My last iOS device keeled over earlier this year!
Oh, I see, YOU don’t have iOS. Well, as you can see here, it is available for a number of platforms. Surely you have at least one of these…
I do indeed. That’s better.
Your favourite designer’s favourite board games features Cole Wehrle this week. I really liked this bit:
“As I’ve designed more and grown as a player, my own standards for what is “good” have loosened considerably,” he said. “If a game is doing something really compelling, I’m inclined to rate it highly even if the game itself might have a critical flaw. I’m also a bit of a capital ‘R’ Romantic and am inclined to give designers a lot of slack for pursuing deeply personal passion projects. As an example, Nate Hayden’s game The Mushroom Eaters is one of the most beautiful games about loss and moving on that I’ve ever played.”
It’s an interesting niche for games; my contender would probably be Android. A bit of a mess, really, but genius all the same.
I know this is late, but my son’s favorite game is Rhino Hero from Haba. Really fun building game where you build card houses, basically. If you can, nab Rhino Hero Super Battle. More cards and more interesting buildings possible, also dice rolling which kids love.
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Cool, we have two other Haba games that I have picked in the past month or so. Animal on Animal and Monza. We like both and play them a lot.
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Meduris sounds like the perfect game for making your children cry.
Carcasonne and Ticket to Ride are games which certainly can be played aggressively but it’s up the the players to choose that course. Meduris, at least in my opinion, does not ask politely if you would care to be aggressive. It demands that you have a minimum amount of disregard for the feelings of your neighbours. This unwillingness to be passive or friendly is what I think ultimately sunk this game low in the ratings. The other Haba Family games didn’t have this quality and they sit far higher Karuba: 367 Overall, Adventure Land 1,275. It seems to me like they should’ve made people more aware that this is often a mean game. That said, let’s look at it anyway because i think it’s nifty.
It has come to my attention that all of my favorite games are ones in which you are encouraged, if not blatently forced, into getting in each other’s way in interesting ways. It’s possible that this says more about me then it does those games but I’m not going to dwell on my own character assassination. What I find most interesting about Meduris is that you sometimes try to throw your opponent off a cliff only to find out that you’ve thrown them over the wall they were trying to climb in the first place, only to discover that there are lions on the other side. I quite like this double edged decision making as it means that the optimal move decision making is obscured. As someone who likes to play games with my gut reaction this makes for a really interesting decision space to try and parse.
Sold.
My 4-year-old son regularly creams me at Monza, and I love it. In most games, I need to hold back, but because Monza is purely dice-based, he always has a chance and for some reason the rolls come up in his favor more often than mine.
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Very similar here, my daughter not only beat me 3 straight games yesterday, two of those were full on trouncings. I kept getting stuck at the single path spots.
That is what I love about Monza. The same game could be played with a standard 6-sided die, but then three would be no decision-making at all. The use of colors, the choke points, and the small amount of planing ahead really elevate the game for me as far as its usefulness to my children as thinking a thinking tool.
So are we gonna have an Ortus Regni tournament or what.
Last Sunday, I got two expansions in which I had been wanting to play for a while.
Played the two expansion decks for Tyrants of the Underdark. The Undead and the Aberrations. Both are quite interesting. The Undead faction lets you do a lot with devoured cards and the Aberrations let you force other players to discard (or have some monsters that give you a benefit if somebody else makes you discard them).
I quite enjoyed them.
Then finally got to play the Hellas map for Terraforming Mars. I was the Saturn Systems corporation, a corporation that likes the Jovian tag. My friend said he had never seen anybody willingly choose them, but my other choice matched my starting cards even less.
I actually came in 2nd, 8 points behind him, so that was a nice surprise.
Then I played two games of New York Slice at lunch yesterday. Realized that I now had three plays of it, so wrote my review of it today.
This is a great, quick filler using the “I split, you choose” mechanism. Great fun, 15-25 minutes (especially when people know how to play).
Really enjoyed it.
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Got back from gaming trip today with following games played (number of plays in parentheses):
- 1846 (2)
- Flamme Rouge (2)
- Magic Maze (2)
- Meuterer (3)
- Vinhos (1)
- Tinner’s Trail (1)
- No Thanks (2)
A fun day/night/day. Sad to report I only won 2 games the entire trip, though, Tinner’s Trail and the last game of No Thanks. 
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No Thanks is such a wonderful filler game.
It is the one game I take to my Dad’s when I go visit, in case we get a third person to join us (last year, it was his partner…maybe this year, one of his friends since she’s not going to be there?)
I’ve found doing reviews of filler games much easier. I wonder why that is. 
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Got in some more Twilight Struggle at my local, found another possible opponent or two, and generally had fun showing people the ropes and discussing it.
Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate is recognisably Betrayal at House on the Hill but with a lot of the rules ironed free of wrinkles, and you’re no longer quite so limited to running around looking for items, weeping at the mercy of chance. It’s a little more even overall, but still a light, fun experience. I wouldn’t buy it but I’d play it.
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I picked up Risk: Europe to draw in a new player (anyone else do this or just me?) as it was cheap, and alongside that, I finally got my grubby paws on:
Reading the designer diary and about the depth behind the game only made me want it more since I first ordered it in July. UK distribution being hopeless, I waited a couple of months before cancelling and going elsewhere, and now I have it.
I’m going to get it into rotation as soon as I learn it, though that will inevitably take longer than I would like, as Venus Next is emerging and I’ve just bought a few more fillers to bulk out my throne of games. I also picked up Chicago Express, One Deck Dungeon, and Rhino Hero Super Battle for Christmas presents. Sticking to what I know.
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I wish I lived near you, because Sidereal Confluence sounds neat but there is probably no way I’d ever get it to my table.
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That sounds really cool! Too bad you’re not in Vancouver. I’d love to try it.
My Sunday last week was a couple of filler games (Age of War and Can’t Stop) and then finally learning Le Havre. The last game took 2.5 hours as a 3-player game, and it was cool to finally know what is going on in the game. Now I can finally play the app (I never could understand the game from the tutorial).
But I’m not sure I need to play it on the table again.
Then today we played Pandemic: the Cure at work during our lunch break. We cured 2 diseases but the world ended up dying anyway.
I also did my review of Smash Up on the blog. It’s a fun card game, though really fiddly.
And finally, I started doing book reviews earlier this week as well. Any fans of alternate history?
Harry Turtledove’s “The Hot War #2: Fallout” was my first (I haven’t done a book review in probably 4 years now)
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And I picked up the Hellas & Elysium expansion for Terraforming Mars since I kind of disagree with the concept of Venus Next. The game’s called Terraforming Mars. I don’t see how terraforming Venus can be an expansion to Terraforming Mars.
For fuck’s sake.
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Love alternate history! Can we talk about how good The Man in the High Castle is for a minute?
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Haven’t read it yet, but I have heard how good it is.