A friend I don't see very often was able to visit, so in between the
chat we played some games.
We started with
Jaipur, a game I'd
only previously played online: I picked up a physical copy second-hand
a little while back. I don't play this one often (I'm usually in a
gathering of gamers if I'm playing at all, and many people prefer to
play fewer games which involve more people each) but I do enjoy it a
great deal.
Then on to Terminator: Dark Fate – The Card
Game,
the first time I've tried this with multiple players. I think the core
problem remains that 150-card market deck: sometimes after the initial
shuffle you'll get a cluster of good stuff, sometimes you'll get a
cluster of bad stuff, and there's no real way to compensate for such a
"good" or "bad" deck. That said, I quite like the gameplay, and since
I don't track win percentages and the game doesn't take very long I
don't mind sometimes being handed an insoluble puzzle.
Next morning, on to Spirit
Island;
this time we were both fairly new to the game, rather than last time
when I had two experienced players helping, and while we probably made
more mistakes we still pulled off a win (just barely). I'm very much
enjoying discovering this game (a few years after everyone else raved
about it; as with Scythe and Terraforming Mars the first thing I
heard about it was the hype, and that put me off).
With three players, on to Machi Koro
2, which
tries to fix some of the problems with the original. I like the
variable draw piles, and certainly this seems to solve some of the
"buy up all the convenience stores and hope for the best" strategy,
but I didn't love it enough to think about buying it for myself. (Nice
plastic coins, but very… plasticky.)
On to A War of
Whispers: I
played a couple of times before the latest Kickstarter, but haven't
got my physical copy out since it arrived. And… well, I still really
enjoyed it, even though I'd let myself lose control of all the actual
attack actions at the last moment. (And I have some 3d-printing to
do.) Definitely good fun and I hope to try this more; it helps that it
has a fixed length.
Unlike, I have to say, Star Trek:
Ascendancy,
which ended up taking something like four or five hours of playing
time even without the Borg – admittedly, with distractions, such as
the Federation player having to leave and their position being taken
over by half of what had been Team Ferengi. This is definitely a game
that benefits from players not prone to AP; I wonder whether a
multi-way chess clock might be a good idea, presumably via app, though
I'm not sure how one would penalise a player who ran out of time.
My major error as the Andorians, in spotting two players on the verge
of winning while I was perhaps a turn behind, was not setting them
against each other. (My minor error was not improving shields and
weapons sooner to get the culture bonus. Also I locked myself out of
the Production escalator for a couple of turns by building too many
ships with my initial Production. In fact I made a lot of errors.)
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