It was my birthday on Saturday, so I was able to get a few friends to come home and play a few games with me. We got these to the table:

Cross Clues: Fun warmup game. Easy to integrate people midgame, which happened because a couple of people were running late. Also, my kids (8 and 5) got to play too, even if the 5 year old couldn’t think of a clue (and one of my friends had to bite his tongue and not say the very nsfw clue he was thinking of).

Scape Goat: This game shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s too simple, but still manages to get you paranoid. Also, you need to make sure you read the grid correctly, or you might target the wrong goat, which two of us did. Still, it was fun.

Derby: Simple horse betting game. Not a lot of depth to it, but it was fun. I like the illustrations Maldón (the publisher) usually does, but I think they could have made a better job of differentiating the colors. I wouldn’t play this with bad lighting.

Codenames: Pictures: A classic. Also could involve the kids, so that was fun.

Article 27: I hadn’t played this in ages. It’s a fun negotiation game.

In all, we had fun. Next time I hope I can get something more meaty, but it was still fun.

After half a year, I finally continued my King’s Dilemma game with friends. We had a huge blast again, it’s definitely one of my favorite boardgames at this point and I’m very excited for the sequel.

Also, this is my first post in the fediverse, so hello! So nice to find a kinda active tabletop community here!

I played Santiago for the first time in a couple of years and it was so much fun. Excellent interaction mechanisms.

I played Earth for the second time Sunday night (after my usual RPG night was cancelled/postponed), this time with 4 rather than my first game with 2.

It’s a really interesting game, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I originally took a look because it kept coming up in discussions around Ark Nova (which I tried and disliked), Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc.

I can see why people say Ark Nova is a bad comparison (I agree, very little overlap) but absolutely see why people compare it to Wingspan so often. So many of the mechanics in Earth seem to be directly pulled from Wingspan and then vaguely re-themed to be plant based. It really feels like they started with Wingspan as a base design, and then reworked it into their own concept.

Pros:

• Simultaneous/shared turns a la Race for the Galaxy work super well in a wingspan-like game. Getting to run your engine on other people’s turns is so much nicer than sitting and waiting for them to deliberate over choices.
• The flexibility of getting to build your own tableau with almost no limitations is a lot of fun, as opposed to building off of an existing engine framework.
• The shared turns have made it (so far) such that I never felt like I was truly pinched for resources. I wasn’t taking actions out of desperation to catch up, I was picking what I felt would get me closer to my actual goals.
• Despite the singleton deck, it never felt like I was unable to find cards with the synergies or qualities I needed.
• There were a good number of high payoff “build around” cards that came up, which is something I always enjoy in a board game.

Cons:

• The iconography could use some work, especially considering how heavily the game relies on it. I mean, the “cold climate” symbol is a five pointed snowflake?! The object that is famously six sided?! I understand having a learning curve, but having a player ask, “what the hell does this symbol mean?” and hour into a game isn’t great.
• Flavor is tenuous, in Wingspan I get that predators hunt smaller birds, that birds which lay lots of eggs and store lots of eggs, etc. In Earth, I have no idea why a given plant has 5 sprouts but only 2 growth, or another one has 2 sprouts and 4 growth. The event cards are even more incomprehensible.
• It’s got a bit of the “egg rush” end game from Wingspan (sprout rush here) but it’s mitigated by shared actions, and having more flexibility in how you build things up (this could have also been placed in Pros, tbh).
• I would never ever want to play this in person. So many fiddly bits interacting that I’m happy to allow BGA to handle for me. Especially considering the scoring, which (again) mirrors Wingspan but has significantly higher totals and would presumably take proportionally longer to count up.
• I understand why a game like this uses photos as card art, but I do really wish they had nice Wingspan-like illustrations instead.

Overall, very interesting game. I had fun, and I’m looking forwarding to digging into it more on future plays.

I went to a board game trade fair (“Spiel doch! Am Bodensee”). I had my kids with me, so I did mostly play family and kids games with them, but also found cough some cough games for me. But now I’m broke LOL.

Anyway, I welcome Hens (“Hennen”), Factory 42 (german edition; signed by the designer), Dune:Imperium and Everdell to my collection. I also got bear and puma tokens for Cryptid, as missing an areal and needing to correct a yes/no was always a strong hint to someone’s rule and has ruined a game already a few times.

My kids also got some new games, but the only one of them, that I liked personally was Café del Gatto

I FINALLY tried out the Hansa Teutonica game I got for my birthday two years ago. I’ve been wanting to try it out, but couldn’t bring myself to read the rule manual. It’s nothing against the wording or so, I was just procrastinating (I’m good at that).

1h youtube video later, I felt I understood the basics, and packed the game for our boardgame day last Saturday.

I LOVED IT. I don’t have any other Euro-games, this is by design, but I really wanted to try one. This one came highly recommended, and I can understand why. There are so many things to do, strategies to try… I definitely will play it again.

We also played Codenames and Set a Watch, but that was less of a revelation and more of a return of some favorites on the table.

Diamant 1x 4P (cardboard)

An always fun push-your-luck mechanic with a cave exploration theme.

Low learning curve, highly luck based and just sillyfun really. Yes, I recommend it (c:

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Also in the middle of some games on yucata.de : Port Royal, Rose King, Spexxx, Las Vegas, Thurn and Taxis, and Ali Baba. All are worth a try.

We played a match of Clank: Catacombs with 3 players.

One player was new to Catacombs itself but knew the normal Clank. The dungeon layout this time turned out a bit more tricky and there were few easy escape routes. The new player panicked a bit and decided to grab the lowest value artefact and run for it. He only made it out with 60 points. Final score was 121, 111, 60.

I really like how each game feels much more different with Catacombs, the layout of the dungeon being discovered throughout the game creates a lot of tension. If you love Clank but know the map inside out by now, Catacombs is the answer.

Whenever showing someone Clank, I usually first play a game of Dominion to show Deckbuilding, then we play a game of normal Clank. The next time they come, Catacombs is on the table.