Speaking of excellent small box games!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dailymagicgames/songbirds?
Anyone had any experience with Heroes Wanted? Had a copy offered at rock bottom price.
Played a bit of the Oh My Goods! Longsdale in Revolt story/solo expansion on Sunday and it was great!
Took 3 attempts to beat chapter one (as I’ve never tried to optimize for food production in my previous games), but the setup was simple and playing against an event deck is definitely less taxing than managing a bot player.
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Was at the Terminal City Tabletop Convention this last weekend instead of our regular game day.
Only got 6 games in, but three were long ones, so I think it was still pretty successful.
Started with Fallout, a game I’ve wanted to try for a while now to see if it made me think fondly of the video games.
And it did, though I think it went a little too long with 4 players. We played 2.5 hours plus the 30 or so minutes to teach (maybe less than that, but not a whole lot).
Then played Queendomino along with Kingdomino, using the variant that comes with Queendomino. It was actually a lot of fun, though I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. I did horribly. But it was still pretty good.
Saturday night ended with Eldritch Horror, which I have to try again because this was not a good experience. The game start was delayed for almost 30 minutes due to a friend’s personal issues, and she came back with the personal issue (who also was the owner of the game) so we had to redo the setup for 5 players instead of 4. Then it turns out we were playing the gate-spawning wrong, which means we should have died a lot sooner than we already did.
We also went through 5-6 investigators dying! It was pure madness.
I do want to try it again, though. I can see a game I would enjoy there, but the experience wasn’t the greatest.
Sunday, played 3-player Time of Crisis, where I taught two other players. I won, but it was a close game. Twice my emperor succumbed to a Praetorian Guard rebellion which wasn’t good, but I had still been emperor the most turns at the end of the game, so that was good.
Then I learned a game from AEG called Space Base (first impressions here), which is Machi Koro with a few additions, and it’s actually fun.
Ended the day with Raiders of the North Sea, which continues to be a blast to play even though I suck at it.
All in all, a great weekend was had by all.
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The expansion for Time of Crisis sounds like a must.
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I wouldn’t say it’s a “must” in the sense that the game isn’t that great without it.
But it does sound like it will add a lot of great stuff to it and I hit the P500 button as soon as I heard about it.
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I posted my magnum opus “New to Me Games - March” post today.
Finished March with 21 games played 24 times, with 12 new ones.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to match that in future months. 
Any new games you think I should try out?
Vengeance?
What’s that?
Board game version of a revenge film. Protagonist(s) get beaten up, then you have some recon, a training montage, and then revenge, as you use your new abilities in different combinations to clear out locations full of bad guys.
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http://julian.togelius.com/Lantz2017Depth.pdf
We propose a measurable property of a game’s formal system, which we call ‘d’, that corresponds to the capacity of a game to absorb dedicated problem-solving attention and allow for sustained, long-term learning. To define this property we develop a formal model that measures how susceptible a game is to partial solutions under conditions of steadily in-creasing computational resources. We then sketch out several directions for using the model to investigate questions about the structural properties of games that produce these effects
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Gotta love a paper co-authored by “Spry Fox”. Shout outs to Jason Rohrer and Keith Burgun in the Acknowledgements.
“I say, who’s piloting this sub, anyway?”
I got to play some 7th Continent, and I explored some graves and punched a ghost. My character, you ask?
We had a lot of fun with it, even if I think trial and error gameplay is still very not cricket. Things ended up being rather fitting; our doctor drew a splint, our shovel lady drew a shovel, our Frankenstein drew a bone crowbar, it was all very appropriate to our characters and yet those card draws were random, yet things worked out neatly and thematically. Very annoying to have a card dictate your character doing something you simply would not do, but that’s part of the game’s choose-your-own-adventure lineage. Entertaining stuff, although mostly down to our piss-taking.
Game day tomorrow, so I’ll talk about last week! (I’ve been largely busy this week).
A newcomer to our group brought A Feast for Odin and was really keen to play it. One of my friends really likes Caverna (and doesn’t like Agricola) and he wanted to play it. My other alternative was Merchant of Venus, a game I love but I wasn’t in the mood for 3+ hours, so I said sure.
I like Caverna well enough but not a huge fan, and I really don’t care for Agricola (I’m still trying to figure out the game in the app, if those of you playing in my game can’t tell!), but I thought why not give it a try?
And I really did like it.
Not well enough to actively seek to play it again, but of the three, this is definitely my go-to. I didn’t find the Patchwork part of fitting pieces to my board as annoying as I thought I might have, and the feeding of your people is almost an afterthought (you have to really not try in order to not succeed).
The newbie left, and we had about an hour or so before I had to go, so another friend broke out La Granja: No Siesta, a dice game based on the well-regarded area control game. It’s really a roll & write game, with each player having a player sheet that represents their farm.
I really liked it! Roll 9 dice (in a 4-player game, twice the number of players plus one) and then draft a die. After everybody’s drafted, roll the remaining dice and draft again. Then re-roll the final die and everybody gets the resource on that die.
Lots of different avenues to get points, but you really need to use the hats that you roll as well. This takes you along the Siesta track and gets you more of your player discs to use when you are transporting goods to market. Plus you get one point per hat on the hat track at the end of the game (it ends when somebody reaches the end of the track).
Took about an hour, but I can see this being shorter when not learning.
It was pretty good.
Not sure what we’ll be playing tomorrow, but I’m sure I’ll be late in reporting it. 
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Does anyone know if there is an Academy Games game for 3 players? And I mean 3 distinct teams as opposed to 2v1. If not, does anyone know anything relatively similar that can be taught and played fairly quickly? Thanks.
Triumph and Tragedy? It’s not too complex but it’s a step up from 1754 et al.
There’s also Maria or Friedrich, if you can find a copy currently.
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I’ve got about a half dozen plays of Feast for Odin under my belt, and while I enjoy it, my concern is that every round people will take a whaling or pillage action first. This makes it feel like things end up overly dependent on who rolls best for these actions. With Agricola, and even Caverna, there’s an ebb and flow to which are the stronger actions as new actions are introduced, or accumulating resources spaces getting better.
Is this just group-think for us, or are there stronger strategies we haven’t discovered?
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I couldn’t tell you if it’s groupthink or not, but I don’t think that happened with our game.
Could be because of our newbie status.
I was the only one pillaging, actually. And I think I was the only one who did whaling until maybe the last turn.
Last week brought two new games.
First, 2012’s Milestones where each player has their own rondel. You’re recruiting “workers” to your board and moving your marker around to one of the workers. You can go as far as you want, but you can’t go backwards. Then, when you get down to the building area, you can buy another worker, build a road, build a market, or city, or you can sell some wheat. All for luscious victory points!
You must stop on the castle each time around, though, and the king taxes you (you can only carry three resources total, between money/wheat/stone/wood/sand) and also takes one of your workers!
It was an interesting path-laying game. Nothing spectacular, but fun.
Then finally got to play Madeira. I loved Heavy Cardboard’s runthrough of it but I didn’t get it well enough to play on Boardgame Arena.
Now I get it.
It’s a game of resource-gathering game with dice, with an interesting pirate mechanic. Each turn, in turn order, you choose the set of three dice that was rolled (one set for each player), take a king’s favour from that row, and then place your dice out on the board to do certain actions. Placing the die lets you do the character action that’s on that spot (build and mobilize trade ships, send workers to fields or to the city, or rearrange workers in the city, or just harvest resources from your workers).
After everybody has placed their dice (maximum number of dice on a space is the same as the number of players), each area will activate in order. Roll the regular dice there and subtract that roll from the base cost of an action. You can pay that many Real to take the space’s action. Or you can pass and take a pirate.
Oh yeah, pirates are bad, and if you have a worker in the City Watch, you can spend that worker to place one of the Pirate Dice in a spot. You get to do the character action immediately but do not get the location action. The Pirate die is rolled at the same time as the location’s dice, and that is the number of Pirates (plus the one you would normally get) that you receive if you don’t pay for the action.
Having the most pirates at the end of the game will cost you 16 points, 2nd most pirates will cost 8, etc.
You get most of your points by scoring King’s Favours that you obtain at the beginning of the game and every time you choose your dice. These favours will score in the 1st, 3rd, and 5th rounds.
It’s a really interesting game, and it could hurt your brain. But it was a lot of fun.
Now I can play on BGA!
Hoping to get Time of Crisis to the table this Sunday. We’ll see what happens.