Included are tiny whiteboard squares and circles, in the compartments in the lower right, that I can write on with dry erase markers. Colored blocks, discs, plastic cubes, a few stray markers from other games, extra dice, some teensy little six-sided dice to use as markers, even a wad of bluetack stuck to the side of the wall of the compartment just below all the spare dice.
Everyone makes one of these shortly after they start accumulating boardgames, right? Like, right after getting that copy of Settlers of Catan to live with the copy of Monopoly in the coat closet, they start putting together a tackle box of boardgaming detritus, don’t they?
And done. Persia Bot 74, Macedonian Me 67. I’m sure I gave it an extra 5 points by mistake but academic.
Overall I’m really impressed. I got all the Fame cards but one, so I obviously can’t go for an entirely one-dimensional strategy going forward. Scoring in other areas was…deficient. And we never flipped over to empire mode, stayed as barbarians all the way, so there are certainly a few possibilities to explore even within these two civs.
That’s crazy. A lot of game there, I doubt it will be as cheap as the first gen boxes :)
On the list now! I bought some DVG deep trays and even anticipated the lousy ill-fitting lids by buying some Blutack, but it won’t even hold them on (the top lid got warped in some way, the other 4 aren’t toooo bad).
Played my first game of Legacy of Yu today. Took 1.5 hours but will go quicker now that I’ve played one. It’s a brain burner for me, not as bad as Spirit Island, but for a relatively small table space, I was spending oodles of time contemplating moves.
Got all but one canal built but then was overrun by barbarians. Learned quite a bit and now will get to look at a loss card that will give me something to help make the next game a little less daunting.
A campaign ends when you win 7 games or lose 7 games. Not sure if I will play that many games as I’m not the most euro loving board gamer BUT I did quite enjoy the struggle and having some story elements which can help or hurt the next try gives it a bit of variety game to game. Recommended.
I won’t actually be playing it - I have some reading to do first, and I’m looking forward to more Imperium Classics, which I’ve been playing all week. I’m about ready to move on from playing the Macedonians vs Persians after six games :)
I’ve been enjoying it a lot, but for those more knowledgable about the game than me - is it possible (or likely) that you can win outside of using the basic strategy for the civ? So, Macedonians v Persians, you grab a few regions and cycle through them with Glory, while depleting the Fame deck. Maybe grab a few Tributaries as a spoiler against the Persians. But I found if I go outside that, acquiring good, high value civilised or uncivilised cards, then all I’m doing is clogging up my deck and am unable to implement the cycling strategy above. Just wondering if people have been able to win without using the ‘optimal’ strategy, or if you basically learn to execute that and then move on.
In any case, looking forward to playing the Persians against Rome this weekend.
Had a good time over the weekend playing Persia vs Rome bot (can win fairly consistently by being disciplined and sticking to Persia’s primary strengths) and then one game of Rome vs the Celts bot, where I was beaten down savagely. The Celts had 37 progress tokens (1 progress token = 1 VP) at the end. Thirty seven!
I really enjoyed how the Romans and Celts played, particularly the latter as they strangled me with Unrest - I started off with a strategy of denying them Uncivilised cards, not noticing that if they couldn’t draw one, they gave me Unrest instead :D
Looking forward to examining the bot more closely and seeing how to win. I must say my best cards consistently seem to show up as the last draw from the Nation deck, meaning it’s tough to do what I want :)
Overall, really enjoying the game. I’ve played a lot, so I might check out something else for a while before coming back to this.
John Company! Played it just the other week. Didn’t quite work for me as I’m not a fan of negotiation games and combining that with lots of dice rolls was too much. But I could definitely see it working as a solo game.
Yes! I must admit it wasn’t on my radar until I saw that Ricky Royal had showed off the bot on Youtube, and then it looked interesting enough to give a go. I’m kinda interested in learning more about the East India Company and have a few books to read first, but I’m hoping that there will be enough there for solo gameplay (trying to keep the company alive and thrive, or bring it down and thrive etc) though I was a bit worried that he said the game was very swingy (especially at the end) for scoring and that you should really just enjoy the ride. But I’m open to all experiences at the moment so hopefully it will be fun.
Hypothetically if you were going to pick up a game for solitaire heading into the long weekend, would you pick up Hadrian’s Wall or Skies Above Britain?
I have both and I think Skies above Britain would take a LOT more time to learn and you can get in a few games of Hadrian’s Wall and try the campaign very quickly.
I just received Monster Hunter and giving that a go this weekend.
Skies Above Britain is easily the better design, and you’re going to get a lot more out of it…but you’re also going to have to put a LOT more into it. A lot. Whereas you can probably jump into Hadrian’s Wall and build some stuff and knock about some Celts within ten minutes of opening the box. Roll-and-writes are inherently accessible that way.
But the upside of choosing Skies is that Jerry White knows how to lay out an easygoing and drawn-out learning process, guided through lush velvet ropes draped across glittering brass stanchions. He ensures that you will learn by touching and moving pieces, and making decisions and watching their consequences unfold. You will learn by doing. But even then, it’s going to take a while before you’re actually playing the game he and Gina Willis actually designed. Skies Above Britain is a magnificent design that comes with the equivalent of a mandatory ten-mission waiting period known as “the tutorial process”. It’s a bottleneck, but it beats reading and rereading the rules until they’re ensconced in your head.
So I guess it depends on what kind of a weekend you want?
That said, I haven’t played Hadrian’s Wall myself. I’ve seen a couple of a playthroughs and I would have bought it by now if I didn’t have a few other roll-and-writes already in my collection. In fact, it’s a bit weird that I don’t have Hadrian’s Wall since I’m a massive fanboi for Garphill games (Raiders of Scythia and the North Sea; Architests, Paladins, and Viscounts of the West Kingdom). In fact, I was just coming here to post some thoughts about Wayfarers of the South Tigris, which I’ve been playing for the last few days.
I was just thinking about it, and about to also say: “Operate under the assumption that I’ll probably over the next year end up with both of these games…”
:)
I really love everything about the Garphill games I’ve played (Architects/Viscounts/Paladins) except for the way they end, kind of. And I know that’s weird, because I don’t mind “Count up the points, highest wins” games when I play war-game type games…I guess because in addition to the points, I can really feel less of an abstraction about who is winning and why/how that is with a real historical setting.
Also, damn you, Chick! As if I could resist
Suddenly I am transported back to being a 14 year old learning Squad Leader by playing the Tractor Works scenarios in the tutorial booklet…
Getting set up for the weekend so just for a bit of fun, try and guess what game I’m planning to play (I assume it’s a really easy one but the answer is at the end).
Apologies in advance if any of you suffer from chirophobia :)
Clue 1:
Clue 2:
It is solitaire-only, none of this two player nonsense.
Say more! I don’t recognize it and all I can make out in the pic is the word Napoleon. So it’s a cooking game and you prepare French gourmet dishes and the chits represent deliverymen carrying your baked goods to various bakeries?
It’s supposed to be a pretty good introductory wargame, while also being excellent in its own right. There’s a separate little zoned battle map where most of the complexity lies, it looks like. And nothing too complex, just some pretty gnomic looking battle plans that you have to interpret.
Ah, a DVG game! I should have recognized the components from my time with their similar Nimitz solitaire game, in which you roll a bunch of dice and hope the Japanese don’t behave too randomly. :)
Hope you’ll post more, as Napoleonics looks like a far better fit for the way DVG games tend to work (I thought their Nimitz game was pretty miserable).
