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20 Dec 2021 09:18 #328934 by Legomancer
Yesterday was our Sunday game day. I went to my friend's house at 1:30 and it was just us two until five-ish, when two others arrived. Games played:

Blokus Duo - I always forget how fun this one is. Played twice.

Town Builder Coevorden - surprisingly fun little city building game.

Rajas of the Ganges - One of those current mishmash euros, but not too obnoxious about it. I like it well enough.

It's a Wonderful World - A lot of hate for this in BGG's Worst of 2021 list (it came out in 2019) but it's one we all really enjoy.

Town Builder Coevorden - Someone else showed up and we played this again as it's short and we knew the fourth guy was on the way.

No Thanks - While we waited for food we played this classic twice. Always a good time, it was extra hilarious when the last card was the 34. One guy had the 35, 33, and 32, so he was definitely going to take it but the person before him was unexpectedly out of chips, making both of them furious.

Riverboat - This is very much a modern euro with a lot of things going on, but once you see it in action it actually holds together pretty well. I did terrible at it because I got screwed by the tile draw and forgot I could mitigate the screwage. Wouldn't have done spectacular but the entire second half of the game might have gone differently for me. Nothing special but always a relief to find a modern euro that doesn't make me furious.
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23 Dec 2021 23:40 - 28 Dec 2021 10:01 #329005 by Cranberries
Everyone wants to get together and play games during the break. I feel like I have about four hours a month for boardgaming. Anyway, my Euro buddy who thinks Lisboa is the pinnacle of game design just bought Sleeping Gods and wants to play a campaign with me and the other guy in our group who enjoys these types of narrative games. So I'm excited about that. Probably belongs in the "what games are you looking forward to playing" discussion.
Last edit: 28 Dec 2021 10:01 by Cranberries. Reason: Be kind to accountants
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24 Dec 2021 02:03 - 24 Dec 2021 13:54 #329006 by Virabhadra
Friday Freakout came a day early. Sorry y'all.
Last edit: 24 Dec 2021 13:54 by Virabhadra.
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24 Dec 2021 12:19 #329015 by ChristopherMD
I'd have made a new thread for that.
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24 Dec 2021 12:30 #329016 by Michael Barnes
Dude so sorry- I didn’t even see it…or I may have seen it and eyes glazed over. At any rate it shouldn’t have been up on BGG, I forgot to take it down when it sold elsewhere. I’m usually totally on top of my sale stuff but that got by me. It’s been kind of weird two months over here to be honest. If I still had it I’d just ship it to you with compliments. You want the Knizia Hobbit dice games with no box? I’ll give ‘em to you!
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26 Dec 2021 10:51 #329041 by Shellhead
An old friend is in town for a few weeks. I got him hooked on AmeriTrash games over a decade ago, but he moved away several years ago. Now he's back in town but didn't have any plans for Christmas. So I invited him over to play boardgames on Christmas Day. We spent a long time talking, then finally sat down for a game of Camp Grizzly.

He loved Camp Grizzly, as do most people who have played it. We drew all male characters by chance, with my friend playing CJ and Jody. I got Kevin and Chet, the expansion character directly inspire by Chet from Weird Science. Despite being a vile bastard, Chet somehow found himself leading a small troop of innocent campers. Unfortunately, we got the Blackout card, and when the lights came back on, Otis had slaughtered all the little campers. My characters put together a set of items quickly for the Barn escape, but successive run-ins with Otis left us bleeding and crawling until he returned one more time to finish us. At the same time, my friend's dudes put together a set of items for the Van escape, so he passed me Jody to play for the final stretch of the game.

The van finale was new to me. We were hitchhiking
Warning: Spoiler!


We also played Marvel Champions, but I discuss that in the Marvel Champions thread.
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26 Dec 2021 17:38 #329048 by jason10mm
While it certainly isn't highbrow gaming, I got in a full 6 player game of Clue:Seinfeld last night. This is slightly tweaked Clue, or maybe the intrique cards are now standard in vanilla clue as well. Anyway, aside from the surface skin of seinfeld related people, places, and things, there is an "intrique" deck that plays the part of game timer (draw 8 clock cards and game over for everyone) and game accelerant (the other cards let you go twice, move more, or mess with other players a bit).

Alas, even with 6 somewhat functioning adults at the table, a general lack of clue wisdom led to a 45 minute game where ALL SIX OF US made incorrect accusations and lost the game! A TPK in CLUE!?! We had 7 clock cards early because lots of folks thought the intrique cards were somehow essential to the gameplay and that added a strong sense of "next round and it's over" as you can't always avoid drawing those cards, so we all jumped the proverbial gun (or perhaps "Jerry's microphone" in this case) and made accusations without complete confidence, even the last Elaine standing who could have theoretically just made rumors to sort out her answer to perfection.

What's the deal with that???
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26 Dec 2021 19:35 #329049 by Jackwraith
Had a couple of the regulars over, including the one person I know around here who really appreciates Villainous. So we played two games of it. The first was me as my beloved Hades, with whom I almost never win, against Evil Queen and Pete. I basically got the perfect draw, walking right into both Let's Get Ready to Rumble!s when I had easy access to The Gardens and its 3 power so I could move two different Titans two spaces each. Plus, I had the Chariot in play on my first turn, which is a tremendous (ahem) godsend. Neither Zeus nor Hercules emerged from my Fate deck, so I put Hydros, Pyros, and Arges into Olympus before the Queen had even finished her potion or Pete had completed more than one objective.

Since I'd won the first game with one of the more challenging villains, I decided to play the one that most find to be the worst of them: Ursula. However, my competition was The Horned King, also among the toughest, and Lady Tremayne, who can be tricky if the right cards don't come up soon. That turned into the longest Villainous game I've ever played because all of us were struggling to make progress and I was stuck with Eric and a Snarfblat (contracts cost 3 more power) from my second or third turn onward. However, I did manage to get Flotsam in play and by recycling my Whirlpools repeatedly, I made use of no less than three Eric's Ship contracts to remove Eric, Sebastian, and finally Triton, move the Trident, and won on the next turn. However, I only won because Lady Tremayne fated The King and made him dump his hand, which held the last Cauldron Born he needed to win the game before my turn started with both Crown and Trident in place.

Then we broke out The Others for the first time in I don't know how long. I was teaching, so I played Wrath and used the Terror scenario, Haven in Flames, and encouraged them to stick to Alpha Team, so they would have a lot of power to go with their straightforward abilities. I also picked Corrupted Nuns to go with my demon dogs. We played the B setup as it's a more contained map and has good Metro points to get around easily. Unfortunately, my new players decided to go balls out and dive into challenges with multiple Abominations and the Controller, which didn't end well. Karl was dead in the first round and things didn't improve from there, since I had Hate on an altar, which meant that the Apocalypse Track went up by one for the end of the first(!) round, one for a space with multiple fire tokens, AND one for the Hate card. That released both Marguerite and the ability for the nuns to add one Corruption to every fight in just the second round. Pretty soon, the heroes were getting wounded by Corruption overload and they eventually burned out about five rounds in, losing Rose, Leah, and Morgana along the way. The Others is tough for new players, so we'll hopefully try again soon.

We finished up with a game of Theseus. This is still one of my all-time favorites and I've never run into anyone who's had a negative experience with it. We played Scientists (me) vs Greys vs Aliens. We chased each other around the station for quite some time, including many lesser onslaughts and knocking each other into space repeatedly. But the Greys got two Probes and two Life Tapping stations down, which meant they could recover some of the damage they received from the Aliens and constantly ping us for data points, as well. I finally knocked out the Probes with a Duplicated Detonation, but it was too late and the mindsuckers took over the station from the bugs and the nerds.
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28 Dec 2021 08:34 #329064 by Ah_Pook
@Mezike and I tried out Ark Nova on TTS last night, which is the current hot shit on BGG. after playing it I can certainly see why! I've got it preordered, as it doesn't come out in the US til February, and I'm very excited to play it a lot more.

The shorthand description is: the cards from Terraforming Mars + the focus track action selection from Civilization A New Dawn + a Lacerdaesque tight and crunchy euro framework. All tired together with a nice zoo/conservation theme.

I won't go into details because there are a LOT of details, but man this game was just directly targeting my gaming pleasure center the entire time. My only real issue is it's long AF, and I would be extremely hesitant to jump into a 4p game if everyone wasnt already very familiar with the game. Our 2p learning game was 30-45 minutes of rules and then 3hrs to play it out. I think it would come down to 45-60min per player once you know the game, but it's definitely going to stay on long side.

So, long story short, if you like cards and crunchy euros you should definitely try this one out.
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28 Dec 2021 20:56 - 28 Dec 2021 20:58 #329092 by mezike
Long time without posting here and there are a few things that I have dipped into over the past few weeks.

Castell – there is a marvellous Catalan festival tradition of building towers out of people, sometimes reaching nine or ten levels in height with a huge press of individuals supporting from beneath, an amazing feat of which I was totally oblivious until trying out this 2018 game based on the custom. As one of a number of rival Colla, the teams who perform this acrobatic feat, you travel across the Catalonian region recruiting members, practicing hard to make your towers more impressive, and taking part in numerous competitions in an effort to be declared the best in the land.

Gameplay requires you to focus ahead as progress around the region can be slow-going and so you want to carefully time your travels in order to arrive at certain competitions at the right time; however you can be frequently pulled out of your way by an opportunity to recruit just the right members that you need or to take an opportunity to grow the skills of your team, and which creates one of the key strategic decision points. There is a nice use of a rondel where the training bonuses in each region change with each turn of the dial, further enhancing the need to plan ahead over the next few rounds. By improving in various areas you can grow your tower taller and create seemingly improbable feats of balance and there are clear divergent strategies regarding whether you rush to the big competitions, bide your time in order to dominate later, or focus on touring regional shows that boost your accolade. Sometimes you want to enter into competitions which you know you will not win because you can still sneak some accolade from an opponent, and there is very much a race on to fight over the performers who will be a valuable requirement in the later, bigger competitions. You also get to make a cool tower of people, which is fun enough itself. An unusual and niche theme that is closely interlaced with a thinky and interactive puzzle.


Lift Off has a jaunty Fallout-esque look about it, a race to get rockets into orbit with an okey-dokey thumbs-up 50s cartoon style appearance. Draft cards with colourful characters that gain you cash or supplies, improve your rocket or fling it into space to complete missions (either for immediate bonuses or endgame scoring), or take slightly more exotic actions that give you a variety of options to enhance your position. Feels like a fast-paced race, I thought it fun although the final couple of rounds can devolve into an opportunity-cost calculation where you hold onto certain action cards simply because it will hurt your main competitor more than taking another card would benefit you. I think it’s perfectly fine but unlikely to end up on anyone’s best-of lists.


Escape Plan must surely be Vital Lacerda’s most accessible and most enjoyable design to date. You are all part of a gang that has completed a successful heist and have stashed your ill-gotten gains in various locations around the city. Things have taken a turn for the worse and the cops are onto you so you have three days to grab as much cash as you can and get out of the city before the net closes in on you. There are plenty of Lacerda tropes at work here, that hopeless feeling that every choice is a poor one, the painfully tight economy of having to make sacrifices in order to make progress, and the hallmark amalgamation of bonus tokens and unlocking board spaces that are tied to various in-game actions. There is direct pressure on whether you risk taking negative impact from the exposure gained from rushing between locations, or you potentially lose opportunity to recover loot by taking a more cautious approach. Other players are also getting in your way as everyone is out for themselves, and the notoriety that you gain from breaking a few arms in order to get what is yours from people who clearly see how limited your time is as a marked man is a double edged sword in getting what you want at the cost of bringing the heat down upon on you. In addition there is a deliciously brutal endgame position where you may even strand yourself unable to leave regardless of the duffel bags of cash you are carrying around. I am enjoying this very much, it’s a great entry-point for anyone curious about Lacerda’s particular style of intricately interweaved and uncompromisingly punishing play but wanting something a little more dynamic and exciting than car factories or art galleries.


Dinosaur World, which really wants to be Jurassic Park – the Board Game except they clearly could not secure the licence. It sits in an odd place between crunchy Euro and goofball dinosaur fun, being simultaneously a dice chucking whimsy with cute dinomeeple and a dense ever-so-insular over-thinky affair where you will regret every decision you make. First time I played this was at the club, one player tantrum-quit after the first round and the guy who owned it decided to sell it on the spot. I ended up taking it home because I could see something worth exploring in all the uncomfortable weirdness, plus I enjoy making dinosaur sounds with my kids grauwerr snarf grrrk rawr.

The gig here is that you get a pile of meeple each turn that can either be used to build up new enclosures or buildings in your park, or to gather DNA needed to create Dinos. This is the limit of all direct Human interaction and it’s worth being clear that this is the most solitary of solitaire affairs as a result. Anyone left hanging around can then be used to run some standard private projects such as brewing up some Sauropods or hiring a few security guards in an attempt to reduce some of the inevitable casualties; because, much like the films that this is aping, everything will eventually turn to crap before you are wisely shut down from continuing with your wildly irresponsible endeavour. This is not all however, as you then get to take some screaming victims/enthralled visitors on a guided tour/death ride through your park, and some locations will require a worker present in order to activate them during the tour. The more exciting the tour then the more cash you make, hurrah! But each time you visit a location it becomes a little more dull due to repetition so of course you want to breed more dinosaurs to make things even more attractive which also serves to increase the danger still further. Rinse and repeat for five rounds, getting slightly better each time like a montage, then tot up your scores and take a punishment for having too many casualties. Oops.

The three expansions that came bundled with the package don’t do a great deal to enhance the game. It’s more stuff but the extra rules and wonky effect they can have make them more hassle than the variety that they add. There are some pointless functionality choices here as well; the amount of physical space this takes up is obnoxiously large, everything could have been reduced in size by a good third at least and it would have remained perfectly playable. The custom-printed Dinomeeple seem pointless because the game requires you to line them up in rows in the enclosures where you cannot see the beautiful screen-printing and functionally they are nothing more than colour-coded blobs anyway; it would have been much more fun just to have some generic dinosaur-shaped wooden meeple that were small enough to roam around freely on the tiles. Despite how large the tiles are, some of the components are so tiny we are entering the edge of tweezer territory in order to handle them. It just seems like someone wasn’t paying attention to basic functionality whilst they were compiling the list of awesome stretch goals. Why does this game have metal coins for example? There is no thematic justification, they are simply there because metal coins are a crowd-funding trend. Bringing up the subject of theme, everything also feels kind of loose. This could easily be a game about Safari tours with negative Tripadvisor reviews replacing dismemberment by T-Rex, or about running a production line in a factory with QA issues to tackle, or even a million other things.

So given all the negatives I am presenting here, why the heck do I find myself liking this? There is something in the actual play where you are challenged to balance several disparate elements. Thinking about the requirements you need to seek out in order to realise your strategy whilst plotting out how you will arrange your tours (which are the key activation point that both drives your economy and unlocks potential in your park), what buildings you need to add and when, juggling the high rewards of adding Dinosaur enclosures with the risk of racking up hideously violent visitor deaths, all of this makes for some very rewarding pay-offs when you get it right. It’s a good game that is buried under a slew of bad decisions on presentation and usability. Who exactly, also, is this game aimed at? Crusty-bearded Eurogamers will frown at the frivolity and cower at the egregious use of dice, fans of the cinematic adaptations of Michael Crichton will be disappointed at the complexity involved (this is certainly no Funko-Pop affair), and anybody with limited table space will be offended by the unnecessarily large footprint required to play. I guess it is simply a muddled mess that has a satisfying pay-off so long as you are a gaming weirdo like me.


Oriflamme – play cards into a communal tableau then activate left to right. Effects trigger and you score points or mess up someone else’s plans. Not a great deal more to say other than that it’s a decent and quite fighty filler, worth checking out.


Ark Nova on TTS - as Ah_Pook mentions above, this is very clearly the Next Big Thing. I fully expect to see it rising up to the BGG top 20 and making a lot of people's best-of-2022 lists. I enjoyed it a lot, and keen to play it some more.
Last edit: 28 Dec 2021 20:58 by mezike.
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29 Dec 2021 06:35 - 29 Dec 2021 06:59 #329099 by Erik Twice
I played Civilization, the original Tresham classic and it was a blast. We played the basic game with the Western expansion map and a couple small tweaks (short game variant, civil war restored to the V pile instead of IV, etc.). It was just great. We started two hours late (a player got the dates confused) but it was so fun we were all dissapointed to have to call it early.

I've been thinking quite a bit about whether I should make a copy or get the Gibbons edition or what and I think I'm just going to make one. It's such a great game, it deserves to look the part..
Last edit: 29 Dec 2021 06:59 by Erik Twice.
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30 Dec 2021 12:02 - 30 Dec 2021 12:07 #329128 by Gary Sax


Ah Pook taught me Ark Nova yesterday, I put my thoughts in the instagram link above and I don't feel a pressing need to repeat them verbatim.

This thing is going to be fucking huge among the TM set of euro gamers. It's Terraforming Mars with an actual compelling action engine (stolen in full from New Dawn) with some additional complexity but also some smart editing in other places. It still doesn't do much for me. Absolutely 0 drama whatsoever. I'd like to try it a few more times before saying this is my final opinion. Definitely better than TM though.
Last edit: 30 Dec 2021 12:07 by Gary Sax.
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30 Dec 2021 13:45 #329135 by Ah_Pook
my main takeaway from AN is that it takes a TM feel and actually makes the game fun enough to justify being on the long side. the added crunch and systems makes me feel like im actually puzzling on fun stuff the whole time, rather than plodding through an interminable game waiting for it to end. plus the zoo theme gets a lot of points for me personally.

but i dont really like TM, so. ymmv natch.
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01 Jan 2022 16:47 - 01 Jan 2022 17:05 #329201 by Gary Sax


New Years means Arkham Horror 2nd ed! Another fun game down to the last two doom.

As I discussed above, truly comical how insanely powerful the Kingsport stuff is. It escapes me who but one of you generous souls sent it to me a few years ago and I finally unboxed it this year. The context of the ball busting difficulty they went in for in Innsmouth and the later small boxes makes sense now.

I'm tempted to buy the ridiculously expensive expansion expansion. Arkham is forever shelf material through and through, especially after its 2021 resurgence, and that thing is never going to get cheaper, I don't think they did as many print runs of it.
Last edit: 01 Jan 2022 17:05 by Gary Sax.
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01 Jan 2022 17:19 #329202 by Jackwraith
I was one who thought the expansion expansion was a genuinely good thing. The essential element to Arkham Horror is the story it tells. If you're getting the same story at the Magick Shoppe on a regular basis, it can get a little stale. "Oh, yeah. That again. OK, make this same decision and we're done here." Miskatonic adding something to every location in the game was a great idea, since you're likely to always be getting a different story every time (pending number of plays, of course.) I don't regret trading it all away because we played it to death, but it's kind of unfortunate that I don't have a great storytelling HPL game left in the house (Cthulhu Wars, Fate of the Elder Gods, and Lovecraft Letter are the options.) I remember looking somewhat wistfully at a post of yours extolling the virtues of the AH card game, but it's way too much of an upfront investment for me and I'd have no one to play it with and I just don't do solo board games, for the most part.
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