Avatar Rising. Fun game, more difficult than I’d thought (we were three players). And they really nailed the heroes/villains abilities for the lore of the game

I explored Shadowrun: Crossfire together with a few friends last week. I got it pretty cheaply on a yard sale and thought I it would be fun to try out.

After our first round, we went our separate ways and played a second round with the content from High Caliber Ops on Tabletop Simulator, which was also very fun. The second round basically just flew by and we were able to secure victories in both. I’ll probably try out a new role in the next one!

Mh, we had a round of boardgames with friends two sundays into the past. I’ll chalk that up to rounding errors.

The session started with Flashpoint: Fire Rescue. It’s a pretty simple and straightforward opening game about a burning house and rescuing a bunch of people from there, which is why it’s one of our openers. If you know action-point based games, you know half of the rules already.

You spend 4-ish action points on running around, dousing flames, carrying or healing people and such. Afterwards you roll dice to select a field on the board to escalate the fire. Usually, you place smoke on empty squares (and in our case, the toilet was on fire so damn much…), but if you roll a square with smoke, that field and all connected smoke fields turn to fire. If you roll fire, that field explodes and damages walls, doors, spreads more fire in the cardinal directions. If you roll a specially marked field - a fire hotspot - you roll again.

We played on a medium difficulty setting because we had a new player and won that round, but everyone agreed that it was teetering on a knifes edge at 1-2 situations in the game - how it should be. Next time, heroics will be up :)

And afterwards, we tackled our current raid boss, Dune: Empire. This was our third or fourth session, and we found another 2-3 rules we had been doing wrong - one or two of these mistakes being a rather huge one nerfing cards like the Bene Gesserit very hard.

But as a game loop: You have rather normal deck building ideas. You draw 5 cards from a private deck and play one of those cards to send an agent to places - like cities on Arrakis, places at the guilds and the Landsrat, which gives you resources like money, water and spice, loyality with the guild and optionally armies. However - and this was the mistake we made - this card stays in play until cleanup. This repeats until all players have used their 2-3 agents, at which point you play your entire hand to get the final turn bonuses on them, money practically. This allows you to buy cards from the market, improving your deck a bit. Afterwards, the current combat strengths are evaluated based off or garrisoned or active armies, as well as some instant-cast spellcards to ad some spice to the fight and the winners get rewards according to the current conflict. At the end of the game, victory points decide the winner.

It’s very much a bigger game and you can expect to invest 3-4 rounds into the game to understand all the rules, to get familiar with the cards and the pace of the game and to get some understanding of some meta of the game.

Like, I approached my first run with a dominion mindset. Get some trashing, get some value, thin the deck and win.The issue is - you only have 6-8 shuffles available based off of the pace of the game. This makes the usual trashing setup too slow usually. Most trashers also have conditions on them like “Have another Bene Gesserit Card in Play”, and if you discard your cards in play too early, that also becomes harder.

But it’s a very fun game once you get into it and it’s going to be the main staple for the near future of your boardgame rounds.

I’m currently in the honeymoon phase with Innovation, a small but wild and cut-throat, kind of abstract civilization style card game originally released in 2010. I played it twice with my girlfriend now and she won both times, but losing is also fun here, simply because so much chaotic stuff will happen. It seems that so many different strategies are possible that no two games will feel similar.

I heard that some people dislike it for the chaos it contains, but I hope I can get some people from my usual gaming group interested so that I can play more often.

There will also soon be a Kickstarter for an updated version which I am excited for.

I played Earth for the second time Sunday night (after my usual RPG night was cancelled/postponed), this time with 4 rather than my first game with 2.

It’s a really interesting game, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I originally took a look because it kept coming up in discussions around Ark Nova (which I tried and disliked), Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc.

I can see why people say Ark Nova is a bad comparison (I agree, very little overlap) but absolutely see why people compare it to Wingspan so often. So many of the mechanics in Earth seem to be directly pulled from Wingspan and then vaguely re-themed to be plant based. It really feels like they started with Wingspan as a base design, and then reworked it into their own concept.

Pros:

• Simultaneous/shared turns a la Race for the Galaxy work super well in a wingspan-like game. Getting to run your engine on other people’s turns is so much nicer than sitting and waiting for them to deliberate over choices.
• The flexibility of getting to build your own tableau with almost no limitations is a lot of fun, as opposed to building off of an existing engine framework.
• The shared turns have made it (so far) such that I never felt like I was truly pinched for resources. I wasn’t taking actions out of desperation to catch up, I was picking what I felt would get me closer to my actual goals.
• Despite the singleton deck, it never felt like I was unable to find cards with the synergies or qualities I needed.
• There were a good number of high payoff “build around” cards that came up, which is something I always enjoy in a board game.

Cons:

• The iconography could use some work, especially considering how heavily the game relies on it. I mean, the “cold climate” symbol is a five pointed snowflake?! The object that is famously six sided?! I understand having a learning curve, but having a player ask, “what the hell does this symbol mean?” and hour into a game isn’t great.
• Flavor is tenuous, in Wingspan I get that predators hunt smaller birds, that birds which lay lots of eggs and store lots of eggs, etc. In Earth, I have no idea why a given plant has 5 sprouts but only 2 growth, or another one has 2 sprouts and 4 growth. The event cards are even more incomprehensible.
• It’s got a bit of the “egg rush” end game from Wingspan (sprout rush here) but it’s mitigated by shared actions, and having more flexibility in how you build things up (this could have also been placed in Pros, tbh).
• I would never ever want to play this in person. So many fiddly bits interacting that I’m happy to allow BGA to handle for me. Especially considering the scoring, which (again) mirrors Wingspan but has significantly higher totals and would presumably take proportionally longer to count up.
• I understand why a game like this uses photos as card art, but I do really wish they had nice Wingspan-like illustrations instead.

Overall, very interesting game. I had fun, and I’m looking forwarding to digging into it more on future plays.