Thank you. That looks… really cool.
No worries. Apologies for the typos and missing words in my original reply. I typed it from my phone and it can be a tad unreliable for those things.
Wendelius
It’s pretty rare for this board to ever get 100% of my attention. I’m squeezing in posts between meetings, calls and fighting sleep sometimes. I completely understand barely understandable posts… but yours was clear.
I finally got to play Quartermaster General 1914 last night. The original game was one of my favorite games of this past year, and the new version did not disappoint. In fact, I think I may enjoy it even more. I especially like the multi-use card mechanics they’ve added, which make it even harder to discard cards. Also, really love how you add up points every third or forth round (though I understand this was added in the Greek QM game). What surprised me the most was how much it actually felt like WWI. In our game, the beginning was aggressive, then it turned into a stalemate for the middle part since we had lot of prepared cards, and then in the end it came down to attrition and late game moves. I can’t wait to get this to the table again. Highly recommended!
Awesome! I also played it for the first time last night. I’d suspect you were someone in my game group, but our game didn’t really work out that way. Germany just romped throughout the whole game with their crazy events (that often allow them to do two or three things in a turn). I just sort of held on as Austria-Hungary, and we pulled out a narrow victory. Everybody ran through their deck, and the UK and I both ran out of cards altogether before the game ended.
The “prepare” mechanic makes for agonizing choices every turn. I want to play again just to try to make better use of them.
Hmmm… do you like games with heavy theming? Just noticing a trend there.
Hey, I’ve been playing games lately!
Energy Empire. A spiritual successor of sorts to Manhattan project. It’s a worker placement game where you build up your own personal tableau of buildings for your workers to go. However, when you retrieve your workers, you can also roll dice representing power plants to get “energy,” which can function as a worker. However, you might (or certainly depending on what types of power plants/dice you have) create pollution. Pollution goes onto your personnel 3x5 grid, blocking a VP.
However, despite thinking I would like the game as an improvement over the Manhattan Project, its kind of fallen flat for me. I think it has to do with how players earn VP. Its an engine builder, but the engine doesn’t really lead to more VP unless you have specific VP awarding tiles (called achievements). Even then, they don’t score a lot of points, 5 max. It does have a pretty quick play time.
Trickerion. You play 19th century magicians. Not spell casters, but illusionists like Harry Houdini or… Gob? However, this belongs to the Scythe family of theming, it comes through the artwork but not really the mechanics. This is a heavy euro, with multiple mechanisms at play. The core mechanic is ultimately worker placement, but you have different types of workers with different action amounts. So, send your magician (representing the player character) to the market to use his 3 actions to buy multiple things. In addition, the worker at a spot gets bonus actions. Sometimes, this is absolutely necessary to use an action, like learning a new trick (illusion) needs 3 actions. This results in a lot of thinking about which workers need to go where to make sure you can do what you need to do this turn regardless of what other players do.
Then comes shows.
I’ve only managed to play this once, but I certainly liked that play. This is game about careful positioning, squeezing the most out of limited actions with imperfect knowledge of what your opponents hope to achieve. The base game (it comes with an advanced variant which is basically an expansion with the base game) only lasts 5 rounds.
Karmaka An interesting card game about reincarnations. This is a surprisingly thinking card game about reincarnation. Essentially, your life is represented by a hand/deck of 6 cards. Every card has a color, a number, and an action on it. On your turn, you must play one of those cards. One way you may play a card is into your future life. That means playing it facedown. When on your turn you have no more cards, you “reincarnate,” and take that stack of cards as your new hand. You may play the action, at which point you resolve the affect which might be to take a discarded card into your hand. Or, force an opponent to discard a card. However, before resolving an action, your opponent has the right to place the card in his future life. Meaning, use a powerful card this turn, it may come back to haunt you. Alternatively, you play it as a deed, face up in front of you. When you reincarnate, you add up the score of a single color. Get enough points, you reincarnate. The next time you reincarnate, you’ll need more points. This starts out easy, but you have to plan ahead to complete the last reincarnation stage.
Overall, I liked this one, kind of like Tides of Times only better since it doesn’t have drafting. I will say 4 players had a bit of a Munchkin dynamic, with players ganging up on the player about to win. Or, deliberately not and forcing another player to waste his resources to block the winner.
Yeah, I like games that tell a story as you play them. those types of games tend to be pretty thematic.