Usually when I play a game, I do it by myself. Just to learn the game so it’s easier to teach later on. When I teach a game the first play never counts either way. I need to see that some of the mechanics click for people. Because I alsp need to see that first game and feel some things click for me too.

I recentlt palyed Santa Maria for the first time with my fiancé. She kicked my behind and won, but man was it a good game. Many things to keep track of but never feeling overwhelmed. Using blue dice to activate building left to right, white dice to activate up to down and maybe uae some coins to activate specific buildings. Lets just say that some of the reason I lost was my wheat empire… It was not a solid strategy! Who woulda thunk?

But back to the topic. I feel many games are hard to really grasp before completing a game that uses points as a winning factor. Before you see potential multipliers, negatives and so on. The first time new players play 7 wonders it is especially clear to me. Even if you say it, people tend to forget what goves points, how they gain multipliers, that depending on which age you are in you get more and more points for military victories and so on.

This is why I have adapted the “session zero” idea from role playing games. The first time you play a game, it does not count. After that… You are on your own. Well, not really, if I see someonenmake a wierd move I usually ask. Maybe the see something I don’t. Maybe they want to try something out. If not, I try to be helpful. Depending on who I play with and what game it is. If it’s a cutthroat versus game I might be less inclined to help. 🙂 But at the same time, a friend of mine wants to learn how to fly in formation in X-Wing, of course I let him redo his turns to a certain degree. But when he has learned it better he will be a huge threat and I will use his mistakes against him. As he will use mine against me.

Then we gave the games that can’t have a session zero. For example Twilight Imperium. A game that takes that long can not have this. You will have to learn during. I have only plsyed it once, I loved it, I know some of the mistakes I made. I will be better next time. That is one cutthroat game… player elimination can ve a harsh mistress. And in this game she can be more harsh than in most other. It feels wrong to eliminate a player in this game, that is basically the only reason not to do it. A game that can take 12 hours the first time you play and maybe get eliminated after 3 hours… Oh the joy. Let us play this again please. It was so much fun sitting there watching you play…

Or the first time I played Wingspan. We were 5 people, but the game does not take that long to play. None of us had played ut before and we all sat down and listened to the rules as we went on… Even though it is far from the mhe most advanced games any of us had played, it was clear that this is not the way to play. 🙂 Still decided to buy the game afterwards… after spending 4 hours on one game of it… because it was obvious that we liked it.

This is why I sit down by myself and play the game by myself. Even if it does not always work and my head almost explodes for all the possibilities that two players can do (Cooper Island). That and you can easier see how many points something can give. Even if I read it, it does not stick until the points are counted.

How do your first impressions of a game look?

Play more games!!!

I have not had a lot of time for a while. Where didnit go? It’s still 24 hours in a day right?

I have taken out a box from the shelf and opened the box but haven’t had the energy to actually set it up and play… until yesterday! Yesterday I was told to get into the shower while the food was finished and after that, I should go upstairs and do a setup while she did the dishes. I decided that we should play a game we both know and like after that. I decided on Wingspan.

Every time we play it we realise how much we like it. It’s not a hard game, it’s not complicated, but man is it fun, beautiful and high quality.

After trying to play a single game for a week and not having the energy, this just put a smile on my face. Just as simple as that. There are a few, simple things that doea that. Playing a board game. That means we have time to spend together. And having breakfast together. Not the one when you sit down for 10 minutes, chug a coffee that burns your throat and throw in a piece of bread in your mouth swirling it with the coffee and run out the door. I mean when you sit down for ATLEAST 30-40 minutes and eat in peace. Talk and all that. Those things are really precious to me. That is one of the reasons I love boardgaming.

I think I’ve talked about it before. But it is worth saying again.

Play more games!!! And spend time with the people you love.

We all have a guilty pleasure. Something we like that we really should’nt, or feel ashamed that we like. We all have a movie or music that we listen to behind closed doors. Atleast I know I have…
But what about a guilty pleasure board game? What game do you like that you maybe not will proclaim to the world? Since not very many people read this I thought I would give you an example of mine. The Game of Life. If anyone has played it, you know it’s not all that super deep or anything like that. But… If you play it with someone that enjoys it. Atleast I can find it funny. It is so simple, and let us talk a little bit about the realism of the game, of which there are… none.

I bought it for basically no money, it would be hard for me to motivate it for me and even harder to motivate it for my fiancé! But after being a lawyer that was fired for sleeping on the job and becoming an actor, she actually found it a little entertaining. I was a veterinarian who brought my cat to work and got fired… The stories and twist and turns of this game, makes it hilarious. That and the fact that you, I think, sell your kids at the end of the game. Which I actually find kind of wierd and maybe not a really good part of the game… Selling people might not be a thing we should teach our kids… And I see this game as a kids game. And the fact that I sold all my four kids and still didn’t win made me feel sad…

Other than that I actually am pretty proud of the games in my library. Maybe not all of them deserve a spot in the “Boardgame top 100” but all of them makes me happy to play. I tried to think of which game I would sell to buy another one and actually had a hard time deciding. Some games don’t get played as much as I would like. But when I looked over the games, I didn’t know which one it would be! Maybe one version of Munchkin? But then it would be harder to play if we were more people and they wanted to play it. Even though I don’t really know when the last time we played it was. It’s a game that’s fun to pull out from time to time, but not to often.

But do you have a guilty pleasure game? Which one?

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This weekend I got to play both Twilight Imperium 4th edition and Cosmic Encounter for the first time. Both of which was a blast! Cosmic Encounter was actually more entertaining than I thought.

Twilight Imperium 4th edition is a game that many boardgamers say is a game that everybody needs to play. I might not agree with that. This is a game with backstabbing and politics in the middle of it which can be pretty harsh. Think of it like this. This game can take around 12 hours to play with new people. And has player elimination… That could REALLY suck for the person getting eliminated. But that is a different story.
I’ve only played this once, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
At the beginning of the game you get to chose a race and there are alot of them. Every race is unique in some way. The race I played was called “THe Yssaril Tribes”, they don’t have a hand limit and they can discard a action card to not do something when it is their turn, they also draw more cards, discard one and are generally very card based. I LOVE asymmetric games. Because it’s alot like Syndrome says “And when everyones super… No one will be”.
This game has it all! On a round you can do any number of things you start by taking one of eight cards that each are focused on different things Leadership, diplomacy, construction, technology, imperium, trade, warfare and politics. They are numbered from 1 through 8 and have a primary and secondary function. To use the secondary function you need to pay a strategy chip. and you can basically use a worse version of the primary use of the card. I will not go deeper in to this aspect because this is one of the many things you can do in a round.
On a regular round you use chips from your tactics pile to move units, create units and so on. You can have a set number of Fleet units on any tile depending on how many chips you have set in the Fleet part of your player board…

Well… Instead of describing every part of the game lets just say there is a lot going on. Every round takes around an hour to play (granted this was the first time for 2 of us, so it might take way less if you played it a lot more). depending on number of players. And you go up to 10 or 14 points. You don’t always get a point on your round and you can get more than one. It is all very much to take in the first time you play it. But it still isn’t very hard. Just much. And after the first round you start introducing laws and such that you get to vote on. So there is a lot going on. The first time I played this I just wanted to sit back and see what the game was actually about. I found it really entertaining and want to play it again with a different race and see how that affects the way I play. The only thing I need to know is to play more aggresive but that feels kind of wierd in a game with player elimination that takes this long to play… But maybe that’s just me.

Cosmic Encounter on the other hand… This takes away alot of the aggresiveness of the game. You seldom chose who you attack, you win by getting 5 colonies on other peoples planets, you have many different things that you can do and there are 50 different races in the box from the beginning. All are different and are made to play against the other different races and have setups that lets you chose different kind of play styles and still be balanced. It takes way less time to play and I actually liked it more than I thought I would. I genereally don’t like the changing allies part of games and stuff like that, but in this game it just felt right, since in this game, everybody is SUPER.

And in this game one of the funniest things that have happened in a long time in a board game happened.
Another player had the skill that he could change the hand he had with the player he played against. He had 2 cards in his hand and I had 6. He did not like his hand and switched with mine when I attacked, then he wanted to negotiate. He agreed not to destroy me if I just went back to my planets. I agreed to this, then I played the other card he gave me. “Quash” this game negates the negotiation. And I had more ships than him in hte attack so I won. He agreed that this was not his brightest moment…
Also My fiancé won the game in a way that was impossible for any of us to counter without the right card. She won by using her races skill “Upset”. This makes the winner lose the fight and the loser win the fight. She only had a negotiate card and her skill made me use my attack card. Which made me lose the fight by winning the fight… This game is wierd but Funny!

Cosmic Encounter is a really nice game that is ALOT quicker and a little nicer than Twilight Imperium 4th edition. Depending on what you have time to play and how often you get to play the games bring different things to the table and are not really comparable. But as the person who brought Twilight Imperium 4th edition here said, “I play this at most every three months”. And I get that. It is a beast and you want to play it again. But it takes alot out of you and the day. Going through the rules and playing it to the end basically took 10-12 hours. I don’t really remember, it was so engaging that I actually did not look at the watch. So it got that going for it. 😀

Have you played any or both of these games? If so What do you think?

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As this year started I got a new job (new year new me?). I am very grateful, but the job is not very close to my home. I don’t want to play a mobile game (wait 10 minutes or pay $30), I want something more like a complete boardgame or such that I can play when I’m traveling to and from work. It would be beneficial if this game could be played solo.

I have destroyed humanity more times than what is OK in Plague inc. I tried Legendary (the free version with no IP attached), which I did not find very entertaining… I play some Fly Casual (X-wing), but that drains the battery faster than a I could drink a milkshake thru a straw.

Does anybody have any good tips? I am asking since I want a good “port”. And bot something that does not work or is not the real deal.

(I want to) play more games!!!

I wrote about this game in a previous post about introductory games. So lets talk a little more about why I think that.

In Luxor you essentially play as grave robbers. You are delving deeper and deeper into the grave of a Pharao. The game ends when the two sarcophogi in the middle has been picked up. This can be done by two different players or the same player. When you go deeper into the grave, which is a a winding square that gets smaller and smaller, some things happen. There are three places where you get more wooden figures that start at the entrance of the grave. You do this by going past the spot where they stand. You also can pick up some treasures. There are three types of treasures. Which are worth a different amount of points depending on how many little figurws of your have to stand on it to get it. In the end of the game you get more points if you have sets of these different treasures 1 set gives you [insert points up to three sets] and so on.

When you get a treasure you simply grab it off the board and give yourself that many points on the point tracker that goes around the map. (We do it a little different, we place the points from the treasures at the end of the game, because we think it is more interesting to not know anyones points befirehand.) If you see a little picture of an animal on top of the square where you picked up the treasure you lay down a corresponding tile from that animals pile. This is where it starts to get interesting. [Shift Enter] There are many different things that happen on these tiles. Some lets you get a scarab with some points on them. There is one with a kind of parchment on it that you can use in place of one of the treasures. Some have a a little key on them. You need a key to enter the room with the sarcophogi, if you have more keys than you use they are each worth 1 point at the end of the game. There are hidden passages that always brings your people to the hidden passage door that is rhe furthest down in the grave. If there is no other door, nothing happens. Then there are the tiles that lets you get a special movement card. Which leads us in tonthe movement part of the game which is very interesting.

You start with five cards on your hand. And you remove a card from your hand to do the movement on said card. But here is the kicker. Of the five cards on your hand, you can only use the two cards at the edges. And when you pick up a new card you have to put that in the middle of the cards on your hand. [Shift Enter] The standard movement cards are one step forwards or backwards, 2, 3, 4, 5 steps and roll a dice and take that many steps. Then on the tiles there are symbols that lets you take special movement cards. There are many different cards which have different functions that helps you on your quest to rob a tomb.

The last way to get points is by getting deeper into the tomb, the deeper you are the more points you get and each meeple gets these points.

This is basically the rules. But there are more things to say about this game. [SHIFT ENTER] I talked about this game in the post about introductory games. And to me this is a really good one. You get to learn movement, hand management in an interesting way, set collection and tonread iconography. Because that is somethibg this game is really strong at. Once you read the rules there is almost no reason to looknat the rulebook. Everything is clear, except maybe the special movement cards. But they are pretty apparent to.

I don’t think I ever won in this game but if there ever is someone who have never played a board game that want to try one out when they are at my place, this will almost certainly be the one we play. Easy to learn rules, good iconography and not much else to learn than the basics of board gaming.

What is your choice of game to introduce someone new to the hobby?

Play more games!!!