Recap Monday - Week 23

We spent most of our week discovering 2 kickstarters that just landed, The Witcher and Isoforian guard.

The Witcher is very easily becoming a slog when playing at higher levels. We played a 4 player game that lasted 3 to 4 hours. It is a lot of fun, but the sweetspot for the game feels around 1 or 2 players. Lastly we are thinking anout adding some extra homerules, as you can now win the game by only fighting lvl 1 monsters. This is also something I see a lot of on BGG forums.

The Isoforian guard is so much fun! Really like the bag drafting gameplay, and the story. The game is tougher than we thought. We wanted to continue with the story, but we got our asses kicked and learned that grinding might be needed to get some better equipment and abilities.

Knocked out some Dominion! I have all the original cycle expansion, plus the 2nd edition updates. First game was crazy, Platinums/Colonies, Tiara, Pirate, Tide Pools, all lead to crazy and big plays. Second game was grindy as hell, only trashing was Lookout and Jack of All Trades, and only draw or action engine was doing nonsense with Trail. First game I got to try Tournament though, which is a really interesting power-curve throughout a game.

Started playing Imperium Legends, amazing game despite all the problems the spanish editions has (a lot of rules not translated clear enough to the point i had to reread most of the rulebook in english, tons of typos, paragraphs moved to incorrect parts of the rulebook, king of kings card being printed only in one side, sentences just incorrectly translated and more, seriously, just dont buy Devir's edition)

Im loving the mix of deckbuilding with a bit of civilization buildign/resource management, have played 5 games solo already

My main gripe being how the Qin faction is just unfun to play against (in Solo), after searching a bit i saw that is a common problem, whish i had read that before playing as most of my games were against them, still had fun getting to know the mechanisms.

We played our first game of Ark Nova (2 Players). There are lost of mechanics to take into account at first and while the start was slow, I am eager for our next session. Since its raining outside, this might even be today.

We also had a session of Splendor Duel. I love this tiny duel game, currently its my favorite in our collection.

I introduced @[email protected] to Wingspan

I finally got to try The crew: Mission deep sea. I like it, but I think I prefered the simplicity of the first one. The game is basically the same but I have to constantly remind people what the meaning of the goal cards are.

On Tuesday my group played Die Zwerge - Big Box Scenario 2 and so far I'm not a fan. There's no real mitigation option for bad dice rolls making combat really unsatisfying and the final three challenges were just ridiculously impossible.

On Sunday I played Mystic Vale with my girlfriend. She had a powerful totem that gave her a free mana and a VP for every upgrade that she bought. This meant that she was quickly racking up pretty sizeable mana pools and getting a constant trickle of VPs. I on the other hand was stuck with two sun elements and a hugely expensive leader which I couldn't upgrade until well into the second half. I focused (perhaps a bit too much) on getting a decent set of elements to buy vale cards which let me rack up a good amount of VP that way. Ultimately the game ended really tight with 64-62 VP in her favor.

Also on Sunday my group met for DnD. We're almost done with the Lost Mines of Phandelver - or so we though. Almost got TPK'd. A 28 damage fireball took out half of our party, a third tried to ram open a door and knocked himself out leaving only our halfling - down to 2 HP - trying to save everyone. Miraculously she remembered that the healer still carried a healing potion, used it on him who was then able to heal everyone up with a lucky dice roll on his group healing spell. In the ensuing retreat the knight managed to alert another horde of monsters to our presence.

Saturday was our twice a month large meetup. Went with the kids for the first couple of hours, and we played:

• Dodo. The kids love this. It's really simple, just be fast and remember position of the tokens, and that's it. But it's a lot of fun watching that ball roll slowly towards disaster.
• Team3. Interesting communication game, we discovered that if the 8 year old gives spoken instructions to the 5 year old tempers can get a little hot. All other combinations worked well, it was just that one that didn't.
• Stella. My 8 year old loves it, but the 5 year old still isn't fully ready. She has issues with mapping the cards to her pad. Still, by the fourth round things went much smoother.

Then the kids went home with mom and I got to play a couple of heavier titles:

• Pax Pamir 2nd Edition. First time playing. I expected this to be good, but it was still much more fun than I expected. The rules seem a little dry, like you're just moving stuff around, and all the theme will be all condensed in the card text. But then you play it and everything feels very thematic. I'm pretty sure we played it extremely wrong (in the strategy sense, I think rules were fine), but still had a blast. And I think it would probably work better with at least one more player (we played a three player game)
• Beyond the Sun with expansion. I love this game. First time playing with the expansion (the other two players were also first timers, one was also a first time BTS player). I really liked the leaders cards. Also, it was a weird game, in that there was no achievement token in either Empire or Trascendence. One player had the leader that gives you a private achievement, and he completed that, plus the other two achievements that were drawn (4 strength in three locations, fully empty a single disc track), that meant three and triggered game end. He was the second player, and I was the third player, so I maneuvered to be able to colonize a fourth system, while at the same time denying player 2 the ability to do so in two of the systems he had a majority in. Player 1 had nothing to earn him more points than maneuvering over the map, so he did that, and he couldn't prevent me from colonizing (I had two possible targets and he didn't have enough ships/jumps), so he prevented player 2 from doing so, since that was a 9 point difference (5 from the planet, 4 from the achievement). Player 2 had his turn busted, so he instead prevented me from colonizing. My last turn was also maneuvering on the map, so nobody got their fourth system, and the achievement stayed empty. And for techs, there wasn't even a single level three tech researched. The leaders do push you to play more on the map board, plus only a single guild came up, and I chose the terraforming one because others were better prepared to take advantage of the research action. And only a single level 2 tech that could research level three was drawn, but again, it was discarded. So that was it, no level three techs, so of course no level four either. Scores were quite lower than we've seen other times, too: 36/32/31. Anyway, definitely the highlight of the night, and as usual after playing BTS I'm left wanting to play more.

We tried the 2-player variant of Cat in the Box. It works fine but it left me feeling that a better 2p variant should be possible. Seems too easy to tie the tricks and avoid paradoxes. Might be our lack of experience with the game, maybe it's different with a more aggressive playstyle? I have some ideas for tweaking it but I want to play it more first to better understand the game.

Would love to hear other experiences, especially about the 2p variant.

Also learned Challengers, online only on BGA so far but thinking about picking it up. Love it when a game doubles down on a core idea and makes it work. In this case it's focusing entirely on the deckbuilding portion of deckbuilders with with the round playing out mostly automatically, sort of like in auto-battler video games. It also reminded me of some other games I like: Tea for 2 and Baseball Highlights: 2045.

I was looking for a highly thematic, immersive solo game with the restriction in mind that I only have around 60min to play once or twice a week.

People recommended Marvel Champions, since Arkham Horror LCG takes way too long per session, and yeah, …I’ve never been into super hero themes that much, but I liked it.

Last week though someone sold Arkham Horror LCG (1st Ed.) + Dunwich Expansion for just 25€! I couldn‘t resist and boy, I played my first hour, didn‘t even finish anything, but this game is exactly what I was looking for! When I have to stop playing I take a foto and arrange everything in sorting trays to “save the game”, and atm it works great! I’m really looking forward to the next session! What a masterpiece (if you’re into storytelling, Lovecraft, deckbuilding and medium/heavy games)!

• The Toledo War - Two player Schotten-Totten style fun, quick card game from Amabel Holland @ Hollandspiele about the historical conditions of Michigan becoming a state. Was the free game giveaway for their 2019 Holiday Sale. Played a couple rounds before everyone arrived.

• Land and Freedom: The Spanish Civil War - Three players (max). Currently, my favorite game. The Semi-Cooperative nature of it is fantastic. You have to work together with your political opponents to defeat the fascists. Unfortunately, we lost at the beginning of Year 3 this round.

• 7 Wonders Duel - Two players. First time playing, but neither of us cared much for it.

• Cat in the Box: Deluxe Edition - Two player variant. First time playing with only two. Usually love this game, but there aren't enough interesting things going on in the two-player version in my opinion and probably will stick to 3+ players from now on.

We played Lost Ruins of Arnak on the weekend for the first time. My first impression is a massive recommend! Nobody at the table had played before. One person read the rules the day before to be the instructor. It took one round to get an overview of things. Then the games flowed nicely. By the end it was amazing what cool interactions we would find.

It's a management game about exploring ruins to find treasure. It has worker placement, resource management and deck building elements as well as a sort of tech tree to climb. Finding ways to have the many many different resources and mechanics interact and when to buy cards, when to place a worker, when to research, when to explore a ruin and when to fight a monster. We had an absolute blast and in our first game focusing on either aspect of the game as well as going for a balanced approach yielded very similar amounts of victory points for everyone. The winner and loser were a mere 4 points apart with everyone sitting at around 45 to 49 points.

I hope we get to play another game soon.