1961

I haven’t played Spiecherstadt, but have the other two as well as Brugges and Bora Bora by him. Trajan is my favorite. I’ve probably played it 20-30 times and the elements I didn’t think would stand up to intense scrutiny still fascinate and confound me.

One of the big takeaways I’ve had with his games is I can’t judge them until I’ve played them at least 3 times. The rules often seem too arbitrary and sometimes it just doesn’t look like there’s much going on in the games, but after a few plays a ton of nuances to playing well come up and I start to really enjoy the games. Bora Bora went from one of my least favorite games I owned to one of my favorites after a few more plays.

I’m curious about Aquasphere as well. Radho seemed ecstatic about it in his video, but Tom Vasel was quite negative, in particular about the elements of that game that had me worried (unclear theme, finicky scoring for area control, and the programmer / engineer relationship not looking that interesting). Still excited about it, though. Hopefully those all pan out after a few plays.

1962

porousnapkin – I’m glad you liked Notre Dame. It’s one of my all-time favorites, and not enough people have had the opportunity to play it. Whenever I think of it, I always think about how vicious the plague can be and the trade-offs between insulating yourself from the plague and doing something more productive.

I played Pandemic: The Cure last night, and it was really, really good. There are a number of clever systems, but the heart of it is that your actions as a player are determined by what you roll on your dice–and the dice are different for each role. For example, as the Dispatcher, I had more airplane sides on my dice (let you move anywhere, as opposed to the boat which lets you move to an adjacent region only) than other roles, as well as an airlift side which I could save to use anytime to move any other player around. We got pretty well stomped by the game (on standard difficulty), so I’m looking forward to working out how to defeat the game. You can reroll your dice as much as you like (until you use one to do an action), but each time you’re in danger of rolling a “biohazard” side that advances the infection level and can’t be re-rolled. Nice, simple pressing-of-luck.

Does it have “The Pandemic Problem”? I guess. I never saw this as a critical problem in regular Pandemic, honestly (as has been hashed out in this or other threads in the past), but I think this mitigates it a bit by being less fiddly with your movements and trading, etc. There feel like fewer critical moves in this one, which I think fits a shorter, lighter variant on the main game.

1963

Sorry if it seems like I’m shilling, but now on TimeWellSpent’s Christmas sale are Nations for $60 (normally $100), a couple Shadows of Brimstone sets, and the Robinson Crusoe Charles Darwin expansion.

1964

Nation’s actually under $50 right now at Amazon.

1965

Heads up: I just got the call from Chicagoland Games, my copy of the new Eldritch Horror expansion, Mountains of Madness just arrived. In other words, it’s in stores for you fellow fans of the game.

1966

Had never heard of it before, but found myself convinced (partly by Tom Vasel) to buy Lost Valley: Yukon Gold Rush, which looks to be a fast-playing exploration game with neat rhombal tiles. Apparently it’s a new, rejiggered edition of an older game. The publisher is Pandasaurus games, the same publisher as Machi Koro. Figured I liked that entry so much I’d trust them on this one, too.

I’ve also gotten another play in on Pandemic: The Cure. This was a serious nail-biter that we were sure we were losing, but we managed to just squeak out at the last minute. Pretty great. I miss the big map and some of the difficult decisions around how to move around, but the dice version manages to capture a lot of what is fun about the original game.

1967

Played Euphoria and Among the Stars tonight, both three player. I won both.

Euphoria 3 player was a very different experience than the 5 and 6 player games I’d played of it before, although I kind of doubt it typically ends up the way tonight’s session went. Virtually all the points were scored through spending artifacts at the various artifact markets (in our previous play artifacts barely even factored), only one of the six under construction markets actually got built, all the allegiance tracks eventually got maxed and only one of the tunnels was fully dug. In fact, only the player with the Tunneler recruit actually dug tunnels for the majority of the game. Meanwhile, I never added a worker throughout the entire game, never took energy, and only got water during the closing phases of the game as I was trying to drive the Subterran allegiance to score on my third recruit, never spending any. (I got three of my stars on recruits, three on the Icarian territory, two on the Subterran territory, one on the constructed market, and one on the Wastelander territory.) The tunneler was a couple of stars behind me, and our third player got a little too wrapped up with trying to abuse his Lobotomist recruit (understandable) and was lagging a fair bit behind. That probably contributed to the weirdness of our ending setup. Still, I think that demonstrates how many paths to victory it offers.

Among the Stars was played with all the expansion content and optional features except Conflict sets. I won largely because my alien race scored VP off having ambassadors in my station (which accounted for pretty much my entire lead), but it was surely satisfying after trailing well behind on VP the entire game because I was inviting ambassadors and building delayed effect locations instead of the more immediately rewarding approaches of my competition. Events, alien races, ambassadors, bonus objectives, multi-colored locations, double-sized locations and so forth all added a great deal to the flavor and robustness of play, in my opinion. The base game seemed solid enough but it seems like you’d exhaust the variations pretty quickly. (Note that events, alien races and bonus objectives are all in the base box, they’re just optional. The expansions add more of everything plus the ambassadors and I -think- the funkier special locations. I got it all in the same shipment so I don’t really distinguish what adds what all that well.)

1968

I like Lost Valley, Nightgaunt. I’ve had my copy for years and years, and I’m really happy the new edition has gotten interest up in it again. It isn’t a great game, but it is simple and fun, has decent decisions to make, and one of the best map-building systems out there (the real draw for me).

1969

Awesome. You might look into the improvements in the new edition, Don Q, because they’re apparently substantial and do a lot to balance the game. But, yeah, the map-building part is totally what sold it for me.

1970

Huh. My understanding was that they hadn’t changed much, if anything- I looked into the KS when it was happening. I’ll look a bit deeper, now, thanks for the tip. I always thought it could be a great game if there were just one more good system in there to give it a little more meat.

1971

The end of this Tom Vasel review has some details on what’s changed. It might not be as sweeping as it sounds, but I’m comparing to the more common scenario of just reprinting a game with new artwork and wooden components or something.

1972

Lost Valley: The Yukon Goldrush 1896 brings new twists and enhancements to the classic board game Lost Valley through the new additions to the gameplay on top of balance tweaks.

• Stake Your Claim: This module allows players to “claim” a single goldmine that they build. While it won’t prevent others from using the gold mine, it will require that any other player who uses the gold mine to pay you a small fee of one good, which you can collect when you return to the gold mine.

• The Experienced Prospector: This module grants players a single experience point every time a player constructs a building improvement that other players can use (gold mine, fish trap, etc). Players can on their turn use two experience points to learn a new ability for their prospector, such as the scout (who is able to look at two land tiles and select which one to place when expanding the map) or the adventurer (who can look at event tiles before deciding to take on the event). These abilities can make or break your prospector’s chances of striking it rich.

• The Treasure Hunter: This module adds a third path to victory to the base game. This module replaces some of the event tokens with clues as to where the buried treasure is located. These “clues” correspond to one of the five types of terrain in the game: water, forest, bottomland, wasteland and mountain. You find the treasure by using the clues that you have collected to search for an intersection that matches the clues in your hand. For example, if you had two river clues, one mountain clue and one forest clue, you would need to find an intersection where these and only these four terrain types come together. When you locate the treasure, you gain a bounty of gold nuggets.

• Team Rules: This module for experienced players allows teams of prospectors to work together to explore the Lost Valley. In this mode only the lowest scoring of the team-mates score will count towards the win, so you need to make sure that both team-mates are succeeding in the Lost Valley!

• 2 Player Mode: Using the Team Rules the game can now be played by 2 players!

• 6 Player Mode: Enough components have been added to the game to increase the number of players to 6.

• Classic Mode: This mode strips out most of the improvements to the game and returns the game to the classic gameplay from the 2004 smash hit!

1973

So, I picked up the latest Sentinels expansion… It looks like I’m the only one? It may have been put on shelves early or something. So, some preliminary thoughts:

Cap’n Cosmic: Creates zillions of constructs that buff your heroes, and can occasionally blow them up for strong burst damage. He’s the answer to the question “what if Unity was actually any good?”

Skyscraper: She has three character cards, one for each size. She’s beating stuff up en masse when she’s tall, using neato spy gadgets when she’s small, and drawing two cards a turn when she’s normal sized. Great variety, very thematic, I like her a lot already. Also, 33 hp!

Infinitor: We were basically dead by turn two. He’s like The Matriarch on bath salts.

Deadline: Ah, the “tragic villain”. Everyone loves these guys. Tons of ongoings that hurt you, mess with the environment, and blow up your stuff. But still, they are just ongoings. Paging Ms. Parse to the front desk…

Other villains: one has a neat looking arena mechanic I haven’t tried yet, the other appears to be Doomsday from Superman. And to think that he, not Infinitor, is supposed to be “the hard one”.

Environments:

Enclave of the endings- they’re almost all characters. Let’s hope sentinels sidekick updates soon…otherwise, get ready for a lot of bean counting.

Thorathian Capital- seems a lot like The Block, in that there are multiple factions killing each other with the heroes and villains caught in the middle.

So that’s what I’ve got so far. If anyone has any questions I can answer, go ahead and hit me.

1974

I preordered the new Sentinels expansion, but it hasn’t been delivered yet. I think it ran into some of the same ocean shipping issues a bunch of my boardgame Kickstarters have been running into. Plus there’s apparently a dockworkers union action on at the moment or something.

Edit: Wait, what?!

1975

Yeah, I’m with malkav, waiting for my preorder to come. Stores got it first, huh? I should be letting loose my internet rage, but I won’t. (My secret is that I’m always angry!)

Speaking of which, has anyone discovered a single one of the promo character unlocks in the mobile version of Sentinels?

1976

I think touch arcade had a whole list in the forums of how to unlock them, just haven’t had time to play it and find out.

1977

Speaking of Sentinels, they just released a list of super-advanced villain challenges and hero achievements. Neato!

1978

I’m also waiting on the SotM expansion to be delivered (although technically I don’t know I’m getting it, wink wink and all). I’m fine with waiting on stuff, but I am a little surprised stores are getting it before pre-orders unless there was some sort of hangup with the promo cards. I’d think that stuff would all be on the same boat.

Mark, where did you end up getting it from? Doesn’t seem to be in stock at OLGS like CSI yet either.

I saw that in Handelabra’s twitter feed the other day. I’d be more inclined to purchase if it got me a license for the Android app as well, but when I asked they said there was no plan for that. I’d be at least a little more willing if I knew the DLC was going to be cross-platform license as well, like some of the Days of Wonder apps.

1979

It was just hanging out on the new games shelf at my local FLGS.

1980

I got a big box of ridiculousness in the form of Fantasy Flight’s Imperisl Assault. Being Star Wars Descent I was suckered in pretty quick. I haven’t had a chance to play but we’ll see how it turns out.

I also got Five Tribes. I see why the Shut Up and Sit Down Guys were split on it. It’s easy to get overwelmed and stuck analyzing all the moves. But all in all the variety of moves and scoring systems is interesting. And the rules are fundamentally pretty light. So far I’ve enjoyed it.

I got replacement dice for Quantum and had a chance to play that again. I really like it, a light space 4X that cranks out little 45 minute galactic conquests.

Tom M