Tag: games

I may have completed only one book, but I did get some game playing in during the month.

Played a game of Everdell at a meetup. I lost.

A friend is restarting a pre-COVID tradition of weekly dinner & game nights on Fridays. We played The Crew: Mission Deep Sea at the first event. It’s a cooperative, trick-taking game of restricted communication. Not my personal favorite of game mechanics, but it was still a good time. We played several missions with a mix of defeats and victories (they get harder as you succeed).

I finally made the effort to corral a group to play some of the many campaign games I’ve purchased over the years. By “campaign game” I mean any game with continuing state from session to session, but focusing on off-the-shelf experiences which don’t require a game master (so not something like Dungeons and Dragons).

I got a group of 4 of us willing to make a reasonable effort to meet approximately every other week. We’ve met twice now and the first rule is to always schedule the next session before we start playing. I figure that gives us the highest likelihood that we actually keep it running.

The group selected Kinfire Chronicles: Night’s Fall as our first game and we’ve played through 3 quests so far. Victorious in all 3–though by the absolute barest of margins in the third. The monster we were fighting died just as it was about to land the killing blow on our revenant.

At another meetup I played Critter Kitchen. It’s a lighthearted game of gathering ingredients to prepare dishes for a set of food critics. It can be rather frustrating as ingredient gathering depends heavily on what the other players try to collect. So it can commonly happen that you end up with very little while other players collect copious bounties. But it was decent overall. Has enough going on that it would take a few plays to get the full hang of it and has a lot of variability built in to which shops/critics are in each play through. I lost.

The couple who host the regular meetup occasionally hosts all-day events at their home. I was able to stop in for a few hours in the afternoon after the Mathcounts tournament. Lots of turn out this time around. I jumped in to a group that included a 6 year old so we played a couple of simple games. First was Moose Quest. You need to lead your herd of moose on their annual migration. Grow your herd, limit your casualties, cross lands to earn points. To me, the game would have been stronger with a more serious take on the theme. But it’s designed to be more whimsical and goofy. Probably a better design for a target audience of <10. I lost.

Next up we played Taco vs Burrito. This game lands in the same vein as “Exploding Kittens” in that it’s extremely simple, short, with little strategy. Draw a card, play a card, antagonize the other players. I lost.

Next the groups rearranged and I moved onto a more serious game, rather misleadingly so given the art and theme. Fort is a game of improving your play fort to be the best while recruiting kids from the other players to help you. It has a lot more going on that it seems like there should be. We decided that was intentional to play on the idea of kids making up new rules as they go about whatever they’re doing when playing “fort.” I won.

Made it to one board game meet up. Played a round of The Guild of Merchant Explorers. I won.

While waiting for other games to wrap up we played a quick game of L’Oaf. I lost.

And I rounded out the evening with a game of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. This game is about laying out an ecosystem (in this version, within a moor) and placing animals in your environment. I filled my moor with dragonflies and newts, but didn’t win.

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By quick count, I played ~63 games this year. (I counted unique games in each monthly post I made, so if we played “Cat Fluxx” 4 times in one session I only counted that as 1).

Got a couple of new games this month, some simple card-based games that are quick to play.

First up is L’oaf, which is just a fantastic name for the game. The premise is that the players are team of bakers in a French boulangerie. But, none of you _wants_ to be a baker and this is just a temp job. So your goal is to do as little work as possible without getting fired. Each day the boss sets a production quota for the team. Each baker privately selects how many loaves of bread they will bake. Then you reveal your choices and see if the quota is met. Bakers earn or lose reputation based on their efforts and the boss’ mood. Whomever does the least amount of work while still remaining in the boss’ good graces wins. Played 4 times. Won 3.

The second new game is Goblin Laundromat. The players run a laundromat (individually) to clean the filthy clothes of adventurers. Clean the most laundry without taking on too many stains. This game is primarily a push-your-luck game with a memory component. I like L’oaf better. Played twice, lost both.

Played another really great game of Heat at the board game meetup. Really tight through the whole race with several switch ups of leader. It came right down to the wire on the final turn. I lost.

Played a couple rounds of Cat Fluxx. Lost both times.

Storyfold: Wildwoods is one of the last games I’ve crowdfunded that I was waiting to be delivered. A solo (or loosely co-op) game built around a narrative. It sounded intriguing. To my dismay, however, the gameplay is built around an arbitrary restriction on how many turns you can take before you lose each scenario. I typically dislike that mechanic. It makes the game into an optimization puzzle–which can be fine if actions are fully under your control, but when success or failure is probabilistic you create a game system where perfect play can still mean you lose. Which is stupid. And a couple turns of poor dice rolls means you can end up in a situation from which it is impossible to recover. Which is stupid.

I played through the prologue twice (which guides your turn and dictates your successful dice rolls) and then played chapter 1 twice. The first time I was defeated and the second time I fudged the rules a little to accommodate a couple turns of bad dice rolls to make it more fun and less annoying.

Played a round of Hardback at the meetup and won. Played another round at home and Jess won by a point.

Played Ruins again at the meetup. I lost.

Started the month off with another adventure in Vantage. We completed our mission for a victory ending. Looking forward to playing again.

At the board-game meetup I played a couple rounds of Ruins. It’s a trick-taking game which usually isn’t my thing, but it has some interesting tweaks which I liked. It uses card sleeves and overlays so the cards get more powerful each round. I usually find trick-taking games to be repetitive and not interesting after a few rounds, but with this mechanic the game has a very different feel each time and we discovered very different strategies that could be used. The second game ended in a one-on-one tie-breaker round which I lost without even taking a turn when Robert made the ultimate play using every card in his hand on his first turn. It was brutal and epic. I also lost the first game too.

At the next meetup I played the classic Carcassonne for the first time. I can see how many games since have borrowed or built on the concepts introduced in Carcassonne. I lost.

After Carcassonne we played a couple rounds of a Hanabi. The cover art would have you believe this has something to do with fireworks. That’s a very loose theme–so loose I didn’t know that was the concept until looking up the image. It’s a card game where the only cards you can’t see are your own and you have to work together to play the correct cards in the correct order.

Like most games which do cooperation within restricted communications you end up with game-impacting issues. For example, if someone asks for clarification about a rule, just asking the question might give away a piece of knowledge that they’re not supposed to. Also, once a group has played a few times you end up with a significant amount of implied communication which maybe is intended in the design, but maybe not.

Rather than win/loss the goal is to get the most points. In our two games we ended up with 14 and then 20 out of 25 points.

During Jess’ birthday weekend we played Garden Variety which is another trick-taking game. It kind of highlights the things I don’t much like about many trick-taking games. In particular, many of your turns are spent just throwing away a card for no purpose because you have to play a card and your cards aren’t currently relevant which is both annoying and boring. I lost.

We also played several rounds of Cat Fluxx that weekend and in the following days. The base game, Fluxx, has dozens of themed variations and Cat Fluxx was just released in September. I thought Jess might enjoy the general concept themed around cats since the general concept has a lot of arbitrariness and is not to be taken seriously–like cats. I lost 3 and won 3.

Back to yet a third meetup for the month I got in a game of Heat. I still really enjoy playing. I was pushed to play much more aggressively than I usually play games and I just barely squeaked out a victory in what is probably the tightest and closest race I’ve played yet. It was lots of fun.