Indeed I do! To play a board game at least one time.
It’s a good start! :)
I had a few months last year without a single play. I’ve missed the interaction with other players a lot. But to not even play with the family or solo made me miss the hobby a lot.
I have a premium Boardgame Arena account. Which means I can access all the games there and free players can play at my table for free. If you are not being facetious and they have the game you wanted to play, I’d be happy to set up a game with you and other interested QT3ers and we could have a go. It’s not facee to face gaming (which might be what you are after?), but the site is quite slick.
I haven’t really used BGA but we (I can’t remember which all QT3ers were involved anymore) played a couple games of Pax Porfiriana via yucatan.de a couple of years ago. I’m always game for asynch play. Synch is a bit more of a hill to climb.
I don’t really set targets, mostly a rough goal of pulling out a new boardgame every month or two to solo play, and just keep cycling that way. With logging plays, I tend to make my own excel documents. Not because I think I do a better job, I don’t. However, since making my own, I’ve come to learn a lot about using Excel that I didn’t otherwise know, solving problems problems to track data, that sort of thing.
I think the site should be: https://www.yucata.de
I don’t know that game. That site has a good selection though, with some overlap with Board Game Arena. I wonder how the implementations compare.
Neat. I have had too many dealings with user spreadsheets in Excel in my professional life to want to deal with it more after work. But that seems like a great way to track exactly what you are interested in and learn in the process.
I hadn’t set targets in BG Stats before these ones. But realising that my plays could get really sporadic last year, I thought it would be interesting to set goals I thought I could achieve and see how I do against them. That app makes it easy to review your progress while you play. I can also tell you that my wife has a 66% win ratio in 7 Wonders Duel playing against me and her highest score is 16 higher than mine. She is ruthless. :/
One of the solo games I need to make time to bring to the table this year is Fortune and Glory. Only played it once last year because of the space and time commitment. But it’s always a treat. I also have hope that my wife and I will play through Sleeping Gods together. If she ends up not liking it, that’s going to be my solo campaign for the first half of this year.
Yes, autocorrect being “helpful” yet again and I didn’t proofread sufficiently. I’ve never played the game the site is named for, either.
BGA is ‘slicker’ than yucata in general (although Underwater Cities, one of yucata’s latest games, is pretty good). BGA has some features like allowing simultaneous actions that yucata doesn’t.
They have somewhat different implementation philosophies as well. Yucata seems to like to show you information you could get by scrolling through the log, while BGA only tends to show you things you would see if you were sitting at the table. Yucata is also generally more undo-friendly, although some games on BGA do allow some amount of undo.
Also see this thread:
So my board gaming group was talking about the various aspects of games we like and one of the guys said he likes “turning things into other things” which sounds simplistic and yet resonated with me. For example, our group likes a number of Uwe Rosenberg games including Le Havre, Agricola and Feast for Odin, all of which involve “turning things into other things” in interesting and/or strategically demanding ways.
I’m wondering what other good medium to heavy Euros out there involve “turning things into other things” in interesting and strategic ways. Resource conversion, production chains, etc. What are some good suggestions for my group to contemplate?
How about Tzolk’in?
There is an implementation of it on BGA if you want to give it a whirl: https://en.boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=tzolkin
Some of my favorite Industry games.
Altiplano, Crisis, Clans of Caledonia, Arkwright.
Actually, Tzolk’in is already in our rotation of games :O, I just forgot to mention it.
Here are the games we’ve played and enjoyed over the last couple of years:
Gaia Project
Terraforming Mars
Le Havre
Castles of Burgundy
Brass: Birmingham
Feast of Odin
Tzolk’in
Underwater Cities
Energy Empire (Manhattan Project)
Trickerion
Champions of Midgard
Raiders of the North Sea
Roll Player
Marco Polo
Rajas of the Ganges (for certain values of “enjoy” - I personally kinda hate this one)
In addition to that, a few we used to play that have been replaced by the new hotness or we burned out on:
Brass: Lancashire (Birmingham is better in our view)
Terra Mystica (replaced by Gaia Project)
Caverna (we love Uwe but one of our players has a Master Caverna Strategy so it doesn’t get much play)
Ora et Labora (this one does get some play as again there is a Master Strategy but several of us are good at it)
We average about 3 medium-heavy games a week, depending, so we get a lot of plays. Almost always 4 players.
So I’m looking for suggestions to add to that list, newer is better. There are some obvious suggestions like Marco Polo II and Tiohuacan but we haven’t gotten around to those yet. And also, ideally of course, I’m looking for the “good games” not just “new to us” - this group strongly values quality over novelty. In fact introducing new games can take some elbow grease - it’s best if they are very good.
Got my copy of Dune Imperium. Never played the original Dune game but with the movie coming out in the future and having loved reading the book in high school, I had to pick it up and give it a solo go.
It’s a worker placement game with some deck building. I’ve heard the deck building portion is very basic and the game is really not long enough to allow much deck variety. But In my first game I’ve played the first round of 10 rounds and already bought 2 cards and trashed 2 others so my deck is already quite a bit stronger.
It will take awhile to really figure out all the strategies, and the AI cards from the 2 AI’s tend to push out a good amount of combat troops each round and winning at least some of the combat rounds is very important for supplies and victory points, so it seems there is a decent amount of thought to give in this game
And, this is making me want to read the book again or get my kid to enjoy that world so that’s a bonus.
The new (I don’t think it’s out in English yet) Anno 1800 board game is extremely “turn things into other things.” Like, that’s the entire game. There are maybe 30 things to be turned into other things, from wool all the way up to champagne and artillery.
Hmm, I’m going to look into Anno 1800 - that sounds like my friend’s cup of tea. There is a TTS mod in English apparently.
Res Arcana is very much “turn things into other things”…and in 45 mins or less!
Vindication is a resource conversion puzzle. it’s all about turning one type of cube into another type of cube. It’s not an economic simulation. But the puzzle of how to efficiently set up your resource conversions is what the game is about.
You could make an argument for Century. It’s definitely about setting up your resource conversion engine, then running it repeatedly to generate points.
Plays inside an hour so definitely doesn’t fit the “medium to heavy” requirement, but the occasional filler can be handy too. Not sure how much I’d recommend it though; don’t think it really survives repeated plays. OTOH, I haven’t tried the expansions.
Yes, I was about to recommend it myself.