RogerBW's Blog

Boardgames in Isolation: July (part 1) 27 July 2021

More boardgames played from home.

One of my regular opponents when I was playing lots of Letter Tycoon on BGA invited me to a tournament he was running, so I played a lot more games of that. Alas, I'm still pretty much done with it; even with the mode that lets you benefit from only a single doubler on any given word, whoever gets the J first is very likely to win, and failing that whoever gets the B. Basically, at this level of play we're all about as good at each other at actually making words, so what's left is pretty much luck. Oh well; it's a shame, as I really enjoyed this one for a while, until I got good at it.

I realised I was three games of Downforce short of having played ten this year, so I played some more on BGA. Before playing I was havering over whether to buy it… and I'm still havering. I really like the courses, and the special effects on some of them… but the actual gameplay is very unsatisfying. In particular, even with highly-rated players, there's usually an obvious leader, and that's the safe bet everyone goes for even if they aren't the owner of that car. Ah well; perhaps I'll steal the special effects for use with Rallyman: GT.

Talking of which, some Rallyman: GT. On BGA I'm basically only playing in groups of people I already know.

Castellion, mostly for the podcast – an interesting game but the whole mechanic of "draw cards from shuffled deck, play them in hope of being able to arrange them the right way", although it's very popular among solo games, is one I'm finding very frustrating. How can I compare my playing competence this game with ditto last game, if last time everything went wrong and this time it all went right? (This is also why I tend not to play Railroad Ink or NMBR 9 solo.)

FUSE… which although it has similarly random stuff is far less frustrating, perhaps because it's usually soluble.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1: another game in our sequence. We're playing about a game a month, and this feels about right. More on this once it's over.

Red7 which I always enjoy – even getting knocked out of the MediocreLympics. Purely abstract, and it holds together for me in a way that many simple games don't.

Riftforce on TTS. I really liked the original demo graphics (see my photos of it from the 2019 UK Games Expo when it was called "Chapter 2"), so I built a mod with similarly plain cards. (I offered to make an official TTS mod for the designers, but they'd rather have it only on Tabletopia; so this was done in great haste, and isn't publicly available, but there's nothing to stop me playing it with friends.)

[Buy Letter Tycoon at Amazon] [Buy Downforce at Amazon] [Buy Castellan at Amazon] [Buy Rallyman GT at Amazon] [Buy FUSE at Amazon] [Buy Pandemic Legacy Season 1 at Amazon] [Buy Red 7 at Amazon] [Buy Riftforce at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

See also:
UK Games Expo 2019: Friday

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