Ganymede. Mid length game, about 45 minutes. Some splendor elements, where the more of one color you have, the more bonuses you get. The trick is that the color you need isn’t always available. Essentially, you’re trying to launch colony ships, and launching 4 ends the game. You have 1 dock that takes 1 of each color colonist (there’s 4 colors), and the other dock takes 3 of the same color colonist. You then have specific shuttles to go from earth to mars, then mars to ganymede. Your ships give bonus objectives, most points win. SImple game, but fun. 8/10

Artemis project. Building colonies on Europa. Dice placement game, not too complicated. 6 rounds, 3 phases each round. First phase is the dice “bidding” Higher dice are more powerful, but lower dice get resolved first. Creates an interesting dynamic. Second phase is the resolution phase where everyone gets the stuff they bid on. Third phase is upkeep. Really good game, a nice change of pace from the usual worker placement game. 9/10

On Mars. Saw this game awhile back but its expensive ($100+, not sure what the official msrp is), 4.65 on BGG so one of the most complicated games I’ve ever played (but I feel like I mostly got it all down after just a single playthrough). It’s a worker placement game, and the board is broken up into two sections, orbit and planet side, so whatever side your initiative marker is on (it flip flops back and forth), that’s the side you do actions on. The worker action economy is very interesting and tightly balanced. We didn’t really know what we were doing to start, so we kind of ran the warehouse dry of resources before upgrading the joint life support level. Bonus actions are key, as is making sure you have enough of a supply cap to hold the resources you get. Our first playthrough took 3.5 hours, which honestly isn’t that much longer than our typical Terraforming Mars game (which I think is more of an indictment on how slow some of our regular players are in that game). 9.5/10. It’s a pretty cool game, but it is heavy.

Las Vegas Dice (battle royale version). We play a fair amount of the normal version, and apparantly there's an hard to find expansion that adds some gimmicks and adds extra players. This is like a reimagining of the game, taking some of the gimmicks, but not the extra players. The new gimmicks are pretty cool, but the game becomes quite a bit longer despite being a round shorter. It's probably better than just the base game, but I can see just playing the base game as is as well, so I think keeping it the same rating is fair.

 

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good two person game for a couple to play that won't end up in a fight/death?

 

Fog of Love is a good one. Alternately, look into co-operative games that are designed for 2 players. We found Marvel: Legendary to be pretty fun at 2 players.

 

Azul is good fun, and with only two players, there's not much kingmaking or backstabbery able to go on. It's also pretty quick to pick up (both my parents managed it within one game), short to set-up and clean, and point-scoring is easy to calculate.

 

7 wonders duel: agora. One of the expansions. Adds a senate to the game. Its enough to be interesting with detracting from it. Same rating as the base game

It’s a wonderful world. Dystopian themed card drafting game. Engine builder, tableau, catchphrase, etc. It’s good, but it’s a very light game, and I think I’d prefer it to be longer. 7/10

Terraforming mars: ares. It’s a simplified card version of terraforming mars. Obviously, I’m biased. Some people might just expect that I won’t like it on principle alone. TM is pretty much my highest rating game… and this isn’t it. It’s a watered down, less fiddly version of the game, and some people compared it to Roll for the Galaxy, which I've never played. Some people will rate that as a positive, but I don’t. A lot of the elements are unclear and could use better wording, and some of the cards are outright confusing to me, because they share the same name as a normal card, but have different costs and abilities. But hey, congrats to them for making a game they can sell at Target. 7/10

Sagrada. My guess is you have to play this game with a group of players who are capable of making decisions, which wasn’t my group. Dice drafting game player over 10 rounds, you get 2 dice per round, and you’re trying to fulfil objectives and create patterns. I wanted to like it, but my playgroup prevented me, since it somehow took longer to play than the game of scythe I played earlier that day. 7/10

 

Bargain quest. Boardgame version of a flash game essentially. You’re a shopkeeper selling gear to adventurers. Some people might find the concept novel, I guess, but I found the game kinda boring, which is a shame because you get to draft cards every round and I like drafting. It’s just that the actual mechanics of the game are a bit too simplistic, and it always seemed like there was an obvious best play.. 6/10

Dice throne. Battle yahtzee. Unfortunately, a certain other player prevented me from enjoying this as much as I wanted to (yes, it’s always the same player). I like the concept though, but it is essentially a luck based game, and not really the push-your-luck kind either. 7/10

Catan seafarers. I’ve been over Catan as a whole for a decade at this point. As a game, I find it to be heavily flawed, but it’s still fun in small doses. Seafarers adds a bunch of water tiles, a pirate to go along with the robber, trade ships to go along with roads. Game plays out similarly to normal catan, so I guess that’s a plus, so if you love Catan and want to spice it up, it might be for you, but this one playthrough has fulfilled my quota of Catan for the next half a year. The series just really feels like a dinosaur at this point, which I guess isn’t that surprising since this expansion is like 24 years old, and board games have come amazingly far in the last decade. 7/10

Terra mystica. Been 2 years since I last played it, and I have a lot more board gaming experience under my belt, so I have a greater appreciation for the strategy involved. Some of the mechanics feel kind of disjointed and arbitrary, and there’s a shit ton of little systems in the game, plus each player has a unique player board, which is fun. There’s a fair amount of bookkeeping, but not as much as some other games I’ve played such as Teotihuacan or Barrage. I found it to be fun though, so Im adjusting the rating to an 8.5/10. I’m also looking forward to playing Gaia Project, which from what I understand is a sort of space themed reskin of it.

Terraforming Mars: Ares. Follow up to the last update. I just want to add that it’s still quite a fiddly game, even without the actual mars board with placeable tiles. And without that board, I don’t really feel like the theme comes out at all, which really makes it feel like a reskinned cash grab. It’s still fun, but we’re already back to playing the actual version of the game, unless we’re on a very strict time budget.

 

So I've recently been playing a few games of Darwin's Choice with the brother and his partner. It's MUCH better than I'd initially thought (although don't think I've ever posted), because he also reads the rules, so it's not entirely on me to make sure everyone's playing properly.

Darwin's choice is a planetary ecosystem simulator game, where they change over the ages, and your 'job' is to create and evolve animals out of the cards in your hand, scoring points as they stick around, and amass the largest amount of points by endgame.

There's four continents (play areas), and you play across four eras (meta-turns). Each continent has it's own resource cap and skill floor, with the least skilled animals in each losing out on the resources if there isn't sufficient. There's no /direct/ combat, as you can't attack, but carnivorous animals will eat herbivores and omnivores if there's not enough spare meat, depending on their skill level and generalised 'power level' (smarts and strongs put together in a loosely defined rating).

The game is supposed to be for groups of 2+, although it doesn't really work if there's only two of you - it's still playable, but there's much no interaction, and the gamestate doesn't change much between each turn. Once you get three people though, it definitely picks up.

Each creature is built out of cards in your hand, drawn from the 'Big' and 'Small' decks. 'Big' cards are either Body or double-Leg cards, whilst small cards are Heads, Legs, Wings, or Tail. Animals need a Head and a Body, and each body has a different amount of slots for other small cards. Each card can also provide Swim, Walk, Climb, Fly, Heat, or Cold; which are needed for different environments and improve the animals 'skill' if relevant - having a climb of 7 is useless in a coral reef, and Cold Resistance isn't allowed in the desert. Better animal parts often increase how much food they need, but you'll get higher scores in each era... And as you only get the full score if a creature is still alive after the final era, that means you'll generally want to have high-value creatures.

The problem, of course, is that eras cause continental changes. Sea-levels fall, and suddenly there's no oceans. Or a volcano erupts, and one is rendered uninhabitable... But the others now don't need cold protection. You'll need to migrate your creatures to a new area they can thrive in, evolve them to meet their current environment, or let them die and leave their remains to the fossil record. So you have to make sure that your creature has a potential back-up, especially once they become worth lots of points.

Our last game had a leviatian creature, super adapted to the ocean (something like 14 swim, 10 strength, which is OBSCENE)... and then the oceans dried up, and the one it was in became a desert, which didn't have enough food to support it. so it would have needed to move somewhere with enough food, but then it wouldn't have been specialized enough to take any; or lose some cost and gain heat resistance and gain walking, which wasn't possible.

Definitely worth giving a go. It's on TTS if you're interested at all.

 

Eclipse. One of those white whale games, costs a million dollars used, etc. LGS has had a demo copy forever though, we busted it out last week. Well, kinda. Long story with a lot of drama. Anyways, it’s a 4x game played over 9 rounds. Honestly, the game took 5 hours and I found it dreadfully boring. All the 4x stuff just felt kind bland. The techs were okay, but kinda uninspiring. No combat really happened until the very last turn. The exploration was hit or miss, and all the t3 tiles were used up before I could connect and form diplomatic relations. All in all, I’m not really in a rush to play it again 7.5/10


Concordia Venus. Economic city-state/trade route builder. Your actions are dictated by cards, but it’s not really a deckbuilder in a traditional sense, since you don’t draw cards or shuffle your deck. Not sure really what a comparable game is, maybe something like marco polo. I found it to be really fun. 8.5/10


Tawantinsuyu. Another game in the T game line (tzolkin, teotihuacan). Tekhenu is on my list as well, but for a game that came out less than a year ago, its impossible to get at a reasonable price. Same story for this game really, but I found a used copy for $30 that hadn’t been played at all. Complex, but really fun. Kind of a magical game once you see how everything works. 8.5/10

 

Great Western Trail. As a general rule, I tend to avoid Western themed games. For one, the theme itself doesn’t usually appeal to me, as it just feels dated without being the distant past, and two, I once got stuck playing a 5 hour game of Western Legends and that’s put me off the whole thing. But this game is pretty good. It’s a worker placement/deck building game, but it’s quite different than other games that you could describe like that, such as Dune Imperium. It’s a fairly complicated game with a decent amount of nuance, but after the first game, we were all wanting to play it again.

The game board starts off with 7 neutral buildings which are where you do your actions. But then each player can build their own action spots, and some of them have tolls that other have to pay you when you go through. You have a fairly complex personal action board, where you unlock addition gear actions, and hire engineers/cowboys/conductors with. Your deck consists of different types of cattle, each with different sell values and colors. So, for an example there’s an action where you sell a green 2 cow for 4 dollars, and then you get to take a cattle buying action, where depending on how many cowboys you have, you get do buy various different types of cows with various discounts. Eventually, you make it to the end town to sell your cattle, which you discard your whole hand and you get the sale price for each unique cow. And then depending on how many cows you sold, how many bonus prize ribbons you have, and how far along your train is (for a discount), you get to put out a disc from your board to unlock a new action and get some bonus points. 9/10


Vindication. Area control game. Similarly to Great Western Trail, except instead of theme, it’s mechanics, and I’m just not that big of a fan of area control games. But as far as they go, this one is fairly tolerable. You can sort of ignore it and focus your attention on just doing your actions, but that will probably put you at like a 30-40 point disadvantage. This game has been a bit of a meme in my group for years, so this was the first time I finally got to play it. The attribute collection part was kinda fun, but I don’t think we should’ve played with the treachery expansion on the first play, as they were kinda feel-bad to play as they don't contribute to color mastery, but they were pretty powerful (think of the skull cards in lords of waterdeep). Also, this game felt like it was impossible to make a come back if you were too far behind. Also the manual was pretty much worthless. 7.5/10

 

Tekhenu. The 4th in the series of T games, following Tzolkin, Teotihuacan and Tawantinsuyu (there’s a 5th coming out shortly called Tabanussi, builders of Ur). I think there was a recent reprint on this, because I was able to get it for $40 off miniature market when it had been around $90 on ebay for a few months prior. It’s a dice drafting game, which are a pretty fun type of game, though I don’t get to play them often. There’s 6 different main actions you can do, representing 6 different egyptian gods, and the strength of the action is determined by the number of the die, and whether its a positive or negative is determined by the positioning of the sun and the shadow it casts upon the obelisk, as you got to make sure you're as balanced as possible for the mini-scoring rounds. I’ve only played this twice so far, but I’ve found the dice regeneration phase to be quite finicky, though hopefully we’ll have everything smoothed out for next time. 8.5/10

Nidavellir. Set drafting, bidding game. It’s got a vague nordic theme (which you could guess from the name), but it’s largely irrelevant beyond that’s simple the theme for what the card names are. I’d play it again, but it was largely forgettable. 7/10

Papayoo. Trick taking game. It’s a mix between a few other games. There’s no trump card, but there’s a fifth suit that is worth points for whoever wins it, so you can sort of poison the well like in Friday the 13th. It also scores like 5 crowns, where the lowest score wins. It’s not quite as random as 5 crowns, so it does feel like your decisions actually impact the game. 7.5/10

I think there’s a 4th new came I’ve played recently but I’m drawing a blank at the moment

 

Wingspan, by Stonemaier Games (they did Scythe).

Engine building game, where you attract birds to your nature reserve, collect food from a birdfeeder, force them to lay eggs, and then [strikethrough]make them fight[/strikethrough] compete for points.

Like most Stonemaier games, the rulebook is... lacking. We ended up giving up on our third game when we realized we'd been playing it slightly wrong through the first two, although the difference was slight, based on the wording on the cards.

Art's very pretty, everything fits neatly into the box; and whilst the game gets more complex as it goes on due to interactions, you also lose actions, so it gets quicker. We played about five games. Would definitely recommend.

 

I'd recommend giving Wingspan one more go. While the rulebook is a bit shit, once you've got the rules down it's a really well made engine builder. It's one of the favourites in our house and there's enough variety in engines to build that you're not going to find the most optimal path and play it every time, like happens with some other engine builders.

 

Oh yeah, once we figured the rules out properly (we think) on round three, we cancelled that one, and played three more. It was SUPER fun, and the amount of cards, plus the slight randomness, means it's going to be different each time. I'd definitely want to try doing a five-player version, not just two.

 

I've played wingspan like 50 times, so I'm curious as to what rule you got wrong. I had it taught to me, so I've never looked at the manual myself, but after seeing the abomination that is the Tapestry manual, I wouldn't be surprised at the awfulness.

 

Dinosaur World. Sequel to Dinosaur Island and all of its expansion. It plays about the same, but I'm not sure if it’s as good. It has a lot of the same aspects. I found it pretty easy to learn, since I’ve played the first a bunch of times, though there was still a few edge-case stuff that we had to look up. They streamlined some of the finickiness of the first game, but added even more, so it tends to be a deceptively long game for how much personal agency you have. Like in the first game, you have all these park visitor meeples which is a completely random element which ultimately determines whether or not you win the game. Those are gone, but instead you have boredom token which has to be one of the worst implemented tokens I’ve ever seen. Supposedly in the beta test, they used dice which makes a ton of sense, but the cost of so many dice would be quiet high, so instead, you either suffer through them (and they’re tiny tokens, like a quarter inch square), or buy your own dice anyways. But at least the completely random meeple element is removed and replaced with 3 random death dice, so you can just focus on trying to optimize your turns. And like the first game, to help cut down on downtime, half the game is played simultaneously, but that has its own downsides. 7/10. If it wasn’t for the boredom tokens, it would be 8/10

Power grid remake. Not sure exactly what all changed except for some initiative rules I think. I always manage to lose this in the last round, so in that sense it's sort of like Smart Phone where there’s too much emphasis or power in going first or last (though admittedly this game is like 17 years old. It’s like a weird sub-game within a game, so in a sense it almost comes down to the start of the first turn.

The Crew (underwater sequel). I only played the original like twice, despite liking it quite a lot, because the other people in my play group overplayed it in their other play group. Anyways, it’s like a mix between a trick taking and a puzzle game. This version of the game cut out the mini deck used to generate the scenario tricks, and instead has actual scenario cards. Honestly, if you have the first game, you could probably just print these out yourself and save some money. I think I like it more than the first. 8/10

The Great Dalmuti. I have played this before this past week, but looking at my ratings chart, I don't see it on there. I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s a card game, and the goal is to go out first. It follows Stratego rules, where the deck has 12 12’s,11 11’s, 10 10’s, all the way to 1 1(and 2 jesters), and 1 beats 2, 2 beats 3, etc. You have to follow the lead like a trick taking game, except you only have sets (mean, 1 of a kind, 2 of a kind, 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind ,etc). So the lead plays 4 12s, then someone in turn order has to beat that with a lower 4 of a kind. The fun part is that it’s an escalating game. The first person to go out is the Great Dalmuti, second is the lesser dalmuti, and the two people who go out last are their bitches. In the next round, the last place person has to give the first place their 2 best cards (and the first gives them their two worst cards), and the 2nd to last and 2nd give 1 card. It's a game of the rich getting richer, and shows the class struggle of trying to get out from the bottom. It’s best with larger groups, like we play it with 7 or 8 because it's harder to get interesting games that play that many (though the discovery of Papayoo has helped). Also, I didn’t know it until just now, but this is a Richard Garfield game. 7.5/10

Concordia Venus 6 player variant, Multiplayer. Half the reason I bought this game is because it supposedly played 6, and that is a tricky number for my play group. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently the 6 player variant is 3 teams of 2 (you can also do 2 teams of 2 for a 4 player game). We put off trying it for awhile since it made sense to learn how to play the game normally first. Not much is changed. There’s a few minor rules changes, and there’s some single player cards that are swapped out for multiplayer cards. It sort of works like 6 player catan, specially starfarers (since that's the only one I’ve played 6 players in), where there’s a joint turn, with a primary and secondary player. This means both players of a team take their turn at the same time, doing the action of the primary player’s card. You can do some communicating, within reason. I found it to be pretty fun, up until we hit about the two hour mark with no end in sight and some teams just unable to make an expedient decision. Ended up taking about 4.5 hours to play, which is 2 to 3x longer than normal, which is really crazy. I still really like the game, but that alone makes me not want to try 6 player again

Star Scrappers: Orbital. A remake of an older game. You use cards to play event cards and build up your space station to unlock a higher population and more actions. Pretty easy game to learn, and fast to play as well. Not that much depth though. 7/10

 

Furnace. Cute little bidding/engine builder game. Anyone can learn it in 2 minutes, and its played over 4 rounds. Each player has 4 bidding disks, numbers 1,2,3,4. 4>3 obviously. You have to use all your discs, and you can’t bid on a card that you’ve already bid on, or use a duplicate number. Each card has a compensation bonus, so for example if it’s 2 coal, Red bid 4, you bid 3, you would get that compensation bonus 3 times. Each player has a game-breaking special power, such as 1 player gets a 5th bidding disk (it’s an additional 2), while another can ignore the normal placement rules (but they lose ties), things like that. The cards general work the same, having a production bonus and/or a material exchange (either to another material or to money), and each card can be upgraded as well. Whoever makes the most money wins. 8/10

Time stories (hadal project). I’ve never played one of these before, but i’ve seen a bunch of different ones sitting on the shelf for years. Not the kind of game I’ve ever been particularly interested in, but sometimes you have to play other people’s games to make them happy. It’s sort of a legacy game, sort of a campaign-in-a-box, but mostly it’s just a story-based game. Not really even much of a game if I’m honest. The story on this one was okay, but the actual gameplay elements are pretty much non-existent. I’m sure we probably weren’t even playing this correctly, but I’m in no rush to try again. 6/10

7 wonders: architects. I’ve said it before, but I think 7 wonders: duel is the best 7 wonders game by far. And this new game doesn’t change that opinion. Anyways, in this game, each player has a personal multi-step wonder to complete. You know, the Colossus of Rhodes, Great Pyramid, the shit the games named after etc. Each step is progressively harder than the previous to complete, and gives progressively more VP and occasionally a special ability, such as +1 passive attack, or an extra card draw. The cards work different as well, as the individual symbols don't matter and it’s mostly just a set collecting variant, with gold being a wild resource. And instead of drafting, you either draw a card from your face-up deck, your opponents to the right face-up deck, or the neutral random face-down deck in the middle. It was cute, I guess, and I guess that’s sort of the point since it’s a simple, popular game that anyone over the age of 4 could play. Meaning, it’s not really for me. But it does play 7 players, so that’s something I guess (though we almost always split up into 2 groups rather than play a 7 player game because we can never get a consensus). 6/10

Tapestry: plans and ploys. Small expansion that adds a few cute things. 10 new civs, 5 bonus objective cards that award a building, a couple new tapestries, some new space tiles, and some 1p and 2p stuff. The new civs are pretty cool, and add a breath of fresh air to the game. 4 of the 5 new bonus cards seem reasonable. The one I had wasn’t, which is to collect 6 tiles in my supply. It’s pretty much impossible to do in a timely manner, whereas the other ones were doable. After all, it’s a game of inches, and the quicker you get that inch, the more times it gets to pay off. Overall, it’s still a fun game, but at its core, it’s still extremely flawed and unbalanced, and you’ll still have 1 person finishing at 300 points and another at 100, despite neither of them doing anything wrong other than being first or last player. And yes, the expansion adds even more errata to the starter civs. I honestly wonder how much better the game would play without any civs at all, as you would have to rely more on comboing with your tapestry and technology cards, as well as your choice of advancement track. The expansion makes the game better, and while the game is fun to pull out occasionally, it’s still not something I’d play more than once a month.


Some misc updates on our "meta". Concordia Venus has been getting lots of play time, to the point where it's getting a bit overplayed, and there's always the one guy who things its clever to rush an end-game condition as fast as possible. They've lost every time they've done that, but the winner still isn't very satisfied. Very good game, with enough randomization to keep it from feeling like a "solved" game. I'm just glad I'm getting my moneys worth with it, as it was quite an expensive game.

Speaking of solved games, Scythe very much feels like that. You only have like 3 different moves you can make on your turn, so it's not really that hard to figure out the best path to victory. Then the option is for one or two players to gang up on you... and inevitably someone else entirely will win. We've been finishing 6 players games of it in an hour lmao. I actually broke 100 points for the first time ever the last time we played.

Our current meta filler game is papayoo, sort of replacing wizard (though we often still play both). Just for a change of pace, but I think a lot of us are getting tired of that too.

Other than that, Terra Mystica and Tzolkin have been getting decent playtime, Terraforming Mars has actually been on a slight downtrend to maybe once every 3 weeks.

Upcoming games that I'm aware of are Khora (mine), anno 1800, and the expansion to lost ruins of arnak. There's some other expansions as well, to Ganymede, Concordia, Tekhenu that we'll probably get eventually as well. Oh, there's also Ankh. I've read all about it, watched a vid on it... and it just doesn't interest me at all. But naturally, since it made the rounds on some blogs and shit, someone bought it so I'm inevitably going to have to suck it up and play it. I'm sure the same could be said of Khora, so it's whatever. But at least I managed to avoid having to play the flavor of the month campaign-in-a-box Sleeping Gods.

 

couple new games in the last month, probably still forgetting some

Grav Well. remake. Super unremarkable game. Using cards to control both initiative and spaces you can move at the same time, so mostly just hedging your bets on whether or not you can move forward or not, as the goal is to make it out of the gravity well which is 54 spaces from start. You get some special power cards that you have to charge up that can give a sort of rule-altering ability. There's some strategy, but honestly it feels like a kid’s game. 5/10

Anno 1800. Cube pusher. There are 5 flavors of worker cubes, you start with 4/3/2 of the lower 3 tiers (tier 1/2/3). You also start off with tier 1/2/3 industries. The goal is to upgrade your industries to unlock more materials to collect vps. Every time you gain a new worker, including the ones you start with, you gain an objective card. The game doesn’t end until someone has managed to play all the cards from their hand, which can be quite a difficult task since that means that someone has to have bought one of the industries so you can at least trade with it (or find a way to put the card back into the deck). It’s pretty fun, but there’s definitely a balance you have to find between building industries and completing cards, which means you have to sus out when your opponents are going to make that turn and try and pre-empt it. 9/10

1775: rebellion. Area control game. Not my favorite genre of game, of rough level of dislike with role deduction games. This was fun for about the first 30 minutes before my terrible luck no longer made it fun (multiple losses with a 2:1 advantage), as well as our opponents (its a team game) inability to come to a timely agreement with a game plan, since one is an actual general in the military and the other a board game vet. 6/10

Last aurora. Wasteland Express if it was made by a different company. Better vehicle upgrading system, but awful combat system. Also round based, which feels at odds. 8/10

Architects of the West Kingdom. I played Paladins once like 3 years ago and liked it, and haven't been able to play it since. This is in the same series, with a third that I'm aware of (Viscounts). Not as complicated as Paladins, and importantly, it plays 5 players. We’ve had access to this game this whole time but never broke it out, and we now all feel kind of dumb for that since it’s pretty good. I’d almost say that its remarkably well balanced as the 5 of us were all within 8 points of each other at the end. 9/10

 

NEOM: One of those games that’s feels like it’s a mix of a bunch of other game elements. There’s three rounds of drafting, drafting 7 tiles. The tiles are different types of builds, it can be a gold mine, a fire station, apartment building, car factory, etc. As you draft a tile, you play it, and the tiles have costs, sometimes in the form of goods, which the tiles make. If you dont make it, you can pay someone who does. You’re forming a city grid, and you get points (positive and negative) depending on the layout. So you don’t want a lot of pollution near residential areas. It’s pretty fun. 8/10

Key to the City: London. Sequel to Keyflower. Very similar game. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you know Keyflower, you know about 95% of this game. It’s a slimmed down, streamlined version of it, that plays faster and tighter. There’s no green (wild) meeples for example, and no bidding cap. Anyways, it’s a tile auction, worker placement, city building game. 8.5/10

Tapestry newest expansion. It adds a 5th track. Seems like it focuses on giving points based on how well you’re doing on the other tracks, and an bonus production tile and improved/replacement production line tile. And some new civs of course, as well as the usual attempt to balance the game. I honestly appreciate the attempts to salvage this game to make it better, and it’s good, but I think it’s fundamentally flawed. I can’t stand the fact that you can’t keep going after your last production phase. Lots of civs give bonus resources, as well as tapestries and, so lots of times it’s not very satisfying to end with multiple wasted resources.

We played a few games for the first time in years. We played Pulsar 2849, and I think it’s been pretty close to 3 years since the last time I played it. Lots of fun, might make it back into the rotation now that we’ve all remembered the game. Star Wars Outer Rim as well. Still fun, but some frustration in not being able to get the right talents for the right job. These are games we played pre-pandemic which feels like decades ago at this point.

 

Have any of you played Arkham Horror?
It's highly rated on most sites we looked, but ended up not being worth it.
- the rule book is shit. Learn to play with Google or make your own rules.
- if you want to play this game with 4 people you need to buy two copies of the game! Not enough basic cards in the base game for all your characters to build working decks.
- the quest you get in the base game is only 3 acts long. Way too short. Additional quests you can buy are 8 acts long...

2/5 (for the art)

 

Tabannusi: Builders of Ur. Fifth in the series starting with Tzolkin. New release. Surprisingly, this game doesn’t share *that* many game elements with the others. In fact, its almost masterful how they managed to not retread the same ground. I won’t claim to have played every board game in the world, or even that many, but this actually plays unlike anything I’ve played before. I won’t say it’s unique or groundbreaking, but I find it fascinating how game designers can keep finding new design space within the same retread systems.

The game is played over 5 rounds. The board is split up into 5 sections. Each section has a “barge” that contains several resource dice. Each player has 2 different workers, an architect and servant. When you start your turn, you take a resource dice from the area you’re in, and whatever the dice number is, that’s the section you send your architect off to. Thats where your servant will be heading to for next turn’s actions. When a barge has 0 resource dice left, that’s a round over and you do a scoring for that section.

The first 3 sections are a building grid, with very similar actions. You can do a plan action (I forget the actual name of it) where you build a foundation in one of three colors, and put a claim marker on it (which is a limited resource that you have to gain more of). Another action is to build on the foundation, kicking the other claims out for your own and building your house on top. These can’t be more than 3 buildings big and there’s some placement rules to prevent that from happening, sort of ends up looking like a tetris board. Then you can build ponds and gardens and such. There’s a lot of placement bonuses on the board for these. 4th section is the ship yard. Every time you build a house, you can pay to claim a ship of that size, or you can visit the shipyard itself to build any. The ships give you passive bonuses, and completing a row or column gives you another bonus. And you can build houses around the outside similar to Tekhenu to get extra extra bonuses. 5th section is the temple section. 3 temples to match the 3 colors of buildings. First come first serve for the placement bonuses in each mini-section (theres 6 slots). Each building lets you claim a scoring amplifier for that color, up to 3x.

All your buildings come off your player board, and as you take buildings off, you reveal rewards. Theres a row for each color of building, plus a row of colorless buildings if you run out, or if they were specifically called for. You also get a crate resource which you can refresh, but only once a turn. This helps smooth out resource requirements

There’s is also a god track, as is tradition for every game in this series, though it’s called a mastery track. Theres 3 tracks, one for each color of building. There’s several ways to get bump up, either from your claims getting stolen, to adjacency bonuses with your gardens, or outright spending an action to do it. The gimmick is you only get the advancement bonus of your lowest one, so you don’t want it to lag behind too much. Each track also have point thresholds, so you can get a score multiplier on a house color when scoring happens.

After the final round, there’s a mega scoring where every section is scored. There’s also bonus objective cards as well, where you need to build a certain amount of houses in each section.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/316786/tabannusi-builders-ur

All in all, we’ve played it once so far and we found it very fun. The one thing that tends to happen with most of the T games is while they’re fairly complicated and finicky, and can play quite long, they actually end up feeling a bit short, and that’s especially true for this one. 5 rounds of 5 barge refills and that’s not really that much gameplay, and there’s not a ton of bonus actions to be gained, barely any at all in fact. Anyways, a tentative 9/10.


7 wonders duel: pantheon. I’m a bit impressed by how well done all the 7 wonders duel stuff is, and how much better it is than the full 7 player version. It all just works nicely together. All the pantheon cards here just sort of work and make sense, and doesn’t feel like its distracting you from the rest of the game. It still feels like 7 wonders duel.



Through the Ages: This game has been a bit of a meme. I played it once about 3 years ago and only the quick beginners mode without the third age. I will say all the jokes about this game being a 6 hour game are in fact true. I played a full 4 player game with 3 ages and it took about 6 hours, not counting setup. I will say that I don’t actually think it should be a 6 hour game. A lot of that was on a very slow player consistently taking 10 minute turns. Like, I have a cribbage app on my phone and played a full game quicker than it took him to complete one of his turns. Some allowance has to be made when it’s peoples first game, but there should be a line drawn at some point. I think realistically you should be able to get through the game in 3 hours, especially since all of us are seasoned board gamers by this point.

The game is fun. I think one of the main hiccups for the long turns is the fact that you get anywhere from 1 to 10 actions on your turn, and due to the card buying action, it can be difficult to plan your turn out ahead of time, and even if the card you want is still there, you might still get blocked by the randomness of the current/future event decks.

The game plays like a Civ game. Theres 4 different ages, though the first “A” is pretty much just the starter age and lasts 1 round. The cards you buy represent events, buildings, technologies and wonders. You have two types of resources - “population” and “resources.” The best analogue is Terraforming Mars, where the resource cubes are generic until you put them into whatever zone. So a card represents a technology, a population cube on it represents a building, and a resource cube on it represents either food or ore, and depending on the level of the building, that can be different quantities as well. It’s a weird concept to grasp conceptually just reading the manual, but once you see everything play out, it makes sense.

The amount of actions (cubes) is determined by a couple things. There’s also two types of actions, civil (white) and military (red). Your starting government gives you 4 and 2. Later governments give upwards of 8 and 4. You can also gain additional ones through technologies, wonders, and colonies.

Your turn consists of doing a politics actions (either doing an event, pact, aggression, or war) then using up all of your actions, and then going into a production phase.

You always have a bottleneck. You’re constantly battling to try and increase production in something to get to the next step. Early game, I found that to be research. Mid game it was actions. Late game it was stuff to actually do.

Like I said in my first post about this game 3 years ago, everything sort of works the same, but they all have their own quirks and gimmicks that make them different, lots of edge cases, and you end up scouring both manuals trying to piece together how it works from 6 different spots, and still have to google the answer. That sort of thing is what makes it a 4.41 on BGG. Is it the 9th best game all time though? No, not really. It is very good though, and even after 6 hours, I didn’t feel like I was that fatigued, and we were all willing to keep going on with our board game day. And we are all willing to play it again, though with the length, probably not even a monthly occurrence. 9/10