boardgames

We played Next Station: London for the first time, flip & write with a neat spatial puzzle. Does pretty much everything right: simple rules, interesting decisions and scoring and it's fun to pass the color pencils around. Always neat when you realize that a bunch of games you like are by the same designer: Next Station, The Guild of Merchant Explorers and Aquamarine in this case.

Also played Photosynthesis (aka murdertree). Evergreen finds more table time these days but they are very different games and I like them both for what they are. Photosynthesis is confrontational abstract, Evergreen is chill drafting followed by some MP solitaire. Kinda wish I could get a version of Photosynthesis with Evergreen-style components.

Online I've been liking Challengers (BGA) a lot, also got some Newton and Mottainai games going on (Yucata).

Played Imperium Legends in multiplayer for the first time (3 players) , i played with the Qin for the first time and didnt enjoy it as much as i enjoy other factions, too much restrictions and cards that need other cards or are restrictive of other cards you have in play. My turns took more time than i would like to. I dont know if my friends enjoyed the game as much as i expected, but it was a good game.

Also played Discworld Ank-Morpork for the first time and had a really good time, i think that the mechanics on the board work well enough (moving minions, buildings, trouble and killing) and the cards are fun enough too, some really crazy effects on there. But there are two things i really did not like: Events can go crazy on you, i lost in two events played in the same turn near the end 50% of all the money i had made in the whole game, it was too much, i knew at that point that i had no way to complete my objective nor win by points. Also your actions being restricted to random cards can make the game really one sided at times, if you dont draw decent cards with the actions you need you are simply always behind, and having cards that do actions and then let you play another card is just so much better 99% of the time. There were 3 turns in a row where my two friends had a card with an additional play at least and i didnt so i just played a single card and passed and they played 2 to 4 cards, that just was even less fun than when i lost 50% of what i had as i just wasnt even playing the game in comparison. All things said, its still a pretty fun game i would play again, but its really luck based.

Edit: Rereading my comment about Ankh Morpork i think it sounds weird how negative im on random events and cards but i say i had a really fun time, the main thing is the game has hidden objectives to win that can be pretty different so as i was playing with a couple of friends i knew already most of the fun came from trying to guess what was each others win condition and trying to prevent each other from winning.

Because our DnD session last Sunday ended a bit in limbo we decided to continue it on Tuesday which quickly let to another almost TPK. I've grown pretty frustrated with my character and vented my dissatisfaction with the class online and was quickly schooled on my mistakes. I'm now looking forward to our next session and playing it differently.

Friday one of our group had his birthday and an impromptu get together with beer and cake turned into a round of Spirit Island with spirits and cake. Heart of the Wildfire, Shifting Memory of Ages and Stone's Unyielding Defiance played on the sunset layout with events. Said events hammered us hard early on with destroying presence and adding blight which given Wildfire's playstyle was a problematic combo. But we turned it around and managed to remove all the towns and cities by roughly the second level 3 card. I liked playing Stone's Unyielding Defiance. The amount of "defense" and retribution you can apply even pretty early on is just mindboggling. The spirit does take a good long while before you can do much more than that but being able to sit in a sprawling urban landscape looking at whatever damage they do on ravage and just say "That's nice, honey, but the Dahan all stay and fight back, oh and half your damage goes right back atcha" is simply delicious.

Played a few good ones this past week.

• Beast - 4 Players. This was our first time playing. I played as a beast (Hogbad) and was slain by the hunters on the 3rd Day. Would definitely play again.
• Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients - Solo. Very excited to play this a ton more. Plays solo, co-op, and competitive. I did the first scenario in the solo campaign a few times to get some of the basic concepts, and because the Auto-Enemy Bohmerk kept killing my Varpen warriors.
• Wingspan - 2 Players. Always a relaxing, enjoyable experience. I won this time, which is rare.

We played a lot of the Isofarian guard last week, finished chapter 2 from the first campaign. They announced a couple of changes to the rules last week, and we really like them.

We also had our first introduction to Arnak at some friends. I like it, but I feel that you have to do too much, without becoming good at anything.

Lastly we finally git around continuing our alphabet challenge with Noria and Onirim :D

Got plays of Foundations of Rome and Clank! in.

Also played Rear Window by Prospero Hall. It’s roughly a Mysterium-style game themed after the Hitchcock movie. The one twist which probably should be skipped for the first play is that the clue giver might be a secret traitor.

We mainly played Ark Nova. We bought the game a couple of weeks ago but it was a bit daunting to crack it open. Boy am I glad I did it. An absolutely amazing game. Its so much fun with many interesting decisions and a nice flow. It seems very cerebral with some decisions taking some time. I think we did 5 games during the week (2 players)

We also played some splendor duel its just a solid 2player

Another game we played with 6 players was Virus! which is a simple yet entertaining game. The single game was at least 2 hours and we finished a bottle of pacharan 🤪