Recap Monday Week 29 - What did you play last week

Spirit Island and Carcassonne this week.

Spirit island is still very high on my list of games to get. With how many do you prefer to play it?
- I've only had two games, so I'm not sure yet. My second game was with two, but I definitely prefer more than that as it make it harder to perfectly pre plan a turn

I played a couple of rounds of Kingdomino and Railroad Ink red (without the red dice). I have not tried the red dice yet.

Frosthaven, La Granja, Black Rose Wars, Terraforming Mars, Calico, and the Crimson Scales

Didn't get much time to play, just played some Lost Cities with wife.

We played some Castles of Burgundy during the week. The first session I managed to almost fill my entire board and scored almost 250 points in the end. The second session was a bit more of a slog, the board was hard to fill and in the end I scored 208 points. Was still a lot of fun but one thing we keep on noticing, the dies are loaded. Depending on which color you choose, your dies will land more often on certain numbers. Its super odd. This creates a situation where a specific board might be super easy for one player, but super hard for another, depending on the color chosen.

We also played more Ark Nova It still remains my favorite at the moment. After a stomp earlier this week my gf was against playing the game again. However, in the end, I managed to convince her by helping her along a bit with a strategy for the early game. That game turned into a tight race, while she did not win, it was close, only a few points difference. At other session it could be well over 20-30 points apart.

I also tried the sp variant of Ark Nova. I lost miserably and while the game in essence stays the same, you get a lot less actions and need to prioritize a lot. Will give it a go again this week.

What color dice did you notice an issue with? I have this game so I may need to try some experiments.
- pretty much all of them have some tendencies. The white one often lands on 6 for instance. But other dice have different preferences. I can try to get some numbers at some point. We just notice because if you roll exactly the same twice in a row and multiple times similar results, it becomes suspicious.
I adore Ark Nova and every time I play I have so much fun, what is the "sp variant" ?
- My apologies, its the single player version. I still only have tried it once. I prefer the 2player variant :)

Had some friends over on Saturday and played a bunch.

Taverns of Tiefenthal is pretty good, although I think noone really had a good grasp of tracking points. We played the base game (module 1) only, looking forward to the advanced modules.

Then we went for a classic round of Betrayal at Baldur's Gate and got really lucky on the survivor side in terms of both stats and locations. Which is a pretty common thing in this game, I guess.

We ended with a round of Aeon's End, which started off extremely brutal (the keep was down to 13/30 HP after 3 turns or so), but was fine as we got into the mid and late game.

I picked up Taverns recently on sale and haven't gotten it to the table yet, but I plan to at our next game night. Any advice for things to watch out for during the first play? Especially from the perspective of teaching it?
The Taverns of Tiefenthal modules make the game a much more rounded-out experience. If you are comfortable with the base game I think it's pretty safe to just throw in the rest all at once, the individual modules are all fairly simple and make sense together. I kinda wish the rulebook was structured as base for first play and then everything else together instead of piecemeal.

Played our first adventure in The Lord of the RIngs - Journeys in Middle Earth, 2 players: Legolas and Aragorn with the recommended roles. We chose the lowest difficulty "Adventure" and finished it succesfully, felt that "Normal" would've been doable also.

Oh cool! I wish my gf would be into adventure games! How is it playing with the app? Does that work well?
- The app works well enough, used it on PC, I guess on phone it would be a lot harder to see everything and scrolling the map a lot. I find the icoography a bit small compared to the text, I have to see if the text size settings change icons as well.
  
  At one point it mentioned a word I was thinking could be a keyword, but wasn't highlighted as such, I didn't find it in the rules in that moment. After the game I realized it was a specific status I got. Something to learn probably.
  
  And it would be cool if flavor texts would be read out loud, not just the intro.
- Maybe try with some property that she really likes? Or get here to like some IP that has adventure games, and when after watching movies / TV Shows, she wants more of that IP, show her the adventure games. 😈

Played Coup with my friends in different exploring the city

Dnd got cancelled so a few of us played gloomhaven and got bent by some frost demons and hounds. It was still an enjoyable session though and I'm looking forward to playing again in the future

Did you guys just randomly start a campaign or something or just do a random scenario together?
- We're about 4 missions in and only really play when someone ditches dnd. It's a somewhat complicated game and takes some setup, but the best part is the persistance imo. Global achievements that change the world, robust character progression, and tons of new classes to unlock once you retire a character

I've been on vacation so I've finally been able to play some games!!

Turing Machine (6x, 2p) - I pre-ordered Turing Machine as soon as I heard about and was pretty hyped to play it. This game is exactly what I hoped it to be. The logic puzzles are great, I had a ton of fun. I can't even begin to imagine how much work it took to engineer those punched card so that every puzzle has a single and unique solution. Fantastic work. The game gives a lot of the Shipwreck Arcana vibes, which I love. It feels like a solitary multiplayer game, which not everyone will enjoy. I personally don't really care, the lack of turn structure makes everything fast and I'm just eager to find the answer. Very nice game, can't wait to play the harder setups.

Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion (2x, 2p) - We love Viticulture (with the Tuscany expansion) so we had to try the cooperative expansion. We got absolutely destroyed in the introductory mission. Not sure if another year would have done it, to be honest XD We hadn't played Viticulture in a while so maybe we are a bit rusty but seems like we're not efficient enough to even beat the tutorial. Since you have 6 years to reach 25 points, getting expensive wine orders in the early game really hurts your chances to win. We need to get better and give it another go!

Menara (2x, 4p) - Menara never lets me down, it's such an enriching experience. Everyone is super engaged and the game gets really tense in the end.

Ready Set Bet (1x, 5p) - I played as the house and while it was a decently fun experience, I think I'll just use the app for the next time. The experience was a mixed bag, some people liked it but others weren't really into it. I suppose not everyone is into betting. I think the game delivers its premise really well, I do wish its components were a bit better tho. The horse board is very small, the game probably assumes you're always gonna use a tablet.

Played ticket to ride for the firsy time in a years. Managed to span my network all the way across europe and get a 20 card. My friend made a network in western europe which branched out to practically every city and won. In hindsight, I think a good strategy would have been to draw ticket cards and when possible only keep ones which were already connected by my network. Instead, at the end I kept an additional card and tried to finish the route. Oh well, maybe next time I'll remember.

We started on our Dorfromantik campaign. Only 3 games in so still a lot to explore. It was fun even in its simplest first-game setup and its cool to see the decision-space expand as new ways to score are added. Feels a bit like My City in this sense.

We've also played some Sagrada which is a turning into a real comfort pick that I am happy to play even when I am too tired for other stuff. Easy to get on the table, no problem remembering the rules, focused decisions. And I love drawing dice from a bag, Pandemic The Cure, FUSE and Roll Player are some others that do this that I like a lot.

Online I've been enjoying the BGG version of Wizards of the Grimoire. Still in alpha but already works very well. Planning to get in a few plays of it in person too.

I have been playing the Steam version of Dorfromantik and am curious how it compares. Have you tried it?
- Yes, I have played the Steam version. IMO the boardgame captures the essence of the videogame quite well. There are changes but they totally make sense, for example counting individual buildings or trees by hand would get annoying real quick so in the boardgame you count entire tiles. The way they handled the quest rewards extending the game is quite neat and smooth too. My partner liked the boardgame so much that she has started playing the Steam version too.
  
  (note that this is based on a few early plays, not the entire campaign)

Everyone from my group was available this week! So naturally this meant that we went the cinema and watched Barbie! Not quite games night, but a good time nonetheless!

It was also my birthday last week, so the group gifted me a copy of Unmatched: Cobble and Fog which I look forwards to trying with my partner!

We also visited our FLGS and grabbed Exit: The Pharaoh's Tomb which, aside from one frustrating puzzle, was a good time!

happy birthday! Hope you enjoyed the movie and report how you find Unmatched!
- Thanks! I knew I was going to enjoy Barbie, and it lived up to my expectations.
  
  Will hopefully get Unmatched to the table this week, so hopefully I'll be able to put it under next week's post!

I tried Orleans for the first time. I liked it but lost badly against someone else who had played it before. (And who owned the game.) What I didn't realize is how important gaining money and adding estates was in terms of point value. I went the route of adding goods for points but it wasn't nearly enough.

I also played Cartographers for the first time. I really like roll and write games, but this one was more of a "card and write". It has different colored pencils you can color in the maps with, so that made it more fun.

It actually doesn't come with the colored pencils in the retail box, I had to pick some up aftermarket. The basic pencils it comes with don't cut it! But I do enjoy that game a lot, as an avid doodler!
- Oh I had no idea! The person who taught it must have supplemented it with their own pencils.
- I found out that the colored pencils came in the Collector's Edition.

I am not big into boardgaming... but all of my friends are super into it. It makes playing against them much less fun for me. Guys who play dozens or hundreds of games a year begin to recognize the different "engines" that boardgames run on... so they dont have to wrap their mind around the mechanics, just have to adapt to the scoring mechanism. I have to do both, and am at a disadvantage... so I tend to look at more co-op style games.... but those arent to everyones liking.

BUT... This past week (actually the past two weeks) me and a couple of friends played quite a bit of The Crew. Since my oldest friends and I grew up playing Spades and Hearts, the concept of The Crew really clicked with us, and we have enjoyed it quite a bit. It is a fun game, that feels rewarding when youe play meshes, and you eke out a victory from what was looking like a loss... And it also makes you feel like an asshole for miscounting or missing something in a hand, and throwing the wrong card at the wrong time. I think we played very well up unitl the 29th or 30th hand, where we got a mission that was by far the most difficult. I think in all of the prior missions, we may have had to replay two of them, and only once... This mission (no player could win two more hands than any other player) was nearly a showstopper. I think we had to play it 9 times to get by it.

But since I finally played a game in the past week, I was happy to be able to post it in one of the weekly threads! lol

and what a worthy post it is! I completely understand you and can see how that is very hard to play against. Good coop games are rare but the crew is just amazing! I love the game a lot. Its simple but yet very deep at the same time.

For those of us that have played a lot of different games at some point winning is not so important anymore. Its the fun during the game that counts. I hope your friends are at this point and have the patience to play with people that are not that "hardcore" boardgamer. In the end, it should all be fun for everyone.

Played a few rounds of Thunder Road Vendetta, finally breaking out the Choppe Shoppe expansion. Such a fun game if you can deal with unexpected chaos.

And as usual a few rounds of Unmatched. I've just got Doctor Strange left to play and I've played everyone at least once.