RogerBW's Blog

Boardgames in Isolation: June (part 2) 08 July 2020

More boardgames played from home, though the pace has slackened a bit.

The game I played most was Rallyman: GT; its availability on BoardGameArena, and a number of tournaments and championships, have meant that this has leapt up my games-played list. Right now it's at 61 on the "all time" list (i.e. since 2016 when I started logging plays at all), behind Red7 at 70 – but I only got it at the start of this year.

A bit more VOLT, though on yucata.de I seem mostly to be playing with people rather better than I am; I've lost a lot. Still love the game, though.

Some of the SU&SD forumites who've come over to discussion.tekeli.li were talking about 18xx games, and specifically 1889: History of Shikoku Railways, so I tried that with them on 18xx.games. It's an odd sort of beast, in which you play both an investment game (working out which railways will be most profitable) and an railway-running game (developing routes and running train services); at times I felt that I'd have been happier with just one or the other, because it felt like a dual-viewpoint novel, always forcing me to switch just as I was getting involved in the story. It's very fiddly and old-fashioned, and if we hadn't had the site to enforce legality of moves I'm sure I'd have made more errors than I did.

Enjoyable, though; I don't want to play again soon, but I will want to play again at some point.

Some Automobiles on yucata.de, where I'm still trying to work out what I'm doing wrong but I'm having a good time finding out.

A game of Chess for the 52 game challenge ("a game that has inspired a common phrase or idiom"). I'm still rotten at it.

Some more Flamme Rouge: the second Tour, which I ran on boardgamegeek, has ended. The third one is in stage 5 of 6. I really like the Tour style of play and plan to do it again some time.

Machi Koro on yucata.de, where my "single die only" strategy paid off and I won a game.

Red7 as a filler on BoardGameArena.

Star Wars: Outer Rim on Tabletop Simulator – a survivor of the great FFG purge. It's very Firefly at times; even the things that are different are different in ways that address some of the specific complaints people have about Firefly (while others are present here just as they were there). I do like the bounty huntimg mechanic (you don't know where your target will be, so you have to search for them), but since I'm not particularly a fan of Star Wars – and therefore the fact that you can hire Chewbacca onto your crew doesn't give me any more fannish squeeing sensation than that you can hire Jayne onto your crew in Firefly.

What's really painful, though, is that this is very obviously the usual FFG bare-bones core set, intended to be fleshed out and given replay value with expansions… which haven't materialised. (Well, you can buy a play mat that's half the cost of the boxed game, but there aren't any gameplay expansions.) In particular, the various numbered cards are clearly meant to be at least a bit unexpected, but you're pretty much funnelled into a particular play style by the character you pick, so I don't see this having much in the way of legs.

(How does a rocket launcher help you to take in a bounty alive? As I see it: "You know what it costs me to pull this trigger and blow you all over the landscape? A mere two thousand credits.")

[Buy Rallyman GT at Amazon] [Buy VOLT at Amazon] [Buy Automobiles at Amazon] [Buy Flamme Rouge at Amazon] [Buy Machi Koro at Amazon] [Buy Red7 at Amazon] [Buy Star Wars: Outer Rim at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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