Be Excellent To Each Other

Did my bit to support local business. At least they'll look good on the shelf.

Thanks for this!

Has anyone played Detective: A Modern Crime boardgame? It’s fantastic. You play as detectives solving a case with a very involved story told through the medium of cards with decision points that take you to new cards or info, an online database where you can look up evidence or case files you encounter, and by creating mind maps to link all of the evidence you find.

I played the first case ages ago and really enjoyed it but it takes a few hours to complete a case and we wanted to play the second one with the same group so it never ended up happening again. In lockdown I thought it might be a game that could work on zoom so bought an expansion; LA Crimes. It’s set in the 80s. We’ve been playing with three households over zoom with only my house having the game and it’s working fantastically well. Finishing case three tonight then we have one free case left before the next expansion comes out in June. If you’re looking for a game to play with friends remotely, I really recommend it and happy to share few tips on how to make it work super easily over zoom.

New boardgame arrived today! I preordered it a while ago and have been seeing increasing levels of praise for it so excited for it to finally arrive. Apparently they’ve released rules and material to make it work over zoom when only one house a game copy so might give that a look if any of my friends have the appetite for it.

The game is Forgotten Waters and it’s another Crossroads game from Plaid Hat, using that same Crossroads mechanic that they introduced in Dead of Winter but this time in a pirate theme and using a map book similar to the type found in Stuffed Fables or Near and Far.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective completed over the weekend, we did cases 9 and 10. Immediately ordered the 2 expansions, so another 20 cases to do!

It's a really nice game, and perfect for 2 people. Lots of headscratching and you can very much "play it how you want", it's more of a detctive roleplaying/mystery rather than a boardgame as such.

Two thumbs up!

We've played about three cases from this but we haven't played it now for ages.

Two cases into the first expansion for Sherlock Holmes, the first four cases deal with Jack the ripper, which is clever and interesting due to the subject matter and how it weaves real history into the game.
Unfortunately, it makes for a poor game though. Whereas the normal cases have a solution and a couple of "sidequests" (for want of a better term) that you have to answer questions on at the end to score points, the jack the ripper cases have the same questions at the end, but with no case to solve as such. We can be 2 hours and 15 leads in and still have no idea if we are done or not, as there is no way of even guessing what the questions will be!

It goes back to normal from case 5 onward, with fictional murders or thefts or whatever to solve, so hopefully those are back to the quality level of the main game.
We'll most likely finish off the jack the ripper cases first though, as we are halfway through them and the subject matter is interesting at least, but it's a bit of a disappointment after how good the main game was. I can see what they were trying to do, but it just doesn't work very well.

SUSD review Go. Quinns' enthusiasm for the subject and his description of the agonies he's faced trying to understand it make it compelling viewing. I'm almost tempted to look into online/Switch tutorial systems as it's always been (along with Bridge) a game I've wanted to learn but as with all hobbies it's a question of how much time I'm prepared to sink into it.

https://www.board-game.co.uk/product/pa ... ason-zero/

New Pandemic Legacy is out next month, and reviews seem to be very good.
It's £70 though...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/se ... e-the-hero

Personally I thought The 7th Continent was crap, but it's impossible to buy the kickstarter edition anymore and it's worth a fair amount on ebay. So if you wanted to try 7th Citadel out, I expect you'd get your money back if you didn't like it. Other people rave about the game.

Past me backed a few games on Kickstarter a while back. They are now starting to arrive and most likely will remain on my floor in their shrink-wrap for a good few months at least. Future me will, I'm sure, appreciate Past me's enthusiasm for the platform.

Pandemic Legacy season zero has just dropped down to £60 on Zatu games today.

So Joans bought me Forbidden Sky for Christmas. We've just had our first run though (it's pretty tricky) and he pulled his first character card and sat there giggling.

Forbidden sky is pretty good, build a rocket launch pad, then get an electrical current to it to get a pretty pleasing whoosh noise and flashing red lights when you make it.

Digital boardgame "board". Looks rather natty.

"unique square design"

...

I thought that, but then I assumed they meant ‘unique for a tablet’ which is what it *definitely* isn’t.

How good does this Kickstarter look! Trying to convince myself I don’t need to drop £200 on a game to play with my kids when they won’t be old enough for another few years at least

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/up ... l-circuits

Amazing! But tough. Also almost impossible to back the lower level - the fear of what you'd miss out on!

Exactly. If you back at the lowest level you miss out on that second pack, and if you’re backing for the second pack it would be nice to jump to the next level and get the other game that ships two weeks after the Kickstarter ends. All of this ignores the fact that I have no time to play them and no one to play them with. Why am I like this! Must resist!

Back in July I watched an SU&SD review of Dream Crush, a fantasy dating game. Not a genre I'm familiar with, but the way it was described meant it quickly became something that sounds like the kind of thing I like.

After ages spent hunting, I've finally obtained a copy. The idea is that you and your friends go on dates with three lovely people, discovering more about them as the game progresses. At the end of each round, you have to guess who your friends have the biggest crush on. Guess correctly, and you get points.

Anything that creates some minor roleplay and some discoveries about people I thought I knew well is always going to be a hit, and I'm looking forward to trying this out.

And yes, we're totally playing this at Cottage.

In.

If you like the roleplaying aspect of board games, make sure to sit down with me and play Sherriff of Nottingham!

Love that game. Not played it for ages!

Has anyone played WINGSPAN?

Some friends of mine are big fans of it, and was wondering if anyone else had it or had played it? It's about birds.

Don't own it but I've played it a couple of times at the board game group. It's really, really beautifully made, and the mechanisms allow for some fantastic egg-laying engines.

Oh @theVision : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cm ... or-eternia

That's nice looking... $110 is a little more than I'd be willing to spend though, especially when the only time I'd probably play it is at the Cottage.

Oh, also you can't get it in Europe, which is perhaps a bigger problem.

It was so good to be back with my board game group last night.

Started by playing Suburabia, probably my favourite city building game (a while back I dropped over £100 for a shiny shiny Kickstarter special edition, I love it so much). Equal parts peaceful tile-layer and agonisingly frustrating you-just-screwed-me table flipper.

Then we moved onto Bristol 1350, a game with an unintentionally unfortunately timed medieval theme so for obvious reasons I'm hiding it.


Finally, we end the night with a few rounds of One Night Ultimate ["Mafia"], the faster and more enjoyable version of the classic game. I didn't fall asleep.

Really on a buzz today for being back round tables with friends.

Do you use the phone app for that? It makes it much easier to run.

Yep, it's a great system.

He's not wrong about the Bard's video being one of the best things on YouTube.

Save you a click:

I was going to get Hero Quest for Christmas, but it doesn't seem to be available until January.

Any recommendations for similar games that kids of 9-11 years old might enjoy?

Dungeon! Is meant to be entertaining.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1339/dungeon

Here is the review that made me interested.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/881263/why-bother

That does look cool. Investigating!

Well, I ordered DUNGEONS!

On your head be it, Mali

High scoring game of late night (not rude, just late) Scrabble

439 plays 424. I won the game, but my son is winning 3-2 overall

Took me a while to work out how REORIENTING would have got down - the I there already, then REORiENT for a 7 letter?

Excellent skills on show.

I assumed "orient" was a stepping stone

yeah, I ummed and ahhed over reorient or orienter (and I wasn't sure the second one was a word, so opted for the first). Then I added the ing a few turns later, and the QI (64 points for 2 letters, thank you very much, yes please) above it 2 turns after that.

It worked out quite nice that way round, otherwise I would have been stuck with that Q, or only got 20 points or something for it.

Pan Am - Ticket to Ride the Big Blue Sky

I played Pan Am at my board game group last night.

At first, I just thought it was a retheming of our beloved Ticket to Ride, connecting distant cities by laying cards and placing plastic vehicles. But that's not the case at all. It's an enjoyable mix of three main mechanisms: worker placement, auctions, and creeping predatory capitalism.

Each round starts with worker engineer placement: do I bid for a new airport, a bigger plane, or a particular route. When everyone's placed their wor-er, engineers, the board is resolved and people place their airports, buy their planes, and claim their routes. You can connect neighbouring cities if you have the city card, a card of the same colour, or are happy to dispose two unmatched cards. You can also connect to a city without any cards if you have an air port there. Longer routes require bigger planes, so you have to balance bidding for new destination cards against bidding for new machines, especially as you have a limited number of engineers (3 in the four player game!) and money can get quite tight. Once you have a route, you'll get income for it each turn.

If it just stopped there it would be a pretty reasonable diversion, nothing exceptional but not an objectionable way to spend an hour. But introduce predatory capitalism into the mix and you can some quite interesting decisions!

You see, there's a new start-up based from Miami that is slowing building up an aviation empire of its own. After each round, it claims new routes and gobbles up any small local airlines in its path. If Pan Am reaches one of your routes, you get your plane back, lose the income from it, but are awarded cash as compensation. You might want to place a route hoping to get bought out quickly so you can get the cash and a plane back, particularly in the later stages. I actually lost out on winning by placing my last route out of the path of the global behemoth!

To win, it's not about how much money you have left over. Instead, every turn you get the option to buy shares in Pan Am at the going price, which rises and falls based on event cards. The person with the most shares in company at the end wins!

I really enjoyed this, and it's one I'm thinking about adding to my collection as one to bring out when we fancy something different to railway trains.

We were playing Feed the Kraken at my board game group last night. It's a ship-based hidden role game where sailors are trying to get the ship to port, pirates to the pirate island, and the cult leader into the comforting gullet of the Kraken. I liked it, and found it fixed some of the thematic and mechanical issues I have with Secret Hitler.

Anyhow, during one the inevitable debates about who was and wasn't evil, someone was going round the table with their suspicions until they got to me and said:



A reputation is earned, not made.

Were you guilty?

Totally.

Nice.

Played Catan for the first time in at least a decade last night. It pains me to say it, but the mechanics felt really clunky. Things weren't helped by the imbalance of our island's economy with severe sheep and clay shortages throughout the game. The end was pretty abrupt too. Someone hit 10 points, we said "well done", and that was that. Like going back to a favourite childhood TV programme, sometimes you just can't recreate the past.

That said, having wood and needing sheep remains as hilarious as ever.

People were talking about the Birmingham games expo over the Jubliee weekend, and after checking my social diary I booked a ticket for the Friday. Quite excited as I've never been to an expo before and it's just up the road from here.

And in "Kern looking guilty in hidden role games" news, none of the fellow Brits in Tortuga 1667 refused to believe me despite my repeated claims and actions to prove otherwise. I think I'm being persecuted.

But were you guilty?

I was on their side FFS!