Well, now there’s a thread, I guess I can go back to talking about weekly plays.
I’ve been playing loads of trick-takers lately. Mostly because I was commissioned to write a piece on trick-takers for Senet magazine, but grew up in a family that considered the things Satanic. My wife’s family always played them, so upon marrying in we would play them and I’d get creamed. After playing about 30 new trick-takers, I’m finally settling into a nice spot where I can win now and then. This week, we played Scout, which yeah, yeah, is a “ladder-climbing” game, but they’re pretty similar. Also played more of Tricktakers, an asymmetrical role trick-taker that’s getting an English printing sometime soon. My copy has paste-ups in sleeves, and I’m working from a translated rulebook that leaves something to be desired. It’s still pretty nifty. Oh, and Sail, another Japanese trick-taker (formerly Hameln Cave) that’s coming to the US at the moment. This one is a cooperative game where you’re trying to navigate a ship past a kraken. It might be my favorite trick-taker of the bunch.
Had some solid solo plays this week. I like Paperback Adventures pretty well, although the production leaves something to be desired. The Votes for Women oppobot didn’t put up stiff enough resistance to warrant another solitaire session, but I could see playing with a partner for a lighter experience.
The biggest play of the week was a six-player session of Guards of Atlantis II. As far as I can tell, this is the best tabletop MOBA. But I thought that about Battle for Biternia a couple years back, so maybe I’ll eat my words again soon. The quantity in this box is staggering. There are something like 22 heroes, and of course the real centerpiece is how they all interact with one another. My team’s trio didn’t synergize all that well, but we were able to push an early mob advantage to barely take down the opposing throne before they killed our last hero. It literally came down to one last card play. Tense stuff.
I played Guards of Atlantis II with six players a couple of weeks ago. A fun time as usual, but I think I prefer it with teams of two. Teams of three slows it down a wee bit too much for my taste.
This weekend I got in some good family gaming: Innovation, which I will always love, and Akrotiri, which doesn’t get off the shelf nearly enough.
I played Guards of Atlantis 2 as well last week and had a terrible time. It was 2v2 and we were not able to kill each other. We danced around killing mobs till the game timer ran out and one team won in what felt like a random fashion. I was the least experienced player and was told this was unusual, probably just a bad pick of competing factions (both characters on my team were slow and heavily armored, opposing team both characters were super fast). But it has made me hesitant to give it another shot.
My experience was much more in line with others in the thread here. Unfortunately it’s very hard for me to get 4 people at the same time and it’s not built for less (there are variants but they seem clearly suboptimal).
I love me some Guards of Atlantis II but I have a hard time selling it to gamers.
Had quite a few games this week.
Hellapagos
Is quick game for 3-12 as you try and get off the island and more importantly survive the betrayal of your fellow castaways. There’s not a lot to it, but I found it amusing enough and any game that plays 6 players in 20 minutes is good in my book.
Sidereal Confluence 2nd ed.
I don’t generally gravitate towards negotiation games, but after playing and enjoying Trade on the Tigress, I thought I might like this one too.
What the hell are you doing in this game? I’m trading my cubes of various sizes and colors with 6 other players so I can get cubes of other various size and colors I need to run my game engines that create yet other cubes of various sizes and colors. I found the game long and pointless. I kept a commanding lead (so I thought) through the game And was sure I had won at 53 points but was beat by a half point because I was one cube short. HALF POINT? Who has half points in a game…FAIL.
Nemesis Lockdown
Quite possibly my best game ever. Scruffy the janitor was given the option of sending a signal and killing the queen or or making sure player 3 didn’t survive. So Scruffy went around powered rooms for players managed to find the nest which player 3 needed let him go in there and then stole his martian rover, turned off the lights and forced him to fight aliens in the dark and run along the Martian surface. Meanwhile player 2 was desperately searching for the gate key. With chaos and aliens galore Scruffy headed to CS A and hoped it was the one launching. It was. As he headed off into space on Turn 10 laughing at how easy it had all been. Then he held up the gate key for everyone to see. Scuffy’s done cleaning up messes.
Finally,
Edge of Darkness got some table time. Has anyone played this. What are your thoughts? It’s a little fiddly with a prologue round, but other than that it was very interesting. Tons of variability and lots of to think about. Can’t say if it is a keeper or not yet, but I suspect those that gave the game bad reviews only played the intro setup cards. Looking forward to getting this to the table again soon.
I’ve been enjoying a very light adventure game called Lands of Galzyr. It’s lighter than light, actually, but just my speed when I’m really too tired to think much after a day at work. I’d guess most folks here wouldn’t care for it, because the amount strategic decision making is quite limited, and it requires accessing a web-based CYOA style interface (though not an app, and it can be used offline). There’s no campaign, just a lot of quests and road events. And the save system is quite ingenious, so that in five minutes you can pack it up mid-game, then resume later with just five minutes of setup.
My dog chewed one of the cards so I messaged the designer on Discord. He’s in Finland. He mailed me a replacement! I venmo’d him a few bucks to cover postage. Nice guy and I hope his game does well.
I played Lands of Galzyr at a friend’s house for a couple of hours and had a blast. Because of the save system, I was easily able to pick up another player’s character and start adventuring. The skill system is great. The game worked well with two players.
The aforementioned friend also liked Dawn of the Peacemakers, a legacy game set in the same world from the same designer. I haven’t tried it myself.
Lands of Galzyr was super well reviewed, and I was interested - but it looks pretty much like a choose your adventure with very thin skill checks driving most of the experience… so I decided not to find a copy.
Glad people are enjoying it - might need to give it another look.
I attended a little convention last week, so finally got some board games played. I taught Sirlin’s Codex to a new player. I’m also new myself, all these years later after buying it. It turns out I love the focus of competitive two-player games, but I only ever have board game events with three or more people. I still have no idea how Codex plays with all three heroes in play and knowledge of the factions. When do I give up on the hope of seeing it?
This was the same downside I ran into with Magic: The Gathering. We had a group buy a small pool of cards and only use them for our games. But, that was always four or more people meeting up, which turned into multiplayer games. They were fine. They miss that game’s finely-honed edge of 1v1.
I played Dune: Imperium for the second time. Two other players were also relatively new. The person hosting the game happily set up with a trade/artifact expansion. And also happily won by a large margin. That gladdened me, because so far I’ve pushed hard on one system each play (money first, trashing second) and not figured out how it all works together. That victory shows that a person has a huge influence over their outcome with a multi-faceted strategy.
I was the player with a time limit when we sat for Twilight Imperium 4E in a 10-point game with six players. Everyone was fine with my restriction, but I still felt quite bad seeing the game end one turn short of what it needed to conclude. It was a very friendly table. I hope to be so well-mannered in my on-the-board aggression in future games. Again, my personal failing is that there seems to be a richness I’ll never experience because I don’t find the time to play this more often than…once every three years, apparently.
Looking at TI4 from the outside, I would think, why devote one whole day to this single game, when I could play through several others. But there’s something about the scale that is its own quality to appreciate. There’s also a unique degree of fatigue that sets in after eight hours. It’s a fascinating little tidbit to try to plan around next time. Someone made the comment that “90% of time in TI is spent giving bad advice”, which I just find hilarious. Maybe you had to be there?
I played John Company 2E for the first time. That’s likely my first experience with such a strongly-focused negotiation game since playing Diplomacy once about 20 years ago. Just to get things moving with us two noobs, we had randomly dealt starting card positions. I had no one in charge of anything. I didn’t see a way in to the game, so I wasn’t very vested in what was happening. Which made it all the more amusing when our second turn in, foreign armies invaded from all three seas and ended the game. The host had said random events play a significant role, but even they were surprised at that outcome.
I think that assessment is pretty correct, so if that doesn’t sound like fun I don’t know that you need to re-evaluate. I wouldn’t generally be up for something as light as Galzyr is but I think the dice mechanic is lightly clever and it puts the writing in the spotlight so I can live with it.
Agree fully. It’s for me, for now, because it is light. Sometimes I leave heavier games set up on my table and then stare at them when I come from work, and realize I just don’t have the mental wherewithal to jump in. With LoG, I jump in easily, get through an entire play session (8 in-game days when playing solo) and finish up in about an hour. But the phrase ‘CYOA with thin skill checks’ is spot on.
Another good week. Apart from one game, which shall go unmentioned, every play was solid.
Endurance is brutally hard. My crew survived. Well, about a dozen of them did. Everyone else remained in Antarctica, and not because we’d established a permanent research station. I played Votes for Women with my nine-year-old. An interesting experience. She asked a lot of questions, some of which could have been less comfortable in another setting. I think the most interesting play of the week, though, was Land and Freedom. Blue Panther has provided the POD production for publishers like Hollandspiele and Catastrophe Games for years, but now this is their first self-published title. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it’s polished and clever. It’s semi-cooperative, always a fraught proposal, but it does a good job of demonstrating why Spanish leftists were ultimately swept away by the country’s fascist movement. My group happened to cooperate better than our historical counterparts.
My copy of Land and Freedom arrived last week. So far I’ve only gotten in a solo game. The solo system is super-easy to operate, but I think the game will really come to life when I have some human opponents to get mad at.
The table talk it can engender is something. In our play, the Communists were insanely selfish, so we (the Anarchists and Moderates) were constantly having to browbeat them into contributing to our fight against the fascists. Eventually we made an ultimatum: we’re going to spend a few turns shoring up our own goals, which means they’ll win if you don’t start pulling your weight. Good thing our Communist player grew a conscience in time.
Played Frostpunk this past weekend and I’m pretty sure its not meant to be a board game. It’s actually a really good game but, it’s a solo game and very very very long.
Yes you can play co-op, but all the other players really do is book keep and help you puzzle out your turn. I can see two players as an optimal count as you then have someone to help see the bigger picture of the scenario and give you some interaction in decision making, but otherwise I’m at a loss as to why you would play this over the video game. Wish it had been competitive or semi co-op where you represent different factions of the city fighting for your laws, people, etc get what they need to survive. It’s definitely thematic and the puzzle is definitely there. If you love the theme and you just love sitting in front of a large table full of stuff then this might be for you, otherwise I’d say just play the video game.
In other news
Wonderland Wars is painted and back in rotation
I just got Frostpunk and am only a solo player…I love sitting in front of a table full of lots of stuff with lots of decisions so this seems perfect for me…we’ll see this weekend.
I hope 300 wasnt the downer. I play it a bit on the rally the troops website and find it to be a really interesting and elegant little wargame. The online play inspired me to pick up the physical box and I absolutely love the way it’s presented. The small form factor and great materials are wonderful.
