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Officially started the Seafall campaign. We played with 4 players cause the 5th one couldn’t make it due to a family emergency.

Everyone has already played the prologue, so we just ignored the plot twist that happens at the end of it.

Game one, we sort of worked to really push the milestone to get the first unlock. I definitely recommend getting it, cause otherwise game 2 just ends up feeling like game 1 I’ve been told. It definitely adds a lot I say.

Game two, one of our players is pretty much going for the “We raid everything we can, then we explore another island to raid later!” As for me, I’m currently doing the “eurogame” strat of trying to get a strategy of rushing to islands to buy goods, then using them to get upgrades later. The other players are working on trying to make sure their ships are stated to be able to support each other (same sail speed, get better at endevours) , while I’m making the smaller ship the fastest ship in the sea (next game, it’ll be able to reach the farthest fourth island in one sail action. My plan is to get to that island first, buy the goods, next turn, sail back and use the goods.)

Its a pretty slow strat I find compared to taking riskier endevours, which are made less riskier with the right advisors and one of our players having created a chart of dice success odds (with how many dice you have vs the defense, = the chances of not taking dmg.)

I’m looking forward to the next game, cause of the unlock we did in Game 2 (basically a mechanic to build more things.) Probably won’t happen until January.

Whenever my 2nd group gets to playing Seafall, I’ll see about making a raid scummy build.

As for game length, we started at 1 pm and ended at 7 pm. With everyone knowing the prologue, that game went by fast, so game 2 and 3 were probably 2 1/2 - 3 hours give or take.

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Neuroshima Hex has an excellent iOS and Android digital port available that I can recommend if you’re curious. In fact, I actually prefer playing the digital over the table version because it does it so well. Not that I don’t like the table version (which is awesome), but it’s nice not having to set up and tear down :stuck_out_tongue:

There are actually a few games set in this universe that might also tickle your fancy and have seen releases recently; Convoy is a two player async multi-base game where one play is Moloch, storming towards New York, while the plucky humans just need to delay them as long as possible. 51st State is a neat tableaux builder that has been rethemed as Imperial Settlers, but also the original is still excellent if you can find it. It also has a new Master Set version, which I’ve not tried yet, and I hear they’ve streamlined things to bring the original theme closer to the Imperial Settlers mechanics.

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Is there someone here who has tried the Roller Derby game, Jammer Up? I would like to buy it to myself as a christmas present, but I am worried that specific strategies will just always win and that the game might not actually reflect how the sport is played irl.

Are there other people here who are curious about christmas gifts to themselves?

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My wife got me 7 Wonders: Duel for Christmas. We loved playing the regular 7 Wonders game with another couple, but hated that we couldn’t play it 1v1 (there is a version but it involves a proxied 3rd player and isn’t much fun to us). We really like how the game plays and think they did a great job of porting the feel of 7 Wonders into a 2-player game. My wife beat me the first 3 times we played, and I only finally got a win last night. It plays in about 45 minutes to an hour, though the box advertises 30 minutes I think you’d have to be pretty familiar with all the cards first.

At first I thought the alternate victory conditions like Science and Military were a waste, but when you can chain Wonders that let you take 2 turns in a row to get to the important card you need, they become very real. My wife actually won with a Science victory our 3rd game. I don’t know how well it will hold up to scrutinized competitive play, but for a fairly quick 2-player game there are a lot of decisions to make and it rarely feels obvious what the correct play is. Also, thanks to the card distribution, you see a quite different 3rd age each time what with guilds being random and removing 3 random cards per age.

If you liked 7 Wonders and are looking for a fairly deep 2p game, you should give it a try.

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Holidays got to play:

New Experiences:
Splendor, Betrayal at House of the Hill and Twilight Imperium.

We did BAHOTH for New Year Eves, and everyone had a great time, so now considering having my own copy. Reminds me of Room-25, but with story. The highlight of the evening was our Heir VIP player using the Mystic Slide and grabbing all the magic items off the other dead player corpses, to jump the Traitor and blew him up for 9 physical damage. Another player died using the mystic elevator to get me to do the finishing blow. Its like something out of Charmed or Buffy.

Splendor - Haven’t decided whether I like this or not. Its a good thinking game, makes me think of it as a less complicated 7 Wonders.

Twilight Imperium - Got to play the Ghosts of Chassis. Lost terribly cause I was still learning how to play so fell greatly behind on tech, economy, military strength you name it. I’ll probably do better if I play it again.

Added Experience:
Bloodborne with 4 players - basically at 3 players, you have just enough damage to kill monsters and everyone gets a trophy or someone misplays and misses out. With 4 players, now there’s a big chance someone will miss out, and cards like the Pistol (you won’t score a lot of blood, but you’ll at least be in the running for trophies), Blood Vial and Tonitrus gain a ton of value.

Seafall - not me personally, but one of my players is also involved with a 2nd group (which btw, he is definitely not accepting my cousin wanting to start one too which would make it his third), and one of his friends who is an absolute tryhard got 23 glory points by the end of game 2 (keep in mind, you need 12 to win) so he’s so far ahead, he’s not having fun anymore. From what I heard personally, Game 6-8 fix that problem so I’m optimistic.

I am running game 3 this weekend, and it’ll be exciting cause it’s the race to get colonies on the board for more “colonialism is bad” fun (seriously, I’m not that against the theme like Zee Garcia.)

Video Games:

ICEY - its like Muramasa meets The Stanley Parable. On its own as an action game, it’s an enjoyable short action game that mechanically works great (just don’t be like me and discover by the last boss, it was totally my controller that was defective. Switched from my ps4 controller to a ps3 and suddenly my dodging skill went up by 10x.)

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I play a lot of Betrayal at work, and I’m of mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it’s often a good, light game with flexible player counts. On the other hand, sometimes it turns into a slog - especially when the traitor is winning.

And it’s often a terrible game experience for the traitor. In many of the hauntings, the traitor has little to no agency, and who wins is often predetermined when the haunting happens. If you are just playing for the emergent storytelling, it’s not bad, I guess.

A word of warning - the expansion’s hauntings seem to be fan submitted, and were not proofread. So there are sometimes mistakes, or important information missing from one team’s instructions, or implicit assumptions about player behavior that aren’t necessarily universal.

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I agree with this sentiment. My group has played plenty of BaHotH, although not at all for the past couple of years. It’s a fun game to play a few times per year for the storytelling thing, and the way that (at least for the first half of the game), no-one really has any idea what is going on. But there’s no way I could honestly call it a “game” in the sense that I understand it. That’s not to slate it at all - it’s pretty good at what it must set out to do. But it’s just not the same sort of experience that you get in anything I’d call a strategy game, and I’m counting Ameritrash games in that too.

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The type of people I played this with, it’s about the right chemistry I say (they’re not really the deep competitive types, but they like to do stuff like this at gatherings) though the player who ended up the traitor I suppose was rather unpleased at becoming it (we got the scenario of the royal heir.)

On a silly side note, while coming up with an idea of making a 3 shelf board for my friend, was going “I wonder if I could turn Room-25 more like the movie Cube that inspired it?” While looking up at work how many tiles there are (32 base, 15 expansion, so not enough for a 5x5x3) came to learn there is:

  1. An Ultimate Edition that has the base and expansion packed together, and some revised rules that fixes what Tom Vasel disliked about the rules.

  2. There’s another expansion coming out this year, which, at best as I can interpret the translations, adds a puzzle element to the game (so in a way, be more like the Cube movie.) Also 60 sleeves (implying 60 tiles total?) if you’re like me who have varying degrees of off colour tiles.

Also got to learn there’s an expansion for the Xcom Boardgame with EXALT. Reminds me I still haven’t gotten a game played of it.

New on the videogame department - Downloaded Let it Die. First impressions is, it’s definitely a Suda51 Grasshopper Manufacture game (its very Japanese with underwear, and then it has suplexes and a grim reaper riding a skateboard that basically was like, this is a Suda51 alright. Even more so as you find it its a videogame within a videogame.) But it, it’s basically it’s if Suda51 designed a roguelike, with combat that’s like Dead Rising in terms of super low equipment durability. And the online component is dead player avatars appear as tough enemies.

Weapon mastery is sort of annoying cause it levels off last hits (so expect to be punching enemies a lot.)

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Also the Ghosts are pretty bad. Their starting planet doesn’t give them much, and you don’t start with good enough ships. But yeah, TI requires frequent play to learn the rules.

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So my cousin pointed out Gloomhaven to me, which I heard of but never knew anything about. Now my two Legacy groups are pretty hyped (I haven’t read through the rules yet but a friend of mine tells me they’re beautifully elegant.) I personally don’t know when I’d get a copy.

On Legacy progress - Team Red finished October in Pandemic Legacy, barely, and was basically saved by the Box 7 reveal Not needing to deal with the 7 Quarantine objective and instead setting up vaccine factories. Also we named the Immunologist, Steve (Jobs or Seagal) the Demonologist. Team Blue will be playing game 3 and beyond of Seafall this weekend. I will say it will be the race for colonies (not really a spoiler)

More Bloodborne: The Card Game stories - so continuing to play more games with 4 players, now I can see the value of things like the threaded cane (where the scenario where the monster only has 1 hp left is very possible if you’re the 4th player) and blood vial (for sneaking blood echo steals.) I will say, damage wise, the game’s monsters are killable with 3 players, and its 4+ where it gets tricky on where you may or may not be able to get the trophy kills, and where the upgrades that seem pointless get value.

On sheer stupidity, when coming up with a 3D board for Betrayal at House On the Hill, was musing if a 3D Room-25 could be done (so that it’s like its movie inspiration, Cube.) What I figured out was, with 47 tiles, a 3D board consisting of: 5 floors: 1x1, 3x3, 5x5, 3x3, 1x1 and 2 empty rooms for Sarah Connor’s sabotage power. So sometime over the next months will be constructing this “3D Room-45” variant.

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Seafall Game 3-6. We unlocked a lot of boxes, and just say we encountered the twist that slows the game down to a crawl (its cool but really restricts how much you can do from that point on.) Some things learned:

Endevours (Raid or Explore) and especially ones that get you milestones, are the most swingy way to get points (call it super random.) This is probably the quickest way to get through the games until the big twist. Any other playstyle is too slow (being a trader and builder I feel is too slow) Currently we don’t play slow enough for more than 1 winter to happen.

My players feel Seafall suffers from bad pacing, where the fact we unlocked this much all at once, piled on a lot of things at once. With only one box left and the big twist, we feel it’ll be a slog to the finish.

So general feelings:

Individually, Seafall has some cool concepts and mechanics, it just ends up a bit of a mess as a whole as too many things can happen at once or too fast.

EDIT: One day later, was talking with the other lowest player, and we’re plotting Operation Cannons Ablazin’

At the moment, he’s in the best position to become the most raidy player right off of Turn 1. This will get him in a good position to take 3 milestones. He’s pretty hype about this plan.

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lately i’ve been playing almost exclusively Caster of Magic, a very very good Master of Magic mod that fixes almost everything wrong with the original IA, rebalancese the game and is generally way more challenging and fun than the original game.

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Seafall Game 6,7,8 - we knocked the first player down to 2nd, but now the formerly 2nd player is 50 points above me.

There things we like about Seafall, but the disparity on the balance of playstyles is really off Exploring is basically the quickest and worth the most points by a long shot. As we found out, its also grants major bonuses, like really massive. Economy is the slowest and if you don’t do it from the start, might not even get a payoff before the game ends.

The legacy elements are still the best twists in the game (and one really hilarious gimmick), even if the pacing is dependant on your group’s ability to play the game. I do feel with some house rules, it can make the game more enjoyable (and you definitely need FAQs because of how vague the rules can be.)

We still want to see the ending, its just a slog to get there.

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I’ve been playing For Honor; it’s an easy execution fighting game

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Is there truly such a thing??

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It is 3D tho

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For Honor is great! I’m really enjoying it so far.
I was worried about the grindable stats but they do not apply to the duel and 2vs2 mode, where their impact would have been greatest.

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I’m actually playing a lot of HotS lately. I’m really enjoying it.

Hey @Leontes, come back to hots! You got me into it then never followed up!

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What server are you on? (NA here, although I’m messing around a tiny bit with the EU server.)

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Yeah NA. I get the best connection to it.

If any of you blokes wanna play HotS with me, Bomber678#1122

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