Of Dice and Men

Tried out Wondrous Creatures tonight. It's a bit light for my taste, almost like a family weight Ark Nova without the map building. Your actions are either gathering resources (with ridiculously overproduced meeples), playing up to two cards, claiming an achievement, or recalling your three gatherers. Like most games of this style it boasts a large deck and public draft, attempting to find all the suits you need to score objectives first.

I think I stand by my first impression of "Ark Nova without teeth". Would be a good family game though. #boardgames

Tonight I wrapped up a game of Lost Ruins of Arnak on one of the new Twisted Paths expansion boards. This one (the Spider Temple) introduced the idea of Dark Tablets. Once you were at a certain level of research you can use a dark tablet to choose and activate an artifact from the card row, which can then be reused by other players. But the more dark tablets are used, the more negative points used tablets are worth at the end! #boardgames

Gosh I love Barrage! #boardgames

Second side of the Twisted Paths expansion board for Lost Ruins of Arnak! The Owl Temple makes the end game tokens more valuable as each set allows you to use an additional idol! #boardgames

I finished playing through all of Innovation Ultimate tonight.

The entire game was new to me, so when I picked up the box I felt compelled to play through each of the 5 expansions it came with.

I think overall it's an interesting game, in the same school as card games like MTG where "the game is balanced because everything is broken". It's hard to really gauge who's winning, because a new tech card can come out at any time and completely change the state of the table.

Each of the expansions fits in nicely with the base game, doubling the card count and adding a small twist to the game. I think my favourite was the artifacts, as it gave you a nice bonus for seeking out a specific combo rather than just modifying existing draw rules.

The game is published by the same company as We Didn't Playtest This At All and definitely shares some DNA. It would work best for players and groups who are fine with crazy cards and combos coming out unexpectedly, embracing the chaos. I could see some of my more strategic friends absolutely hating the last two hours of gameplay being overthrown by a sudden "you win" card coming out in Age 9.
#boardgames

Finished a game of Barrage with the Nile expansion today. The expansion adds the concept of "irrigation" where you can discard water from specific dams to get little bonuses, and the players who irrigated the most after each round get additional points. Ignore this at your peril; in this game the player who didn't irrigate at all lost by 37 points! #boardgames

Got the Act II Collector boss down to 19 health (from 114!) but wasn't able to get the win. Although to be fair it's my first run, I don't think roguelikes are supposed to let you win the first play :P
#boardgames

Hello #boardgames! I have been gone for far too long, an unfortunate side effect of my focus on campaign games this year. I've finally wrapped up my play of Stars of Akarios, and am going to spend the next few nights playing through my non-campaign backlog before picking up a new one.

Today was Voyages as a new map was released, this one focusing on bike trails and trying to catch a glimpse of Nessie :). Didn't do too bad with a score of 104! Didn't use a single bike trail though as I was focused on visiting all the distilleries.

On terrible amounts of fire, but barely managed to survive the act 1 boss in the Slay the Spire board game! #boardgames

The last scenario of Welcome to the Moon is a neat area control game that even works well with the solo rules. Finally won one!
#boardgames

Tried out Earth with the newer Abundance expansion. I'm not sure it adds anything needed to an already convoluted game, but the cards sure are pretty.

The main addition is seeds, which can be exchanged for the ability to search for a specific card (somewhat offsetting the fact that there are over 300 cards in the draw pile), or for various other resources. In reality this just adds another factor to a game that already suffers from an overwhelming number of data points, so I don't think I'd recommend it.

That said I'm still a fan of the 4x4 tableau each player grows, in particular when there are scoring or game effects that take row/column/adjacency into account.

#boardgames

Finally got around to trying the new Merchants Cove expansions, Master Craft. I didn't care for the new gameplay additions as they add unnecessary new steps and phases to an already complex game, but the new player boards are good.

Baker - same as Tzolkin
Diver - bag building push-your-luck
Detective - merge translucent cards to create a completed 2x3 grid
Mushroom Farmer - move insects around to grow and collect spores, which merge into mushrooms you can sell
#boardgames

Second run had the Guardian down to 11 HP before being wiped out! #boardgames

Super Boss Monster's town board is a huge improvement on the original Boss Monster design, adding minion placement spots that get covered up by unassigned heroes as you play.
#boardgames

Gave the Planet Unknown: Supermoon expansion a spin today. It adds some nice to haves but still leaves the original game feeling unpolished, there's a bunch of small fiddly aspects of the design that always require me to look something up.

The expansion adds a few modules, including the extra small moon board to fill with specific tiles for bonus points and laser meteorites from, some different patch tile types, and a new modular map and corporate board to play with. Likely good to have if you've played the base game to death, but certainly not required otherwise.
#boardgames

Made short work of the slime boss, but couldn't handle his split off minions!
#boardgames