missions of our Bomb Busters box I had brought along. Her’s is much further along and I wanted something cooperative I knew ahead of time we all liked. I think it plays best with 4 but 3 is a pretty good number, too. And we had some good moments and fun deductions.
Hot Streak (the winner ended with $95!) followed by ~4 hours of A War of Whispers (5p). I don’t dislike the game, but it drags on a bit much for my liking. The duration was not helped by some appalling A.P. turns. I was chatting afterwards to one of the players, who proposed a “Chess clock” system, whereby everyone runs their own count-down timer (probably on their phone) during their turns. All players start with the same amount of time, and that’s how long you have for the whole game. So you’re free to take a long turn, but it just means you have less time for all of your other turns. It would put some players at a disadvantage for sure, but with a suitably reasonable time allowance I think it could be a pretty good system.
A war of whispers and the expansion are still on my “pay silly money for this one day” list, even though I haven’t played them yet.
Hoping I can find a crowd who don’t have that kind of AP though.
My experience has been shorter, perhaps because I don’t play with as many AP-prone players.
Neighbourly games on Monday: Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition with K.N.Y.F.E. (me), Parse and Chrono-Ranger against Apostate in Rook City.
Which was pretty tough: lots of damage being handed out from the start, and a mere -1 to damage didn’t seem to help all that much. Rook City with its fixed psychic damage just made things worse. Still, there was a point just after the flip at which it looked doable… but I think we’d taken too long to get there.
Usually I’m happy to go on to play a different random combination each time, but I want to try Apostate again. Preferably with Fanatic in the team. A very good game even though we lost.
And Thirsty Meeples Oxford last night, with new Stefan Feld release Medico. Which to me fell firmly into the “beige modern Euro” camp: there are things slightly influenced by the theme, but mostly you’re collecting tokens to get other tokens to get your score up.
It’s all a bit of an abstract point salad. There are some pleasing optimisation puzzles, but if you want something that will give you any idea of the decisions faced by a travelling barber-surgeon in mediaeval Europe, this is not the game for that. I mean, there aren’t even any patients! (Oh, you can “heal the city lord and gain his favour”, but in game terms that’s simply picking up a Favour card.) It’s all set collection and tactical movement.
All of this is not helped by what is either poor translation or terrible original rules writing. Is selling in the market an action you can take in passing rather than only at your specific destination for the round? Probably, since it’s listed under secondary actions, but if so why does it say “at your Destination”? How does Prestige relate to the actual scoring track, if at all? What is the point of the small white meeples, the Medicus’ juniors?
There was nothing here to offend me. Stefan Feld is a competent game designer. But there was also nothing here to appeal, to say I should ever play this game again rather than any other competently-designed abstract Eurogame. If someone has it at a convention and says “hey Roger, come and play”, sure, I’ll come and play. But I can’t see why I’d ever seek it out, and at the same time I can’t see any obsessive Eurogamers deciding that this is their game that they will play and get good at to the exclusion of all else (which might be the case for some of Feld’s earlier designs such as The Castles of Burgundy, Trajan or Bruges).
After a hiatus of 3 months over the summer our Deadlands RPG resumed. I didn’t do anything but help the wounded and roll for negotiation once and keep writing our campaign diary. I do hope we will move on to another system soon. This one is too old-school for me. I prefer being able to do cool things.
On my solotober table I found Enchanted Ivy for yesterday:
This is for the second campaign scenario.
I often do not enjoy solos of games that are “solo only” several well-known instances failed for me first and foremost I am thinking of Witchcraft. But I also couldn’t wrap my head around Maquis (app plays though). So I refrained from buying Black Sonata for instance.
But I do like puzzles and tile laying so much that when I saw people posting pictures of this on the solotober challenge site… I ordered myself a copy.
This is the first small All-Play Squarebox that immediately moved into the “keepers” department for me. Just my kind of game. And I kind of like it in that box even though the fit of the components is very snug.
To the left is the finished “Inn” built from the Ivy cards and filled with walls and balconies and guests looking out from their rooms and to the right are the scoring conditions for each guest. In each scenario (there is an endless mode that I have not got to yet) there is a specific set of guests that you place.
On your turn you draw 2 cards, play one with the balcony side and the other one with the wall side. The scenario gives you the shape of the Inn you are building but like Kingdomino doesn’t force you to start in the lower left corner, you just play adjacent after the first card. On each balcony you place one of the two guests currently “waiting at the reception”. After your turn another guest shows up from the bag… a secondary goal to placing the guests in rooms they enjoy (next to other guests, high up, in solitude etc.) is to try and create as few disconnected patches of Ivy as possible.
Lovely puzzle just the right amount of burn for a 15 minute game. (so far. I suspect as I march depper into the short campaign things might get trickier.)
I also played my first (solo) game of Jisogi: Anime Studio Tycoon today. I forgot to take a picture in my excitement of playing the game. I backed this on its second run through crowdfunding, so this is version 1.5 and it shows. The rulebook is well-done. It even includes a “recap” page after the main rules to help you see all the rules on the table that you learned up to there. It is also quite nicely illustrated and the game/mechanics feel very coherent without any superfluous parts.
The only criticism I had was that the introductory solo is a bit on the easy side
The game plays over 4 rounds during which you use an action selection mechanism where your 4 dead-inside employees try to make an anime by writing it, animating it and trying to improve the situation at the studio by either upgrading staff from dead-inside to “genki” or hiring new people entirely and getting buzz or merch deals and so forth.
After each round you can release an anime (and you should, it’s your main source of income and points) made from Setting + Plot + Twist pieces the staff writer(s) collected and it scores with matching symbols on your pieces with current trends times your animation quality and any staff enthusiasm and other bonusses on top. There’s also a bonus for being the first to follow one of the trends and there are achievements … from releasing the anime you obtain both points and money and merch. The more merch deals you have the more stable your income.
There is also a debt mechanic that has you pay actual interest on each credit you take.
I really enjoyed my solo play. It was very smooth. The solo-mode has various difficulty levels and is rather easy to handle. No bot/automa just some random(ish) action blockading and a few levers for difficulty adjustment.
The teach should not be too difficult for this one. The game does not have all that many moving parts and almost all the rules details are reflected on the game and player boards. The only mistake I made is that I played some extra cards you can get by networking on their own a couple of times instead of pairing them with an action.
As for film-making themed games I also have Roll Camera and while this one has been enjoyed for a couple of plays, I always found it that one weak mechanically and therefore leaning a little bit too much on the roleplaying/narrative side the players have to bring to the game. Jisogi is much stronger mechanically. I can see myself playing more solos but also maybe bringing it to the table competitively because it’s not that difficult to teach. It does not have any parallel play so I have no idea how long it would play, the solo was quick though. Turns are fast, there are only four types of actions to select from and everyone starts with 4 employees (max 6). Hopefully next game I will take a picture. I think there will be a next game and I suppose rules retention should be good.
I should add that this was the expanded War of Whispers with the two additional sets of councils – the Orca raiders, who behave differently to the other clans, and the Guilds, which is a array of unique abilities – so that would certainly make the game take longer.
Nevertheless, BGG suggests “30-60 minutes” for the base game, and “60-90 minutes” for this version; so even allowing for publishers being liers and teaching time, this went long.
I’ve never experienced it being nearly as snappy as those suggested times; but I’ve only ever played this expanded version of the game, with 4/5 players, at least some of whom are new to the game.
