it’s more that there’s almost no effective way of storing the cards intuitively between games in the amount of space and the number of bags they give you. it’s probably the norm for LCGs but I was immediately hesitant.
even so I didn’t hate it but there were a lot of accumulated no’s.
I think that with the recent ‘return to dunwich’ set (I think it’s a rework of dunwich’? I’m not super sure) it comes with a big box and dividers to sort cards. the way I’ve seen sorting work best is with little logos for each encounter set. the management of setting up an encounter deck before each session can be a little tedious for sure. when I was most into the game I was considering sleeving every card and sorting them by set so I could just pop them out and easily shuffle them.
edit: ya!
Gloomhaven is hard.
We just unlocked squid face and musical note and I’m so excited to try my new floating friend out
I played Neanderthal (some of our game group were away & we were down to 3), and wow Phil. Not the worst game I’ve played, extremely low fun and very hard to set or achieve short or long term goals.
The biggest positive was picking up the rulebook & throwing it down in disgust at the horrible pedantic design footnote & realising that is exactly the kind of crap I would pull in a heavy-hand game I’d design.
I got the PnP itch and tried out Magic Realm Light 30. It attempts to condense the 300-odd page Magic Realm 3rd ed. rulebook to just the actions and the straightforward combat + simple magic and get the playtime down to 30 minutes. It’s good, you learn what the chits are for and maybe even how to tell which ones are good. And you start by making your own map:
We manages to defeat a Tremendous Spider and some Giant Bats in some hills in week 1, and did it again in the other hills in week 2.
I’ve played Spirit Island five times now, and I think it’s very well designed. It’s interesting how configurable the game is, with optional elements that add complexity and variety. I’ve mostly played the game with two players so far. I’d like to try it with four at least once, though I can imagine that it might take a while to talk through your options–especially near the end of the game.
Finally got to try Azul 2 a couple weeks ago. I like its different take on the same basic formula, but I don’t think I need to own both. The second game might be a little better in some ways (I haven’t decided yet), but I think the way you have to mess with the components and keep them in place makes it less elegant than the first game.
Time Stories is rad ya’ll
Tell me more because this has been sitting in my Amazon wishlist for like two or three years
I was intrigued by the premise, but Sam Kabo Ashwell’s review put me off ever pursuing it myself. I’m interested in hearing any dissenting opinions, though!
Yeah, I haven’t played it myself but I have heard mostly negative things about it from board game snobs, that its just a mediocre choose your own adventure that trades on aesthetics rather than design
Well shit, my friend, that might actually be right up my alley.
Yeah so far this is a glowing recommendation
I think TIME Stories feels more like a point-and-click computer game than a choose-your-own-adventure book. I don’t own it and have only played the first (included) scenario, but I’d recommend trying it if it sounds at all appealing and you have a group who would enjoy solving the puzzles. I played it with strangers and had a good experience. We found ourselves taking notes and everything.
One criticism I have of the game is that you are expected to retry a scenario if you fail, using what you learned the last time. We were at the very end when we “failed” with one choice (not an incorrect puzzle solution) and there was no way we were going to repeat the whole thing. But that didn’t spoil the experience. And maybe that works better if you make a mistake early on.
After you finish a scenario, successfully or not, I can’t imagine having any desire to play that scenario again.
Last night, I got to try Wingspan. I had been curious about it, mainly because of the theme.
When a game is described as “engine-building,” my instinctive reaction is normally negative. That term makes me think of Magic: The Gathering players who win in just a few turns, explaining as they do so how each ability has triggered another one. An interesting exercise that drains a lot of the fun out of the game.
Wingspan does involve building engines. A new player among experienced players might fall behind in setting up combinations and be unable to fully recover. I guess it’s a little like Scythe but with less player interaction.
I like that every card is unique and has appealing art, and the facts about the birds are a nice touch. I’m going to have to play at least once more to really decide how much I like the game. But I guess it’s a good sign that I am interested in doing so.
Played DiverCity Mini, which got a very good reception from my group, and I loved it.
Basically Hanabi crossed with Pandemic, except I like it (I don’t like the latter game series much). It’s small and portable, supports 1-7 players, and is 15-30 minutes. Pretty much exactly what I was looking for!
It’s also a very simple game to learn and play, but there is enough going on to keep you engaged, and also enough going wrong to always keep it tense. I recommend it.
The regular board game club folded, ran out of money from moving venues and days so the Bloodbowl players all went to a different club! New club is also in a church, but Episcopal rather than Methodist so we can enjoy a cold beverage or two while playing.
I played Wingspan, it’s a Race For The Galaxy retheme. We’re pretty good at combos and engines so we ran out of eggs.
That’s exactly how it played!
I also tried Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The downtime sucked with three, maybe it would be ok with two. I thought it was bad: the main challenge each turn is to choose the right Action (to study elements & make them available), the right Moves and Visits (to get cards, for use as elements or as works of magic), and then Perform to use cards whose element match the studied/available elements to fulfil the necessary elements on a work of magic. This is easy to mess up! Even if you have heaps of time to consider your plan while waiting for your turn! Other players can barely interfere with your planning so it was very multiplayer solitaire.
The art is fine, the theme and the mechanics barely meet, and the design seems half-baked. There’s some good ideas for variants on BGG, and thinking of more ways to make it better is more fun than playing it.
I’ve been playing Dicey Dungeons so I thought I’d try Favor of the Pharaoh, which has a similar mechanism of rolling dice and gaining powers. Crucially, the tiles you pick up by Yahtzee matching don’t have any prerequisite for using them, so it’s less tactical than Dicey Dungeons. I like it, it’s very fast.
I picked up Elevenses but I don’t know what I think of it yet. I’ve been getting thrashed by a 7-year-old and even with my best A-game I struggle to draw a round. It’s supposed to be swingy with two, so I’ll wait to play it with more before deciding.
Just wanted to testify that I’m not aggressive enough for Sidereal Confluence. Love that game, though
yesterday i played wingspan and tokyo highway for the first time. wingspan is great, i wish i could afford my own copy 
tokyo highway rivals pandemic legacy as the most stressful and tense board game experience.
also played castles of mad king ludwig for the second time. the first time i lost miserably, the second i won with a massive lead 
i played suberbia and did not like it
like scythe and powergrid, i felt there was too much luck that can swing a game that’s so long. and like scythe, it’s the objectives that killed it for me. my personal objective was to build the fewer of one type, but another player didn’t build any either (for no reason except it didnt fit their strategy) and i couldn’t do anything about it. even if i did, another player had an objective that matched one of the public ones, so they ended up trouncing everyone. another player was annoyed because the first player (who won) was doing what they believed was the “optimum strategy” and did everything before they could. also i didnt feel like i was building a city, it just felt like plopping tiles next to ones that gave me more money or points even if it made no sense from a city planning perspective, so too abstracted for me too
i have other issues with it too, but yeah, this kind of game is just not for me.
also just to make sure people dont think i’m a sore loser, i actually won the first (and only) game of powergrid i played, but i felt it was because i lucked out with a combination of cards i got at the start of the game which made me pretty unstoppable for the rest of the game
I guess it depends on your playgroup, these auction games aren’t very fun if players aren’t aware of how to work out the expected value of the resources/power plants and someone either values things correctly or lucks out.
Whenever I play Power Grid and inevitably lose, I can see how either I overpaid for a power plant or crashed into a squeezed market for a particular fuel type.
