Category: Snippets

My kickstarter copy of Tiny Epic Western has finally arrived. Very nice production and the gameplay looks interesting. Hoping to play soon.

In September, I didn’t manage to play any games due to my house move and family stuff. In fact, I didn’t play anything between 12th August and 5th October – which could be a record for me. October wasn’t much better but I did manage to play 10 games of 7 different titles, 3 of which were new to me. The new games were:

Holmes: Sherlock & Mycroft – This is a very neat two-player worker placement, set collection game. Your workers visit different Holmesian characters with new characters turning up in each of the 7 rounds and you’re aiming to claim majorities in the various card sets for VPs at the end of the game. Jan and I really liked this.
Codenames: Pictures – Just the same game as regular Codenames but with pictures rather than words. I didn’t think this worked as well because the pictures are Dixit-like and you tended to spend more time working out what was in the pictures than giving clues. I’d much rather stick to the word version.
Fields of Green – This is supposedly a re-implementation of Among the Stars but I’ve never played the earlier incarnation. However, it worked well as a tableau builder where the positioning of your cards to gain synergies with surrounding cards was the key to doing well.

I added 13 new games to the collection: Chariot Race, Codenames: Pictures, Cottage Garden, Eminent Domain: Microcosm, Fabled Fruit, The Game of 49, Kingdomino, La Granja: The Dice Game – No Siesta, Multiuniversum, Oceanos, Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, Sola Fide: The Reformation and Tides of Madness. I also got rid of three titles and re-acquired two, which leaves my total collection at 535.

My list of unplayed games has risen from 4 at the end of August to 15 now (due to all the Essen releases, even though I didn’t manage to go this year) and my Game of the Month was Holmes: Sherlock & Mycroft.

In August, my gaming was very limited due to preparations for moving house so I only managed to play 9 games of 8 different titles, 3 of which were new to me. The new games were:

The Grizzled: At Your Orders – Only tried the solo rules and they work pretty well.
Warhammer Quest: Adventure Card Game – First play through tutorial. Thought I was going to win but forgot one of my characters was bleeding and they died the turn before I would have won. Need to explore this more in September.
Mystic Vale – Excellent new “card crafting” system with lots of options for how to construct your deck and a nice push your luck mechanism. Really impressed with this.

I sold 12 games and added 6 new games to the collection: The grizzled; At Your Orders, Warhammer Quest: Adventure Card Game, Thief’s Market, Holmes: Sherlock & Mycroft, Matcha and Musee. My total collection stands at 523.

I have 4 unplayed games in my collection and my Game of the Month is Mystic Vale.

Well it seems to have taken a long time but on Wednesday we’ll be moving out of our current house after having lived in it for ten years. The games room is all packed (37 boxes) and they’ll be going into storage for a couple of weeks, as we don’t move into our new place until 13th September.

All that remains is for me to thank the folks at the Shrewsbury Boardgames Club for putting up with me for the last 15 years and wish them all the best in whatever new home they end up playing in. Unfortunately, my new place isn’t as big and so does not have the massive games room we’ve been thankful for over the last ten years. However, we’re trying to work out where the gaming space is going to be and I still have to see which, if any, of the Cheshire games groups will work for me.

Gaming’s likely to be sparse for the next few weeks so I’ll see you on the other side.

Tip of the hat to Billy Joel for the post title.

Just a notice for my game group (and anyone else interested) that my seventh geeklist auction is now running until the evening of Thursday 4th August.

The 24 games included this time are:

Carcassonne collection
Broom Service: The Card Game
Say Bye to the Villains
Flip City
Royal Goods
Oltremare
Forbidden Desert
Bang: A Fistful of Cards
Master Thieves: The Robber expansion
Settlers: The Fishermen of Catan
Phoenicia
Edel, Stein & Reich
Schoko & Co.
Maloney’s Inheritance
Knock Out
Australia
Il Principe
Jolly Roger
Top & Down
Hispaniola
Pizarro & Co
Tycoon
Port Royal
Armchair Cricket

In July, I only managed to play 13 games of 12 different titles, 5 of which were new to me. The new games were:

Molkky – Fantastic outdoor dexterity game that I’m amazed I’ve not discovered until now (thanks Messrs. Boydell and Bateson). Our lawn is a bit spongey meaning the pins were prone to falling over by themselves. However, this is a great way to spend a summer evening after a barbecue.
Broom Service: The Card Game – Stripped down to the bare bones of playing a card in either cowardly or brave orientation to collect sets of the same type of card with bonuses for the number of times you are brave and for collecting certain combinations. I thought this played ok but it doesn’t have quite the same appeal as the board game.
FUSE – Ten minute real-time game of rolling dice to get the right combinations to defuse bomb cards. Pretty challenging as a solo game (not tried multi-player yet) and was good fun.
Shakespeare – Very good game of recruiting actors, building stage sets and designing costumes to gain the most points. We played with the Backstage expansion which adds another layer for how you use your workers.
Tatsu – Interesting two player abstract that is a bit reminiscent of Backgammon but, rather than getting all your pieces off the board, you’re trying to either keep your opponents pieces from entering the board or eliminating one set of the three types of pieces. Having played once, keen to play again.

I sold 23 games and added 3 new games to the collection: Fuse, Tatsu and Mystic Vale. My total collection stands at 529.

I have just one unplayed game in my collection and my Game of the Month is Molkky.

Having challenged myself in 2015 to reduce my collection by 365 games, which was about a third of my total collection and succeeded in selling over 400, this year I’m going to see if I can get my collection down to below 400 games, which means again selling about a third of the games I own. This is the sixth auction towards this goal and runs until the evening of Thursday 14th July. Here is the link

The 40 games included this time are:

Master Thieves
Castellion
Pentago
Guildhall
Baseball Highlights 2045: Deluxe Edition
Cheeky Monkey
Nations: The Dice Game
Spectaculum
Pole Position
Speed Circuit
My Village
Holiday AG
Schrille Stille
Cuba
Havana
M
Power Grid incl. Taxes promo
Power Grid: France/Italy
VeloCity
Oasis
Schoko & Co.
Tycoon
Yeti Slalom
TIME Stories: A Prophecy of Dragons
Industria
Pluckin’ Pairs
Camel Up
Maloney’s Inheritance
The Hobbit
Phoenix
Robo Rally
Age of Assassins
Mogul
Sobek
Scharfe Schoten
Flash 10
One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Of Mice and Lemmings
Templar Intrigue
Flickwerk

This week, I got hold of three new games. The Last Spike is one I’ve been interested in for a while due to comments from geek buddies, Doug Adams and Mark Johnson. It looks like an interesting take on Acquire with a railway building theme. Onitama is a two player abstract played on a 5×5 board where you are attempting either to capture the opponent’s king (sorry, master) or get your master onto the opponent’s home space. However, your movement is limited by the cards in play and there are only five in play and once you play a card, it gets passed for your opponent to use. Finally, Broom Service: The Card Game is a simple set collection game using the brave/cowardly mechanism from the parent game. It also comes with a mini expansion for the board game.