Lurker > Colegreen_c12

NFUN posted...

making zero profit would also not be "profitable" so

Correct

NFUN posted...

is this a bit?

He's actually right in the wrong way. You can have a negative profit but you would not be considered profitable.

Bump in the Night

Sorry been busy. Going to try to get it up tommorow.

Also if anyone was interested in breakers the kickstarter is up https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breakersgame/breakers

Bump, will probably do a writeup in next few days:

Hint: a 4X space game that can be played competetive, co-op or solo. There are dice but combat is completely deterministic.

Decks that rely on putting a bunch of creatures in graveyard such as self mill then returning them to the battlefield.

(Idk what the term is for this)

Arena

Bitto posted...

You know, I just sorta assumed Ticket to Ride was pre-Catan due to its simplicity in rules and older aesthetic artstyle

It's actually crazy that they are almost a decade apart

But honestly the bigger problem was other players not adding enough to the experience. 2 players is probably the perfect number as you have someone to talk to and don't feel like your playing by yourself, and they can read off your entries and you can talk about what you see, but without it taking a while between turns. With 5 players I just felt largely uninvested in what everyone else was doing because it simply didn't really effect me that much. It was too many people to keep track of what everyone was doing based on their descriptions so I only had a vague idea of what was going on.

And that leads into my other complaint, some people can just be incidental. For example I didn't contribute to the mission, the or the destiny at all. I didn't get any goals so honestly I don't know if I even contributed at all. It was still enjoyable because I got to see some cool stuff but you really need to be ok with it. I really wish the missions and such seemed to require more coordination between players (I understand why it doesn't cause it's designed to be playable solo).

So yea overall while I enjoyed my time with it, I didn't love it. I wouldn't mind trying it again with a smaller group and see if I enjoy it on a second play that goes faster (our game took way too long due to being unlucky in finding what we needed to finish the mission). It has a lot of content (750+ locations) and a lot of items, 20 something missions, 20 something starting locations so there is some replayability, but as you play more I'm sure you will see more and more repeating content as you go to locations you've been to before. I don't see myself playing this more than like 10 times even if I enjoy it because once the sense of discovery will be gone I don't see a point of playing this.

But overall I don't think the game is bad, this isn't typically my type of game to be honest so others may enjoy it more than me but its got great production quality and a lot of stuff to discover. There was some cool things we found in our game that I don't want to spoil so yea i'd say try it if this is something you typically like or want to try.

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Likely to Trend: Could go either direction
Future: Might play this again, but I don't think I will play with over 3 players

Vantage
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/420033/vantage

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Vantage is a recently released game with a lot of hype around it by Jamey Stegmaier, the guy behind many popular games, Scythe, Tapestry and Viticulture probably being the most noteworthy. This game is pretty different from the other games of his that I played of his.

Vantage is what I would call an experience more than an actual game. It's a co-op game adventure game where you and the other players crash land on a planet with a mission to accomplish. The main gimmick is that you all are in different locations and can not actually see the locations the others are at, but you have radio communication and can communicate with each other about what you see. So you can describe everything on your card but cant show them the actual artwork.

The game is pretty simple to play. After the setup (determine characters, your mission, your starting locations and resources) you all take turns doing one action at a time until you complete a destiny and win the scenario or one player dies. You have three separate meters: health, morale and time and if any of these drop to 0 you then read a passage which i think gives you a last chance but it didn't happen to us so I'm not positive.

On your turn you can do three types of actions: a location action (one of the six actions on the location you are on), a card action (an action on one of your cards or in the middle) or a departure action (move to another location in one of the four cardinal directions). Every action has a cost associated to it as well as a type (one of six colors basically), you will know the type beforehand but not necessarily the cost.

How paying a cost is a pretty cool concept. You basically roll that number of dice (you can discount it if you have the appropriate resources, but they aren't that easy to get). 2 results are good and take the die out of circulation, 1 does nothing but puts the die back into the pool and the other 3 are each a type of damage (one for each type). The thing is that you can assign die to your grid (basically a 3x3 square where you have your character in the middle and can get other equipment and stuff around it). Cards in your grid will have squares in them that hold dice, and usually those squares have restrictions/effects on them. For instance a starting character has one square that is color coded to their characters "type" and they can put any die there if they were rolling that color of action and it gives you a boost. The other square they have has a lightning bolt on it, which means any player can put a die there, but its for one specific face on the die (one of the damage types).

If you ever go to roll dice and there's not enough in the pool they all refresh (go back from the cards and the ones out of circulation and back to the pool) freeing the cards up to be used again.

As you get more and more equipment you will have more and more places you can put die, and they usually have other affects too. Sometime cards will have other actions that you can do, such as upgrading them for a stronger item but I wont go into too much detail because by nature this is a spoilerly game. Cards also can hold cubes on them (when I said boost what that means is putting a cube on it) which can be used for different things depending on the card. For example on your character you can spend a cube to reroll a dice, but theres a variety of things that can be done on different cards.

In locations you can usually only do one action per card, so the general gameplay is do action -> move -> do action -> move although you will mix in card actions here and there. By default when you do an action where it isn't explicit on the card (for example when moving sometimes it will just say what location you go to if you go west, that has a cost of 1) another player will look up the card the action is on in the colored book of that action and tell you the cost and then read it once you pay the cost (There is like 9 books as an fyi). There might be choices that they read for you as well. I will say that there is a site you can use (https://vantage.rulepop.com/#) that makes this a lot easier to manage.

I don't want to too much into details but the game really is pretty simple to play. You just take turns doing actions until the game ends. You have a mission from the get-go, you will get various destinies throughout the game, and players can get individual goals as well. If you complete any destiny the game ends and you win. If you complete your mission and then a destiny you super-win.

This game is not meant to be super-strict, if you don't know a rule they say to use the rule of thematic fun, make the most fun ruling that thematically makes sense. It's more of an experience than anything else.

Now onto my thoughts, we played this with 5 people at my club, which was frankly too many people. Bgg recommends 1-3 and I see why. Honestly this is likely a pretty good solo game. The problem with too many players is twofold: it actually makes the game easier and it doesn't really add enough for the increase in length between turns.

The dice pool is dynamic, being 8 + 2 per player, so we had 18. By the middle of the game I never felt like we were in any real danger even if players did dumb stuff (and they were doing dumb stuff). It's not a huge deal since this is more of an experience, and there are difficulty settings (which just effect your starting health, time and morale) but its the kind of game that feels like it gets easier as you go on as you have more places to put dice, and with 5 players getting cards to put dice on instead of just 2 or 3, it felt too easy. I don't neccessarily want it to feel hard, but I definitely wish it scaled better with more players (I do believe there are optional rules to add more dice in as the game progresses, but its meant for the 3-4 player count as there's not enough dice in general to add enough in for 5 or 6 players).

Duress

Dune Imperium - enthusiast strategy
Ticket to Ride - casual strategy
Pandemic - coop
Codenames - party

Tried to balance different types of games while being both popular and good.

HM to wingspan, gloomhaven, splendor, quest to el Dorado, carcassone, dominion, just one

Planeswalkers (as a card type not lore)

Read deck wins

Red deck wins

SeabassDebeste posted...

root is one of my biggest purchase failures

Why is this? Honestly I think i'll like Root but mainly I like trying everything at least once, especially notable games like this

KommunistKoala posted...

and teaching it can be a mess since every class is doing completely different things with completely different starting points

This is the main reason I haven't played yet, I've got one friend who really wants to play it but is having a hard time finding someone to teach it. I'm considering just buying the steam version to learn how to play

Epyo posted...

have like 40 or 50 of his games

I have played 4 (I just checked). I'm a huge fan of Quest of El Dorado and like the others I've played.

NBIceman posted...

Root and Great Western Trail are both big favorites for my group and me.

Glad to hear, GWT looks dry to me, but everyone that talks about it seems to like it a good bit so I need to try it.

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I did find a board game club that I've been going to for a few weeks now that meets 2-3 times a week so I've been playing more games that ever before. Unless anyone specifically wants a top x list of some specific category I will probably just occasionally throw up a review of a game I played recently that I want to talk about. Don't expect any kind of set schedule, and I'm also cool if people just want to treat this as a discussion topic with any occasional review once in a while.

Overall List

1. Breakers - 9
2. Endeavor: Deep Sea - 8.5
3. City of the Great Machine - 8.5
4. Andromeda's Edge - 8
5. Critter Kitchen - 8
6. Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory - 8
7. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - 8
8. Leviathan Wilds - 7.5
9. Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game - 7.5
10. Marvel Dice Throne - 7
11. Table Golf Association - 7
12. 25 words or Less - 7
13. Res Arcana - 7
14. Portals - 6.5
15. Emberleaf - 6
16. Deep Regrets - 4.5
17. Alliances - 4.5
18. Wild Realms - 4

Thoughts

Overall I really enjoyed the con this year. I only played 1 game with a stranger I didn't particularly care for, everyone else was great. I played 3 games that I am very very likely going to buy, 2 games my friend picked up and a couple more I want to replay and make pick up at some point.

A few other things to note at the con that didn't really come up:

• They had a giant pandemic board, over 30 feet wide. It was really cool to see and I watched a group play it for like 10 mins. I don't like pandemic enough to actually want to play this though
• I bought like 10 games from the virtual flea market from other attendees. A couple were purchases for other people though but I think I got 6 for myself
• Dice tower also runs a flea market of games they are selling off. The longer you wait the cheaper it gets and I waited for the bogo section and couple more games here. I think overall I spent around 90-100 and got like 10 or 11 games
• Exhibitor hall is always cool to look around. They got a snack shop that you can actually get delivered to your table. Its got a lot of foreign snacks and stuff, I picked up a few things from here and enjoyed them. I also picked up some xtrays from the expo hall as well.
• They had a painting thing where they give you a mini and paint supplies to paint it with. I thought about trying doing it but ended up not.
• They had a few panel like shows and other things that I didn't go to.

And finally a list of games I was considering trying (or my friends wanted to try) but didnt have time to get to:

• My Father's Legacy
• Nuns on the Run
• White Castle (I have Played this since)
• Root
• Western Legends
• RA
• Great Western Trail
• Hedge Maze
• Finspan

Next Steps

Definitely going to take a few days off regardless but was curious if people were interested in more ratings/rankings/writeups. And if so what would you prefer?

• Top X of a category (You guys can pick a category, I will decide x based on how many games I have played in that cat, expect 5 for most, with some 3s and some 10s)
• Just a rating of games I've played recently
• I briefly considered ranking every game i owned but decided that was crazy talk. I own way too many games and haven't played or barely remember at least half of them.

Do note that if there is interest I will probably cut back to maybe 2-3 writeups a week. Also don't feel like you need to say interested if you aren't, I'm perfectly content stopping here since I accomplished what I set out to.

Glad you enjoyed it.

I'll probably post a quick post thoughts later today or tommorow, as well as gauge interest for doing some more write-ups

#01 - Breakers
My Score: 9.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/431098/breakers

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Breakers is the only game on my list that I played twice that wasn't back to back. I played this in the demo zone on the first day with the two guys running the demo and greatly enjoyed it so came back on the third day with my two friends to try it again with them.

This is an unreleased game that I believe is scheduled to go to Kickstarter later this year. The game we played looked fairly complete and I think the rules are largely set, they may just change the components a little bit.

So this game is a competitive trick taking game. It is not a team game by default but they said in the final product they may have rules to play some different modes, but its meant as a FFA game. The goal is to be the first person to win X tricks. I believe they said 3 was the recommendation but you can do whatever.

I'm going to assume everyone knows the basics of trick taking games, if not look up something like Hearts or Spades or Euchre. In this game they have 4 suits of cards, and you take out some of the numbers if playing with less than 4 people. The game is played in rounds and in each round each player will get 10 cards and you will play 8 tricks. There will be 4 cards not dealt out, and each player will not use 2 cards in their hands.

So where it gets interesting is that each round will have a unique monster that determines the rules for the round and also what the trump suit is for the round. By default whoever takes the most tricks win the round, but some monsters change that. For example one monster we had made it so that whoever had the second most tricks won the round, so your strategy will have to change from round to round.

The games namesake Breakers refers to how ties are resolved. Whoever is the last to get to a tied count will get the breaker token which means they win a tiebreaker (so if two players get 3 tricks, whoever got the third trick last is considered the winner).

So the monsters do a few different things, they they tell you the trump suit, tell you who wins the round and they have special rules for the round. (For example, the monster I talked about earlier making the second most tricks win also makes the second highest card win each trick). But the final thing monsters card do is give you a bonus if you win the round. Whoever wins a round gets that monster card and can use the ability of the monster once per each round moving forward. So for that same monster you may be able to make one trick have the second highest card win instead of the highest.

The people who lost the trick each get an equipment. This is a one-time use thing that lets you raise the value of any card by one, so you can turn an 8 to a 9. It's important to remember the tie breaker rules, so an 8 that turned into a 9 beats a natural 9 because it was done later. You can save these between rounds if you know you aren't going to lose a round, but you can only use equipment on a card once (so you cant turn an 8 into a 10 for example).

So overall this game is pretty simple, if you've played a trick taking game before you can learn the rules in 5 minutes, but I think the monster mechanic is what really makes this game. Each round feels different. One monster we played the trump suit rotated every trick, another one we were passing cards every trick so there's a good variety.

The game is quick too, you can probably play a trick in 5 minutes, probably finish a whole game in 30-45 minutes. It almost felt too short because you don't get to stack up a ton of different abilities, but I understand why. The short nature of the game prevents it from being too snowbally where one player has a bunch of abilities while other players have nothing. The equipment also prevents this problem by giving the losers something, even if it isn't quite as powerful its close and in some cases can be better. And they have the flexibility to save it if they are destroying or getting destroyed in a round and don't need it.

Overall I think this will be a great filler/end of the night kind of the game with it's simple ruleset and good length. I also think this will be a super easy game to expand as you can easily throw in some more monster cards to add some versatility. Overall I'm really excited for this and this was definitely the biggest hidden surprise for me of the con.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to Positive
Future: I plan on kick starting this whenever the kickstarter is up

The next action is diving. This doesn't take a second disc but you instead need to be on a an area that has dive tokens. Some areas start with some dive tokens when they are played but they have a limited supply. These generally give you options of either DNA or something else (or in some cases let you take an action). You can only hold one at a time and if you get a second you must spend one (they can always be spent for DNA).

The fourth action is Conserve (Saving the turtles basically). This is similar to sonar in that it takes a second disc and generally gives you resources/a bonus. Links seem to be very common here. Conservation typically takes DNA as well.

The final action is Journal. There are four types of journals spaces and there is a market of journal cards. These also require a second disc and are generally the rarest spaces to go too, but potentially the most powerful. Each journal card has a DNA cost, symbols that say what kind of journal spaces you can buy them from, and effects (usually multiple). These effects can be VP at the end of the game, resources for you, resources for everyone else, and potentially a one time action space that you can put a disc on to take the corresponding action.

It's important to note that journaling is the main way to upgrade your specialists (I believe a couple of the dive tokens allow you as well but its rare). When upgrading a specialist you take any disc off of it (you don't get it but the specialist is freed up) and flip it over, getting whatever immediate effects it provides and you can now use the actions from the upgraded side.

There's a few other things, such as a shared impact board that's different for each mission (some stuff let you place on the board, its a way to get resources and victory points), areas with special effects but overall that's really it for the game. It plays pretty quickly and if everyone knows what they are doing there's not a ton of downtime. But I really liked how it flowed together

My favorite part is probably how the crew is handled, I like the design of how some have stronger immediate effects but some have stronger actions, or there are some that are kind of weak but then really good once upgraded. It makes you really consider who you want to bring for both your short term and long term goals.

The area mechanic is done well, the limited spaces/supply force you to move around but you usually benefit from being with another player, but if your alone you don't have to move as often so its a nice balance. It does create some competition between players to get to the valuable spaces first though which is nice.

The track system works well, I reached near the end of each track, but not till the last round. It really feels like you can specialize but you also generally want to get at least a little bit of everything. In my case I went pretty hard on the crew one so I was getting stronger crew then everyone else, but not as much discs each round.

And the mission system works well. In our game the three bonus goals were "most sonar discs", "most journal discs", "most conservation discs" as we did the first scenario which I think is more of the tutorial, I glanced at a few others through and some of them wanted x discs in the rightmost column and y discs in the leftmost column so they definitely will change what you want to focus on.

Overall I liked this a lot, it wasn't super hard but had a good amount of depth, plays quickly and has good replayability. I'm not quite sure how it would hold up after 10+ playthroughs if some specialists would end up being deemed inferior but honestly even then I think I would still enjoy the game. I'm going to most likely get this at some point, and possibly the expansion releasing next year.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to Positive
Future: I'd like to play this again, Will probably get at some point
Next Game Hint: A monster hunting trick taking game that's not out yet and might be the simplest game on my list

#02 - Endeavor: Deep Sea
My Score: 8.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/367966/endeavor-deep-sea

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Endeavor Deep Sea was a game in the hot games area, but we ended up checking it out from the library and playing it in the open gaming room on the third day. We had one stranger join us that had experience with the game and it's predecessor. I haven't played the other related games but he stated that this was the best one and no real reason to go back. He was a friendly guy and taught us everything we needed to know.

This game is a game that can be played cooperatively or competitively. I got the impression that it works better as a competitive game though. I would consider this a medium length game and the play time probably scales based on player count, but even with 4 players of which 3 were new and setup it probably took us under 2.5 hours so not a hugely long game.

The game is mission based, but the missions don't seem to change a ton other than the starting setup and how the scoring work for the game. It is most likely enough to change how the game feels to give some variety without forcing you to learn a bunch of new mechanics each time so that's a plus. The missions have 3 objectives that you are aiming to do, and in competitive there is a points bonus for first and second in each, while in co-op you have a goal for the team. I like the mission structure, and you could honestly just randomly pick one and be fine or go in order.

So this is another points game. In this one you play a certain number of rounds (I believe 6) and at the end you add the end game bonuses to whatever points you have and decide a winner.

So in this game you are using submarines and exploring underwater. At the beginning of the game you have one crew member, one sub and can only explore the surface. But as the game progresses you will get more crew members, get more subs and be able to explore deeper and deeper with 5 different depth levels. The starting map depends on the mission but generally each depth can have up to 5 areas in it (We started with 3 areas in our mission on the first depth) and each area has different things you can do in it. A lot of the things you can do in areas are limited in supplies or spaces you can go so you will be forced to travel and eventually go deeper as the higher depths run out of resources.

The game has two phases: a preparation phase and an activation phase. The preparation phase is made of 3 parts and everyone can generally do these simultaneous. One thing to note is that in this game you have 4 tracks which are two-fold, you score at the end of the game based in your progress in them and they also effect what you can do.

The first example of this is the Recruitment subphase. I said you start with one crew member who is your team leader. They are kind of a jack of all trades character, so very versatile and really strong early, but some of the later crew members can outclass him in certain aspects. At the beginning of each preparation phase (including the first turn) you will be able to recruit one specialist, but the tier you can recruit depends on your progress on one of your tracks. At the beginning you will be able to recruit Tier 1 only, who are generally weaker usually only having one or two actions they can do. But as you progress through the tiers you will get people who are more versatile or sometimes people who can do 2-in-1 actions (opposed to the team leader who can do any action but only 1 per activation). Once you get to tier 5 you start getting people who can give you victory points as well.

The other part of recruiting someone is they usually (but not always) give you some kind of immediate bonus, usually up a space on one of the tracks. But sometimes they will have a stronger ability for their tier but give you no immediate bonus, or have no actions at all but a stronger bonus. They can also be upgraded so sometimes they will have a weaker unupgraded side but a stronger upgraded side. Overall I think the system is very smart and there's a lot of consideration into picking your crew, my only fear is that with only 3 choices at each tier it may end up with you picking a lot of the same people in repeated playthroughs.

The second subphase of preparation is the effort phase. Here you gain discs from the supply depending on the relevant track progress. At the beginning you will gain 1 per turn but can gain up to 5. These discs are very important as they are used both to activate your crew as well as perform some of the actions.

The last subphase is the reassignment subphase. In here you reclaim discs from your specialists back to your supply, once again depending on a track going from 1-5. This is doubly important because it will help you get more discs (you can theoretically get 10 total if you have both relevant tracks maxed) but it also frees up the specialist you are taking the disc off of. Once a crew member has been activated you cannot use him again until the disc is removed (but if you can somehow remove a disc during your turn you can theoretically use them twice in one round). I will say that unlock the previous track, for this track it doesn't make sense to up it faster than you are getting crew members.

So I mentioned 4 tracks, three of them control the preparation phase and the last is perhaps the most important. The last track controls three things: how many subs you have (you start with 1, and can get up to 3 at certain points on the track), how deep your subs can go and how far your subs can move.

So once preparation phase is done you will then take turns performing actions until everyone passes. Usually an action consists of playing a disc on one of your crew members that does not have one and taking one of the actions available on that crew member. When you take an action it can be for any of your submarines, your crew members aren't tied to a specific ship so it usually makes sense to have your ships spread out and focused on different activities.

The first action to talk about is movement. You can move a sub a number of spaces corresponding to a track. Once you get there you get whatever the arrive bonus is for the space, usually up on a track or getting a disc. So this way movement isn't really a wasted action, although it usually benefits you less than other stuff. Another thing to note is when you get a new ship it generally starts at the starting square and you DO get the arrival bonus for it being put there. This includes your ship at the start of the game so you will start with something.

The second action is Sonar. Some zones have sonar spots that have places for discs. This means you need to spend 2 discs: one to activate the crew member and one to put on the board. You have to go left to right in each track and they sometimes give you resources of up on tracks, but a lot of times they allow you to discover a new zone. When discovering a zone it will tell you what depths you can discover (so if it says 1-2 you can choose either a depth 1 or depth 2 card) You pick the depth draw the card and then pick where you want it to go, now allowing to go wider than the scenario allows, and for deeper depths there must be an area above it. Once you place the area you then get the arrival bonus of the area you just placed.

Before I go further I want to go over green lines real quick. A lot of spaces in areas will have green lines between them with some kind of bonus on the line. This can be between any of the spaces on the board where you are putting a disc. How it works is once both sides of the green line are filled both players get the bonus of the line, but if a player filled up both sides of the line he only gets the bonus once, so it encourages you to cooperate with others a little bit.

HanOfTheNekos posted...

s SETI competitive, just with stuff where you can give others information with actions?

SETI is competitive, yes. A points game basically

HanOfTheNekos posted...

I've spoken about me and gf before, but we're very Co-op oriented so that's always what I'm looking for. Spirit Island, Arkham Horror LCG, and DC Deckbuilder Co-op are our top played games.

Are you playing at 2p? If so check out sky team

I have not played Dwellings so I can't really say for sure, I know one difference is how the dice rolling works.

It's probably a situation where if you don't own either just buy andromeda's edge but not worth upgrading from one to the other.

The other major thing to go over is how riots work. When a hero attempts to riot in a location it costs 1 trust per guard x the number of UNidentified famous citizens (once you identify a citizen you change the rotation and the heroes can look at them at any time from then on). So it can be pretty expensive or outright impossible to do if there's a lot of guards and unidentified famous citizens. Once you do pay you flip face up all of the citizen in the space and the number of people supporting you must be more than the people against you (which is spies + guards). So generally early on you will be trying to raise discontent figuring out where people are and doing the riots later on. You also get one free riot for maxing out the discontent track, which sounds like happens in most games. If a riot fails the master plan advances and the great machine can arrest the active citizens in the district for free.

There's some more small stuff but that's the gist of the game. I like how it has a lot of different things going on and it seems like it has room for different strategies from both sides. I will say in our game we kind of steamrolled so that's one negative that if the Great Machine gets behind it can be hard for them to catch up.

But I like the options the Great Machine has, they can try to get their cards in play early to scale late or they can focus on moving guards around and denying heroes trust to do much. The city events are also done well since usually they require the heroes to do or not do something to prevent the master plan from advancing, which can give the Great Machine some insight to guess what they are going to go for.

This is really a game I want to play more and see how it holds up balance wise with multiple plays (although I believe he said there are some things you can to make the game easier for one side or the other). I also really want to try and play as the machine side as it seems more interesting to me. The guy hosting this game said he heard there might be a new printing with an updated ruleset (fixing a few minor issues with base rules) the end of the year and if there is I will likely pick this up. Do note once again that I am generally biased for 1v3 games/

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Likely to Trend: Could vary in either direction
Future: I'd like to play this again, Heard it might get reprinted so might wait for that
Next Game Hint: A deep sea mission based game where the missions don't effect all together that much.

#03 - City of the Great Machine
My Score: 8.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/263895/city-of-the-great-machine

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This is the second game that I had scheduled before I got to the conference. It was on the second day I was there before my friend got there. but after the virtual flea market (VFM). I don't believe I talked about the VFM yet but basically for a few months before the con people can sell and buy games from other attendees online. You then do the exchange here. It was pretty slow this year, taking over an hour but I did buy like 10 games for around $100.

But about this game, City of the Great Machine is an 1v3 game, which I generally greatly enjoy which is why I scheduled this. I generally like asymmetric stuff in nature (except when its done like Emberleaf). In this game one guy was running the 1 side that owned the game, and he actually set up multiple rounds of the game throughout the days.

The basic premise of this game is that the 1 side is the "Great Machine" basically a robot overlord controlling 3 servants and a large amount of mechanical guards. The goal of the Great Machine is complete a master plan which is basically done by advancing a track that can increased in a variety of ways. The players are represented by heroes that are trying to incite riots and overthrow the great machine. Once they have incited 3 riots they win the game.

The game takes place in a floating city with rectangular districts that can be set up in different ways. One cool thing about the game is that there are ways to actually move districts to different places in the city (along with whoever or whatever is on it). The districts all have different actions you can do at them. Half of the districts are major districts that have unique abilities (such as rearranging the city) and these abilities can be used by either side (in some cases the action differs between sides)

There are also famous citizens randomly scattered across the districts that at the start are unknown to both sides. At the start of the game almost all of the famous citizens will start neutral but there is a discontent track, and as the discontent goes up more and more citizens will start siding with the heroes. There are a couple of spies mixed in that will always be against the hero's.

Both sides are limited by money. I believe its called trust for the heroes and bonds for the great machine. Pretty much everything you do on either side costs money and you earn some each round. Heroes earn it based on how many famous citizens are in their current district (its split between everyone there so you want to spread out) while the great machine earns an income that grows as discontent grows. The heroes have a trust limit (it depends on which character you are playing) while the great machine does not.

So a round consists of 5 phases. The first phase is income & revealing a City Event card. Usually a City Event card is something that affects the current round, such as giving players or the great machine additional things they can do that round for a cost and then a condition for the end of the round that will cause the master plan to advance. Once you go through a certain number of cards you start the countdown and the master plan advances one step every round. (I believe the master plan has like 10 spaces so not an instant game over but you won't have long).

The second phase is hero's each choosing a location card from there hand. You start the game with 8 of the 9 location cards, so at the beginning you can't go to one random location. There is a major district that allows people to get their location cards back, as well as ways for the great machine to make you get rid of more cards.

After Each hero chooses a card face down and then we go to the Great Machine Phase. In this phase the great machine can move each servant and perform an action with each. Moving a servant costs 2 bonds per space and an action cost 2 bonds as well. They can also move guards for 1 bond for each space separately of their servants.

There's a few actions servants can take, including the major districts actions. They can also repair a broken guard, arrest a revealed citizen or place a raid token. A big think they will want to do early on is get and play directive cards (from two different major districts) that are sort of passive negative effects for the hero's that make the game harder for them or positive effects for the great machine.

After the Great Machine has gone the players now go. The first thing they do is move to wherever the card they played is. They can choose the route but for each space they leave the must pay 1 trust per the number of guards in the space they are leaving from. If they run out of money while moving they will have to roll a dice and have a chance of being captured. Once they have reached their space they can then do an action. Most actions also cost trust and depend on the number of guards. You have the district actions, attack a guard (variable cost to destroy a guard depending on a dice roll), look at a citizen in your space, move a citizen from your space to another, gain a trust (you do this if you can't afford anything else) or start a riot. They can also raise discontent in minor districts. I will go over a few of these in more detail in a minute.

The final phase is the closing phase. Here you resolve anything that happens at the end of the round for the city event, see if the master plan advances from it and resolve any failed raids which I will go over in a second.

So a big thing that great machine can do is raids. Basically this is another way to capture a hero other than making them go broke in movement. A servant can use its action to raid the space it's on, and if any hero goes there (not through the space just ending there) they get captured. But if they guess wrong and no hero goes there the discontent increases by 1. If the Great Machine successfully captures a hero they can either: advance the master plan and let the hero do their turn like normal, prevent there turn and make them discard the current location card (limiting their future options), or prevent there turn and take all their trust and turn it into bonds.

banananor posted...

Is this the main way to get points? I imagine it being frustrating to not know what's going to award points until it's too late. Game sounds right up my alley regardless

I wouldn't say main way but the tracks are important. At the end of the game you score for every track. You also score points for developments, but how much they are worth depends on a tracks progress. A lot of points also come from techs/moons and recalling.

Also iirc the bottom of each track start at 5 and they go up to like 20, so if you max out a track and then a card flips with that color that can be a pretty big swing but generally it was like one player gets 12 another player gets 18. I think I ended with over 100 points in the medium length game so it's not the sole factor but def makes an impact

Got home way later than expected so #3 will be tommorow

Shattered posted...

Couldn't you just tap your lands in response to this card and not use the mana so that the person using that card can't access the mana?

Sure but then they are tapped out after the phase ends. Its more of a denial card than actually trying to get mana

So I mentioned tech cards and how those work is they add modules on your home station. These are just various benefits that might give you resources or let you take actions such as building a ship. These come into play when you take a recall action. When you recall you can use each of your undamaged ships that you are recalling to activate various undamaged modules. (Some modules come in damaged and you need to use a repair action to fix them). So the more ships you have the more modules you can activate. You can also spend an energy to activate an additional module with no limit, so if you have high energy income you can activate a lot of modules even without a lot of ships.

The one exception to this is the green row, for the green row you use one ship and get to activate the entire row, which could be 4-5 modules so it can be pretty powerful (and you generally want to do it in most cases since the starting module gives you 2 energy which you can use to activate other modules). I also mentioned moons earlier in the game, some modules have spaces for moons which will make that space also do whatever the moon gives you (usually resources). Some modules have half circles on one or both sides and if you put two modules next to each other to make a full circle you can slot a moon there, that you will get the effect if you use both adjacent modules.

Overall I like how the modules and recalling are done, since you build up synergies and make them very powerful late game, I think near the end of my game I was activating maybe 12-15 modules in one recall which gave me a ton of stuff.

The last thing to mention are there are also cards in this game with various ways to get them (by default you get one for losing a combat for example). These cards are pretty varied in effect, some let you influence combats, or give you bonuses for losing combats (or protect your ship if you lose combat). There's other types but I don't remember them that well, the main thing I remember is they reminded me of dune imperium cards, where some seem very strong while some seem just ok. But in general they are pretty worthwhile for going for.

There's a bunch of smaller stuff I didn't go over, partially just cause there's a lot and partially cause I don't remember it that well. But overall I liked the game. The combat system/alien system reminds me of a more "american" game while the upgrades and tracks remind me of a "euro" game and I think it works well together. Upgrading ships feels good, you have 4 ship types and can choose one of two upgrades for each ship so you have to make some choices depending on your strategy.

The factions are slightly asymmetric but I think it works here, you have a small ability and slightly different ship upgrade choices but it doesn't feel like you are pigeonholed into one strategy. (I had a research upgrade but I think I actually ended up being combat focused). I think the board works well, I like the moon concept and how you can use it to upgrade your techs (you can also upgrade your loss bonus with this, so you get whatever it is when you lose a fight, or you can just discard it for resources)

By tying actions to spaces it creates hot zones, where everyone wants to go to encourage fights, even if someone doesn't necessarily want to, and the scalation mechanic encourages you to strategically place your ships so they can help each other if one gets attacked, same with developments.

Honestly the only thing I wasn't crazy about was the card system, its also one thing I'm not crazy about in Dune Imperium (not your main deck cards, the intrigue cards) just because it feels like sometimes you get something that doesn't help you at all which feels bad.

I'm pretty positive on this game, and want to try it again to see how it holds up on a repeat playthrough, ideally when I'm less tired. I really like the blend of euro and American elements for when I don't feel like playing a pure euro, and it definitely seems like something that will have a lot of replayability.

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Likely to Trend: neutral to positive
Future: I'd like to play this again, Might get it in the future
Next Game Hint: The second game on my list to include riots, but this time against machine overlords

#04 - Andromeda's Edge
My Score: 8.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/358661/andromedas-edge

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I played this game at the end of the night on the first day after Res arcana. It was in the hot games area and I saw a flag and it was on my list that I wanted to try. I played this with one guy who taught and a couple who were also new. The game is fairly long so I was pretty tired by the end of it and won't necessarily remember everything perfectly.

Andromeda's Edge is a space themed game where you are exploring the andromeda region, building and upgrading ships, and getting into conflicts with other players and/or aliens. While I would say SETI is a Eurogame, I would say this has some euro elements but has decidedly more player interaction. This game is also considered somewhat of a reimplementation of Dwellings of Eldervale (a game I haven't played) with a different theme. From what I've heard though this is generally considered a little better due to some tweaks to the rules.

So there is actually a lot of small rules and different little things you can do, but the basic gameplay is pretty simple. On your turn you can do one of two things: either deploy a ship and resolve all of that, or recall all of your ships and resolve that. There's no rounds or anything like that, you just keep taking turns until someone reaches the end of game score (this number can be set differently depending on the game length you want) at which point everyone (including the person who triggered it) gets one more turn. Then end of game bonus scoring is done, and whoever has the most points wins.

So touching on how deploying a ship works, there are various hexagon region tiles that make up the board that are somewhat randomly distributed. There's also room for more tiles to be added below the existing ones as the game progresses. For your first ship (either at the start or after you recall) you can deploy one of your ships anywhere on the board (besides a few spaces that need a specific type of ship for). After that your subsequent ships have to be within a certain range of one of your ships on the board, the range depends on the ship type.

When you deploy a ship on a region, you get to do whatever that space allows. Planets allow you to get a moon token (will go over later) or build developments for a cost. Alliance Baes have various actions such as upgrading your ships or building new ones. Nebulae are a special type of space that only a ship with a certain attribute can enter (your research vessels basically) that allow you to claim a moon and do different actions on.

After you do your main action you then see if an alien raider is close enough to you, if you do they will move to to you. The final thing that happens is a battle if there are two or more factions on the space (factions include you, other players and raiders). If there is a battle will take place and any player (including yourself) can choose to escalate the combat by bringing ships that are within their movement range to the battle.

Battles are decided by dice rolling. You get one dice per the sum of your ship weapons in the region (most get 1 dice, your fighters and some others might get 2). You get an additional dice if you have a development in the current or adjacent region. You can also spend energy (a resource) to get extra dice, with a limit of 6 dice total.

The other aspect is what is called targeting, this by default is just the number of ships you have in the region, but some might give you an extra targeting. This determines they minimum number you are allowed to roll on each dice, with a maximum targeting of 5. So if you have 6 dice with 5 targeting, you roll all 6 dice, and reroll any dice with a 4 or below until everything is a 5 or 6.

Overall I like how combat is handled in this game, no matter what you technically always have a chance, but unlike risk or something similar, your chances are astronomically low if you have 1 ship vs someone with 5 ships and I think that's ok. And how losing combat works is your ships just go to the scrapyard (they aren't gone forever) where they will give you less of a bonus when you do the recall action. Some ships also have shields so they instead take a damage the first time they lose and stay on the board.

You can also get bonuses even for losing (And you can spec into it to make it stronger as well) so sometimes you may just send one shop to a fight that has a shield, fully expecting him to lose just to get your small bonus. But overall I like the system, its fairly simple but makes sense.

Another aspect of the game to talk about is the tracks. This game has five tracks similar to the cult tracks in terra mystica or tracks in other games. As you go up them you will you get various bonuses, either one time or permanent and the tracks are themed. The main way to go up is to to take a research action on some spaces which will let you purchase 1 or 2 techs of the color the spaces allow. Any time you purchase a tech you move up the color of that track. The exception to this is the red supremacy track, for this one you just move up one space anytime you win a combat.

Various actions will also move up the event tracker. Once it reaches the end an event card will be revealed, which will typically have some kind of effect, give everyone some points based on the relevant track progress and spawn new alien raiders. It will also spawn a new region on the board you can start going to. There are ways to look at and modify the event deck so you can prepare or try to get events that give points for the tracks you are high in. There are four tiers of alien raiders that are randomly decided, so each game will have a different set of aliens. I don't know too much about the various aliens since I don't think I even saw all 4 in my game but I believe there is some variety.

Not feeling great today so will resume tomorrow

So overall this game is actually fairly simple, pick where my workers go and take the ingredients, plate dishes. But there is actually a fair amount of strategy in selecting ingredients. Which locations do you think everyone else is going to go, this location doesn't have anything great but some decent stuff that i can maybe easily get. I'm first in the pick let me snag this amazing ingredient before everyone else, and hopefully they realize i'm going to win it and don't send their fast guy so I can keep the tiebreaker, etc, etc. It's not hard to play but you do have to put some thought into it.

There is some thought on plating dishes as well, well more of considering your carry over limit, what is worth keeping, since the last meal is only 1 of each ingredient (unless you have a critic like the mouse letting you have as much as you want) you may want to hold back your 7 cheese for that. But it also might make you able to go from 12 to 21 and get 2 extra stars so it's a balancing act.

It's a game easy enough to play with the family but has enough going for it to make it enjoyable. I like how the bonus cards are done because you have to prioritize them over getting ingredients, and it's definitely possible to see all three but not guaranteed. And sometimes seeing them earlier helps influence decisions of what to keep between rounds. Choosing where to send your guys is great, there's a real risk/reward since you might end up with nothing, And since its mostly simultaneous play the game doesn't take that long regardless of player count.

My only downsides are some of the bonus goals feel pointless to me, and i'm not quite sure how I feel about the temp worker, they generally seem strong to me, almost to the point where if you're first pick you want to always try and get them.

But overall I was pleasantly surprised with the game. My friend ended up buying the game so I will be playing it again, and it's a nice length for what it is, especially since I don't think additional players add much to the length. It plays up to 5, and I think there's an expansion that lets you play up to 7 and lets you give some of the normal locations an additional effect. Will be a good second game of the night type of game.

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Likely to Trend: neutral
Future: My friend bought this so I'm sure we will play again at some point
Next Game Hint: A space game where you explore another galaxy and sometimes fight each other or aliens

#05 - Critter Kitchen
My Score: 8.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/393429/critter-kitchen
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In contrast to my last two games, Critter Kitchen is a relatively simpler game. I've heard it is a spiritual successor to flamecraft with the same publisher artist but I have not played flamecraft so I can't comment on this too much. From what I've heard they do play differently so don't let your opinion of one influence your opinion of the other.

Also I lied earlier, I forgot about this when I said I only played Leviathan Wilds without any strangers playing with us. Me and my two friends played this by ourselves in the hot games room pretty late at night on the third day, but we did have a nice lady teach us the rules for the game real quick (She was unable to play at the time).

Critter Kitchen is played over 7 days with whoever has the most points at the end winning. The game revolves around sending your workers out to get ingredients and at the end of the third, sixth and seventh day you preparing meals for judges using your ingredients to earn stars (points).

I'm going to go backwards and talk about the judging first and then go into getting the ingredients. You are judged three times throughout the game, and the first two times work exactly the same with the final judging working a bit differently. The first judging takes place after day 3. At the beginning of each of the first 3 days a desired dish will be flipped which takes three different ingredients. (The third days dish will only have two ingredients with the third blocked off to make up for having less time to compare).

So once you get to judging you will have three dishes to make. In order to present a dish you have to have each ingredient represented or you cannot present, BUT you can substitute soup for ingredients (soup is magical in the land apparently) as long as you have at least one of the proper ingredients. For the ingredients you use you can use as much of it as you want each each ingredient will have a different point value (soups value is 1, there is an upgraded soup bisque that is worth 3) which seem to range from like 2-7. There is also spice which can be used as a 2x multiplier on the appropriate ingredient (ie there is a spice for cheese that can only be used on cheese).

You then add up the total value of the ingredients and that determines how many stars the dish earns. 6+ is 1 star, 12+ is 2 star and 21+ is 4 star. So ideally you would get 21 stars on each dish and no more as any over is wasted. But mainly you are trying to be efficient. You don't get a penalty for not presenting a dish, but this isn't a super high scoring game so not getting points is hurtful.

The second set of three days functions exactly like the first, but the final day is different. At the beginning of the game a celebrity critic will be chosen (we had The Mouse, his affected cheese) who slightly changes how the final day will play out. But in essence you are making a smorgasbord, one ingredient (You can spice it though) of each type (there are 7 types). You get a bonus star if you present all 7 ingredients, and then you compete against the other players for each ingredient. The highest for each gets a star. (So you could theoretically get 7 stars from this alone).

Whoever has the most value in soup left at the end of the game gets a star (you cannot use soup on the last day). The last way to earn points is the "rumors", basically three hidden objectives about ways you can score bonus points on the last day. These are hidden but there is a way to see them I'll go over in a bit. An example of this could be "if your rightmost ingredient is your highest value earn 3 stars" or "double the value of carrots". I will say that some of them, like the carrot one, don't seem to do much other than mess up the other goals since it is doubled for everyone but that's probably my only minor complaint about the game.

Now that you understand how scoring works and what you will use soup, ingredients and spices for let's go over how to get them. In this game you have three workers you can send out each day, a small fast one that holds one ingredient, a medium one that holds two, and a large slow one that holds 3. Then there are various locations that you can send them to that hold ingredients. The locations differ depending on player count with you having more options at higher player counts.

In your hand you will have a card for each location and simultaneously you will assign a location to each of your workers face down. Once everyone has you flip the cards over and put your guys on their appropriate locations. You will then resolve each location left to right. When resolving a location the small guys go first, then the mediums, then the larges. For ties in sizes (ie if two players played a medium in the same location) there is a first pick tracker. Whoever is closer to first on the track goes first and then is moved to the back of the track (so they will have less priority next time). For medium and large its not a first player takes all of their stuff, then the second player takes all of their stuff kind of thing, but rather first takes one item, then second takes one item then first takes their second item kind of thing.

Lets talk about locations, with the basic setup there are 3 special locations and everything else function pretty much the same. The general locations each have a certain number of slots for ingredients (3-5 I believe) that are randomly drawn each day before you select where your workers go. Once they are all taken they are empty for the rest of the day, so the large guys (and sometimes medium guys) have a chance to end up with nothing. There is a location called midnight merchant that has 5 ingredients but they aren't drawn until after you select where your guys are going, so it's somewhat of a gamble. There's the chef academy which is the rightmost location and gets all the unused ingredients from the other locations. So it can end up with a lot of choices if people double up or it can end up almost empty. This location also has an intern worker that you can use one time the following day that you can take in lieu of an ingredient. He works largely the same as one of your three normal workers, but usually has some kind of special ability.

The final location is actually the first location, the soup kitchen. At the end of the day anything unused in the chefs kitchen goes here. It also gets one bisque each day, as well as an unlimited amount of soup.

For the random ingredients it can be any of the ingredients with any of the possible values, the spices for each ingredient (as well as i think or 2 allspice that work for any ingredient) or one of three symbols. Those symbols represent the bonus cards and if you get one you are allowed to look at the bonus card for the rest of the game. Another thing to note is that after the third day you can only carry over 5 non-soup ingredients (soup is still magical), and after the sixth day you can only carry over 10.

NBIceman posted...

I had a ton of interest in Hegemony when it was being crowdfunded, but never pulled the trigger. Didn't think it would hit our table enough to justify it. I still have some interest if it ever gets to be fairly cheap, though.

Yea I'm not planning on picking up Hegemony atm but do want to play it more

NBIceman posted...

SETI seems like the perfect game to play at a con for me. It doesn't seem to do anything unique enough that I feel motivated to add it to my collection, but it looks interesting enough for a play or two.

Definitely a fair take, I liked it a good bit and have a low bar for buying games if I see a good deal but not something i'm going to go out of my way to get

KommunistKoala posted...

Usually stay away from pure economic games but the asymmetric aspect makes it sound interesting at least

What would you consider some pure economic games, I didn't think I had played one before so I googled it, but some people consider like power grid or puerto rico pure economic games and I would say hegemony is nothing like them. (I like all 3)

So depending on why you stay away it might still be worth checking out

#06 - Hegemony: Lead Your Class To Victory
My Score: 8.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/321608/hegemony-lead-your-class-to-victory
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So Hegemony I believe is the only game we played in a side open gaming room (basically just smaller rooms that function the same as the main open gaming room). This is one I wanted to try last year but didn't get a chance to so we checked it out from the library and set it up. As we were setting up one of the guys I played Res Arcana saw it and asked if we had room for one more for his friend, who showed up maybe 10 minutes later so we played with a full 4.

Hegemony is an asymmetric economic game that plays 2-4 players. Unlike most other games on my list, I think you absolutely want 4 players, or at least 3 due to the asymmetric nature. This game has the highest complexity rating on bgg on my list, but I think it's due to it's asymmetric nature, each role isn't that difficult (not easy mind you) but each role plays fairly different from each other.

So this game is meant to somewhat simulate the economy, with each player representing one of four classes: the working class, the middle class, the capitalists and the state. It's obviously a simplification but it does have some interesting mechanics where everyone wants different things but sometimes you have to consider who will work together with you on something at a given moment.

Each class scores differently as well. I played the capitalists who basically score by making money. The working class score by making trade unions and getting luxuries and healthcare. The middle class is probably the most difficult because they score in some ways that the working class does (luxuries etc) but also in some ways that the capitalist score (running businesses). The state is probably the most different, and if you only play with 3 players is the one left out. They will get agendas that dictate policies they are trying to enact and also based on the legitimacy they have with each faction (they can basically give favors out to the other players to earn legitimacy with them, ie they can give money to the capitalist so the capitalist believe in the state more).

This is definitely a game you need to play through multiple times to really get a feel for how everything works together, and I'm not going to attempt to explain it all here because I don't know it all but I will go over a few pieces I can talk to to give you an idea of what kind of game this is.

One of the big things in this game is policies, of which there are 7. Each policy has 3 levels and usually effects multiple things. Any player can use one of their actions to propose a vote to move any policy one level. The actual vote doesn't take place until later but you mark it. An example of a policy is public healthcare cost with levels being 0$ (I believe the currency is fake and is meant to represent like 10 million or something, don't take the actual value too seriously just treat it as relatives), 5$ and 10$.

It seems like most policies greatly benefit one person to be at the max, greatly benefit one person to be at the min and have varying effects on the other two. In the healthcare case, the working class wants free healthcare cause that frees up more room to buy other things. The capitalists want expensive public healthcare so people will buy from them. The state benefits somewhat from both ways, it gets VPs for providing free health care, but its gets money when it's not cheap. Middle class can also produce health care if it builds a business so it can benefit both ways.

This game seems to be full of push-pull mechanics which is a really interesting dynamic. In our game free healthcare got passed really early, so I sold off all my healthcare businesses. The working class took all of the free healthcare so the middle class ended up having to produce it's own healthcare. The game seems to have a good balance going where you don't want to completely screw over any one player because it hurts everyone else (in our case we bankrupted the state) but I really enjoyed my time with it.

I want to play this game again, probably as a different class. I don't know how balanced the game is, it's highly rated so I assume it's pretty well balanced, and it has somewhat of a self-balancing mechanism long term, but for me this game was less about winning and more about the experience. Out of my list this one probably has the most potential to move (in either direction) cause I feel like I only scratched the surface of it so far. Not currently something I'm itching to play again right this moment as it is a bit of an ordeal to set up and learn, but in a few months or maybe next dice tower I definitely want to try again.

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Likely to Trend: Could rise or fall, would have to see more playthroughs go
Future: Would like to play again, try out some other roles. I don't think it's something I want to play all the time but would be fun occasionally
Next Game Hint: 7 days of shopping, 3 days of cooking

The scan action is very upgradable, you can get up to doing 4 markers with one scan action, and allowing to do a sector adjacent to earth instead of just earth as well to give you more flexibility. It's definitely you can focus on and pump out. Do note that the larger bonus for being the highest contributor fills up, and while you still get a bonus for being largest contributor the second time and after, it's a smaller bonus so there are some diminishing returns.

Once you have data can spend it on the computer track. This is another highly upgradable track that by default is pretty barren. You are basically spending data to fill up circles left to right (6 circles) until its full. By default four of these circles are empty and give you nothing and one gives you an income and one a publicity. You can upgrade each of the empty circles to give you 2 vp and an additional optional circle under it to give you an additional resource. Once the top circles are all full you can spend an energy and remove all the data to analyze it and get a blue alien trace.

So I never talked about alien traces before but there are three kinds, blue which you generally get from computer actions, pink which you generally get for winning a sector and yellow which you generally get from landing on planets. Whenever you ear one of these you put it on one of the alien spaces on that part of the board and take the appropriate reward. Like most things, the earlier you do it the general better rewards you get. I will go over the aliens some more after the rest of the actions.

The final group of actions are what I would call the other actions. Playing a card, discarding a card for it's free action, trading resources I've all talked about before but I haven't mentioned publicity yet. You start the game with 4 publicity and it caps out at 10. You can use a free action to spend 3 publicity to draw a card, or you can use a main action to spend 6 publicity to research a tech. This is main way to get technologies.

Technologies also give you a bonus for being first, techs are grouped into stacks based on what they do (every tech in a stack upgrades the same spot for the same effect) but the back give a slightly different small reward for researching them, usually 1 resource such as an energy. And at the top of each stack is a 2 point victory tile, so if you are the first to research a specific tech you get 2 VP, whatever is on the back of the top tech and the corresponding upgrade. So you are incentivized to pick techs not already picked, but remember this is a game where 200 points isn't a crazy amount so don't take something suboptimal just for the 2 VPs.

So the last main thing to talk about is aliens. I mentioned the three kind of life traces you can earn and when you earn them you put them in an corresponding space in the alien section. At the start of the game there will be three discovery spaces (one of each color) under each of the two face down aliens. Once all three are filled the alien will flip over revealing the unique alien card will flip over revealing more spaces to place traces on and the unique alien stuff will occur depending on what was flipped. You can then place on those new spaces (or on the other alien).

I'm not going to go super in depth on the aliens because I've only seen 2, but they seem fairly different from each other. The main thing to mention is that each alien has its own smaller deck of cards. They cards are like the normal cards you get, albeit stronger. The "discoverers" of an alien get a card each (if you are on more than one discovery space you get more than one card) and you can get more cards by playing on the tracks. These cards are usually better but usually deal with the aliens gimmick.

Overall I will say I enjoyed this game. There's a lot of rules but its not that hard to parse, the symbols are pretty symbol, you board tells you what you can do on your turn, along with a player aid. The stuff flows together and interacts well and the theme is good in this game.

I like that it rewards you for being first to do a lot of different things, because in this game there are a lot of different things you can do. It also gives you a lot of avenues to score so you can somewhat specialize (maybe you decide to go to Neptune or Uranus you likely wont have too many people there) but a general approach also works well. I'd have to play more to see how balanced each approach is.

The scanning and the aliens both are interesting because they feel somewhat cooperative. I may be rooting for another player to scan the third one of an alien that I'm nowhere near so it flips and I get a card. The one complaint I heard from the people were playing was its a little hard to fill up sectors with only 2 players though, and bgg lists 3 as ideal probably because of this. Although unlike other games I think this probably works fine at any player count, although ideally 3 or 4.

The cards work well, I like the quad use they have it makes them very flexible to where they can always do something for you. And I enjoy that the missions on cards are decently common to give you some direction in what you want to work on. The techs feel good and I feel come at a good pace where you will probably end the game with approximately 6-8 of the 12 so you get a decent number but don't have everything. I do appreciate that the game starts you with 4 publicity so you are close to getting your first tech pretty early on.

I'm also a fan of the board, I just like the concept of everything rotating and making it hard to plan, it's also fairly easy to cause a rotation so you can definitely try to screw someone and put an asteroid in their path but it is predictable. I do think it gives an advantage to players who know what the spaces that are hidden (that only reveal when a gap is above them) are but I don't think that's a huge deal in this case.

I think the income system is smart since a bulk of your income is there at the beginning and you are augmenting it, but you probably aren't doubling it until late or anything. It incentivizes you to go for it early, but you aren't going to be crippled if you get less than everyone else since it might be a difference of getting 4 credits a round instead of the starting 3.

But yea, I'd like to play this more and see how balanced it is on more playthroughs and how each of the aliens feel. I will note that while this is my lowest rated 8.0 they are all pretty interchangeable and it depends on my mood that day. I don't have any major downsides about this game other than maybe some of the techs feel a good deal stronger than the other ones (do not site on the cheaper asteroid movement tech). But this is really something I'd need to play more to see where it ultimately sits

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Likely to Trend: unsure, I could see it rising after a few more plays
Future: Would like to play again, might possibly buy/get in future
Next Game Hint: A game with a lot of push/pull mechanics and you accidentally (or purposefully) bankrupt the state

Other than the main solar system map, there's a planet map where all 7 of the planets other than earth (and some of their moons) are along with the bonuses you get for going to them (I will go over that more in a bit). There's also 2 random facedown alien boards (out of 5) that will get flipped at a certain point in the game. There's some scoring milestones revealed for the game, that change every game, a market of cards and a market of tech tiles.

The last main piece of setup is the player board. Each player has their own board that has some of the actions depicted on them that you can upgrade as the game goes on via tech tiles. If you have played Scythe it is very similar to that system except you are putting stuff on the board instead of taking it off to upgrade it. Each player also gets some starting resources, 5 starting cards, and then can turn one of their cards into income (will go over this in a bit).

Resource wise you have credits, energy, publicity (which is actually a track 0-10), and data (which is a special kind of resource, you don't start with this or get it normally). Cards can be considered a resource as well and you can at any point on your turn, change any 2 of energy/credit/cards (the two must be the same) into one of energy/credits/cards. Ie I can spend 2 energy to take a card. When you take a card you will either take one from the market of your choice or draw off the top of the deck, depending on what the symbol for the draw card is.

So now that you have an idea of the setup, lets go through how a round works. A round starts with the starting player taking one main action and as many free actions as they'd like (in any order), then the next player doing the same, the next etc. Once a player has no more main actions they want to do they pass, discard down to four cards if they have more, choose one card from the stack of end-of round cards (basically # of players + 1 random cards, so the earlier you pass the more options you have) and then if they are the first to pass do a solar system rotate. Once everyone passes the round ends, if that was the fifth round the game ends, otherwise everyone gets their income and the starting player rotates and the next round begins.

I mentioned rotating the solar system so I will go over that real quick. There's a small circle track with three spaces and you basically just move it along that track and do whatever the space is for. The first time you will rotate the inner ring, then the inner and middle ring, and finally the all three rings and then back again. Any pieces on that ring will move with it, but if its in the gap of the ring it may get pushed. This can sometimes be used for your advantage or it can hurt you if you aren't prepared.

So before I go any further I want to go over the anatomy of a card. Like is becoming more common, these cards are multi-use. On the top left of a card is a free action, you can discard a card as a free action for whatever this symbol is, it's usually a weaker effect but it might be what you need. On the top right is a color that corresponds to one or two sectors, this will be relevant later in the scan action. The bottom right of the card is it's income effect, if you turn this card into income this is what you will get each round moving forward (you have some base income already this is additional). I believe the income is usually either a random card, a credit or an energy. The last part of the card is the cost (of credits and can be) and the effect of the card. Sometimes the effect includes a mission that will give you an additional bonus once you complete it.

So lets now go over the main actions you can do on your turn. The first playing a card for it's cost (this is no the free action of the card). You can launch a probe from earth onto the solar system map. You can orbit a planet other than earth that your probe it at. You can land on a planet your probe is on, you can scan a sector (or multiple), you can analyze data and you can research a tech.

While everything is interconnected I'm going to roughly group these into three categories and go over them in that way. The first category is what I would consider the probe category. On your player board these are upgraded through the probe (orange) techs. By default you can have one probe active in the solar system board but can upgrade to have two. One of your primary actions is to launch a probe which will start on earth. You can use a free action to spend an energy to move it one space. By default moving through an asteroid takes two energy but you can upgrade it to where it costs 1 and actually gives you a publicity. There are a few other bonus spaces as well but you are typically trying to move it to a planet.

Once you have a probe at a planet you can use a main action to either orbit or land on the planet. When you do either you take your probe off the solar system and place it on the planets corresponding track. multiple people can orbit/land on the same planet and you get rewards for doing so but the first person to do each usually gets an additional bonus. Also note you are encouraged to orbit first because if anyone is orbiting a planet its cheaper for anyone to land there. Some planets also have moons that you can land on once you have the corresponding technology (or play a card that lets you bypass that requirement. Only one person can land on each moon, and while they give resources still, you mainly land on them because they give large amounts of victory points.

Landing/Orbiting on planets is good for various reasons, but its also one of the few ways to bump your income. If you gets this you tuck one of the cards in your hand in your income stack so just the bottom is showing and you will start earning that resource each round for the rest of the game.

The second set of actions I want to talk about is what I would call the signal/data actions. This is two main actions (Scan and analyze Data) that let you scan sectors to get data and other bonuses and then use that data to get more bonuses. I will say there is more ways to get data, such as landing on some planets/moons, but this is one of the primary ways and the only real way to make use of it. Both of these actions have their own track that are heavily upgradeable.

So by default the scan action will let you mark two signals . So each sector begins with a number of blue signals depending on the sector (I believe its from like 4 to 8) and when you mark a signal you take one of the blue signals as data and replace it with a signal of your color. The data then goes into your data bank that you can use immediately or wait on, but you can only store 6 max before you have to use it.

Once a sector is completely full of players markers, everyone that contributed gets a bonus, and whoever contributed the most gets a bigger bonus (ties goes to whoever does it most recently). This usually means you want to either be the highest contributor or just have one in. But back to the scan action, you can't just choose any of the 8 sectors to scan. By default you will scan the sector in the octant that earth is in, and for your second you will discard one of the cards in the market and scan a sector of the color of that card (this is where that color on the top right comes in). I believe every color corresponds to two sectors so you will have some choice, but I think black cards are rarer then the others (but also have less markers to fill.

#07 - SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
My Score: 8.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/418059/seti-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence

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Me and my own friend played SETI on the second day in the hot games room. This was with a couple who owned the game and had played before multiple before with just the two of them. They really liked the game but wanted to try it with a larger player count as they had only played with just the two of them.

Luckily they were experienced with the game to teach us cause this is a fairly complex game. For full disclosure I am generally a fan of heavier games, typically around the 3.5-4.0 weight on BGG is my sweet spot, but there are some exceptions. I do like lighter games as well, as seen by my other entries but if I'm planning a board game night I'm usually looking to have the main game be around that weight. But usually for these heavier games I am the one learning (usually watching a Watch it Played video) and teaching the game, so it was nice to have someone else explain it.

So yea, we played it with 4 people, and I believe we started at around 8:30 and probably finished around 11 pm so it took about 2 and a half hours with the teach. I thought it was a good length for the type of game it was and didn't feel like it overstayed it's welcome.

So Seti is the fairly typical play a set number of rounds, whoever has the most victory points after the end game calculations is the winner. I will say this is a high scoring game from my experience of one game, I had like 160ish points and finished in second by a large amount. First place had over 200 points.

Since this is a very heavy game I will do my best to give an overview of all the major mechanics without going too in depth into the minutia, but this will still be a long explanation.

So the first thing to talk about is the main board. The main board is dynamic and changes every game and is basically meant to be a pseudo map of the solar system, with the sun in the middle, and various layers of rings around it. The inside ring has earth, venus and mercury, the next one has mars, then saturn and jupiter, and finally neptune and uranus. The on an outside ring you can't actually go to is four sets of 2 "sectors" that are basically other galaxy. So another way you can view it: in the middle is the sun and around it is four rings split into 8 octants with a "sector" at the end of each octant.

So I said the map is random, and that's not just the sector placement, but the rings themselves as well. The first through third rings all move at various points, with the inside ring moving always, the second ring moving 2/3ds of the time and the third ring moving 1/3rd of the time. This is meant to represent that the further out planets take longer to rotate around the sun, and it also means that planets that aren't on the same ring will become closer and further apart as the game progresses. The rings that are rotating are also not the entire ring, there's usually like 2-3 gaps out of the 8 so as they rotate the spaces in those gaps will change (because you are revealing through the gaps). The main other thing on the map other than planets is asteroids but I believe there's a few other things as well. If you want to see what a random setup can look like you can check their randomize site to get an idea https://seti-solarsystem.czechgames.com/

I moved this to the next page so the review is together

I like the way you pick your class/character combo, it gives some customization without being too much for a shorter game like this. The classes and characters have various stats that give you an idea of what their cards focus on. For example I played a mobility character and I had a lot of cards that gave me extra movement or free jumps. I also think it will let you customize your team for the current leviathan and what you need. Ie you might want more power characters for leviathans with a lot of high number teal crystals, while mobility is good for leviathans with harder to reach crystals, but it also might be that a balance is generally desirable.

I also like the grip system (grip is what they call the cards left in your deck) where you might have more impactful turns using all your cards each turn but you will then need to risk having to find a ledge sooner, or you could go ultra conservative and just play one card a turn but take longer to get stuff done. I like the choices it makes you make. I'm also a fan of dual use cards in general where you have to determine which card you want to use for it's effect vs the amount of AP it gives you.

Overall I enjoyed this and would like to try it again with some later leviathans. I only gave it a 7.5 because I feel like I need to play it a few more times to see how it works on the more real leviathans, if it holds up and has the right level of difficulty I think this would bump up.

I don't personally see myself doing each leviathan more than once so there's limited replay value for more, but 17 is a decent number, especially if I get it for a decent price. I also see there's already an expansion planned so that could help mitigate that as well. I've got this on my list to pick up if I see it for the right price.

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Likely to Trend: neutral to positive
Future: Nice quicker co-op game. Will try to pick it up if I see it cheap enough.
Next Game Hint: This space themed board Rotates.

#08 - Leviathan Wilds
My Score: 7.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/358737/leviathan-wilds

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This is the first game on my list that we actually went and checked out from the library. The library is the Dice Tower's collection of games that I believe they bring to all their conventions. You can check out anything in the library, first come first served. They have over 2000 games in the library, a lot of the games are upgraded with better components. It's a pretty impressive collection and they had a decent sized room that was dedicated to it. Checking a game out is pretty simple, they scan the board games barcode, they scan your badge barcode, and then you can't check out another game until you return it. They also have catalogs to help you find games.

Anyway we checked this game out and this was also the only game I played without any strangers the entire time I was there. I basically read through the rules while my friends grabbed some coffee first thing in the morning on the last day.

So Leviathan Wilds is a co-op game where you are working together to climb and heal these giant leviathans. Each leviathan has its own page in a booklet, similar to the maps in jaws of the lion if you are familiar with that. There are 17 different leviathans in the book and each game seems to take around 45 minutes to an hour. There's also different difficulties to improve replayability.

So each leviathan has its own unique set of 5 cards, you will randomly shuffle them and lay them down left to right with the purple side pointing up. You then flip over the first x cards to the teal side pointing up (to clarify the cards are still face down, there's just colors on the the top and bottom). The x here depends on how enraged the leviathan is, with higher difficulties raising the starting enrage meter.

There's also various spots on each leviathan to put either a teal or purple die with a number on it. These represent the crystals that are corrupting the leviathan that you are trying to heal. So you set these dice on the appropriate spots with the appropriate starting values. You also put some mushrooms on the appropriate spots and the board is setup.

Each player will pick a combination of a character and a class, take the cards for both and shuffle them together to form their deck that is around 10 cards. You do any setup specific to the character or class, set your starting health to the max and starting blight to 0 and draw three cards. Each player will also pick a place to start their climber out of the starting spaces (on the one we did it was just the bottom row. After this the game can begin.

So you win the game by healing (removing) all of the dice off the leviathan. A climber dies when their health meets or crosses their blight and at that point the other climbers have one turn each to try to win otherwise you lose the game. There's no time limit per se, but as the game goes on the leviathan gets more and more enraged meaning you get more and more teal sided cards which are more dangerous and damaging.

So a turn is made up of 4 steps. The first step is to reveal the threat, which means flipping over the leftmost facedown leviathan card keeping the appropriate color on the top. (It doesn't resolve yet). This will let you know what the monster is going to do so you can prepare for it on your turn. There's a couple of different things it can do but typical is an attack focusing on one or more of the climbers (usually the active player).

Do note that an attack has a pattern depending on the card, but its center is where the climber is when the card is flipped, not when its resolved. So you will put a little red circle around the targets spot so you know where the attack is originating even after you move. This means you have a chance to move out of the area it's going to affect. It also seems to discourage grouping so you don't accidentally get another player hit by an attack targeting you.

The second part of a turn is to activate the climber. You will typically have three cards in hand, and each card has an effect on the bottom and a number on the top left. You start your turn by playing one of the cards for it's number on the top left which gives you ap for the turn. You can then spend AP on climbing (moving one space orthogonal), jumping (moving 2 spaces orthogonal or one space diagonal), gliding (moving downwards efficiently), resting, healing or striking a crystal. You can also use your cards in your hand or your characters skills at any relevant time

On the topic of resting, by default you do not get the cards you've played into your discard back into your hand. The only way to get them back is by resting, which requires 2 ap and that you are on a ledge. A ledge is a space with a white line beneath it and are scattered through the map, with the entire bottom seeming to be ledges (so you can't fall off the map). The other important thing about ledges is if you ever start falling for any reason you will stop once you reach a ledge.

Falling is interesting in this game, because it doesn't actually hurt you in any way (you are still effected by the spaces you traveled through while falling however) and can actually be desirable in some cases if you need to get down or need to rest. You can end up falling in three ways: voluntarily letting go, entering an "empty" space where there isn't anything to grab onto, or if your deck is ever completely empty. So it might make sense to try and accomplish whatever you are doing and then just get over a ledge and let yourself fall so you can refill your deck and keep going.

The last action to go over is striking a crystal. Striking a crystal takes AP equal to the amount of damage you want to do it. If a dice has a 4 face you can spend 4 ap on a strike to completely remove it, or if you spend 3 it will just flip to the 1 side. You don't have to do it in one go (and sometimes can't for the higher numbers depending on your class. But if you remember I said there are two different dice colors. Purple dice are just normal, damage them until you remove them. But teal dice are blighted and each time you strike them (regardless of the damage you do) you take one point of blight so it encourages bigger fewer attacks on them.

After the climber has finished their turn, the threat now resolves. Attacks resolve based on the red circle, and other types of effects (such as an event that says the highest climber loses 1 health) resolve taking the current state of the game. You typically want to spread the damage around, or have it go to someone with defensive abilities so there's some strategy in tweaking who will be the person targeted during your turn. Once the fifth card is resolved you advance the enrage meter by 1 and shuffle the 5 cards and place them again, flipping the new appropriate number of cards to the teal side.

The final step is the climber draws back to 3 cards, immediately falling if their deck becomes empty.

Overall I enjoyed this a good bit for what it was. We just played the first leviathan on hard difficulty (the third of four difficulties, the enrage started at one card being enraged from the get go). It was still fairly easy but I think that's just the nature of the first leviathan (It was a giant turtle, I actually think they call it the tutorial). I glanced at a few of the later leviathans and they seemed to be harder to move around on and a lot more empty space so I definitely think the game will be challenging on the highest difficulty on some of the leviathans.

You do this for all the weeks of the season, rotating opponents each week. At the end you do a championship game between the two players with the best record, tiebreaker is total points scored. You just play a final week, winner takes all. (In case of a tie for the final week you can either do another week or roll the bench as well, whatever you prefer). You can also do a playoffs if desired for larger player counts. You really have the flexibility to do it however you'd like.

So for a game that is fundamentally a dice rolling game I think this game works for what it is. Just like real fantasy football you can gain an advantage in the draft and the midweek, the events keep it interesting so you have to pivot sometimes. I like the variability it offers in setup, for example I think a season where you play each other player once is optimal so it's not too long, but you have options on how you want to set up your season which is a plus.

I'm pretty sure they are using real teams and player names in the game as well. Although they did state that they only have 20 teams in the game (the team synergies were too hard to hit with all 32 players after playtesting). So if you have football fans, even if they aren't huge board gamers, they would probably enjoy this. It's not hard to play, not too long, and not pure luck but has enough luck where anyone could win.

This is also a game that I could see easily benefitting from expansions. It could be something like adding abilities to players, some kind of home field advantage (maybe stadium cards) or anything to spend money on other than just players.

But overall I liked this more than I expected. It's fast, fun and doesn't overstay it's welcome and is something I could play with a crowd usually wouldn't super be interested in. I don't think I want to spend $70 to pick it up but if I saw it cheap enough I would pick it up. Or if someone else owned it I would play. It is luck based so I don't think I'd want to do a super long season or play it a ton, but a short season I think works, as long as I'm not doing it all the time.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to slightly positive
Future: I would play this in the future, if I saw it cheap I might pick it up to play with my friends that are into football but not huge into board games.
Next Game Hint: This game is a co-op where you work together to save something larger than all of you.

#09 - Huddle: The Fantasy Football Game
My Score: 7.5
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/428717/huddle-the-fantasy-football-game

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So I will preface this but saying I'm not a big sports guy. I've done fantasy football in the past but I don't really enjoy watching sports but didn't mind the stats perspective of it. On my first day at the con while I was walking around checking out the exhibitor area and the demo area (they are right next to each other if I didn't mention this earlier. They put up a wall when the exhibitor area is closed though) I saw this game being demo'd. I though my friends would probably be interested so we went back and tried it out on the third day after they were both there.

The guy demoing it was real chill and went over it and talked a bit about their company. He was the marketing guy who was friends with the developers of the game and was heavily involved which was cool. I don't know if this game is officially out yet, but I believe it's either out real soon or already out.

So onto the game itself. This game is meant to mimic fantasy football of both the draft aspect and the week to week aspect. You determine how long your season is going to be (we did 3 weeks then a finals) and that determines the game length. I think it took us between 30-45 minutes so it's not super long, and I actually think it probably works better with shorter season, probably 3 to maybe 6 weeks at most.

So the first part of the game (and imo the best) is the draft. This game is loosely based off an auction draft but works somewhat differently. You have 9 positions to fill and a certain amount of money for the draft. (I believe its 20 but it might have been 25). You need to fill every position so his recommendation was to put a coin on each position so you didn't accidentally overspend and be stuck. The positions are QB, RB, WR, TE, Flex (RB/WR/TE), K, D/ST and 2 Bench slots. Each card (you are drafting player cards) has a position, a team, a player name and a star rating. The star ratings range from 1-5, with different ranges for each position (kickers cap at 3 for example).

At the start of the draft one person for each position gets flipped. Drafting works in rounds, in each round you must bid at least once, even if you get outbid. There is a minute put on the clock and the draft is realtime. If you want to bid on someone you just have to put your chips there (the chips are colored to each player). So if you are the first to bid on someone you have to put at least 1 chip, next one to bid has to put at least one more than you. There's no order or turns, its a free for all. So what would usually happen is you would immediately see bids on the high star players (for their role, a 3* kicked is still a high star player), then some bids would trickle in for most of the minute and someone may try to snipe a player at the end.

After bidding ends, you go one by one for each player and give it to whoever bid the most and put their chips in the bank, everyone else would get there money back. After everything is resolved you then flip over new players for each position that was bought (the ones that were not bought stay) and begin the next round. You do this until everyone has filled their entire roster.

So there is a surprising amount of depth in the drafting system. Do you want to go big for high star players early or hold back and give more flexibility. Since you have to bid at least once each round getting too many players early could mean you are the first one forced to take that undesirable 2 star TE that has been there the whole time, potentially opening up better options for others. You can also try to sneak in an early low bid on someone you know someone is going to outbid you on to effectively stall. The other thing to note about drafting is that teams matter a little bit. If you have two or more players from a team you get what is effectively a one star bonus to one of the two players (even if one of those players is on the bench). This means a one star kicked may be useless to everyone else but can upgrade your 5* QB to effectively a 6*, even if you just keep the kicker on the bench, adding another layer of strategy here.

So after the draft is the normal season. You carry over any unspent money from the draft, and then get 1 more money for each week in the season (so 3 money for a 3 week season). You also discard all of the unbought players. Each week then starts with a global event and player events. The global event is something that effects everyone, it could be something like teams x and y are on bye so you can't use them this week, or team z gets a bonus this week. We only did a few of these so I'm not sure all of the options but they usually effect some players but not all. Each player also gets their own player event card which typically was something like "this position gets +1 dice this week" or "this position gets -1 dice this week", usually small effects.

The final part of the pre-week is the waiver wire/moving players around. You flip over a new player for each position and people can now bid on them again, similar to during the draft (but only 1 round). This gives players another chance to replace anyone they have on bye (if they don't have someone on their bench that they can move around) and to just generally improve their team. If you buy someone you have to move someone to the free agent pool which anyone is free to take from. People are also free to just rearrange their players as desired. You can also trade if desired.

After everyone has there team set you then get to the weeks game. You pair up with an opponent (we played with 4, it plays up to 6 with one box but you always want an even number. I think you can do 12 with 2 boxes as well). You then compete with probably the weakest part of the game. You roll dice position by position (bench doesn't count). You get one dice for each star of the player, plus any modifiers, including the team bonus (only 1 player on the team gets the bonus, but the other player can be benched). After you've rolled all the players you add up each teams total and the highest score wins.

bump, still enjoying this but i finished the second palace now

#10 - Marvel Dice Throne
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/438727/marvel-dice-throne-x-men-iceman-v-psylocke-v-storm

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Dice Throne was right! King of Tokyo would have also fit, but I didn't play it at the convention, and I have played it once before but almost a decade ago at this point.

Anyways yea I have somehow never played Dice Throne before. I'm generally lukewarm on dice game (but craps is the best casino game). But It was set up in the hot games area and my one friend wanted to try it. This was actually the last game I played at the convention as well.

We were joined by a nice fourth who actually owned one of the sets but never had a chance to play it before and wanted to learn how to play. And there was a guy who taught all four of us how to play and had played extensibility before (he's really big into the co-op mode which he largely does solo).

I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with Dice Throne so I'll just give a higher level overview. Each player plays as a character with their own board and deck of cards. On their board are various abilities that correspond to rolls (such as 3 of one symbol, 4 different symbols, a small straight, or all 6s for your ultimate). Characters then also have some status effects that they can apply, sometimes have passive effects and a defensive ability.

You take turns being the attacker. On your turn you will draw a card, gain a CP and can play cards from your hand for their CP cost (You can also discard a card for a CP). It has some similarities to Magic in that you have various kinds of cards with different timing windows that determine when you can play them, with some of them being playable on opponents turns. An example that I think every or most characters have is to change a dice to a 6. Some cards are upgrades to your abilities, making them stronger, some are income based. It seems like the decks have like 10-15 cards that are universal and 15-20 cards that are character specific.

Anyways after your first "Main" phase you now roll to attack. We played 2v2 where who you attack is determined by a dice but this is most commonly played 1v1. Anyways you roll your dice, and can reroll some of your dice up to two times, ala Yahtzee. Once you are done rolling you decide what attack your going to do, people can change your dice if they have a card to prevent the attack and if not the attack resolves. Then effects occur depending on the attack, there's different damage types and for some of them the defender can roll their defense ability. And you pretty much do this until someone wins.

I will say I have played this 1v1 after since my friend bought 5 characters. It's definitely better once everyone knows what they are doing and with smaller player counts. I have since upped my rating to 7.5 for this but I'm keeping the list as-is for my DTE Experience.

Overall though I like the game, and I feel like it doesn't take too long for what it is. It seems fairly well balanced and I like the character variety with different playstyles. Not something I want to play for hours on end but I don't mind a game here or there.

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Likely to Trend: positive
Future: My friend bought some characters so we will be playing this in the future
Next Game Hint: A sports game, an auction game, a dice game. All in one package

#11 - Table Golf Association
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/356954/table-golf-association

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So at the beginning I mentioned there was one minor exception to all games being new to me and this is it. At last year me and my friend demo'd the game for like 5 minutes at their exhibition booth. We didn't really play it last year but I was already familiar.

This game we played on the last day I was there. I'm not quite sure the arrangement but they had their own side room separate from the main exhibitor hall. They were holding a tournament each day with prizes. How it worked was there was three qualifiers each day (I think it was Thursday, Friday and Saturday) with up to 16 people each.

The three of us joined a qualifier on Saturday. They had four holes set up and we played in groups of 4 rotating around the holes. The top score moves on to the finals later in the day. My friends are pretty into golf (I'll play it occasionally if I'm not busy) so they wanted to play. I actually ended up tying for first in the qualifier (one friend was one behind me and one did awful) with a kid that was probably 12-13. We then did a tiebreaker where you have one shot to get the closest to the hole, he went first and knocked it off the board twice so I won by default. He was fairly upset so I actually felt bad about it.

Anyways I moved on to the finals which was a final three where we played all four holes. The winner was a guy who practiced a lot. He won a big box version of the game. I got second and won the small box version (so my review may be slightly biased) and third place won $50 in credit. (The small box is only worth $55 so second and third were pretty equivalent). My friend then paid to upgrade the small box to the big box pro version (basically the top of the line product with 70 tiles instead of 25 and a better material) and I just gave him the game. So he ended up with the $180 version for $95 with the convention discount they were getting.

Anyways onto what the game actually is. This game is a dexterity game basically mimicking golf. The game has a lot of hexagon tiles that have different terrains printed on them (These are just images, they are all the same texture). You start on the starting square and are trying to get to the hole in as few shots as possible. You do this by flicking your "ball" (It's a metal ball in a round disc) up along the course until you make it into the hole. It's pretty simple right?

Well there is slightly more to it than that. Earlier I said there are different terrains printed on the tiles meant to simulate things like sand, rough, trees etc. These all impact both how you shoot and how far you can shoot. If you are shooting from a fairway you are allowed to shoot up to 7 hexes away. If you ever shoot too far you go back to where you started and effectively lost your stroke. If you go off the board or land in water or a pit you go back to where you started and take a one stroke penalty, effectively losing 2 strokes.

For trees if there is one on the hex you are shooting from or next to it you put a little tree figure on the board and if you touch it while trying to shoot you get a one stroke penalty. Now if you are on rough or sand or some similar bad terrain your max distance actually goes down. I believe for sand you are allowed to only shoot three hexes away, and rough 4. And to simulate it being a harder shot they also make you shoot with your non-dominant hand (sometimes with specific fingers). I don't remember specifically which for which but sometimes you can only shoot with your non-dominant thumb.

So overall its fairly simple but with enough to add some strategy on where your trying to shoot and such, they have little played aids that say how each terrain works. You can also incorporate wind somehow normally (They don't do it for tournaments as it slows it down). I like the hex system for building courses as it gives you a lot of flexibility in how you design them.

I enjoyed my time with it overall, tournament idea is cool, only problem is they had one hole that was way longer than the rest so it was somewhat of a bottleneck. Rules are easy to understand, the only thing that's a little weird is if you shoot it too far and then go off the board I think shooting it too far would take effect so you wouldn't get the stroke penalty which is kind of weird. The trees are actually from their meeple beach expansion so a few things aren't in the base game.

I'm not the biggest dexterity game fan, they are fine but not really why I come to board games. But my friends enjoy it and I don't mind doing it for a bit. I personally think this is kind of expensive for it's normal cost, but at essentially half off it's not a bad deal. Since my friend has it now I'm sure we'll play more, but probably not more than like 2-3 holes at a time due to space constraints. It doesn't take super long to play either as long as someone else sets it up lol.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral to slightly positive
Future: Will play at my friend's place if he sets it up

Next Game Hint: I have somehow never played this before, but it's basically battle Yahtzee.

So I just realized I fucked up the numbering by copy+pasting my basic review structure.

Here is the correct rankings for everything so far

12. 25 words or Less
13. Res Arcana
14. Portals
15. Emberleaf
16. Deep Regrets
17. Alliances
18. Wild Realms

#15 - 25 Words or Less (1996)
My Score: 7.0
BGG Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/621/25-words-or-less

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So I played this game for maybe 20-30 minutes. I had some time waiting for Res Arcana to start and was just walking around when I saw some people playing this and joined in. I had never heard of the game show before but the guy running the game was actually one of the people that run the actual game show (I believe he was in charge of the electronics) so that was cool. I may have to check out an episode at some point.

Also sorry I was apparently wrong with my hint. The game show was based off this game, and they are making another version of this game based off of the show.

Anyways about the game. This is a fairly simple party game played in teams. In our case we were playing 2v2 for most of the time. One person from each team is picked to give the clues for each round. The two clue givers then get together and draw a clue card. Each clue card has two sides with 5 words listed on each side. They then collectively decide which side they like better (no idea what happens if they disagree). They then start "bidding" on who will give the clues that round.

So when you bid you can start with any number less than or equal to 25 words and you bid downwards. So basically what's happening is "I think I can do it in 20 words", "I think I can do it in 19 words" until one player drops out. The other player is then the clue giver for that round.

Once that is decided you then give the player that many words and 60 seconds on the clock. (The host had an app we used for this, not sure how its normally done). You can then say that many words total to get them to guess all 5 words. You start top and go down, you can pass on a word and come back to it later. If your team successfully guesses all 5 words you get a point, if you run out of time the other team gets a point. I believe you play to 10 points but its a party game so you can kind of just do whatever you want.

Overall its a pretty simple game. It was a fun short experience, something I could see playing with my family. I don't have a ton to say here other than that I enjoyed it and would consider picking it up if I see it cheap enough somewhere.

Also I just want to note that I kind of treat party games like these and heavier games like Res Arcana different in rankings. I would generally rather play Res Arcana for an hour than this for an hour but I would be playing them with different groups of people so I factor that in. My family could play this, they couldn't play Res Arcana.

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Likely to Trend: Neutral
Future: Wouldn't mind playing with my family

Next Game Hint: This is a dexterity game based on a sport. Not my usual cup of tea but my friends wanted to do a tournament they had and it was enjoyable.

Both res arcana and race for the galaxy are on bga so I could be convinced to play either at some point