No new games this month, so I won’t spend time describing any of them again.
Played Creature Comforts a couple of times. Jess won both times.
Played Kodama. My tree made the tree spirits happiest.
I gave Jess Hardback for Mother’s Day. We’ve played 5 times since then. So far I remain undefeated.
Introduced a friend to The Guild of Merchant Explorers while Jess was off at Six Flags with Heather’s orchestra. I won.
Lost a game of Creature Comforts played with friends. Still enjoy playing. Made a cozy little house for my critters to spend the Winter.
Played Quest 11 of Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall. We were defeated, I think by some gargoyles if I remember correctly. We seem to be getting slapped around pretty good recently. I think we needed at least one of our characters to be much stronger on defense to absorb more damage. But we should be getting close to the end of the story now.
Played Harmonies at the board game meet up. It’s a game of stylized ecosystem building. You place tokens that describe terrain types and place animals in their habitats to gain points. I won.
After Harmonies, we played Hardback. It’s kind of a deck-building version of Scrabble. You start with a deck of cards with letters on them and on your turn you have to make a word and the letters used determine how many points or coins you get. You use coins to buy new letters to add to your deck. It was fun. It solves one of the biggest issues with Scrabble which is your turn is often highly impacted by the other players so you often need notable time to make a move during your turn which slows the whole game down. In Hardback you can figure out your word and then just play it when its your turn so everything goes pretty quick. I lost.
And after Hardback, we played Stockpile–a game about engaging in insider trading on the stock market. Not my typical choice of game concept, but the mechanics are well designed and I enjoyed playing. I lost.
Back at home we played a round of Kodama: The Tree Spirits with friends. Grow your tree and create cozy homes for the tree spirits. I lost.
Introduced the girls to Heat: Pedal to the Metal. I gave them a substantial advantage in having additional heat cards and fewer stress cards while giving myself a substantial handicap of fewer heat cards and more stress cards. I also handicapped the “computer” players. I put up a good fight, but Heather won in the end after I pushed too hard and spun out on the last lap. Corinne found the concept of intentionally using heat to push harder to be too stressful and chose to play it safe. She still came in second.
Played another race in Heat: Pedal to the metal at the board game meetup. I lost. Still enjoying this game a lot each time though.
After the race we played a session of Unmatched. It’s a player-vs-player battle system made of up compatible, themed-boxes of characters. I played as Hamlet who on each turn had to decide whether “To Be” or “Not To Be.” With each option offering various tradeoffs. Hamlet faced off against Ms. Marvel, Dr. Strange, and someone else I’ve forgotten. I lost.
Played a couple of games of Creature Comforts during the month. Still enjoying the cozy art and chill gameplay. I lost one game and won one game.
At the next board game meetup we played another session of Marvel Dice Throne: X Men. This time we played 2v2 teams. I played as Psylocke. I rolled an Ultimate move which tipped things in my team’s favor and led to our scant victory.
With time for something short we played two rounds of Stool Pigeon. This is a silly game of memorization and deception. You each have cards with points on them face down in front of you. You get few opportunities to look at them and many opportunities to swap them around the table. Your goal is to have the fewest points on your cards at the end which occurs when someone uses their turn to trigger a final turn for the other players. I lost the first game, which I called (I managed to work myself down to only 2 cards, but other players swapped in high-value cards on their last turn). I won the second game when someone else called and I was able to keep a hold of only very-low value cards without anyone taking them off me. A silly game, but fun for killing 10-20 minutes at a time.
Jess and I finally got back around to moving our Kinfire Chronicle’s: Night’s Fall campaign forward. We picked up a side quest (Quest 21) and were doing quite well in the battle. But we lost control of our boat and capsized. So we weren’t defeated by the enemy, but neither did we defeat them. Tails tucked between our legs we limped back to town still dirt poor after several less-than-successful missions in a row.
Update:
Played a couple sessions of Keep the Heroes Out! with the family on the last day of the month. We played scenario 7 on “challenging” difficulty and were defeated fairly quickly. So we reset and played again on “family” difficulty. We were defeated again, but we survived a lot longer.
Played The Vale of Eternity at the board game meetup. Overall gameplay is pretty simple, but with many opportunities for emergent complexity and dramatically different strategies and play styles. Definitely a game that requires playing a few times in order to learn what kind of cards exist in the deck and how you might plan around them. Otherwise can be challenging to make much headway since most progress is made by gaining cards that play off each other. I enjoyed it. Would happily play again.
After The Vale of Eternity we played Marvel Dice Throne: X-Men which just came out this year. Select a character and fight each other to the death by rolling dice to determine which action you take each turn. Tons of variety across characters making it nearly impossible to know what other players can do (or if they’re playing accurately unless you’ve played a ton). Dice-rolling games aren’t generally my jam, but the way the mechanics are designed significantly limits the pain of having a bad roll. So that helped. Still not really my jam though. Wouldn’t seek it out myself, but if others wanted to play, I’d still play.
Had friends over and played Ex Libris with the Expanded Archives expansion (which I gave Jess for our anniversary last year). This games is always a challenge to play after time has passed and difficult to learn fresh. While the mechanic of your turn is simple (place a worker on one spot and complete that action) what spots exist each round changes and there are a lot of options. So first just understanding what all your options are is tiring, then figuring out how to utilize those options effectively is an additional challenge. Jess has won Ex Libris every time we’ve played–until now! My only win of the month.
Played Mistborn cooperatively again at the board game meetup. Had mostly players who had played at least once before this time and we did significantly better, but still ended up being defeated in the end. In a crushing blow all 4 of us were brought to 0 health at the same time. I enjoyed it more the second time–now having a slightly better grasp of the general strategy and progression arc.
After being defeated in Mistborn we played a quick game of 7 Wonders. A tableau-building game played across 3 rounds (“ages”) in which you build your civilization and attempt to complete your world wonder. Play is simultaneous and moves fast regardless of player count. This was one of my earliest purchases after starting to attend the board game meetups. I still enjoy it, though it doesn’t get much play. I lost this time.
Tried out the fairly new deckbuilding game, Mistborn, set in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn world. At a game meetup we played cooperatively but were defeated. The game mechanics have a lot of similarities with Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, but inflicts a strict turn limit to defeat the boss. I dislike this mechanic because it tends to be quite punishing and in this case highly unbalances the game when scaling up to 4 players. Because there are only X turns available and you get stronger each turn you take each player will now be only X/4 as strong by the time the turn limit runs out. This is a fundamental issue with this game because you realistically cannot do any damage to the boss until you reach a minimum level of strength. So I think cooperative mode probably plays better with 2 or 3 players. You can also play it competitively instead.
Jess and I replayed the first scenario of Peacemakers: Horrors of War. We were victorious in bringing about a peace negotiation. It’s still a very unusual game of having minimal power to achieve your ends. Will eventually need to proceed to the later scenarios and see how they differ.
With friends we played Call to Adventure. This is the “story-arc generator” game. Your character begins with an origin, motivation, and destiny and then you cast lots to let fate decide if you are successful in achieving your goals along the way which shape your character’s story. I won.
At another game meetup we raced our cars around the track in HEAT: Pedal to the Metal. I lost. I continue to really enjoy this game. The mechanics are pretty simple and turns move fast, but I have yet to see anyone “solve” the game with a definitively winning strategy. And it comes with a ton of variations to layer in to keep it fresh. That and it’s a game in which you need to play aggressively to win, but playing aggressively doesn’t mean targeting and attacking other players. I typically adopt defensive / cautious play styles and this game pushes me to change that without feeling like I have to choose someone to pick on–which I don’t like doing.