We got Love Letter: Jabba’s Palace to the table! We didn’t actually play though as we were busy talking, oops!

Haha I came to post this after doing this at work on a VM.

Our usual players were moving house this week, so they were pretty occupied! I was worried this meant that no games at all this week, but some other friends came round for Bonfire Night, and they brought Cascadia.

I haven’t played before, but I have heard of parallels to Calico, and I can see why! I think Cascadia has another layer of gameplay to it that made it a more enjoyable experience for me. Whilst the interactivity was very low (hate drafting being the only way to do anything), it was interesting watching the other players shoot for different objective sets.

Fun time, but took us longer than it should because we kept getting distracted!

I love how broken all the civilisations are in CE!

And absolutely love Radlands! A very tightly designed game without much overhead!

Thank you!

A smaller, more focused group this week! This meant Gloomhaven: JOTL again! My partner and I got engaged earlier in the week, so we chatted too much to finish it in one session - so our friends came back on Saturday to finish it off!

It didn’t actually take us too long to finish the encounter, so we played a game of Mondo. This is a ridiculous real-time tile laying game in which you’re trying to ‘close out’ biomes on your board. Always good fun and super accessible!

I had a brief panic that I had booked a hotel for the wrong weekend, but I’ve just checked and I’m okay!

This’ll be my first UKGE! Very excited!

Simple games for us this week!

We played Nacho Stack, a small little dexterity game. We manage to stack some of these in some pretty clever ways that made the second phase of remove the cards hilariously difficult. Silly, simple fun!

And then we played a few rounds of Skull to see the evening out!

All a learning experience for the next time!

The coins are a worthwhile investment early on, but we managed to get some good objectives that means plenty of points all around!

Ooo I didn’t know this! One of the few times I wasn’t being a rules goblin, so I gave myself over fully to the owner! We only had one Goblin card come up anyway, so nothing too drastic.

Thank you!

We played Cartographers this week as we babbled on for a bit too long without any thought as to what we’d play.

We played it previously as a group about 2 years ago, so it was nice to revisit it finally. A simple flip-and-write game with some element of interfering with other players (namely the player to your left). A nice fun puzzle to share with the other players!

I believe it got picked up for retail, so do keep an eye out!

Because of the very low player interaction, it worked really well still! I scored 71 whereas my partner scored 69 - so it felt competitive also.

We had to cut out 4-player game a little short as we’d started late and it was running on a bit, however I was teaching the rules to the other 3.

Our 2 player game was probably close to 2 hours, but again there was a reasonable amount of rules clarifications from trying to parse the icons fully!

Last week saw the arrival of a kickstarter game I backed a couple of years ago, Mercurial!

As a result, I’ve seen 3 plays of this in the last week; one solo, one 2-player, and one 4-player.

Very much enjoying this title so far! The designer has opted to use iconography on the cards instead of any words. Whilst this slows the initial couple of plays down, you soon learn the language it was designed with and you can begin to intuit cards quite quickly.

Something I forsee possibly being an issue for some people is the lack of player interaction. It falls into the same space as Wingspan in that the only interaction one can really have is drafting a card that another player wanted.

The art is beautiful, vibrant, evocative, and most of the time you feel like you are manipulating the elements as you flip and convert your dice to your needs!

Agreed!

Thanks for the discussion (and lesson) to get me thinking more about the game!

Great, thanks for clarifying!

I’m afraid that this is probably still prevalent here (wasn’t looking for it, but I do recall a few feelings)! Depending on your prediction, you may only be looking to win one or two tricks, and if you’re positioned in seat 3 or 4 from the trick leader, you often find yourself having to play high beat the first few players only to be trumped by seat 5.

I also wonder if the prediction mechanic aims to keep the leader rotating so as to mitigate seating bias. You’re unlikely to get stuck with 1 leader that keeps trumping the hands as most people are aiming to win 1-3 tricks.

Interestingly, our games have always been won by players that just had 1 extremely good round. In other words, I suspect there’s an element to try and optimise the round in which you lead.

I’ll do my best to answer in my limited experience, but before I do, can I just get some clarification on what you mean by ‘Seat Binding’? A quick Google suggests you’re referring to advantage based upon where a player is seated in the turn order - is that it?

Second week in a row that we brought Cat in the Box to the table, but this time with the full capacity of 5-players!

We’ve now had a few plays of this game, and I think it’s been cemented as one that we actually need to add to the collection. It’s had us howling and shouting at each other like no other game has for a while, but it’s light and snappy enough that you don’t feel like never speaking to these people again!

Last night, we played Greed with my partner’s family. This dice rolling game has you banking dice to try and race to 5000 points. Each roll must score points, or else you’ll bust for the round and accumulate nothing. Not a complicated game, and very little decision making space (to keep rolling, or to keep scoring?), but it was fun! I’m probably saying that because I won at my very first play of it.

This morning, I brought River Wild to the table. This is a solo game in which you’re trying to create “protected lands” to score points. Additional objectives are printed on cards which score bonus points if met! As with all Button Shy games, there’s fewer than 20 cards, which means the game is tight and doesn’t take too long.

Rather than come in aggressive, why not educate? It’s easy to forget that there are genuine needs for disposable items when you don’t encounter them every day.