TL; DR – I can’t say enough good things about BoardGameArena.com! I’ve played a lot of games online with friends there and it helps maintain sanity. I talk about some of them in more detail including: Nippon, Res Arcana, and Russian Railroads. Plus I recommend a tabletop game I’m playing solo mode called Era: Medieval Age.
Read on if you’re so inclined…
BGA Plays
Nippon continues to hit the table with friends since we found the game. A very complex one where you have to watch and calculate every move. You ignore Influence at your peril. It’s awesome to rack up the X5 rewards if you can, but you need to have the right amount of yen, coal, knowledge, goods, contracts, etc. Plus the buildings to go with it! I could go on, but it’s like no other game I know. If you’re into medium to heavy games for 2-4 give it a try! One game this week saw a player pull out a big win. I swear it started with his first round, where he only had one color meeple for all six moves. (In Nippon, changing meeple colors to take actions costs you yen.) Then he had two more rounds with only two colors and his cashflow soared. That was impressive.
To my surprise, we essayed a round of Kingdomino recently. Interface on BGA is pretty good, and helps you avoid matching issues. I still lost even though I really like this game! Maybe it’s the art? I think it’s a nice light game for in between heavier ones.
Speaking of which, in between longer games, 6nimmt and 7 wonders also hit the table fairly frequently. It’s nice having the interface do the work for you with both these games. I can never win at 7 wonders – I think I have once in about 5 years and probably 40+ plays. My friends really like it and it’s quick though so I stick with it. 6nimmt is just pure gamer shrieking and complaining. Excellent palate cleanser.
Three of us gave Res Arcana a try after others stated that it was really good. Well it has really good art and components, but it started off quite hit or miss for synergy, especially in a deckbuilder with set management. I lost one game big, yet I won the second game bigger and faster with drawing the Druid, getting the Dragon’s Lair then putting several dragons out, and just stockpiling gold. With the high random element, we deemed it playable when someone wants to play it, but not our first choice. Then I found out about drafting. Oh-ho! Drafting, which is available in the online version at BGA, makes the game go better. Lots better. We played two games since then and saw improvement. Light years of improvement even. I have to give this more plays to form a full opinion, but I’m very grateful to a couple of Redditors who pointed out drafting. I don’t think I’d even play it without that now.
The shiny new-to-us breakthrough game , which we played seven times over two nights and part of one day, was Russian Railroads. Wow! (I personally have 12 plays in within a week. Blink blink??) RR is a worker placement game where scoring and strategy are not immediately obvious, however all the actions are quite intuitive at the start. We wound up getting pretty fast at it darned quickly. Our scores started moving up to higher totals too. One four player ended in a tie, which was pretty amazing considering that one player looked to be in the lead all game, and that scores tend to be in hundreds of points. I managed to parlay the right combination of engineers and end-game bonuses into being one of those tied players. 🙂 And I’ve won more than my share of this game. Give it a try if you can! Highly recommend. Would have missed it but for the pandemic.
Solo
This week, in my few spare moments when friends aren’t online, it’s been all Era: Medieval Age all the time. (See picture above.) This is a very nifty roll and build polyomino game. The solo mode is a “timed” mode where you want to build and wall your city by round 8. Depending on how well you do, you get a tile ranging from Serf to Merchant to Knight to King to Pope. After trying about every variation I could think of, 17 games in I hit upon the right combination and achieved Pope, with a score of 116! That was a very pleasant result.
Having solved that puzzle, I moved promptly on to Collector Set 2 and Collector Set 3, all 3 sets having arrived by post last Saturday. I played one game solo building the Manor and two more games building the Abbey. I’ve gotten in one play with both the Weigh House and the School from Set 3, and then a game where I just focused on the Schools getting walled early to try to win on Culture. I scored about the same though, so the buildings add some great variety, without breaking the game. I’m very excited to get this to the table with people. Especially because Disasters will be different and we’ll all have our eye on the good things, but possibly different things. I enjoyed the new buildings, though the lack of a quarry or other stone production building seems to me to be a bit of an oversight. Apparently, this is found in the expansion, Rivers and Roads. So there’s something to buy when I next have spare board game budget!
Thanks for reading.
billcollinssite 