Wow, didn’t realize it’s already been over two years since I finished painting Hatchet. Finally painted the next miniature from “Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion”, Red Guard. Since it’s almost entirely red without a ton of little details I was able to paint it all in one day. Spent probably 4-5 hours on it.
Despite my hopes from last month, I did not get much game playing in this month either.
Played a session of The Guild of Merchant Explorers at a board game meetup. I won.
Played a scenario of Mechs vs. Minions and introduced the game to friends. We ran the gauntlet and succeeded in reaching the other side while subduing the minions along the way. Victory.
After playing Creature Comforts at a board game meetup last month I thought Jess would enjoy it. So she found it under the Christmas tree. We played with friends and I won after a very productive final turn bringing in 29 points in just the one turn.
Tallying up the blog posts gives us 63 games played in 2024.
I got even less game playing in this month than last month. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn that around next month.
Jess and I completed Quest 10 in Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall. We didn’t manage to destroy the giant moth monster, but we escaped without dying and reached our objective. So kind of a draw.
At the board-game meetup I played Creature Comforts. A very cozy game about collecting little luxuries and comforts to prepare your woodland-creature home for the long winter. Make the coziest home to win. I lost.
Had a friend over and played Wyrmspan with Jess. Jess won handily.
Didn’t get much game playing done this month. Too much going on with birthday preparations and Halloween I guess.
I made it out to one game night and one afternoon of games at a friend’s house.
At the game night I first played Flamecraft. I’d played once before when the owner first got it and brought it to a game night–which was probably at least a year ago. It’s got really cute artwork about dragons and the town they inhabit. I had thought the girls would like it, but the gameplay can be a little challenging and I deferred adding it to my collection.
On each turn you choose from a variety of actions to collect resources or help grow the town. It’s competitive, but not adversarial. There are several actions you engage in which require you to give other players resources or points and it’s not a zero-sum game.
I had a difficult start, but had two turns where I was able to really capitalize on fortuitous situations on the board and pulled out a sound win at the end.
After Flamecraft I played Zoo Vadis. I knew I wasn’t going to care for this game from the beginning as it’s a wheeling/dealing negotiation/backstabbing game which just isn’t my jam. But I go to play and this is what people wanted to play. Unsurprisingly I lost.
You play as a group of animals in a zoo and your goal is to negotiate with the other animals to get your group promoted up to the premiere animal enclosure.
At the afternoon of games we started by playing Apiary. I played part of a game previously to take over for someone leaving, so this time I got to play through from the beginning. It’s a bit of an odd game–sentient space bees building out spaceships–but, it has solid mechanics (as can usually be expected from Stonemaier Games).
I made a run for points via the “Queen’s Favor” track and chalked up another sound win for the month.
After Apiary I convinced a group to play The Stifling Dark. I got this from a crowdfunding campaign in December 2023, but hadn’t gotten around to playing it yet. It being October it seemed like a good time to give it a go.
I originally backed it because it’s a bit of a table-top incarnation of an online game I’d been playing with friends for a while called Phasmophobia. Team of investigators need to go into a haunted location and avoid being killed by the ghost while completing some objective. So same concept, but here someone has to play the ghost.
Having not played before (which I warned everyone about) it was a learning experience and the game ran quite long. I played as the ghost stalking and attacking the investigators who were trying to escape the abandoned sawmill. The team managed to get the gate powered up and one of them made it out alive, but I got the rest–which counts as a win for me.
I think the game could easily be shortened by skipping the “Act 1” evidence-collection phase and instead dropping the characters in the map and randomly drawing an objective for them (with some balance adjustments to the ghost as well). That would probably get a game down to under 1.5 hours. Our game, with learning, making mistakes, looking things up, and trying to make sense of it all, ran for ~4 hours–which was a bit much.
Didn’t get a ton of gaming in this month. Board game group moved to a new location because the restaurant we were at was grumpy with our existence. I think the group is quite well mannered and we’ve never taken up so much space that they couldn’t seat other guests, but they felt we weren’t spending enough money so asked us to find somewhere else to go. Which, fine, that’s their prerogative, but groups like this meet on Tuesdays because restaurants tend to be dead so our presence is just extra money with little work for them. The last night we met there they had a total of 4 other tables the whole evening.
Anyway. We’re trying a new location, however the new location is a brewery and limited to 21 and over so we’ll likely keep looking for locations since there were often people in attendance that now can’t attend.
Played the first scenario of Peacemakers: Horrors of War again with 2 players at the meetup. We were successful in ending the conflict.
At the next meetup we played Heat with a full group of six. I’m still really enjoying the game. I did not win this time. I believe I came in 4th due to poorly handling the final 2 turns.
Celebrating Jess’ birthday we played Everdell with a friend (without any expansions to keep it a little more simple). Jess won handily.
And the following weekend, to further celebrate Jess’ birthday with other friends, we played Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. We played Year 4, without any expansions, and were victorious.