Would she consider something with a cuter theme?
Root is Cole Wehrle’s take on a COIN game for 2-4 players, with an approachable theme and short playing time. It looks like it’s going to be quite good.
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It might be ok, though she doesn’t really find the concept of these types of games fun.
I will keep it in mind, though. 
Thank you!
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Love 13 Days. Theme, gameplay, everything - I highly recommend it. And I think once you get the hang of it you could easily bang out a game at lunch.
Edit because iPhone keyboard.
Yes, I like 13 Days quite a bit, and it’s very easy to get to the table.
Sekigahara has made it to yucata.de, if anybody would like to play. I am just learning, but it seems pretty simple to pick up.
Also, the fact the Cole Werhle of Pax Porfiriana, my favorite game I never get to play, fame made a COIN game is making me drool.
EDIT: Pax Pamir of course, not Porf…which is also on yucata.de, FYI.
Hey, everybody
Hope you’ve had a good week of tabletop gaming (if you’re into that kind of thing).
A couple of deck-builders to tell you about this week.
First, yesterday I posted my review of the awesome deckbuilder Valley of the Kings: Last Rites
I love the “entomb your cards so you can score with them, but if you do, you can’t use them anymore” mechanic in this series of games.
Secondly, my Sunday game day was a great one. Played another deckbuilder, this one that I haven’t played in quite a while, called Arctic Scavengers. (that’s a link to my review)
This is a post-apocalyptic deck-building game with an interesting “skirmish” mechanic that has you fighting each round for a resource that’s pretty cool.
We then finished up with Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, a wonderful hidden role game set in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld city. Each player’s role has a different victory condition but you don’t know who they are. There’s some bluffing and a lot of card play in it.
What did you play this week?
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This weekend I played Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu and Ghost Stories. Kind of went for the horror theme with Halloween coming. I love Ghost Stories though it beats me to a bloody pulp when I play. Cthulhu isn’t the best version of Pandemic, but I like it well enough. It is funny, I wouldn’t call myself a huge Pandemic fanboy, but I have every version of it on my shelf. I think the game in general is easy to teach, quick to set up, and challenging enough that the Pandemic brand is a staple on my shelf.
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I’ve only played actual Pandemic once or twice (and none of the other versions), but I love Pandemic: the Cure. It’s one of my favourite dice games.
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I quite enjoy The Cure as well, maybe even more than the original. I’ll concede that the original is probably a tighter design, but I don’t actually own a lot of dice games - or at least not many that my wife would like to play - so it is fun to dump the 40-or-so dice on the table.
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I love that game, but have managed to get it to the table only once when it was first released. Highly underrated, IMO.
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I love Discworld but haven’t played the game. I’d love to give it a try sometime.
It is really underrated!
It was really great to get it to the table again. I was Vetinari in a 4-player game, so I needed a minion in 9 districts to win.
I played Mrs. Cake early so I got to look at all but one of the unused role cards, and saw that Vimes wasn’t in the game (he wins if the deck runs out).
So I was playing cards liberally to try and get minions in the city, having the nice side effect of making everybody think I was Vimes.
One turn, I had 11 districts with minions and was set to win when my turn came around again, but the player to my right played a wizard.
Random event
4 Demons show up in my districts, nullifying them for victory purposes. I’m down to 7 and can’t win.
Then I’m in 9 districts with 5 cards left in the deck. The game ends as soon as the deck runs out. One player takes 2 cards at the end of his turn, and Vicki (the woman sitting on my right) ends up playing cards so that she has to draw the last three, ending the game seconds before I’m about to win.
Then she wins on points.
CURSES!!!
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This weekend, we played the second expansion for TIME Stories, called A Prophesy of Dragons. It was quite enjoyable, though we have not finished it–we are in the midst of our second run and will return to it in two weekends.
While (so far) I still believe the first mission, in the base box, is the best one, we are enjoying this one a little more than the second mission (The Marcy Case). It feels bigger, and the mystery feels a lot deeper in certain ways. There is also a subtle long-arc plot that gets a little more developed here too, and it’s been preferable for our group to have more vessels (essentially the characters you can play) to choose from (there are 8 here–in The Marcy Case, there were just 4). Aside from adding variety, having more to choose from also adds a layer of strategy at the beginning of the game and on subsequent runs (because you can switch).
We’re really enjoying TIME Stories a lot and have already picked up all of the available expansions. I had wanted to finally get Fury of Dracula to the table given the Halloween season, but we were all too interested in trying a new TS mission, it was no real contest. Once we complete Prophesy of Dragons, I’ll post our feelings about it.
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Picked up NMBR9 this week, so it’s nice to be one of the cool kids and have a neat little spatial puzzle game for the multiplayer solitary amongst us.
Looks like I’ve found another opponent for Colonial Twilight too. In the meantime, I shall wait for Sidereal Confluence (fourth month of thumb-twiddling), and think over The Expanse.
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Just picked this up on Amazon after playing it with some friends at a pub. Surprisingly well balanced for a dice based game.
Didn’t care much for Brotherwise’s other game, Boss Monster, but this one is great.
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Typically I am not a huge fan of abstract games. I play Hive occasionally mainly because it is such an excellent travel game. My wife, however, enjoys abstracts so I indulge her sometimes. We recently played Sagrada and I enjoyed it. Essentially, you roll a handful of colored dice and take turns drafting them to fit them into your tableau. There are simple placement rules like you need to match the color/number of the square you are placing in, you need to start building at the edge then build only in adjacent spaces, and numbers and colors can’t be adjacent to the same. I found the game enjoyable, and it was certainly good looking. It is a nice puzzle to work those parts of my brain that maybe don’t get worked quite as much when I’m screaming at my die because I just fell in the water again in Rum & Bones.
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I’m trying to branch out a little and pick up some more games that are easier for new players, and Sagrada is one I’ve had my eye on, especially as it looks so good, it always draws attention. Waiting for the reprint.
Played Unearthed with a couple coworkers today (including Bill Roper of Warcraft fame) and it’s a resoundingly fantastic game. I lost, but I’m still in love with all the interesting decisions you need to make.
I was focusing on completing sets of ruins while the other two were gunning for building the best wonders.
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Did Roper use any cool voices when playing his delver cards?
Unearth is fantastic!
Not on this occasion, but when he joined our company (Improbable) a couple months ago, he dropped all the hits in his intro presentation at the weekly town hall meeting.
I squealed when I heard Zug Zug.
I may have intentionally tried not to beat him.
I have heard really good things about Unearth. I hope to give it a try. A friend of mine has Sagrada and I really want to play that as well.
I’m also glad to see this topic is going strong.
This week’s review is for Gale Force 9’s Tyrants of the Underdark, a wonderful deck-building area control game.
There are some more great games in my October “New to Me” post too.
Both games I played last Sunday are in that New to Me post, but I just have to say that Time of Crisis and London (2nd Edition) are awesome games.
Also got a game of Flip City and Okey Dokey in yesterday at lunch.
This week I think we’ll be playing Champions of Midgard too, which I’ve really been anticipating.
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