Be Excellent To Each Other

Ironically, I played Catan for the first time in probably a decade, as I've always hated it and I actually quite liked it. There was loads of trading going on that really elevated it all - but yeah, the honest truth is it isn't great.

Really need to get back into board games. Covid and having a kid killed them for me. Soon though, soon.

Come to Cottage!

I played a really funny quickfire card game over the weekend called Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza.

It's just Turbo Snap, but great fun.

That looks great fun, if likely to get very violent.

It's quite slappy

We play that quite a lot here, it’s one of the kids’ favourites.

I am terrible at the three action cards, always get the wrong one first.

Doesn’t take long before your hands and forearms are fucking wrecked.

Hello, welcome back, good to see you. All that jazz.

Yeah, I always found Catan to be not exactly a fun experience.

I went to the UK Expo a few years ago and had an excellent time...an expensive excellent time.

Star Wars: Outer Rim

I shouldn't like this. I have no interest in Star Wars. The characters, factions, and planets mean nothing to me. Oh yes, of course I know who various key figures are, such is its impact on modern culture. But spending three hours playing a game set in this universe, then coming back a week later to have another crack it? No, this shouldn't be happening. But it did. And I'm still eager to explore it some more.

Star Wars: Outer Rim is, essentially, Elite but in cardboard form. You start off with a basic ship, and can travel around the galaxy delivering cargo or contraband, completing jobs, recruiting crew, or dabbling in a bit of old fashioned bounty hunting. Most tasks give you money which you can spend on upgrades, but you want the ones that give you fame points. First to 12 fame points (or, in the shorter games we played, eight), wins. How you do it is up to you.

Most turns involve a bit of movement, a bit of shopping, and a bit of resolving either a randomly drawn card from that planet's stack or resolving something from your pile. Normally you have to test for skills, and the addition of crew can help increase your abilities.

If you pass a patrol ship from one of the four factions (Hutt; Syndicate; Empire; Rebels), they'll either let you pass freely if you've a positive reputation with them, stop your movement if you're ambivalent, or engage in combat if you have a negative reputation. A bit of dice rolling, but if you or your ship gets destroyed you're not out of the game or having to start from zero, you just have to spend a turn fixing things. This helps move the game along.

The open-endness allows you to decide your own path to victory. In my first game, I fancied a bit of bounty hunting so went all in for tracking down some suspect for a big reward, only to be taken out by a stream of bad dice rolls. Next time round, I realised that I should have focussed on tooling up my ship before taking such a risky career choice, so embarked on some several cargo deliveries before tooling up my ship but by then someone else had scored some easy kills and was well on the way to becoming the most famous person in the galaxy. Next time, perhaps I should try a different approach?

I never felt that I was hanging around waiting for my turn, nor were the decisions particularly onerous. Just a case of should I deliver this pack of space moisturiser for some cash to spend on a new ship, or take onboard some dodgy illegal hyperspace fuel for more money, a shot at fame, and the risk of it all going wrong? Depends on how far away the planet I need is, and what the rebels think of me.

Good fun, and something I didn't expect to enjoy.

I was reading the rules of Fire Tower with the aim of getting to the table sometime (it's been on my shelf for ages), and I'm a little alarmed by the warning in the manual. Are board games the next moral panic? Or is this another example of every sign marking a dead sailor?

I was alerted to this on /r/boardgames, and after watching it yesterday confirm that the Board Game Badge episode of Hey Duggee is a hilarious (and touching) take on modern gaming.

Played an absolutely lousy game of Suburbia last night, but somehow managed to win. It's one of my favourite games but I haven't played it in ages, even though a few years back I dropped quite a lot of money on the fancy super-shiny overproduced Kickstarter box.

The universe corrected itself a while later when we were playing Secret Hitler and I accidently let Hitler win. Oops.

Another enjoyable board game night.

Irish Gauge

Hard to describe this one ["It's 5 Foot 3!" - Railway ed.]. It isn't Ticket to Ride, but then it isn't one of the legendary 18xx series. If you go in expecting either, you'll initially be disappointed but then charmed by this game's simplicity.
Players are wannabe railway tycoons, competing to create the most profitable network across Ireland.

After an initial share auction, the game begins and you can either bid for more shares, build track, upgrade a town, or call for a dividend payout. You can build track if you hold shares that company, which means if more than one of you are shareholders you can build an extensive network pretty quickly. Or, indeed, your fellow capitalist scum can do all the hard work and you can just take the profits. I had invested in different companies to my opponents so looked on in anguish as they spread across the island whilst my services were about as patchy as the current network.

The real meat of the game, and the hardest to explain, is calling for dividends. You randomly pull out three cubes, and the colours show which cities are paying out that time. Dividends are split between shareholders, and likely payout affect the auction price if others want to get in on the action. But with limited cubes of each colour, a formerly profitable line might ebb into irrelevance, so knowing when to buy becomes important. Upgrading towns takes cubes out of the bag too, so you might want to be careful with where you place them - or place them to screw others, even fellow shareholders, over.

The cards are solid, but we did run out of cash near the end and had to resort to the honour system . I also find the board a bit plain but it does the job and the tracker helps with calculating dividend payouts.

We finished within about an hour, including set-up and rules rundown. I've never played the 18xx series, so a few rounds of this might encourage me to go further into the railway capitalism genre. Irish Gauge is solid enough to explore and enjoy on its own merits, and it's definitely one I want to get to the table again, probably with more players for better alliance building.

Sniper Elite
The cardboard version of the hit game, or Scotland Yard with Nazis. One player is a super-stealthy US sniper, roaming the board trying to complete two missions and perhaps shoot people on the way. Everyone else controls squads of Nazis trying to find him and take the intruder out.

The early stages are probably the toughest, as you grope around trying to get any clue that might set you on the right track but as the game progresses and the sniper starts revealing himself (or where he could be), the tension mounts as the options narrow before a final dash on both sides. We got very close, but he slipped us past in the night.

I found the line of sight rules slightly awkward, and the Nazis move a bit too slowly, but the game arc is satisfying, leading to many painful decisions.

We rounded off the evening with another round of Feed the Kraken, a hidden role game with a pirate theme. Doesn't add much to the genre, but at least you're not Hitler (*cough* Lovecroft *cough*).

Hand to Hand Wombat

Yep, it's another hidden rule game! But with wombats!

Each team is randomly assigned a role - you might be a good wombat, a bad wombat, or a chaotic wombat. Good wombats want to build towers within 90 seconds, bad wombats want to stop them, and chaotic wombats want chaos. Pretty easy to tell who's on which side, right? Except, and here's the fun twist, everyone's blindfolded.

After each round, there's the inevitable arguments and voting off, and the game ends when either the good wombats have successfully built three towers, or when the bad ones have stopped them. The chaotic wombats win by avoiding detection.

It's pretty mindless but ideal for that final end of evening wind down, with everyone collapsing into fits of laughter and attempts at tower-stealing. The last blindfold game I played was When I dream but that only had one masked player per round. Having everyone blindfolded adds an element of danger, hilarity, and surprise. It is what it is, and with the right group at the right time in the right situation will cause everyone to leave grinning.

Oh, and the cards are furry.

Parks: Nightfall (expansion)

I'm always in two minds about expansions. Sure, they add more variety and can extend the lifetime of a game, but then a truly great game would not need any extras and instead offer a fulfilling experience time after time. I can never tire of the base versions of Ticket to Ride, Flamme Rouge, or Colt Express for example. As the average plays-per-year of my collection is usually three (and that's generous, as I look over mournfully at expensive Kickstarters still in their shrinkwrap), it's hard to justify the outlay when the original isn't getting sufficient attention. So with trepidation and uncertainty of step, I played Parks with its Nightfall expansion

Parks has long been one of my favourite games of recent times, and always goes down well with gamers of all abilities, tastes, and experience. It's stunningly beautiful to look at, and its engine-building mechanism is cleverly disguised within the theming but easily discoverable. Whilst the teach is a bit involved as each element is explained, people grasp the mechanics the second they embark on their trek.

The major change in Nightfall is the addition of campsites. Land on a tile with a tent, and you can either do that tile's action as normal, or use one of the new camping actions if someone hasn't taken that it first. It also ditches the game's original bonus system (the 'year' cards) and introduces a whole new set with simpler scoring and goals. You also the option to get more and exchange them through out the game, meaning you're not tied to one. It also makes the camera more desirable as some include photos. And of course, it brings in more parks, just as beautifully designed as before, but now with instant rewards for visiting as well as just points.

How did these extra elements work? Exceedingly well. I am one happy camper.

The camping actions contain powers such as refreshing the gear pile or cheaper conversions to wild cards, and provides more decisions about when and where to move if you want something before someone else. The new year-end bonuses are easier to get and being able to switch them out or collect more means if one route isn't working due to the lay of the land you can probably find a bonus that does.

I felt that the expansion changes the game's economy, making it easier to get gear or buy parks. A subtle rule tweak illustrates this: some of the new parks have a cost of a symbol then a set number of any tokens. This means you aren't as constrained by reaching the end of the trail with a pile of unspent pieces. Moreover. wild animals count as two for this. Similarly, the camping and instant bonuses offering a reset of the gear deck and free kit means you don't end up with something people don't want taking up precious shopping space for the entire game.

The original Parks is solid enough not to need any expansions. I've played it loads, and always enjoyed the challenge and sometimes painful decisions. The additions and tweaks in Nightfall add sufficient (boot) polish to make the game really shine. This is definitely going in my backpack.

Just read this thread on r/boardgames and learnt something about the stations in Ticket to Ride: Europe



Wow! That makes it much easier. Definitely going to do that next time I play it.