Race for the Galaxy, Glory to Rome and Innovation all kind of fit into the same mold of being tableau building games where you’re playing cards to play an engine that gets you more/better cards, while trying to balance the economic engine vs. actually reaching the victory conditions. But despite that surface difference they end up feeling totally different, and all of them are just so damn good. My preference is Race with 2p, Innovation with 3p, Glory to Rome with 4p.
Die Sieben Siegel is my favorite trick taking game. It keeps getting re-published with more and more stupid names (first “Wizard Extreme”, then “Zing!”, and apparently it’s now called “Sluff Off”. Not sure they can sink any lower).
Tichu is probably both my favorite team-based boardgame and the only member of the climbing game genre that I can stomach playing. But it’s only good for when you have exactly 4 players, they’re willing to play in exactly two teams, and everyone is prepared to assume that newbie’s will play like absolute garbage for the first dozen hands.
High Society is my favorite pure auction game. Though there’s a little bit of nostalgia there, after a ski trip I took with a bunch of friends during university, where every evening for a week was basically spent playing this and drinking. Probably got a good 150 matches in just during that trip. There seems to be a new edition coming out this year.
Bohnanza is a very good, light, set-collecting game. Nothing fancy, just clean mechanics and the right amount of player interaction. Great for a palate-cleanser or with kids. (Although when it comes to kids, I endorse @sharaleo’s approach upthread.)
Read the ‘7 easily forgotten rules’ section in the book.
Play Voracious Goddess first (as the rules suggest).
If you do, try do everything on the starting area before leaving it.
Study the cards carefully, there are sometimes hidden numbers or other clues.
Be careful with the distinction between returning, discarding, and banishing - when swapping a green card for it’s yellow version, the green is banished which is what this symbol means:
I accidentally put the green into discard a couple of times instead of banished.
This symbol:
means the card is attached to the one in the indicated direction, so you never need to pay movement costs to take actions on the card with this symbol.
Careful with the distinction between items (which can’t be stored in your hand and must go straight to inventory) and skill cards that craft items (which are stored in your hand and must be crafted to go to inventory).
You can’t discard individual cards from an inventory stack (unless the card specifically allows it), but you can discard the whole stack.
You can stack any item in your inventory with any other (up to the limit, 4 stacks of 4 items solo).
But try make use of the keyword matching that lets you increase stack durability (you need to match keywords with the card on top of the stack).
You’ll see this all come together when you hunt, and pull some food items that you need to place in your inventory stacks before using. If you don’t have a ‘stamina’ stack to put food in, each food eaten will reduce the durability of the stack it’s placed in by 1. If you do have a stamina stack, durability will be increased by 1 due to the keyword matching which offsets the loss from using the card.
Lack of resources never stops you crafting. Resources just make crafting easier.
Building a fire is powerful but you can only have 1 (per player) on the map at a time. Consider building them in central areas you want to explore (as they lower movement costs when returning to the card they’re on) or near game (they double the healing benefit of food).
Using the included discard pile holder let’s you choose one of two extra actions you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Just played my first game of Voyages of Marco Polo.
The small rectangular tiles for the smaller cities are labeled A-F, so they go in the same cities every time, right? Why aren’t they just printed on the board? If there’s a reason they’d ever be differently assigned or moved during gameplay, we missed it.
Stop playing the baby game already! :) Go straight to the bit at the end marked “Advanced Game Setup”, or whatever heading it uses for the non-baby game.
Got Eldritch Horror to table again tonight, again with one friend, two handing investigators. This time we tackled Hastur, with the Under the Pyramids prelude adding on the Egypt board and a fun little adventure about a museum heist. I won’t go into the investigators because we ended up running about eleven in total. Turns out Hastur melts through your sanity like a hot knife through butter. Who woulda thunk.
Our first mystery was one that required completing city (or research) encounters in particular (nearby) cities and then spending 2 sanity and gaining a Madness to advance, a total of 8 times collectively. We managed that in a pretty sedate first few turns, including a lucky encounter that closed the only gate on the early board. And then the second mystery required everyone to have an Ally and a clue token, and to spend a total of 8 clues collectively at the end of the Mythos phase. Between the Adventure and some fancy footwork, we were ready to win…and then for the next hour and a half or more that was true virtually every turn without our ever quite managing it. First, the turn we would have won, a Madness went off in a Reckoning and cracked the last bit of one of my investigators’ sanity. Well, the replacement investigator has neither clue nor Ally. But they started one space away from the insane investigator, who had both. So they grab those. Ready to go. Except this time the Mythos card drives the other three investigators insane. Cue a little bit of recovery, but between our influence specialist being easily ready to buy allies, a couple research encounters that grant them, and the librarian starting with a spell that allows her to make any investigator gain clue tokens during the action phase (and on top of another fallen investigator), that’s pretty brief. And then Mythos phases slam us with another couple of big sanity hits, and the librarian goes down. Her replacement starts on the city next to her, though, so that’s fine and…two more go insane. And then everyone’s set up but…the lead investigator gains a Blight condition, which zaps their only ally. Cue dilettante running over with her pile of four. And finally, FINALLY, despite chaos and havoc extreme, we make it. And win the game, because Hastur only needs two mysteries to be solved and thank fucking god for that.
Fun fact: at one point during the game literally everyone had a Dark Pact, which remained largely unclaimed before insanity did away with all deals.
It was just me and my friend Tyler from work both playing it and figuring it out for the first time, so we didn’t do the advanced game setup, and we took the recommended characters for your first game—I was the guy that gets to choose all his die values, and Tyler was the guy that gets the bonus white die and a free contract at the beginning of each round.
I lost by about 5 points; if I’d had one more bundle of silk I could’ve completed a final contract to eek out a win (though he was only a resource or two from another contract as well).
I really liked it and want to play again, Tyler said he would be willing to play again, but would rather play…you know what, I’m not going to tell you, no reason for you to be disappointed in a total stranger! Tyler is game to play anything at least once, and of all my gaming friends he’s up there with the best of them when it comes to patience for learning something new no matter how complicated.
Tyler can get very grouchy about almost any amount of luck in games though, so while he granted it was still hard to judge on a first play, he remains skeptical about the luck of the dice in this game.
Actually, your first playthrough of Voyages of Marco Polo doesn’t really benefit from randomization. It’s not until you’ve gotten comfortable with the pacing of the game, and with how little you can actually do, that you start to the see the different ways a game can play based on the randomized setup and the choice of characters. So I guess you didn’t miss out on anything by playing the baby game. Just don’t make a habit of it!
Oh, great, now I’m imagining the worst thing possible and I’m not only disappointed that Tyler would rather play Citadels, Mage Knight, or that D&D worker placement game, but I’m disappointed that you haven’t brought him around.
Oh, he’s one of those. Now I’m really judging your friend Tyler. You can tell him I said so.
One of the things I like about Voyages of Marco Polo is that mitigating the randomness of the die rolls is party of the economy. Of course, on his first game, his only opponent was the character who simply decrees what he wants to roll. When that’s your frame of reference, and you’re the only guy who actually has to deal with die rolls, of course you’d be skeptical!
Glad to hear about your game. Hope to hear more as/if you spend more time with it.
I was wandering through my local board game shop yesterday and I came across one I hadn’t seen before, it was a version of Pandemic but with Cthulhu elements, sounded kind of interesting. Anyone played that?
