weird Carcassonne alert!!!
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Carcassonne: The Castle is a great game. Not surprising with Reiner Knizia involved. Someone borrowed my copy and moved away years ago, but I’ll probably pick it up again if it ever gets reprinted.
Hopefully tariffs don’t derail the Kickstarter campaign. There are a lot of those in limbo at the moment, including the fancy version of Ra that I’m waiting on that’s just reaching the end of production (worst possible timing?).
Some established companies have already started going out of business, too, such as Greater Than Games (known for Spirit Island) two days ago.
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GMT have announced that they’ll be sending games straight to non-US distributors from the printers in China, so us international customers won’t be affected by the tariffs. and they’ve been searching for US-based printers for years
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I have a GMT expansion and that Ra reprint pre-ordered myself 
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I think Plaid Hat said their plan for Ashes US backers was to give them the option to pay the tariff, cancel their order, or have their order parked in China until things die down. I remember seeing another, small, kickstarter I was following who were going into printing soon saying they’re now going to just wait until things get better and will in the just refine and iterate on the game some more in the meantime. So I think tariffs are going to change the calculus for these crowdfunded board games a lot.
I saw Wizkids had Mage Knight Ultimate Edition backorders at $90 a couple of months ago and I decided to wait until later to buy it, and now not only are the backorders up to $125 (the MSRP) but who know what’s going to happen to it with tariffs.
As a solo only player, I’ve always had my eye on Spirit Island but could never pull the trigger since the digital version is so much cheaper and takes no closet space. But I guess that’s going to be my only option going forward anyway.
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We did end up playing Imperium + Immortality the other night, just the two of us with a bot. I don’t think I really like that expansion. The card mechanics seem neat, like grafting two cards together to gain all their agent activation bonuses. And I am a fan of tracks in my euro games. But Dune Imperium’s tight victory point economy is, imo, the whole attraction of the game. It is a really cramped fight over just a few points. But Immortality adds opportunities for at least two easily achieved VP, and one that is more hard fought, so the game is much less focused feeling when you include it.
I ended up sorting it out of my base game and don’t really plan to play with it again. Will probably pick up Ix at some point, I imagine. And this is all too bad because I really like the Tleilaxu in the fiction, and the art is pretty fun on the cards in this expansion.
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I got the computer game conversion of Root so I could learn all the factions. After five games, I may be getting the hang of it. I still cannot beat the medium difficulty AI. As one of the militarist factions, facing the Woodland Alliance is particularly challenging. Then I played as the Woodland Alliance and still lost. But I’m still learning with each loss. It’s a good game.
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I found this app that can connect to BGG and record/pull stats from my collection or plays, and have been having a lot of fun with it. My partner and I are curiously tracking our scores and averages and assessing what in our collection is underplayed and deserving of more attention. It’s neat!
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I played Eternal Decks the other day and liked it. I wish it were not impossible to find. Just look at this game:
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I also finally got to play a full COIN game last week. It was Father Torque Cuba Libre and I enjoyed it.
As with other games in this series, each player chooses one of the asymmetric factions:
- The Government
- The Syndicate
- Directorio
- Castro’s 26 July movement
I played Directorio (anti-communist students and others) and ultimately tied with the Syndicate (which runs the casinos) for the win.
Now I think I’m ready to try Fire in the Lake (the Vietnam War one), which I’ve owned for almost a year but have yet to play.
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GMT coin games…they cant be good for the brain in the long term…
The new expansion for labyrinth annoyingly takes place in a fantasy world that presupposes one of the tenets of the already existing game (Iraq does not have WMDs) is false seemingly so the CIA guy who wrote it can promote interventionist American foreign policy. God bless!
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Found out last week that one of my favorite games, Bottle Imp, has a new edition that puts all the old ones to shame. And it’s cheap, too.
It features:
- Glass bottles (There are two. See the next bullet point for details.)
- A new 5-6 player mode that actually works. (I tried it yesterday.)
- Some of the nicest card art I’ve ever seen in a game. The design gets more elaborate the higher the number, reminiscent of the layers in the popular video game Rez.
(image source)
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for anyone who likes to play M44
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highly recoomend watch this interview after playing the first COIN game
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I buy literally any game that gets recommended in this thread, and have never gone wrong. I just got Lords of Vegas. And now I think I’ll pick this up sometime.
When you check the new issue of a wargame magazine but notice some place you been there (Cape Nagasakibana) but a new location light up next to it (Mount Kaimon).
You amazed by the beauty in an new angle on the Google Map but then realise in next couple years you may not going there again.
Boradgame things you think a lot of blue blue blue blue
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Had a chance to play this a couple weeks ago. I didn’t think it would be my type of game but I ended up enjoying it a lot. Apparently there’s a re-themed version now called Waterfall Park that streamlines the formula in ways that lessen the experience.
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That’s like a highly coveted game at this point. Lots of embarrassed “is it okay to enjoy this?” feelings too because of the artwork, which is kind of funny to me. I’d like to give it a try sometime but who knows if I ever will be able to. More and more these days auction, betting, gambling games seem to really intrigue me for how they can get a table really talking and yelling.
Think I’ll just share some things I’ve been playing lately…
Carpe Diem is a cheap-o Stefan Feld alea game that you can still find out in the wild new in shrink. It’s a point-salad type euro with personal boards and tiles that sport features which earn you certain things when completed. It’s one of those euros where you are only indirectly affecting each other. Some people think disparagingly about that, but that style has proven very successful with my fiance’s family and I have seen them really engage with the design of this game. I hope that this could be a good gateway of sorts onto more slightly more complicated euros, but I really actually like this one a lot in general. It’s very peaceful, puzzley, and the turns are very quick. I like any game where you build a visual tableau or space over the game. I am going to track down more of these big box alea games to try out, I think. In the Year of the Dragon and Notre Dame seem easy enough to get.
Grand Austria Hotel. We played a couple more games of this recently. Still one of my favorites ever. The character of the game’s art and the mechanisms really bring to life the theme of the game, which is struggling to run a hotel during the cultural height of Austria in the 20th century. You are really battling to get your hands on every dollar, guest, hotel room, or powerful employee. It’s one of those euros that really delight in punishing you, which doesn’t seem popular anymore, and is honestly at times a bit too much, but really works for me here. We have the Let’s Waltz expansion, which is a box of modular expansions that add things to mitigate the difficulty or add unique hotels or esteemed celebrities. Lots of fun ideas. But we have been enjoying returning to the base form of games lately, so we elected to use only one of the modules that changes the turn-order and adds a new action to the board that lets you claim first-player status
Lords of Vegas. I played this lately at 4 and 2-player counts. I was surprised that it wasn’t disappointing at 2-players, but like many other area control games there is a portion of the board they tell you to ignore when you play this count, and I thought that was basically enough. After having played it with four players however, the magic is clearly elsewhere. This is another really easy to get into game with decent complexity and a fun bit of chance, and it resulted in lots of funny banter and shouts as the dice were rolling right or completely wrong. @wourme posted about this months ago and I got curious. Like everything else ever mentioned by Tulpa or you in this thread: certified great.
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