Stage 4: Wooden Caverna Organizer
Had to graduate from the 2 planos I had in there. The box shuts all the way again.
Oh god, Dominion: Empires announced.
The world is big and your kingdom gigantic. Itās no longer a kingdom really; itās an empire. Which makes you the emperor. This entitles you to a better chair, plus you can name a salad after yourself. Itās not easy being emperor. The day starts early, when you light the sacred flame; then itās hours of committee meetings, trying to establish exactly why the sacred flame keeps going out. Sometimes your armies take over a continent and you just have no idea where to put it. And thereās the risk of assassination; you have a food taster, who tastes anything before you eat it, and a dagger tester, who gets stabbed by anything before it stabs you. Youāve taken to staying at home whenever itās the Ides of anything. Still overall itās a great job. You wouldnāt trade it for the world - especially given how much of the world you already have.
A bit more to chew on: It has 300 cards and 96 metal tokens. There are cards you can buy now and pay for later, piles with two different cards, and Landmarks which add new ways to score. VP tokens and Events return from previous sets.
I actually prefer planos, baggies and custom tuckboxes to custom inserts because inserts tend to not work well with vertical storage.
Also it takes like 1/3 the time to organize a box than a foamcore insert, and 1/10 the cost compared to those wooden inserts.
I couldnāt figure out if there was a way to filter out expansions/promos from the BGG export, but hereās my stuff:
BGG says that I own 161 games (goes to 217 with expansions) but that is probably an under estimate because of not perfect adding to database.
A potion to whomever can identify my avatar.
it looks like a dude from the awful green things from outer space
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Captain Yid
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My copy just has tiles. Love the game, though. Itās like a casual Space Hulk with some rougueLite elements
Man, Urban Sprawl is hilariously brutal, and probably way too random with even just 3 players. I love Chad Jensenās designs, but I think Iād probably only want to play this again at 2p because itās impossible to plan ahead at all with more than that. Basically, imagine if you removed the worker placement aspect from Dominant Species and made the game entirely about manipulating the board via a dutch auction row of domination cards. Thatās how disruptive every turn can be in Urban Sprawl to the game state.
On a side note, I did end up playing nuTTA last week and it is as excellent as I expected. The overall changes to flow reduce downtime (calculating corruption before production, discarding military cards during end of turn procedure instead of after political phase, etc), the new tactics board fixes one of my biggest problems with the original game, and everything just looks nice and shiny with all the new card art and stuff, even though I donāt typically care about that kind of thing.
I donāt like it, thereās so much counting and cross-referencing and updating who has highest what in where every turn. Plus the mechanics/theme link is weak!
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Eh, you only really need to recalculate when new values are added to the empty rows/columns, I found it to be about on par with calculating domination in DS as far as mental upkeep. The mechanics I thought were servicable in terms of thematic connection, as an abstraction of cutthroat urban planning politics, though thatās something I donāt usually concern myself with admittedly.
I am very interested in the original polish version of mysterium yeah from what everyone has said. Gonna try and convince this cat from the board game group to bring it this coming week.
Iāve Ben playing a LOT of citadels w my best friend whoās in town right now. We always play it when heās around but we discovered that the 2 player game, far from being inane, is one of our favorite modes yet. One would think it would be more limited but itās actually the most complex and strategic mode Iāve played yet.
So much so that after experimenting w some bonus characters and whatnot we decided to try out an insane super-mod version coming out of our brains or asses w 12 characters, mixing and doubling many of the ranks and coming up w new rules for some of the personalitiesā¦weāve been playtesting it and it is actually a ton of fun. Definitely gonna come up w a pdf ruleset for people to play who are interested. Itās bananas and amazing. And each player has 3 characters each. :0sweat_smile:
Masques looks really awesome too. These leanly-built but intensely complex card games are totally my jam, less unwieldy than big boards but so much more variable.
original ukrainian version 
tho honestly at this point thereās no real reason to get the polish version over the english version since the polish edition is like twice as expensive to import as english version is to buy.
It should be noted that if folks here do not use http://www.boardgameprices.com/ to price their games, they really should. Thereās no reason to overspend on already very expensive bits of cardboard.
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I mentioned theā¦derivative? polish version not out of board game purity but because I understand that the setup is actually slightly different, and from what Iād read/heard, better.
Our newly-dubbed āCitadels: City-Statesā mod is completely obscene and chugging along well. The sheer fun of toying around w these rules has not worn off as we seem to keep developing them mid game. There is truly an element of Calvinball to thisā¦
I got the polish version because it was cheaper than the Ukrainian version before the English version was released but I think the English version was the first real revision
Iām finding myself liking Terra Mystica the more I play it, after being meh on it my first time through. Itās like the designer decided to take the basic concept of the generic resource conversion Euro to its absolute extreme and came out with something decidedly unique.
Patchwork is a sweet little 2p game by Rosenberg where youāre trying to patch a quilt together out of little tetris looking pieces. Probably my go-to filler for 2p from now on, because you can play a game in like 30 minutes.
Yeah, I like Terra Mystica but itās analysis paralysis to the extreme. There are just so many things you can do any given turn, and everyone in my group feels exhausted after itās over. So much counting and recounting, and messing around with the magic bowls. Our group normally plays a little too slowly, so it doesnāt end up hitting the table much.
The asymmetrical faction powers are really cool though. Some are really drastic and significantly change the way you have to play.
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yeah, terra mystica is cool but itās a little too fiddly (and the rulebook is a mess which didnāt help matters). Itās the sort of well-executed eurogame that I always feel tired and dissatisfied after.
I like archipelago better moment-to-moment but man the scoring and the pacing of that game are so arbitrary and a couple of the mechanics are fairly extraneous.