Catching Up on Games (12/16/23)

Septima

For our second game, we used the advanced rules which added the ritual board and spells. There are also locations added to the board that players can use.

I really liked the additions, and the spells were really cool and created some fun turns. Moving up the ritual track was also satisfying as it regularly rewards you along the way. It was difficult remembering the scoring spells way across the table, and I definitely should have grabbed one at some point. While the advanced mode is a lot of fun and adds a ton of extra depth, it didn’t really alleviate the issues we were having with Septima.

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Cartaventura: Lhasa

I really enjoyed Vinland, in the same series, but Kosmos has been too slow bringing more to NA. So far, they’ve only brought over 2 but there are now several. Luckily, someone else felt the same and found a UK website that had the English copies with cheap US shipping, so I grabbed a few more.

Lhasa was the next one I tried. You’re a reporter traveling India and into Tibet in search of Alexandra David-Neel (a real, historical woman with a crazy life story explained in the history pamphlet they include in the game). I’m glad to see that each one brings a unique mechanism to the series in addition to a change in setting. Without going into spoilers, it was pretty interesting to see, even early in the game, how differently the paths might go. And the amount of history is fun to explore in these. I wish there were more historical gamebooks!

Below is only the initial setup; no spoilers.

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Obsession (+Expansions)

This time, it was 3-players with both expansions (and some promos) added in. The new workers are pretty interesting, however, they definitely add a new layer of complexity as there are tons of workers with different rules now. The new ones are especially complicated because they have innate abilities. The player aids could have used some improvement to make it easier to keep track of who does what under what circumstances.

That aside, it’s a great game. And somehow, even though on paper, it sounds like a boring theme, the game and theme are actually really fun.

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Zombie in My Pocket (Pokémon in My Pocket)

ZiMP is an older solo game I had wanted to try years ago, but it was PnP (with a very ugly published version) and I wasn’t really into PnP back then. When I found a Pokémon re-theme, I really wanted to try that one instead. I printed it out on some basic card stock (sleeved the cards too). Played it twice so far.

It’s a pretty simple game all about resource management (time, HP, and items) with exploration. And the Pokémon re-theme has a nice twist to it with Pokémon you can catch and add to your party for bonuses and a unique ability.

However, playing rules-as-written, it’s entirely possible (as what happened in my first game) to have a completely unwinnable setup. Might need some slight house ruling to fix that. But it’s otherwise a pretty fun, very simple and quick (~10 minutes) game.

I did a full write-up of the first session here.

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Runebound 2nd Edition (Sands of Al-Kalim)

Runebound has solidly been my favorite board game for years. And at some point, I’ll finally write a review to explain why. But Sands of Al-Kalim, the last big box expansion I didn’t own (Midnight being a weird expansion/spinoff thing that doesn’t really count). It was getting hard to find and getting expensive. I finally got a copy (that almost disappeared in the mail!).

I’ve played it before in the BGG forums (a group of us played Runebound for years) but this was my first play of a physical copy. Thankfully, my copy seems to be a later printing that corrected some errors, though other oddities seem to come from a lack of playtesting. Regardless, it was a lot of fun.

I did a full write-up of the session here and an unboxing (with more backstory) here.

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Nusfjord

It was finally time to bring this out for 3-player. We played the herring deck with no C-card house ruling. It seemed to work just fine as-is.

It’s fun multiplayer, but something about this one sings as a solitaire game. It’s so easy-going but offers plenty of crunch and really interesting and unique resource management. And the scores were really close: 29-29-30!

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The Liberation of Rietburg

Since Nusfjord can be a quick game, I had brought this as a potential back-up if there was time. It was our first 3-player game of this one. Since I already had plenty of experience with the game and it’s pretty light anyway, we used all of the red optional cards and narrator effects for higher difficulty. We still won with a couple of narrator cards to spare. This one is definitely under-rated.

Playing this one made me really want to bring out more co-op games. A shame Robinson Crusoe has been delayed so much. I was really looking forward to that one. And there are some games, like Yedo, that offer a co-op mode, but there’s a lot less actual cooperating in there, it’s more like coordination. It’s hard to explain, but I wanted a co-op that really pushed teamwork as opposed to players just contributing to a shared goal.

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Knarr

Yeah, I know. More Knarr. I mean, it’s 30 minutes. It’s so easy to bring out! And I still feel like each game can play out very differently. This time, I had a strong recruit token engine going that allowed me to explore very aggressively. I’m actually undefeated so far (barring a couple solo games where I either experimented with rule changes or had a clerical error).

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Septima

So far, it had only been my brother and I playing Septima, but we squeezed one more play in at 3-player (basic mode this time).

I still enjoy it, even the basic version, but the problems still persist. It was especially noticeable this time when it was very difficult for us to get witches (still only 4 trials at 3-player), and none of us were able to score all 4 divination objectives. As a result, most of the scoring was a wash or with one person scoring 1-2 points ahead of others. There was primarily only one scoring area (patients) where one player scored a significant amount more than the others. That doesn’t really feel like good design. That might be more of a problem with the basic version, though, since the advanced rules have other ways to score.

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The Gallerist

It’s been years since we last played this one and it was one of the first really heavy games we played. Bringing it back out, it didn’t feel as heavy as it did back then. I enjoyed it more this time around, though there are other Lacerda games I definitely enjoy more (I’d still place this above Weather Machine, though).

It was also interesting that this was an early Ian O’Toole game, and there were a lot of areas where the iconography was nowhere near as good as he does now. Loads of icons in the Gallerist just don’t convey nearly enough information. And it definitely feels different from Lacerda’s later games—a lot more player interaction (for good and for bad).

After playing so many Mind Clash games, the Gallerist actually felt too short. The game’s end seemed to be coming when we felt halfway through. I was definitely not ready for how short the game was and had made so many bigger plans that were simply not possible.

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Stroganov

I needed to bring this back out before doing the top 100 again. It’s a bit much to handle solo (too many moving pieces around, takes up a lot of space), but plays really well multiplayer.

I think my only complaint about the gameplay is that even when trying to push the Tzar’s Wishes more, they’re very difficult to complete, and some of them have underwhelming rewards. The abilities can be really powerful if you earn them early, but finishing one that’s worth just a few points feels… less impactful. It’s a pretty low-scoring game, but still, for all the work that goes into collecting the right furs, a few points as your reward doesn’t feel very good.

I hope the upcoming expansion adds some nice options and spices things up. There’s already a lot to do in the game, but I just want more! The banners could honestly use a little more something to do with them, too.