We played a match of Clank: Catacombs with 3 players.

One player was new to Catacombs itself but knew the normal Clank. The dungeon layout this time turned out a bit more tricky and there were few easy escape routes. The new player panicked a bit and decided to grab the lowest value artefact and run for it. He only made it out with 60 points. Final score was 121, 111, 60.

I really like how each game feels much more different with Catacombs, the layout of the dungeon being discovered throughout the game creates a lot of tension. If you love Clank but know the map inside out by now, Catacombs is the answer.

Whenever showing someone Clank, I usually first play a game of Dominion to show Deckbuilding, then we play a game of normal Clank. The next time they come, Catacombs is on the table.

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 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!

Was just about to post this myself ;-)

GF and I played a round of Lost Cities, one of our go to games. It’s always fascinating to see how each game develops and agonizing to decide which colors to throw away and which ones to commit to. This was a hugely close game 199 vs 224. The last round we basically didn’t compete in ANY color. Each of us just kept drawing almost all cards of our respective color. She a bit more than me but what I lacked in value cards I made up in multipliers and managed to eek out a single point more than her.

At the weekly board gaming session my group played the last chapter of Aeon’s End Legacy 2 (second attempt). I wasn’t present for their first attempt and they really hyped up that last battle. But we got into it with a nice combo of characters. Despite some painful early losses of expensive cards our main damage dealers were able to power up while I and another geared up for support. At the midpoint it looked pretty bleak for a moment but a turn of 28 damage later things had cleared up very well. At that point I was pretty confident we would be able to exhaust the nemesis draw pile which we were. We didn’t expect that we would also have to whittle down the nemesis to zero but it turned out to not be much of an issue.

Then on Wednesday my GF’s brother came over for pizza and board games and we played Minecraft: Builders and Biomes. Just like last time I had the worst luck in my attempts to fight monsters. Must have wasted something around 10 actions drawing basically just potatoes. As such, while my building was pretty efficient my GF managed to sneak past me to victory. Her brother came in third (he really focused on collecting blocks hoping they would we worth something at the end - despite my assurances they would not shrug) but really liked the game and requested we bring it over when we visit the next time.

Tried Gigawatt for the first time this weekend with friends. It’s a game about countries in Europe trying to transform their energy production into green energy while simultaneously meeting the growing energy demands, balancing the power net, and making sure you don’t go broke. At first glance it seemed a lot simpler than the games I usually enjoy, but it surprised me with interesting strategic choices and a pretty good balance. And the theme is very well executed and (to my knowledge) quite accurate to the real world. Would recommend.

Also played a few games of Frosthaven, we just entered the third year in the campaign. Playing Shackles and Astral. Really loving the experience so far.

Lastly had a few rounds of The Crew, it’s such a good little game for almost any occasion and group!