Catching up on Games (7/30/23)

I had been holding out on another one of these until I had played enough of League of Dungeoneers, but that isn’t likely to happen soon. So, here’s what I played since last time. It’s not as much as I expected, but a lot of stuff slowed down our gaming the past few months. We hope to be able to play more regularly again.

Legend of the Five Rings LCG

We had another 2-player game day, and L5R was first up. This was our first time with custom decks I had made (though I let my friend pick which clan he wanted to play). The decks were Crane/Dragon dueling and honor against Phoenix/Unicorn spells and ring manipulation. I used my friend’s cards too so the decks could be a bit more focused with some of the core box cards. Sleeves and little pieces of paper helped separate them.

This game felt better in terms of us getting a hang of the rules. It’s a tough game to learn. Crane won, but it wasn’t as bad as our first game, and my friend was starting to figure out how to combo stuff together. Still a learning game, for sure. He requested we play again with the same decks but swap them. He wanted to try out Crane after seeing the deck operate and wanted to see me use Phoenix the way it was intended.

Hanamikoji

After L5R, we brought out another Japanese-themed 2-player game. We’ve played this one a handful of times, and the new version had come in with a bunch of new action tiles, so we played that one and tried out some of the new tiles. I think we played 1-3 of the new ones.

We both agreed that we prefer the original item cards, though. The new ones just kind of lose some of the charm. But the new action tiles are really interesting. Some sets create more unknown information while others create a lot of known information. And figuring out which ones work to your advantage earlier versus later is tricky. It’s really impressive how much the game changes by swapping out those 4 little tokens.

Umbra: Ghost Stories of Visagros (playtest)

This is my game currently open to playtesting (see here for more). It’s a solo gothic horror/fantasy adventure game. I’ve been working on it over the past handful of years, coming back to it every year or so to work on it some. It started out as a more generic fantasy setting with a couple of twists, but the flood of fantasy games made me reconsider the setting.

The basics of the game: You make a character by combining a background and profession, giving you abilities, attributes, some starting items, and a starting quest. You begin in the starting town and can go do whatever. As you travel the map, you can resolve encounters, discover new towns, fight enemies, and attempt quests. In some towns, you can purchase businesses and improve your business. In the most difficult regions, you can look for bounties. All this is to earn Reputation. You have a limited number of days to earn a pre-determined amount of Reputation (which you choose during setup based on desired difficulty).

The main mechanic of the game is a dice pool mechanic. You always start with 2d6, then you can spend stamina to add dice to your pool. Some items can also grant dice to certain tests. Being extremely good at an attribute can also grant free dice to your pool. Once rolled, any die less than your attribute is a success. The difficulty of the test determines how many successes you need. You’ll also have some number of re-rolls from your proficiency and items.

This playtest was before the version available, so there are a few things that have changed since then (but everything I described above is current).

Wasteland Express Delivery Service

This was on our radar since it was first shown. My brother and I enjoy these types of games, but we never pulled the trigger on it. My friend acquired a copy a while ago, and it was finally time to play it.

It would be easy to use the enemy movement to screw over opponents, but we don’t play that way (mostly because my brother would hate it). So we focused on our own things and left each other alone. Some of the missions can be a bit annoying if the locations happen to be really far apart, and at one point, I was having trouble drawing one that would help me with winning the game (placing your standee token on completed missions). My brother got a lucky draw so he could skip one of the public missions, but I was forced to do all 3. I lost, but I was close to getting the last of it done.

It’s a fun game with really nice production, though between the card draw and dice rolling, it is pretty random. That’s not necessarily bad, but mitigation is mostly for the rolling.

Darwin’s Journey

My friend and I played this during the KS, and I was a little lukewarm on it. Playing the final version was a bit better. It’s good, still pretty dry, and doesn’t have a wow factor for me. It’s good. But I’ve heard the expansion is more interesting.

One of the unfortunate things about the KS deluxe items was the playmat board. It’s pretty washed out and very fuzzy compared to the board, so we just played with the board. The other components are really nice.

One thing I do appreciate is that there are a variety of ways to earn points. It’s not quite so point-salad that strategies aren’t that important; you’re still rewarded for focusing. And there are some interesting timing elements with the specimens area. You earn more money early on but earn more points later. And wow is money tight in this game! Overall, I think the stamps might be the least interesting part of the game. It feels the most tacked-on.

Legend of the Five Rings LCG (TTS mod)

Since we can’t always keep doing 2-player days, we settled on playing online. There are a couple of ways to play L5R but the simplest for us was Tabletop Simulator. So found a good mod and remade the same decks.

I played Phoenix this time and my friend played Crane. It was a much tighter game. Part of that is likely that my friend was getting better at it, but he was also playing a deck he had seen in action before.

TTS isn’t the best way to play. It can be a bit fiddly, even more so for some games. It worked well enough for this but certainly isn’t our preferred way to play. A shame that none of the mods are complete though.

51st State: Ultimate Edition

This was my pick for game day. One I had wanted to play for a long time. We only played with the vanilla deck, and it was a bit difficult even figuring out where all the cards and components belonged and what each expansion/module did.

It’s pretty fun and moved smoothly after a few turns. The downside, however, is that there don’t seem to be too many strategies in the base game. Especially when one of those strategies is attacking other players (which my brother would never want to include), it created a bit of a runaway leader problem. Hopefully, mixing in other sets of cards into the game will alleviate this.

What an ugly cover for the ultimate edition, though.

Legend of the Five Rings LCG (solo)

After adding to my collection and making an insert for it to better store everything, I wanted to make new decks and play some more while the rules were still fresh. My friend also let me hang on to his core box and add them to the collection (for easier deck building).

For these two decks, I made a Phoenix fire/spells deck against a Unicorn overwhelm/movement deck. I hoped that a less technical enemy deck would help the AI be more of a challenge. It worked okay. I think with a little more focus on raw power, the AI would be able to pose more of a threat. But the game went longer than some of the previous matches (having some of the missing solo rules helped).

Maybe a week later, someone was kind enough to send me a Lion playmat they had sitting around unused. Next time, the enemy will also have a playmat!

Empires of the Void II

My brother and I were looking forward to this one. It’s a sort-of pick-up-and-deliver sandbox, sort-of space adventure game. But you could also play it very aggressively like an area control game.

It has a nice mix of mechanics. And I like the action selection and follow core mechanic. But after the game, we all kind of felt like the nuts and bolts of the design didn’t live up to the core mechanic. A lot of the mission cards were a little boring, and my brother wanted there to be more pick-up-and-deliver. He also isn’t into area control games, so we didn’t mess with each others’ influence.

I enjoyed the game the most, but even I felt like the game was trying to be two different things while not being great at either. We have better area control games and better sandbox/adventure games.

Architects of the West Kingdom

We’ve had mixed feelings about the Garphil games we’ve played so far. Raiders of the North base game was okay but great with the expansions. My brother played Paladins of the West Kingdom and were a bit lukewarm on it (extremely dry and surprisingly random in a couple of places). So we were unsure how Architects would land.

What really caught us off guard was how fast the game was. I think it was around 45 minutes playtime at 3? We weren’t expecting that one, but the game isn’t on a strict timer, so who knows if it will always be that quick. The downside is that it didn’t really leave much of a strong impression. A cute twist on worker placement but otherwise a pretty predictable Euro. A fine but not very exciting game. Maybe an expansion can uplift it like RotN.

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