Any tips, good strategies, warnings, recommendations or funny sessions? Please share!
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We played a 2-player session of Ark Nova - I cannot get enough, the game is fantastic. Luckily, I lost the session so my gf might not get burned out again of the game. Really enjoy the game with 2, the gameplay is super fun. I am dreading to play it with more, I think it would become super chaotic. Anyone tried with more? Does the game take ages?
We also played the classic [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/84876/castles-burgundy](The Castles of Burgundy) with 4 players. Its a super fun game, definitely the older-style Euros but it really still holds its own. We have a pretty nice organizer for it with dice trays and a place for all the hexes. It makes the setup and replenishing of tiles super easy and fast. Got something like 255 points in the end and almost filled my Kingdom, I had 2 or 3 hexes left to go. All Animal hexes and mines. The other three went for animals early game so I decided to leave it for later, 2-players completed all three mines before I could thus the victory marker was gone for it.
We also played Dominion, 2nd edition with 3 players. It just works so well, especially if you just have 30min. Its enough to explain the game and whip out one game. Just perfekt.
We player Brass: Birmingham for the first time. It’s very promising, but by the time we finished the canal era it was almost midnight and we decided to stop there. It took us 3 hours to read the rules and play an half game ;)
Looking forward to play it to the end next time!
I am curious but also afraid of this game :) not because of complexity but not too big into “economy” games :)
Much of my group are on vacation and another had to babysit unexpectedly so it was a two player evening.
We first played Firefly (respectable business people I think) and it was pretty tight the whole game. What threw me off at first was just how unimportant a big payday is in this scenario. For the first part you really just need to get one mission from each of the non alliance folks done. You’re almost automatically swimming in cash afterwards. Enough to do some shopping in the line up to the final two stages. We both were reasonably close to each other with me having somewhat of a lead. Then I brain bleeped. After moving all the way to the fringes of space I traveled back to the core, to where the second stage was starting, forgetting to actually turn in my 4th mission in outer sectors. So I then had to fly back out and back in again. All the while the nav decks were getting dangerously small. There’s a bad card somewhere in them in 2 player and every turn became an agonized will it hit me or the other player game? Then luck swung hard and smacked my friend with BOTH of them one after another. This put me clearly ahead again and thanks to my extended crew quarters the final two stages were a breeze.
We still had about an hour to spend so we whipped out Factory Funner, always a blast but I don’t get to play it often enough as my GF doesn’t like it and neither does one of our group. My friend started designing this nice and well structured factory, leaving room for connections, while I again just slammed everything the first place where it fit. This turned out to be costly for me at times as about halfway through I was forced to place over a dozen pipes to make a new machine fit. But my friend’s plans also didn’t work out quite as well and I was actually able to place more machines than he was. After the last round he had a commanding lead but the interconnectivity bonus came in clutch for me once more, allowing me to jump ahead in the final scoring.
On the weekend I had the saturday for myself and invested it in translating an RPG system to German. I am now close to having a pretty comlete wiki for it. Once that is done I can start putting effort into the campaign details.
Members of our group were finally around! A couple weren’t, so there were just 4 of us which means Gloomhaven JOTL!
We hadn’t seen each other for best part of a month, so we spent far longer catching up than intended so we ran on later than usual, but thanks to some incredible damage output, we managed to speed through some sections of our scenario! Nothing like the smell of burning vermlings to invigorate us before a boss fight!
Our copy of Button Shy’s River Wild also showed up this week, so my partner and I played an introductory game of that and scored a mildly reasonable 39 points! 1 more point and I could boast it was a reasonably good score!
I played a few solo games, including Dustrunner and Gate, and I did a couple scenarios in Monster Expedition (in which I realized I had been under-improving my hunting camps in my previous games by not using all applicable dice). My girlfriend and I got in a couple games of Wingspan ala duet mode, which is always a satisfying way to spend post of an afternoon.
Also, I picked up the BG Stats app and have spent a fair amount of time entering any logged games I could scrounge up. I feel complete now.
Haha, I try to be less analytical in games, this app would destroy me and possibly the fun of the others I play with.
Its probably cool to optimize each game and I would even like to do it for some of them. But this only works well if the others can invest just as much into theory-crafting and data analysis otherwise I would just win most of my games and nobody would like to play anymore.
When I found by accident that chapel is the best card in Dominion and tried it out and won all games where there is a chapel it is now a banned card from the table :D
I see your concern there, and I’m in the same boat as far as not wanting to make games not fun. For me, the app is more of a way to keep track of what I’ve played, keeping high scores, and knowing what day of the week I sacrifice most of my time to board games on.
Thanks for that info about Dominion though. I’ll only abuse it a couple times. ;)
Chapel strats are fun, just never be shy to trash everything. You basically want to be down to Chapel+Silver+Copper at some point. From there, you just get another silver and buy your way out of poverty. With sentry or similar you can also try to trash the chapel once you do not need it anymore.
My gf refuses to “scoop” to my level and will rather try to stop the chapel strat instead of using it, too. After a couple of brutal games it got banned. But I am OK with that. I also enjoy other combinations and Chapels are maybe even a bit too easy.
Maybe its not a bad idea for highscores and the like, we sometimes wonder if this or that score was the highest ever. Will check it out, thanks for the tip!
Hmm… that’s an interesting strategy. We consider chapel to be one of the most useless card (unless there are Witches in the play), second only to Adventurer.
But then again, we are all very casual players. Would try this strategy next time we play.
My friends and I played Legends of Andor with the expansion where you are on a ship. It was very hard for us the first tries because alot of monster spawn at the beginning and we didn’t have the right tactic to fight all of them. Also we didn’t get the rules completely right which made things much harder for us. But we beat the first chapter and I don’t know if I wanna play again. It takes sooo long to play and to setup
Is this a coop game? I find many of those less entertaining. We love deckbuilders but Aeons End or Battle for Hogwarts are all a bit lackluster and often can be boring for the “healer” or similar dedicated support roles (at least in our group). The games are also often very mechanistic with lots of dependencies occurring in sequence.
Maybe spirit island and pandemic are better but I have not tried them
It is a coop game, I’ve played Robin hood and I actually liked that one, it has a nice story and simple mechanics were I think almost nothing is dependent on dice. I got later to the group for Andor and didn’t even play the base game, maybe that’s why I didn’t enjoy it as much
In legends of Andor there isn’t really a support role but some characters you can choose are stronger than others.
I’ve been playing Zamek (a.k.a. “The Castle”) with @smorkin. The plan is to get to at least 1000 plays of that game. It’s a 1x1000 challenge. Fun fun fun ♥
We don’t have as many games as most people in such communities have. 😀 I was on vacations last week, so we went through most of the games.
Played a game of Settlers of Catan, couple of games of Ticket to Ride, one game of Splendor, and some games of Monopoly Duel.
Just got Cities & Knights expansion for Catan, but that seems a bit more complicated for the kid, so haven’t stared that yet. Maybe after he has played a few more games of base Settlers of Catan.
Played all of these with wife and kids.
Those are super good games, ticket to ride is a fun family game! No shame in having a few games, I prefer playing them instead of a huge collection!
If you dont know it yet, but I think in particular for kids its great, check out Carcassonne! It also exists as a junior version but depending on the age I think the normal version is amazing even for kids!
Thanks!
We already have Carcassonne, and it’s one of our favourite! Don’t know why we didn’t play it last week 😀 (Offtopic, but if you play videogames, I am currently playing Carto, which uses Carcassonne’s gameplay, and adds further puzzles and story to it. Highly recommended!)
Other than those we also have Dominion, Lost Cities, Dungeon Mayhem and Point Salad. Though I have been thinking about getting my kid a bit into D&D. He loves video games, so I believe it should attract him. Just having trouble figuring out how to start, specially since my wife isn’t a big gamer, and I don’t know how she will feel about goblins and orcs.
How is Gloomhaven, for kids (and non-gamers adults)? Just read about it, and seem like a good first step (but an extensive one) into Dungeon Crawling, without going full D&D. Though that is just by reading few snippets, I haven’t even begun the research into it yet. So, I could be completely wrong about it.
Not counting Gloomhaven, Munchkin is next on my wishlist, but that too needs a little bit more research.
You have a nice collection!
I have not tried Carto but have been playing Dorfromantik on steam, which is like a hexagonal puzzle carcassonne! I love it!
Have not tried Gloomhaven yet, so I could not say.
So your kid plays Dominion? If so, Clank is a must! Its a dungeon crawling deckbuilder, its amazing!
Another option for DnD is to ask ChatGPT to DM for you, this way both of you can play. There is a bit of a learning curve to understand how to ask ChatGPT certain things but I think a lot of people already are using it for that. So there might be some tips to be found online!
If you are not sure about gloomhaven get Jaws of the Lion. It’s easier to learn and get to the table than the big box. Not very story heavy and not many decisions, but might be a nice introduction to dungeon crawlers.
Thanks for the recommendation, going to check it out!
