If you’re interested in the actual game, SUSD does a review with as usual a good mechanics description.
I downloaded the Tigris & Euphrates app a few weeks before I got my physical game. I learned about this game from Rym & Scott’s lecture videos and no surprises, it really is an amazing game… kind of like Go and a Euro had a baby. I think it took me a solid 10-15 plays on the app before I started wrapping my head around it and understanding some of the tactics & strategies. I’ve played it at different player counts and kept losing at the 3-4p counts but once I played a few 2p games, the game really started clicking for me and I’ve been winning a lot more games now. Pretty obsessed with this one right now.
Having played it more than probably any other Euro, it never gets tiresome. Y&Y only heightened my love of T&E. They complement eachother.
Played my first game of Concordia earlier today. It certainly lived up to its name and I really had a lot of fun playing this one. There are so many different ways to play it and I can’t wait to really go deep with this game.
After that, I played a solo game of Nations. Did WAY better than my first game.
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Commands & Colors: Ancients
Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage
Pax Pamir 2e
Arkham Horror: Living Card Game
The 7th Continent
Champions of Hara
Anthony and I started Friday at GK playing Commands & Colors (since most of our usual friends hadn’t arrived yet) and I was soundly defeated in two consecutive cavalry skirmishes. Then Mike showed up and chased me up and down the Mediterranean in Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage. Not complaining, I learned a lot watching someone with years of experience.
We have so much 7th Continent stuff now. I properly took out the graph paper and started mapping for future curses, since we’re trekking back over territory we already know.
Champions of Hara is great, btw - but the best scenario is buried among all the others in the back of the book. If you want to play co-operatively, play Lights in the Dark - you get to use everything, and the quests extend the game an extra round or two.
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Got in a great afternoon of gaming today and 3 wins made it even better…
Played my physical copy of Tigris & Euphrates for the first time today! Played a 2P game with an American friend who was playing it for the first time. Took me about 20 minutes or so to teach him then we were off to the races. Considering it was his first time, he played really well and picked up the tactics pretty quickly. I ended up winning 18-12. I’m really in love with this game.
After that, we played a 2P game of Concordia. He’s played before so we had a pretty tense game. I ended up winning 128-113 with a strategy that came together towards the end of the game. I really felt like I was losing the entire game.
We wrapped up the day with a game of Carcassonne. After watching Rym and Scott’s How to Play Carcassone video, my gameplay is a lot more solid now and I crushed my friend 128-85.
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Taught my good Taiwanese gaming friend two games tonight…
Played a 2P game of Nations and ended up crushing him 41-10. Despite losing so handily, my friend absolutely loved the game so I think we’ll definitely be getting it to the table a lot in the near future.
After that, we squeezed in a game of Tigris & Euphrates before the game shop closed. I won 13-7.
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Friday I played a rather fun C&C: Ancients magazine scenario with @DemoWeasel, and Strike of the Eagle with Bill.
On Saturday, we finished the new two-parter Exit - increased budget for components (money AND size) and an extra hour make it stand out from the earlier Exit games - and the puzzles were just the right level of challenge without being unfair.
Caravan would feel perfectly at home if Uberplay or ABACUSSPIELE published it in the late 90s, almost like a companion piece to Samarkand/Bazaar II or Santiago. Make them into a desert / square grid series. 
Plus revisiting Mansions of Madness and Ticket to Ride: New York.
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We had a typhoon day in northern Taiwan today so a few of my friends and I got in a long half-day of gaming in:
We first started a 4-player game of Nations, which was an absolute blast. Two of the four players were first-timers, so the game ended up lasting over 3 hours, but fortunately everyone was really enjoying the game the entire time. I really enjoy civilization games as it is so I’m really happy my group really likes this one.
After an early dinner break, we followed up with a 3-player game of Ora et Labora, which I’m happy to say I won be a decent margin. This game is such a brain burner, but I have to say I’m quite obsessed with it. I haven’t evenly remotely cracked the synergies between the different buildings so I think this game will be getting a lot of plays going forward.
Oh yes, give me a Uwe Rosenburg game any day and I will play the hell out of it!
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It’s a cliche, but expansions are a good way to push a game in a universe where everyone just wants to play new, shiny things. This weekend we inaugurated new stuff for Hara, Legendary, Homesteaders, and Ancients.
Had a bunch of people over at my place over the weekend.
We played a six player game of Imperial 2030, a four player game of Deus, a four player game of Century Spice Road, a two player game of Antike Duellem, a two player game of 7 Wonders Duel, and a six player game of Codenames.
Overall, it was a pretty great weekend of board gaming!
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The Dune boardgame re-release is accepting pre-orders on GaleForce9’s site. Check out Polygon’s writeup on it.
Everdell: Pearlbrook, because @DemoWeasel was playing it all weekend
Sean and I had a blast with Napoleon’s Triumph, such an incredibly cool game - the giant board and unusual blocks drew a lot of attention, but the way combat is resolved is a wonderful bit of magic.
During the week Anthony and I did more Greco-Punic and Greco-Persian battles in Commands & Colors: Ancients. Plus more Detective: City of Angels, Champions of Hara, and On Tour.
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Had a guest this weekend, hence the big list of games… Friday at the store was Pax Pamir 2e and Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea. 4p is such a perfect number for Pax Pamir - the first count where players are forced to work together. ACIS was a hell of a roller coaster with a rare group of players - we had Joe (who I bought my copy of Napoleon’s Triumph from) in the store for the first time, and Mike came up from Delaware to run the Trojan public-works program.
The rest of the weekend was great fun… another Detective case that was solved in 6 actions (it’s a funny story), the most broken turn I’ve seen in a while in Spirit Island, and the narrowest possible victory in Champions of Hara.
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I haven’t been playing board games for a little bit, but I stopped into the Bard & Baker in Troy and got my girlfriend, who isn’t much of a gamer person, to play Puerto Rico with me and some friends of ours and she loved it! I’m now slowing ramping up through the more complicated/intricate board games to help develop her heuristics so she can pick them up faster. I may even get her and I out to Unplugged this year!
I bought far too many small games, recently. I was hoping to play more at my family reunion, as Betrayal at the House on the Hill was a big hit last year and I hoped for another. No luck as such.
However, I have a lot to play, now. I tried Trash Pandas and it was very fun. You’re a raccoon digging for trash. It’s a card game with a die mechanic, every turn you roll for what tokens (dictating actions) you can take and the challenge is to push your luck. You roll for the same token twice in a turn and you lose all the tokens you collected. The rest is victory points- collect the most of whatever trash item for more points.
It was cheap and fun with wacky artwork, I would play it again.
Sometimes its the small things…
The game is Nemesis btw. Unfortunately it still looks like there are too many components so this empty space will have have to hold some tokens :X
Nothing like designed inserts. Honestly it might be the thing I’m most hype for in the Suburbia Collectors Edition this fall.
I played a game of Raccoon Tycoon today which is a pretty good economics game with cute animal pictures. In the game you manipulate the prices of six different types of commodities, produce and sell them when its most opportune to you. The game also has a bidding mechanic and different ways of achieving victory points, and an optional hidden goal mechanic which we used and I think definitely helped the game. I also very much liked the card mechanic as the cards only let you simultaneously manipulate the prices and produce goods, but usually not the same goods for both parts of the card, meaning you have to plan a number of turns (both yours and your opponents) in advance.
I won that game, and I think largely through two key decisions at the start and end of the game. In the beginning you get two hidden goals and chose one. I had the option of between a goal that would give me 10 victory points if I had the most money at the end of the game, and a different goal that would give me one victory point per coal commodity in my coffers at the end of the game. The former seemed more riskier as an all-or-nothing proposition, so I chose the later. At the end of the game I had a bunch of coal saved up which I could have chosen to sell off to have money and be able to bid at an auction later, but I took the bird in hand instead of the two in the bush, and chose to play a card that would allow me to produce another three coal, though I had to discard some other commodity tokens because I didn’t have enough space left. This turned out to be my final action in the game anyway and it won me the game as the coal card gave me 12 victory points in the end (so more than the money goal would have given me anyway) and that was the difference of victory by three points. I possibly could have done better, but I made the mistake of buying two different types of production cards at the beginning, one for coal and one for iron, and the one for iron I rarely used and didn’t bother to upgrade, though maybe that also had good value to deny it from another player.
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