Boardgaming 2021: minis are back, baby!

Sadly, it’s junk. I love the idea of those adventure book games, but the scripting will fall apart in your hands.

-Tom

It’s pretty good! Very detailed combat, and quite lethal. Don’t get shot!

The new version of Greenland seems to have 4 factions now. I’ve got them both, the original 3 and the new style box with the fourth faction. There is also a newer edition of Neanderthal but that still seems to three only.

Definitely don’t get kicked in the 12’s, that’s for sure.

Wait, it’s JUNK?!?! I feel like I remember reading a gripping yarn of Tom Chick playing it! Goddammit!

Wha…? Did they just invent a new faction or something? I got the sense that the three factions were a pretty comprehensive registry of the human inhabitants of Greenland at that time. Maybe they discovered a new faction that can time travel? Or did some other upstart Europeans want in on the action of discovering Greenland on the way to beating Columbus to America?

-Tom

From the rules:

The four players represent the Tunit1
(Player Green), Norse2
(Player Red), Sea Sámi3
(Player Blue),
and Thule4
(Player Yellow) tribes fighting to survive in Greenland in the 11th - 15th centuries. Each
tribe sends Hunters to gather food and fuel to support their children, elders, and livestock while
collecting victory points by wiping out competing species or gathering resources. Historically,
the climate turned frigid and all but the Thule (Inuit) died out.

From the footnotes:
1 The Tunit migrated to the New World relatively recently (5000 years ago) and are thus not closely related to either the
Inuit or the Amerindians. Specializing in ice fishing, they lacked even domestic dogs or the bow and arrow. “Tunit” is the
name given to them by their traditional enemies the Thule-Inuit, but the anthropologists call them the Dorset culture. In
1903 a British whaling ship stopped by the last colony of Tunit living on an island in Hudson Bay. One of the sailors was sick,
and within months all the Tunit were dead. Nobody deciphered their language before their extinction, and it was never put
to writing. «The Tunit were strong people, but timid and easily put to flight. Nothing is told of their lust to kill.» Netsilik Inuit, 1923.

2 In 984 CE, Erik the Red, a Viking outlaw leading a group of Norse settlers from Iceland and Norway, founded a colony
known as the “Eastern Settlement” and the “Western Settlement”, the first European colonies in the Americas. Accord-
ing to the Sagas, he named the island Grænland essentially as a marketing device.

3 The Sámi are Finno-Ugric speaking tribes who have long inhabited the arctic regions of Europe, and had started to do-
mesticate the reindeer since at least 800 CE.

4 The Thule are known today as Inuit or Eskimos. Besides their fabled harpoons and kayaks, the Thule had dog sleds, umi-
aks (skin-covered open-topped boats with up to twenty sets of oars), a complex food cache system, slit goggles, and
finely tailored parkas, pants, leggings, boots, double-thumbed mitts, and tent covers. They were a whaling culture, and a
single 40 tonne Bowhead would sustain a community of 50 for a year with food and flammable blubber. They deracinated
and enslaved the Tunits whenever they met them, and perhaps the Greenland Norse met the same fate.

I don’t know the explanation for the Sámi being in Greenland.

Pandering to the Finnish audience, obviously.

-Tom

Lovely stuff, my copy is still on my shelf at home!

The horror, the horror. NSFW Disgusting

Someone’s list of digital adaptions of board games, most of which are on sale in the current steam sale. Who needs cardboard?

I don’t get why they did the rulebook for Aftermath the way they did it. There are so many implicit “rules”. Like the scavenge tokens. Don’t put them back to the supply when scanvenged. So, what should I do then? Thank the mighty micce at BGG for clarification.

The Rulebook is written for people who know already how to play the game. Same with the influence cards (the +3)… Nothing in the rulebook about them.

Otherwise, I like the game and mechanics. Will post my painted rodents later…

Cleaning up at all is totally gay. Just leave it there. You have other horizontal surfaces.

No, it really doesn’t have anything to do with loving someone of the same gender.

Not bad for a holiday week. Wouldn’t have minded getting in a more involved Pax than Viking, and Unfathomable feels stiff (probably because it’s a zombie). But other than that, had a great time.

After playing a couple of missions in Aftermath (the postapocalyptic rodent game), I stopped to care about some minor rules. Like checking for threat when every char left the page. There might be some instances when this is actually relevant, but who cares… a rule that is maybe used once or twice I can live without.

Also, the stop-on-eye-symbol-rule-the-first-time. I will not remember when I come back to a map if I explored all points of interest. So I do what I see fit for me. Don’t care for this rule.

I wonder how the game is balanced, because my rodents get more items and abilities. Items need to be repaired before starting a mission, I guess that’s balancing. And new missions are entering through the adventure book… So I guess it is balanced.

Otherwise it is actually an enjoyable game, I had it for 2 years in my backlog…

No minis here, just me moving some magazine games into new boxes that aren’t falling apart!

Some of you may get a kick out of this! It’s about 2/3’s of my magazine game collection - I finished one box before deciding to record it. I need more time. And a very large game room. And probably less cats.

Absolutely infuriating video! Every third or fourth game I wanted you to take out of the baggie and show me, but nope, you just kept stacking them one on top of each other. Sure enough, there are two more I want to look at. Oh, there’s another! What’s that one? Wait, go back! What was that one???

Six minutes of sheer torment.

-Tom

I post this here because I did it in 2021. I got the hankering to pull my 7th Continent boxes out of the closet and make another run at The Voracious Goddess. This was my 3rd full attempt and at this point I’m not trying to prove anything so I

  • played on Prodigy mode (5 extra somewhat powerful cards in the Action deck)
  • played on Easy mode (basically gives an extra life)
  • ignored rockworm, plant, and weather cards. (These are expansions that make the game harder.)

… and I still lost. Or rather I threw in the towel because the path to winning required too much backtracking. That said, I think I know how to beat it now and where to go. And I actually think I did pretty well. I didn’t use the extra life until I was deep into searching the island to figure out what I’d missed. I’ll make another run at it this weekend and post in the 2022 boardgaming thread.