But you get a SECOND CHANCE!
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Pax Pamir: Khyber Knives - I just spent an entire weekend with 2e, so I had to revisit the original plus the expansion material. You still can’t blink without stumbling into a pit, which I was distracted enough to do on Friday. This used to be my least favorite Pax series game but I’ll let it back into the cool kids club so it can continue to punish me. This is what I want right now.
Quartermaster General: The Cold War - missing some of the team-based magic of WW2 and 1914, because you can acutely feel any disparity in experience between players with no one to fall back on. Learning games can go funny, and the instant-win condition is too wide if players aren’t willing to collude to hammer the biggest nail.
The Rise of Queensdale - After a dozen games, still lovely in its low-key way.
Near and Far: Amber Mines - Second edition via expansion - presented as new modules, but nearly everything replaces some aspect of the original game. Fine game, very fun stories (imagine a domesticated and tamed Tales of the Arabian Nights hitched up to a resource conversion game) - but you have to keep your eyes on the prize. It’s easy to lose sight of points with so many goodies to play with.
You know how I know Crown of Emara is good?
I had a dream about it last night. I was playing it in a dream. I have a wood-based strategy now because of that dream.
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Can’t wait to get a game in next time we meet.
I want to master the book and the bread, just like real life.
Got in my first full game of Castles of Burgundy today. It was a 2-player game and I ended up losing 158 to 169. The game is a lot of fun and I really enjoy the different mechanics going on in the game. The city building aspect of the game is really satisfying too and even though I ended up losing, it’s cool to see what you built at the end.
I focused on completing the building, livestock and knowledge sections at the expense of the boat and mine sections (we both used board 1), which my opponent exploited quite well. I was able to successfully complete the 5-tile livestock and building section, and also complete the two 3-tile knowledge sections.
In some of the general CoB strategies that I’ve read online, a good player should be able to get well over 200 points, so there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. Looking forward to getting a lot more plays in.
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Castles of Burgundy is a favorite in our household because it does scale really well down to the two players and I love how the routes are (seemingly) equally viable. When I play I will usually rush to get mines and castles as soon as possible since they take the least time to get and you get those bonuses for finishing first, plus extra silver from the mines is a big boost. After that I tend to go buildings and shipping if no one else is doing it, and then get whichever knowledge tiles make sense. I almost never go livestock unless I’m on a board where it makes sense, and it also depends on who I’m playing. Katie (my wife) always goes livestock, so I don’t compete with her on it.
It is definitely true that once you get used to it, getting over 200 points gets more common, so you’ll get there.
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I’m a big fan of Castles of Burgundy too. I do like to try to get the mines early as well, since the extra money goes a long way towards filling up your estate by letting you buy new tiles without spending an action. Beyond that, I always like to buy into the knowledge tiles and let the loadout of those determine the rest of my strategy, figuring out which rules they will let me break this time. If there’s one or two knowledge tiles that influence what happens when you buy or use workers, that makes getting those feel like a much less wasteful action.
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I’m not sure if you guys have seen Rym and Scott’s video on Carcassonne, but the impression I’m getting after a few plays is that the same strategies apply to CoB as well, especially:
- Completing smaller sections (more difficult to complete the larger sections), especially because you can get 10 or 8 points per section completion in the first 2 phases.
- Paying attention to your opponent’s board and denying them tiles that will help them complete sections
I’ll have to get more plays in before I can provide any more insights but I’m having a lot of fun with this game.
That makes a lot of sense for sure. I just haven’t been able to put in enough reps with the same people to get them up to speed to where the cutthroat denial strategies are needed, so my playstyle has been more of the solitaire variety. I found that I like to work out a primary, secondary, and tertiary color focus, basically trying to advance those in order of priority whenever possible, and if none of those 3 options are available, choosing something that will make it easier or more lucrative to do those in the future instead, like knowledge or mines. Bonus if you can chain an action to hit more than one focus with a single die. I used to largely ignore the trade goods you get from the ships, but I found that they can be leveraged to great effect if you go into a game expecting to use them, especially if the relevant knowledge tiles come up.
How do you all store and sort the tiles for the game? I couldn’t deal with the default packaging, so I bought Plano box to sort the tiles into, and I put them into a small dice bag one color at a time to randomize them between rounds.
I use a Plano box as well and divide the tiles by color. Then I divide the tiles into two sections: one for the ones that are all the same (ships, castles, mines) and the ones that vary (livestock, knowledge, black, buildings and goods tiles). Helps shorten the set-up time significantly.
Played Agricola for the first time tonight. It was a 4-player game with 3 first time players so it turned into an all night event. Managed to score a 20 (not sure if that’s good or bad). Despite the play time, I really enjoyed it and love the challenge and tension that the seasonal feedings present on a regular basis. My brain is a little fried but now that I know the ropes I look forward to playing again.
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How to win Agricola:
You know that the first card that lets you make babies is in one of three spots. Make absolutely sure that you have everything necessary to make a baby before that action becomes available. Then, make sure you take the action that lets you go first. Keep taking the action that lets you go first until the baby card appears, and then make the first baby. If you make the first baby, you have more actions in the game than all the other players, and your chances of winning are increased dramatically.
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The other option is to get dealt/draft the right hand to do something ridiculous like completely ignore farming and build a mansion without ever taking Family Growth.
But yes, the earlier you take family growth, the more actions you get, the more points you can generate. The “more actions = better” phenomenon is quite pronounced in Agricola relative to other worker placement games.
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Yup, babies are the way!
From the other thread where we acquired new board games, we played a few of them that night.
Ursa Miner: Nice fun, easy to learn/play game, with cute theme and bear tokens. You’re essentially trying to mine the most honey at the same time trying to outwit/block your opponents from acquiring honey. You do that by removing the hexes and making your area of where you can go smaller, making your decisions a bit more difficult.
It’s fun. I would definitely play it again and bring it to cons to show people.
Nefarious: also another fun game. It’s a race to get points by deciding 1 of 4 actions to make inventions, acquire money, acquire inventions to eventually create, and spy on your opponents. Simple to learn/play and pretty fast.
The formula to win is “get your extra spies out first” to be able to acquire money faster than your opponents to get make inventions to win. However, it’s the 2 Twists that change up the game for playability. They are essentially 2 rules that limit your game play in a certain way. That’s where the game brings playability and variation. It’s not really a huge challenge, but it’s solvable, but overall fun with theme.
Barhen Park: bought a week ago. It’s Tetris to where you need to get boards filled up the fastest. If you can get the bigger “crane” pieces first as well as complete the statues, you will more or less have a better chance of victory. I was behind the entire game. Next time I will be more aggressive in getting the bigger more rare pieces.
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Jumped from a full game of Escape Plan into Triumph & Tragedy with Sean and Bill. We had to call it in 1940, but not before I made a hopeless amphibious invasion of Leningrad.
Dan, Anthony and I played games 13-14 of Rise of Queensdale, case 3 in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and Roll for the Galaxy: Rivalry. Some clever expansion pieces explain the strange orange-bordered tiles in the picture.
On Sunday Anthony kindly agreed to climb a mountain with me and hear me explain the rules for Empire of the Sun, along with half of the magazine scenario in the box.
This afternoon I got together with some friends to play Azul and Tzolkin. I haven’t played Tzolkin in years, so it took me a little while to remember how to play and to figure out how the game worked again.
My friend got Tzolkin as a Christmas present, and I asked him if I could paint the plastic gears for him, since I had seen some people on BGG do that, I thought it would be fun to paint, and it would really add to the game, instead of just having the plain plastic gears. I was painting them off and on over a couple months, but finally finished them, and this was the first time my friend had seen the finished gears and the first time we played with them.
The game was a lot of fun and the gears really made the board pop! You can see the progression in the pictures below from the unpainted gears to the final versions. I’m really happy with how they turned out and my friend was blown away at how good they looked compared to the out-of-the-box gears.
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Looks awesome, is that all drybrushing?
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A lot of the surface areas, mainly the gray and the silver, were drybrushing. The small gears and the gold, red, green, and blue on the big gear were painted using a fine detail brush.