Boardgaming in 2019!

Of anybody? Didn’t Kingdom Death do $12+ million or something?

But TG did $5 mil, and Etherfields just started and is already halfway there. Who knows how far it’ll go?

Really, I think the answer is ‘how long do you want to wait?’ TG is shipping… soon? ish? Etherfields says end of 2020.

Yes, once! It was an exciting game, I felt (playing Long John). Pretty sure the other players liked it, too, although I recall at least one saying they weren’t sure if they would like it as much after the newness had worn off. Its uniqueness is definitely the best thing about it, so there might be something to that. I’ll have to play it more to see if it holds up longer term. Let me know what you think!

Yup, played with @Wendelius and @Ginger_Yellow and loved it. Highly unique and has a super short learning to play before you start the fun period. Whomever plays as Long John should know the rules well so they can be clear and consistent, then you are good.

Pretty much essential to play the Black Sails TV theme tune as the intro music. In fact pretty much essential to watch Black Sails - all seasons. No really!

Another South East London game day report and renewed invite to you. Join us! Ping me if you would like to join an ever evolving group of video and board gamers that meetup at my place regularly for gaming. I serve pizza and have a tray in my freezer that literally never runs out of magnum ice creams :-P

We played . . . . Root! With 6 players and therefore both expansions. The deeply asymmetric factions and cohesive woodland theme had huge appeal (helps that I live next to a park with potentially warring squirrels, birds and foxes). Learning to play was a bit of a challenge but helped a lot by a paint-by-numbers first two turns starter guide included with the game and good player guides.

Useful to know a bit how other factions work but if playing for the first time I would suggest players focus on learning one faction well and worry about the others later. Also, Birds are tricky.

We played two games back to back sticking with the same factions which worked very well. Within the second game - playing as the rebels / guerrillas / woodland alliance I found myself realising that there were things I should be doing that I had no concept of in the first game.

Downtime with 6 players is . . . . not terrible. Individual turns are fairly swift and planning time for your next is useful.

Also played, Decrypto! Happy to rate this as one of the most fun to play light filler games. Clever and tricky but not a brain burner and funny when your own team completely misinterpret your word clues and you have to keep a straight face whilst you watch them screw it up! Just as much fun to lose as it is to win. Great game.

Also pizza. Shout to @Wendelius and @Ginger_Yellow and some non-QT3ers!

I guess I could just get both. I backed TG, but don’t think I need 2 campaign games.

I do like how Etherfields seems more bizarre gameplay-wise than Tainted Grail, which looked really good but perhaps more conventional. I almost backed Tainted Grail but cancelled last minute due to “collectors syndrome”, but I think I might not back out of Etherfields.

Played the Z-Man version of History of the World today with some friends. It took us around 5 hours to complete, though we weren’t really in a hurry (and one of the guys had serious AP). It’s a really great Risk-like, especially for history geeks. Its definitely a game where the mechanics create a narrative, as opposed to relying on flavor text or mobile apps. That said, it is definitely a beer-and-pretzels game, and its mechanics may be a bit out-dated compared to other modern games. It was still a lot of fun though, and will definitely hit the table again sometime soon.

It’s strongly reminding me of 7th Continent in the gameplay videos I’ve watched (albeit mostly in how scenes and such work - action resolution is fairly different). But supposedly the preview videos show it at a very basic stage of play and things get much more ambitious later.

The game should speed up with repeated plays, and the faster it is the more enjoyable it is.

What’s crazy is that the original was longer. I imagine it would have been a real slog to play.

Got to get both Villagers and Tiny Towns to the table tonight, and a good time was had with both.

Villagers went over particularly well! I had been slightly put off by some seeming fiddliness with the rules, but now I think it’s not a problem at all. The game is actually quite easy to explain. And the variety of directions players can go to score points makes it feel like you really are building your own little unique village. “Round here, we make carts and wine and do some mining on the side!” “Well we are a priestly town that makes beer and provides the other villages with blacksmithing services!” The game has that beautiful modern white-background look (like Tokaido) and super on-point packaging. Not sure if it’s at retail yet (I kickstarted it), but I’d recommend it!

Tiny Towns looks light and simple–and it’s certainly elegant as hell, which is why my designer-brain likes it! We also found it to be easy to screw yourself up and sometimes agonizing to decide what to do with your one resource block a turn. I ended up doing dismally because I made one or two mistakes early that just cascaded into more bad moves I couldn’t avoid. Others managed to do much better. I think the game really is a marvel of design; I just wonder if you can finish it feeling good about yourself, or if it leaves you with a catalog of your missed opportunities.

Tiny Town is the most brutal game since Agricola.

-Tom

I’m a big fan of Tiny Towns as well. Are you guys playing the “standard” way of each player gets to pick the resource in turn or using the deck for randomized and equal distribution? The former really lets you mess with other players if you are paying attention.

Yeah, we played the standard rules where the master builder chooses the resource, and there was definitely some consciousness of what everyone else was up to. But mostly we screwed ourselves! I need to play it more, but I could see the card version being a good alternative for when we want something a little more casual.

I have CO2 : Second chance sitting here collecting dust, but I just can’t understand the manual. I try to read it and get bored after 1 or 2 pages. I try and try but I cannot get to the interesting stuff.

Anyone else can sell me on CO2 ? Also, icons everywhere. Race to the galaxy is nothing compared to this. And then different stacks of cards, which differ only in some color shading. I cannot understand the manual without having the components in front of me.

I usually like reading the rules manual, but I can’t do it with CO2. I tried to watch some videos, but they are boring as well. Maybe the game is just a big bore …

Like a lot of Lacerda games, I don’t think you can really internalize what’s going on until you actually start playing. After that I think it’s a fantastic and super difficult puzzle.

I have that same problem with some games. The manual is dense or so full of verbage, I cant just get started to really understand. Then watch vids and just dont really grasp the essentials.

Bios:Megafauna is the one tripping me up right now.

I also get so used to easy to grok games, then when I get a deep one, I just kind of dread spending so much time trying to figure them out and just leave them on the shelf to collect dust…lots of those on my shelf right now.

I played Anachrony a second time yesterday and it went quite a bit better, now that I knew how to play, and we also clarified some rules that prevented some of the cheese I hated in the first game. (In our first game, we had not realized that to grab first player and also use one of the 3 main board actions like Construct, the 2 existing Construct slots need to be taken first, so we allowed the first player to basically hog first player all game which ruined it for me as last player with no chance to ever move up the order. Yesterday we played properly so turn order changed a number of times.)

However, what really impressed was my friend had the new Folded Space insert for the game, which was really very nice. Much lighter than Broken Token and very functional.

No, but I have a copy here I’d be willing to sell for cheap. :)

It feels super heavy, but also super abstract, and oddly punishing. None of the things I’m doing – planning and infrastructure for power plants, training scientists and sending them to conferences, cashing in favors from (?) lobbyists, managing an international market for carbon emissions – feels like the things I’m supposed to be doing, if that makes any sense. The map, inasmuch as you could call it a map, has no personality. Sometimes North America loves solar power, sometimes it prefers wind, sometimes it wants recycling plants. It’s just a random set of requirements that changes every game. Furthermore, there are all these arbitrary goals around the edges of the board that actually drive the gameplay, but they’re literally flipped up from a deck or drawn from a bag of chits. And they demand that you pay attention to them above all else, because they will scuttle your game if they don’t. So in one game, I absolutely must have two solar plants in South America, but in another game, I absolutely must get four scientists to the London climate talks, and in another game, I absolutely must max out my research into reforestation. If I don’t do these things, I will fail. I like how variable victory conditions can tweak a game, but I’m not sure how I feel about being straightjacketed by variable failstates.

I love the concept, however, of fighting against the downward pressure on the score track as a way to represent climate change. But, ugh, the combination of density and arbitrariness is just too much for me. Thumbs down on CO2, and I’m not at all kidding if anyone is interested in buying my copy.

-Tom

Oh, hey, I have a good topic for meta-board-gaming discussion: gaming sportspersonship (yes I made that word up, you like?) and pointing out when someone is about to make a huge unforced error. In yesterday’s Anachrony game near the end, I started to place my last Mech worker on a spot that would have precluded me from doing the Evacuation action which I had been setting up all game for a large amount of bonus points. As I was doing that, another player pointed out the mistake so I stopped what I was doing and did an Evacatuion, and ended up winning. (I had forgotten you need a Mech to evacuate, I thought i could just do it with any worker.) If the other guy had not pointed out my error, he would have won.

I feel he showed good sportsmanship and I generally try to play that way myself. It’s a slippery slope though and I know some people strongly believe in “survival of fittest” or “you break it you lose it”.

What do you folks think? Should people point out glaring mistakes and allow people to correct them, or should we all go full Darwin and devil take the hindmost?

Hate hate hate Tiny Town. The only other game I hate (and own) is Root. Brutal both.