During the week, @DemoWeasel and I (successfully) played CO2: Second Chance - seems like we got lucky, or 2p is the easiest player count. Friday saw a quick run through Fort Sumter, two separate games of Cryptid, and a few hands of Sticheln before sitting down with Sean for a game of…
Combat Commander, where I simply could not keep smoke on the battlefield - by the end we were nearly in tears with “really breezy night, huh?” The best part about Combat Commander is that every game generates half a dozen moments worth retelling.
Before closing out the store on Friday, I also snuck into a game of nearly-forgotten HiG game Hawaii with @DemoWeasel and two of our friends. I nabbed a lot of very inexpensive tikis and kahunas early on and drove that to victory in our all-beginners game… I’m fond of of the sideways take on worker placement in Hawaii, just a good balance of flexibility and player interaction.
On the weekend, Anthony, Dan and myself got to play Robinson Crusoe: Mystery Tales, which has successfully disrupted the approach we have used to win the last couple times, and also put together our decks for another Arkham Horror TCG campaign.
Two incomplete wargame plays - The very short Napoleon: The Waterloo Campaign (Wellington was absolutely crushed in the first real engagement and we called it for Napoleon there) and Empire of the Sun: South Pacific (we had each made enough of a mess of ourselves by 1943 that we called it at the start of the last turn).
I’ve been playing the digital version of Isle of Skye recently and really like the game. That being said, I have no idea how to play the auction phase of the game where you price the value of two pieces and “axe” one piece you don’t want. I recall Rym and Scott saying in their talks that people are usually really bad at auctioning and bidding. What are some general principles/strategies that one should keep in mind while playing games with these auction mechanics?
For Isle of Skye specifically, keep a keen eye on everybody else’s kingdoms. If you end up drawing a tile that you know someone will really want, you should price it so that it’s on the higher end of reasonable. If you have a tile someone will really, REALLY want, then you axe it. Can’t risk them getting too many points off it.
Start by developing a heuristic for yourself to determine the maximum you are willing to pay for a piece. Keep tinkering with it until you are getting good value when you are a buyer.
Once you become a good buyer, it’s now easy to become a good seller. Apply that same heuristic of pricing pieces, but just put yourself in the shoes of every other player. If you know what is a good price for them to be paying, do your best to get them to overpay.
Turn order is also important in Isle of Skye - if you are first in turn order you can’t tie up all of your money pricing your own tiles and ALSO purchase another player’s tile. (Although - this could be correct if you only intend to buy your own tiles)
Been soloing Empire of the Sun: South Pacific some more
the most striking thing this has shown me:
the US made a lot of airplanes and a lot of boats after the war started… like, a lot
24 Essex class carriers didn’t sound like a lot before, but it sure is
wipe out nearly the entire fleet in April, a brand new one just shows up in May.
Dude, the first years of the war there are ridiculous. It’s like, 4 carriers total on each side barely capable of operations. Losing an entire air wing to wound one carrier was a victory by many standards.
The war was won before we even deployed most of our naval assets. We build more ships in the last year of the war than in the rest of the war**
**Depending on what you count, lots of caveats, etc…
If you want to get a real sense of it all, this is probably the best source.
On our kitchen table, there is currently an unassailable fleet of Japanese battleships operating out of Rabaul and the eastern end of New Guinea, except… the US has an endless supply of resources and Japan can’t actually replace its losses fast enough (eventually, not at all). Japan’s victory condition is a conditional surrender.
And that settles it - New Zealand’s only unit gets MVP. Soloing this was quite helpful, because I can actually teach some strategy that completely eluded me the first two times Anthony and I played. Especially using operations for broad smothering attacks - your opponent can’t respond to everything at once.
And then there’s the full campaign scenario with the entire Pacific theater.
Got in a full 4-5 hours of gaming in this afternoon.
Started off with a 2P game of Castles of Burgundy. I played really well this game and crushed my opponent 212-170.
After that, played my first game of 7 Wonders Duel. I really enjoyed this game and liked the balance between strategic consideration and speed of play. It was our first time playing so we were really just feeling things out. Look forward to playing this more in the future.
Finally, played a 4P game of Orleans (just the base game). I had played a 2P game of this once before but wasn’t able to finish, so this was my first time playing a full game. I made a bunch of mistakes that took me out of the running pretty early on but I can’t wait to play this game again.
Yeah, two Japanese field armies on New Guinea there, not getting dislodged anytime soon (they’re stacked with some carriers that are keeping them supplied from the combined fleet HQ). New Zealand’s only a division, a tenth their size but they snuck onto the Admiralty Islands with that carrier group. And since it was the last cardplay, and supplied ports are the win condition in this scenario, that was the winning play.
Castles of Burgundy has been enjoying quite a run - it was recommended to me when I started playing games in 2012, although it was relatively new at that point. It never clicked with me, and I never see it played locally (I think the local would-be Feld fans are playing Terra Mystica and Terraforming Mars, instead), but it’s probably still his most popular game.
Friday Fast Food Franchise! Ice Cream emerged victorious. If you were there, you would say the dice were blessed.
Triumph & Tragedy found us in a unique situation where eastern Europe collapsed so quickly that Rome fell to the USSR in 1940… while Germany was off gallivanting around Spain.
On Saturday, we took our Arkham Horror TCG decks to Carcosa and failed the first scenario so thoroughly that we called a mulligan and restarted it. Five experience points bought a few nice upgrades right away… trying to take inexpensive cards, because I drew a big pile of overdue bills for my basic weakness.
New Frontiers finally clicked. Every Race for the Galaxy game is now the favorite of a different group of friends (That’s Race, Roll, New Frontiers… maybe not Jump Drive).
I’ve been playing the Arkham Horror LCG with my netrunner crew and it’s been really fun; I played through the entire carcosa campaign and put together a pretty busted Wendy Bow deck. Unfortunataely, I drew the DOOMED! weakness, so my entire idea for a draw engine got shut down hard. Weirdly, I did not die from my weakness over the course of the campaign, although I did get to the Bell Tolls for Thee, so it was pretty close.
I also gave it a hard pass when it first came out. The first scenario was super boring and the card pool was pretty small, so there wasn’t much room for deck building. The interesting thing for me right now is the deckbuilding mechanics. Since swapping out cards costs xp, you need to make sure your base deck has the cards to survive the initial encounter while still having cards that combo well with your intial deck and your later deck.
Sort of; each scenario has things you need to do, but there are also things you can do to get xp. If you keep skimping out on the things that give xp, you won’t have a deck that can handle the later scenarios. However, getting xp tends to involve wasting time, fighting things that it’s a bad idea to fight, or just bad ideas in general. It adds some interesting risk/reward elements to each scenario that I think isn’t really present if you play it as a one off. I think my favorite deckbuilding snippet so far was I bought this card that gave me more XP, but if I ever got knocked out, I was immediately dead. I got so terrified of getting knocked out, that I got my entire team knocked out(and murdering myself), because I turned into this greedy, cowardly jerk from running around with this card.
This sounds even more like Slay the Spire. Do I fight that Elite to get a relic, or do I skip it because the Elite might kill me? Without the relic I might not be able to beat any bosses after the Elite, though.
