Recap Monday Week 44 - which boardgames did you play last week?

Played Scythe, and got absolutely demolished 2/3 times.

Over the weekend, played some 3P:

Cat in the Box

Trick taker, with a twist. The cards are numbered, but when playing them you declare what colour they are. A couple of ways to push for points. I liked it.

and

Godzilla: Tokyo Clash (2020)

Yeah, so this is fun! Giant kaiju battling around a city, trashing buildings, tanks and eachother. What's not to love. (Also played the 13min 'All monster roars' video, to spice up the immersion)

Tuesday:

Startups: Nice quick game

Coup: Pretty nice quick game, we've played it quite a bit though but it can still be fun.

Labyrinth: A pretty cool game about trying to find treasure in a shifting maze. You move the tiles around as you play so all the paths and items change. Pretty fun game although it can get a little slow if you're unlucky.

Sea Salt & Paper: Quick game, pretty fun.

Wormholes: The main big game, about delivering space cargo. You make wormholes to travel around faster. Pretty cool game, although we played with a couple weird rules since they didn't read the rulebook properly lol. It was still pretty fun.

Friday:

Scythe: This game is great. I played it once before and it seemed pretty complicated, but after playing it a second time I've started to plan out strategies for it because I played pretty inefficiently the last two games. Really fun game.

Flotsam Fight: We played one round of this and were kinda confused about the rules and strategy. We'll have to play again sometime.

Parcheesi: A basic simple party game, but there were some pretty crazy moments and it was pretty fun.

Darwin's Journey - A nice combo-tastic euro with an interesting theme. Looks great on the table. Many familiar elements from other Italian-style euros and also a hint of Maracaibo. Left it on the table for a couple more plays and I might try the solo too later on. Minor regrets about not having the double-layered boards from the collector's edition.

Sky Team - This is a really good 2p-only co-op. I first tried it on BGA and had to immediately order it and we played it on the table a few times since. Easy to learn rules and the box contains a lot of content to allow you to ramp up the difficulty. Highly recommended if you enjoy limited-communication co-ops (Hanabi etc) and dice placement.

Castellion - got in a few solo plays, it was nice coming back to it after a long break I enjoyed it a lot more this time and I finally gave the advanced mode a try.

We got Love Letter: Jabba's Palace to the table! We didn't actually play though as we were busy talking, oops!

We were on vacation for a while, so mostly played smaller games such as splitter, qwixx, agropolis.

Since we got back we started with Aeons end future and past, where we had a really cool play to win the game. Everything just came together perfectly. We also received our kickstarter for Borderlands, and played 1 game of it. Really enjoy the gameplay, they managed to capture the BL soul really well :D

Voidfall, Terraforming Mars: Dice Game, Beer and Bread, Scout, Apiary, Black Rose Wars, Star Realms, Tigris and Euphrates, and Frosthaven!

Voidfall continues to blow my mind. May be the perfect game other than the arduous setup. It’s incredible.

Not board games more of card games, but mtg, Gloom, and Unstable Unicorns

We played another session in our Kings Dilemma campaign. With about 10 sessions in we're reaching more of the story endings and the excitement for the finale is growing. We're playing woth a lot of roleplay and the campaign has born a lot of running gags, so it was a blast once again.

I also got to play a game of Blood Bowl, for the first time in many years. While my dwarfs sadly lost to the Skaven and Orcs, a lot of fun was had, especially when the Steamroll came in in the last turn and massacred both enemy teams in the Bloof Bowl.

We played Expeditions, the successor of Scythe and really enjoyed it. Expeditions is a completely different game from Scythe, except that its design is very similar. Unlike Scythe, it is not very strategic but a very tactical game. We played it the second time now, but got a rule wrong, leading to really easy accomplishments of quests (I guess they may be called like that in the English version). I'm excited to play it a third time, and am very interested in playing it with a third player, as I only got to play it with my wife yet.

Last Wednesday we played a 4-player game of Evacuation by Vladimir Suchy - we all were new to the game but all came prepared having watched a how-to play video.

The game is a race to evacuate your people and economy from earth, which has become uninhabitable, to a new planet. During the game you will have to dismantle you local economy on earth, transport people and infrastructure and build up on the new planet. You will have 4 years to do so and each year is divided into 7 different phases. The action phase is by far the most time consuming as you will use the resources generated to buy ships, build building, settle people and conduct research. To perform actions, you will need to invest your generated energy and as the game progresses and you dismantle your economy on earth you will need to carefully plan to have enough production already on the new home for the next year. Its a balancing act and rather challenging. Each action has a specific value and in the next phase you add all the values together to advance on the progress track which unlocks moving certain aspects of you economy and settling new biomes on the planet.

While the game only has 4 turns, the phases are long enough and filled with decisions that it does not feel like you need to min/max too much. This is something I never liked about Arnak which is also from CGE. While overall I thought it was an interesting game it feels a bit over-complicated. I would not mind to play again but would not buy it myself to add to the collection. Towards the end of the game everyone is basically performing the same actions (or at least the 4 of us were). Might be possible to play a different strategy but in such a complicated game it can be hard to come up with the alternative strats. The final advancing on the progress track in year 4 feels more or less pointless.

Furthermore, we also played 2-player Castles of Burgundy which we actually tied in score :D and a game of Ark Nova which was a bit of a slaughter. However, we finally found a good way which avoids shuffling the cards of Ark Nova and makes playing a bit more fun.

I got to play Apiary last week and really enjoyed it, although we got a rule wrong having that I think probably would have had a pretty significant effect on the flow of the game.

I also played a game of Tyrants of the Underdark last night that was really interesting. Because of the decks we used there were almost no cards that generated influence, which led to spies and assassination (plus discard) being the main way we were interacting with each other. It was neat how drastically the marketplace deck affected how the game went.

Concordia, Splendor, and Horrified

Oath - this was the weirdest Oath game ever. 90 min, four players, 2 citizens. The Empire couldn’t move because it was so inflated. Weird cards on the board , restricting movement. Chancellor got rid of all sites just to keep his power. And he did. Time to strike again next time.

Agent undercover nice hidden role game. Still like it. Some players struggle to ask questions. Maybe some ideas could be exchanged at the beginning to help them out.

Arborea and Bitoku - twice and I won. What a weekend. Will keep playing these games cause they are so lovely. First time playing the Bitoku expansion. The Art on the double cards are more lively than the older ones. I like the lake replacements, the festival cards are ok. The mean ones could possibly stop too strong players, but not me 😎

Tiger and Dragon - won. Little bit of tile counting and luck. It was ok. Need to play again to judge.

Outlook: would like to try the Witcher again. Hope I get around.

I finally got our group back into the Scythe: The Rise of Fenris campaign after ~8 months due to work/schedule conflicts.

I played Star Realms with a student I'm tutoring. And I usually play one or more games of Xiangqi every week.