We have room for one more in the Gaia Project game. If we don’t get another by around 9am PDT tomorrow, I’ll start us with 3. But I prefer 4 players.
Good game of Space Base @Thraeg, @pizzaddict , @bmarinari , and @dionisus1122 ! Two of those double-arrow cards (on 8 and 11) along with a die-adjusting card (on 4) made this one a bit of a runaway for me, as I was able to hit my big VP and gold cards regularly.
Also completed After Us with @Thraeg and @dionisus1122 , just barely edging out Thraeg to get to 80 points. I’m still not completely sure what the strategy for picking up new ape cards should be, but I’m fairly certain it involves having a mix of level 1 and 2 cards. If you try to focus on just one or the other, you end up with a lot of good abilities that have nothing to connect to, especially in the bottom row.
We need one more to make 4 for Gaia Project!
Play Gaia Project for free with me: Play Gaia Project online from your browser • Board Game Arena
If we don’t get a 4th by 9am PDT today I’ll go ahead and start with 3.
Very interested from 30th onwards when I’m back home. Hopefully another game will be starting around then.
I joined against my own better judgement :)
Sorry guys I set up the Gaia Project game with the 3 player map. Let’s all abandon that game.
I set up a new 4 player game and invited you three to it. Please accept your invites.
Again, sorry.
Nice job on both games!
Yeah, I’m not quite sure what to think about After Us. The hand ordering mechanic is certainly novel, but most turns I felt like there was a clear optimal ordering to use, and finding it was time-consuming but not particularly interesting. And with the commonness of “3 different apes” as a condition, it feels trying to do anything but balance your species is going to be a bad idea. And the blind buying process meant I felt like I was rarely interacting meaningfully with what you guys were doing.
Still willing to give it another shot and see if it gets better going in knowing the rules.
Yeah, I played one game of After Us and… there’s like, no player interaction at all? You can use your neighbor’s tokens, but it’s not like you’re going to play differently depending on what tokens you think they’re going to play. You’re just going to use them if they’re helpful to you. They could just be random tokens. It’s really a solitaire optimization puzzle game that four people play at the same time until someone reaches the finish line.
I finished a game of About Us recently and my feelings are the same as @Thraeg. There are no interesting decisions to be made, no trade-offs to consider. The card arrangement had at most 2 orderings that were optimal, and there is no incentive to go for a suboptimal ordering to strategically get something good later because all the card draws are blind. Perhaps the game might play differently with a different set of human artifact cards in play than the recommended beginner set.
In our game of After Us, I checked out early and spent most of the turns just auto-playing the cards as they were dealt. I still didn’t finish that far behind which makes me worry that in addition to it be uninteresting, there isn’t much of a strategy level there.
I was sort of in the same mind space at about halfway through the game, and I won. Convert one or two basic resources to a battery or a lightbulb? Yep. Three or more, nope. Accumulate five batteries and turn them in for 5 light bulbs. Rinse repeat.
Yeah. That’s a shame to hear that we all landed in the same place – I was hoping there was some hidden appeal that I was just overlooking.
Looking for 1 more in our game of Small Islands. I’ll give it a bit longer before just starting a 3 person game.
Similarly, we’ve got 3/4 slots filled for Bunny Kingdom and Beyond the Sun. Will give them a bit longer to see if we can get a 4th before reforming as 3p.
Play Bunny Kingdom for free with me: Play Bunny Kingdom online from your browser • Board Game Arena
Play Beyond the Sun for free with me: Play Beyond the Sun online from your browser • Board Game Arena
And here are a few more that looked interesting to me:
Play Res Arcana for free with me: Play Res Arcana online from your browser • Board Game Arena
Play District Noir for free with me: Play District Noir online from your browser • Board Game Arena
Play Moon River for free with me: Play Moon River online from your browser • Board Game Arena
Is sfranklin1717 @ineffablebob? Sorry, I always forget. Anyway, he just beat @pizzaddict and myself at Wingspan, congrats. You played masterly while we were just… winging it.
Yeah, that was a beatdown, well played.
Thanks, though you guys did warn me at the start that you had terrible draws! I’ve heard Wingspan described as “the game all about eggs” and that seems pretty accurate, it’s hard to go far wrong focusing on putting out as many eggs as possible.
that makes sense as you need eggs to lay down birds and they are used often in the scoring for the round bonuses. this was the first time I had played a game where it was like I could get nothing for my bonus or the round bonuses. Everytime I would draw birds, which I did a lot, I’d get birds that weren’t useful. I even played a bird that let me choose a 2nd bonus card and neither of the bonus cards worked with anything I had already played or had in my hand. Usually early on I have a good idea of what I want to focus on but with this game I just couldn’t get anything going.
GG @Timemaster_Tim and @Thraeg on Through the Ages. Thraeg and I ended up with an exciting tie. End of the game snuck up on me(as it always seems to do in this game) so I missed my chance to have a culture war with Timemaster_Tim at the end. My army was all ready to call him “woke” too.