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FavouriteFoe:
August had pockets of hot, and our gaming table was just as fiery at times!
Firstly, we got to play a preview of CITIES by Devir which is brilliant! Puzzly, tile laying, placement optimisation, pattern matching, and variable scoring objectives combined expertly by Steve Finn and Phil Walker Harding. I expect you know PWH from his polyomino hit, Barenpark, but Steve Finn is an under-the-radar genius. Pencil First Games seized the opportunity to give the good Dr. Finn’s designs a home. And his games including Floriferous, Herbaceous, Delicious, Sunset Over Water, and The Whatnot Cabinet, are gorgeous, puzzly fun. So the two coming together has made sweet gaming music. We played at 4P, but I anticipate this will be great at any player count!
Solo wise, I have been playing lots of DRAFT AND WRITE RECORDS. This is a combotastic flip and write game about creating a rock band. Hiring musicians, going on tour….it’s all in there. The neat twist is that you need money to fund your endeavour, so you must find ways to get those greens, and get them early. And when you create harmonies (by matching symbols between band members and setting off other triggers), you unlock jubby bonuses. It’s one of those game where you select a card and cross off a box. But then, if your pick was smart, you will be whizzing about your sheet like a polished pinball, crossing, gaining, and grabbing points. It’s not all beautiful music, however. If you can’t place a card icon on your turn, that counts as a fail, and is worth negative points at end game! So managing the growth and development of your band carefully! Although the close drafting (pick and pass) is missing in mode, I really enjoy the BYOS challenge which forces you to make tough drafting choices!
Luke Pickles:
August was a pretty good month for gaming – mostly because of a pair of conventions and my birthday weekend giving even more games. All in all, I played 51 different games in person, and a bunch more online. Let’s just worry about the physical plays though. Some of the highlights were expansions or variations of classic games, like Clank! Catacombs (the excellent version of the deck builder where you build the map as you go) and Mists over Carcassonne, the cooperative version of Carcassonne where you have to deal with ghosts pottering about to score points collectively.
But my birthday weekend had the opportunity to play a bunch of heavier games, including the stunning Sankore, the crunchy Nucleum and the newest venture of the COIN system, A Gest of Robin Hood. All three of these games topped the list of favourite games for that weekend, but I also found my way into two card games, which could be potentially dangerous for my personality. Both the My Hero Academia CCG and Disney’s Lorcana made their way into my house and boy, they’ve taken over my mind a bit. Lorcana is more for my wife and her family, but that’s ok, I’m happy to join in and play the familiar Magic-lite system. My Hero Academia has become one of my favourite animes, and finding a CCG which is so true to the anime is incredible. It uses the UniVersus system, which has all sorts of IP’s involved to create a really neat system. I highly recommend it if you have any interest in the anime. If you want to hear more thoughts on the birthday games, here’s a video where I do just that!
Chris Bagley:
August has been an eventful month for my group with some old favourites mixed in with some new and "new to me" games which have all gone down very well.
The lunacy of the wonderlands theme shines through spectacularly with this multiplayer bag builder and area control game. My group tried it out at a four player count and the brilliant mix of strategic bag building in the "tea party" phase and "push your luck" battling mechanics of the war phase was both a tactical and hilarious hit.
You take turns moving your wonderlands leader (ranging from the mad hatter to the Cheshire cat to Alice herself) around the tea party to collect ally chips to put into your bag and place supporters into the areas you want to fight over, the war phase beginning once everyone is done claiming their resources. The war phase is the battles themselves which consist of pulling the chips out of your bag, hoping for a powerful bonus chip or a forge to upgrade your leader and trying to avoid the many madness chips which get your supporters killed. If you lose all of your supporters you "bust " and lose everything you gained! There is a lovely blend of tactics and luck involved which gets all players on the edge of their seats and keeps them there the whole game.
The artwork and design of this game is second to none, the high quality poker chips and beautiful miniatures (deluxe edition) really pull you into the wonderlands and make you appreciate the well crafted mechanics even more.
This game has shot up my list of favourites and I highly recommend playing with as high a player count as possible if you have access to a copy, never has going mad been so fun!
Anybody whose read my second opinion of Obsession knows that myself and my group are huge fans of this game. The theme is not a universally appealing one, however the mechanics and the gameplay itself is absolutely spot on, there are so many paths to victory and so many moving parts it actually feels like different families desperately trying to restore their fallen reputations in Victorian English high society.
You spend your turns planning activities on your estate which require guests and which gain you; money (for buying upgraded buildings and activities for your estate), more guests (generally higher level to improve your rewards, and reputation itself all of which will help you impress the fairchild twins - the pinnacle of Victorian gentry.
My group recently added the "upstairs, downstairs" and "Wessex" expansions into the game which comes with extra guests, building tiles and most significantly, servants. The new servants allow a larger scope of rewards with each providing a new and decent bonus not available in the base game (the head housemaid for example allows you screen guests by taking two and choosing one, which can be very powerful if you can get a guest with bonuses you are building towards). The wealth of options opening up to us got us all very excited about building even bigger and better estates and kept us all fighting to the very end.
We loved the expansions so much we wouldn't play without them now!
A modern classic of a game which gets played at least once a week in my house, we have recently added the "newleaf" expansion to our games of cute little critter city building. The game is a worker placement one at heart where players build a card tableau of buildings and critters and aim for points at the end of the game. The game is beautifully designed and the artwork looks straight from a Beatrix Potter book, it's easy to see why this game has such a huge fan base.
The "newleaf" expansion is generally more of the same (of the base game) which is already incredible, so more is better right? Right. There are new buildings and characters to play into your city, and a new train station board extension which really opens the game up. Putting all of the modules from the expansion into the game makes it feel less restrictive on where you can place workers and gain resources and can add new combos to achieve an even higher score than before.
There is a token that players can use once per game which allow you to reserve a card from the meadow if it is essential to your strategy, however it does cost you a turn early on. The train ticket gives you just one more turn with your placed workers, potentially allowing you to build an impressive new building or critter and unlock a new combo in your city. "Newleaf" opens up many new strategies and gives so many options it's hard to list them all, but the creative freedom it gives player makes a fantastic game even better.
This small card game is our groups "go to" night ender, an absolutely fantastic card game much greater than the sum of its parts. The aim is a simple one, become the dominant God of the pantheon by building shrines and altars to your asymmetric deity. The cards artwork is very thematic and they feature a range of characters from pagans, to warriors, priestess to assassins. Each card played allows you to perform different actions whether that be helping your own God by protecting it from opposing cards, building or activating one of your own God's altars or directly attacking a rival deity to slow them down or speed up your own progress.
The gods abilities are very well balanced with none feeling any more powerful than others and the cards are brilliantly weighed against each other with no single play unable be to countered by another. Is one God building protected against wizards (used to pull down an opposition altar and add one of your own)? Use an abomination to turn off their God's ability. Is one player holding lots of cards but not building much? Use a warrior to force them to discard cards and weaken their hand. The first player to fill their player board with activated altars will win the game.
The game works fantastically well and is the definition of a hidden gem. I urge anybody with a group who enjoy card games to hunt down a copy, the amount of people I have converted to this game after a single play is unreal. Must play.
Those were my main plays last month all of which were highly enjoyable, this month I am hoping to get "Arcs" to the table, a hugely anticipated space based game by Leder games (creator of one of my personal favourites, "root").
RogerBW
This has been a month for Imperium, using the latest Imperium Horizons edition of the rules with civilisations mostly from the earlier boxes as I’m still learning the ins and outs of the game and its factions. The Egyptians rush to empire status faster than anyone else, but need a supply of resources to pay for their developments. The Minoans can build up a massive stockpile of Progress, but only if they resist the lure of Glory. The Celts have no Prosperity card to trawl up resources from Regions, so they have to go out Cattle Raiding. The Japanese have complex interlocking cards which will produce a solid victory point engine… if you can get them out and running before the end of the game. And all the time you’re having to keep an eye on the card market, and balance a slim and fast-cycling deck against cards that’ll score you points at the end.
Sea Salt & Paper has also hit the table a few times: it’s quick to teach but satisfyingly fiddly as you constantly make decisions with too little information, and if you’re at a convention waiting for people to respond to your Players Wanted sign for a longer game, it’s not only quick to play but easy to interrupt: all that carries over from one hand to the next is each player’s score. Also, I admit, I am shallow, and the origami-based card art is lovely.
Behind that it’s been another relative newcomer Courtisans (i.e. “Courtiers”), a deceptively straightforward game: from your hand of three cards each turn, play one to yourself, one to someone else, and one to the centre, which at the end of the game determines which noble families are in favour (their cards in front of the players are worth positive points) and which fallen from grace (negative points). Then the special card powers kick in, with some counting double, some being played face down and not revealed until the end, and some removing other cards from contention. And you’ll have two secret goals, like pale blue being out of favour or having more yellow than your neighbour. Beyond the basic play to maximise your own score, though, you start to form alliances: we both have lots of red so we don’t want them to look bad, but those two over there are committed to dark green, so let’s both give them dark green and make it negative, while assassinating any reds they have have gathered. And so on across six suits.
