Catching Up on Games (12/11/24)

Dead Reckoning (+Seadogs and Saga 1)

I enjoyed our last play more than I expected. The card crafting really makes the game shine. This time, we threw in a couple of simple expansions. Sea Dogs adds a few unique crew mates to your deck with special powers that unlock when they reach a certain level, and Saga 1 adds some encounters and story.

We didn’t get too many encounters, but what we saw was pretty fun. The way they do it is a little confusing, though. Even if you’re not playing the campaign, you’re kind of playing a campaign because certain cards, once earned, never get removed. Even if you “reset” and play again, you’re supposed to keep those cards in the game. You could, of course, just reset completely anyway, but it’s a little weird to do a campaign and a different kind of campaign.

Sea Dogs, however, was disappointing. Some of the powers didn’t seem all that great (one seemed completely useless?), and they were all very difficult to unlock. In the whole game, between the three of us, sea dog powers were only used maybe 3 times all game? And they weren’t that great when they were used. It seemed to have a lot of potential, but it was a very underwhelming expansion.

One thing about the game I’m not too sure about is the combat and how it shakes out. I attacked my friend (in game) as retaliation for taking over my islands. I had tons of canons to his 1 starter canon, and I handily won. However, since I didn’t deal enough damage to sink him, he didn’t really suffer any drawback. In fact, in one battle, he just got rewarded for getting attacked, sailing out with more loot. So, combat between players, unless deadly, is just a friendly loot-piñata mini-game? That was rather deflating. Sure enough, my friend won the game. My battles were a waste of time after he went about conquering islands.

Dead Reckoning: a solid 7/10?
Sea Dogs: big whiff/10

The White Castle (+Matcha)

I’ve been really enjoying The White Castle this year since getting it, and I was happy to hear an expansion was right around the corner. It was a little disappointing needing to wait forever for the pre-order to fulfill, though.

We’ve only played it once, but I enjoyed the new options in Matcha. It’s still a tight, crunchy game, but it’s now a little looser with more things to do, more places to go, more points to score. I haven’t tried it solo yet, but for now, I think I like White Castle with or without Matcha about the same; it’s just a different way to experience the game.

It’s a little amusing that, even though I like the theme and setting a lot, the game is very themeless—it’s ultimately just a nice aesthetic.

The White Castle: 9/10?
TWC + Matcha: same?

Pokémon TCG (limited/constructed)

After finishing our sealed decks, we pooled all the cards, including a bunch more I had, and made some full 60-card decks. Unfortunately, I have very few special Pokémon, and my friend really leaned into them while I tried out a deck that I just didn’t have any special ones for.

Things weren’t too bad until my friend got his V pokemon in and loaded with energy. Once my evolved pokemon was defeated, it was all downhill from there. My draws weren’t great either, however. I have no picture because I lost for not having any pokemon in play. There wasn’t anything to photo.

I’ll probably need to buy some singles to make the deck building a little more broad. We also might houserule a limitation on special pokemon.

Getting wrecked by V-pokemon: 0/10!

Star Wars: Unlimited (Shadows of the Galaxy starter decks)

I finally got around to getting the new starter. I had kind of put it off because I was hoping a reprint of set 1 would be sooner rather than later. But this one was on sale, so I decided it was a good time to grab it.

I already really enjoy the game, but I knew this set, with its theme of outlaws and bounty hunters, would be even more up my alley. I enjoyed The Mandalorian, so these decks had a lot of fun interactions and cards from the show. And the playstyle of the Mando deck is very much my style. Play things and make them bigger.

It’s hard to say from our limited plays (though I’ve played both these decks and the original ones many times online), but it felt like these decks were a little more powerful than the first two starters. My friend insists he’s still not good at these kinds of games, but he’s won some of our Pokémon games (even overlooking his V deck wrecking my normal deck), and this was our closest game of Unlimited. And our Unmatched games have been much closer after first learning the system.

Side note, I ended up getting some of the art sleeves because the Gamegenic matte sleeves have been out of stock for a thousand years for some reason, and these weren’t very expensive. I actually like the feel of them quite a bit, though they’re roomier than I would prefer. Tokens are the GhostGalaxy Dreamtrace tokens, a throwback to the old tokens FFG used to make. They’re really good and come in a ton of different colors. The boxes are deck-sized for convenient storage in boxes sized for sleeved cards, and they have their own cardboard token tray. I love these.

Star Wars: Unlimited (starter decks only): 8/10

Winds of the North Playtest

The continued adventure of Thorunn. Year 2 has its highs and lows. Things start out fine, some good planting in early summer, good hunting. During an event, some stranded folks show up on Thorunn’s farm seeking aid. She has just enough wood to start building them a Longhouse. It’s a while before that finished, but it came with some nice rewards.

During late summer, the weather is a little uneven. But Thorunn goes on raids for most of the summer, so she’s only worried about preparing to set sail. She crafts a nice high-quality Helm and a Spear. The raid goes much better this year. Thorunn bests the villagers and even takes on the following militia. She walks out with a nice pile of rewards, including a Fame.

Early winter is a bit more rough with almost constant rain (and some storms for variety). Luckily, the weather is clear long enough to harvest the crops with a much better yield than last year. But by now, she’s set her sights on a longer plan. With some gathered supplies, she builds an extension for the house, opening up a lot more room for more members of the household (so they can help out with more chores and bigger construction projects). She also begins construction on a Private Temple where she’ll be able to add a runestone for a bonus to a Skill and later can sacrifice animals at the altar for additional bonuses. But she’s also stockpiling resources to build a ship so she can start completing the trade requests that have been piling up (which she has most of the goods for). By now, she’s also earned an additional Fame and started expanding her Herð.

However, late winter is brutal. It starts out fine, other than some nasty weather, but there are enough things to keep Thorunn occupied indoors. At the Jol Festival, she’s able to earn her next Fame for holding a huge feast, and earns 2 new Herðmenn.

The Jarl makes note of her growing fame and recruits her for patrolling the region against enemy raids. There’s a quick skirmish with the aid of some local farmers, and Thorunn earns some nice rewards for a job well done. She wastes no time taking advantage of her new rank and begins filling her household with foster children offered by local houses (a very common practice during the Viking Age; lesser households would offer their children to be fostered in more prosperous houses where they would learn valuable skills and be well-taken care of).

With a nice full house, the Private Temple is complete and a trip to the market follows to hire a Runesmith to carve a runestone to Ullr, god of hunting and skiing. Things are looking great despite the weather (though, the weather was nice enough just long enough to do some ice-skating), but the final month of winter is brutal!

A huge illness sweeps the house, and happiness dropps a lot. It’s so difficult recovering, that not everyone is able to fully heal by the end of winter when the fates come knocking, and Thorunn doesn’t have time to attend the Þhing. Luckily, there is only 1 death (but a few were at risk). Gyda, a shaman who just came into Thorunn’s service, sadly perished from her illness. There will be a funeral held at the start of the new year. At least things were otherwise going well enough that Thorunn was able to train the surviving Herðmenn. Thorunn also collected payment from her tenants for the first time.

In this coming year, Thorunn plans a trade voyage when the construction of her knarr is complete. If there’s time, a ship for raiding would also be good to have for the summer raids, now that Thorunn has a larger body of supporters. She also needs to slay the Great Boar and Giant Bear. She will hopefully have Fame 8 by the end of the next year, maybe even more than that!

Infinity/10.

Mythos CCG

With a second starter set, I pooled the cards and made a proper solo deck and a mythos deck to play against. It went much better this time.

It begins at Central Hill in Kingsport…

Things are going well, but my first adventure, Alone in the World, needs Ambush, but I’m just not drawing it. Houdini and his pistol are keeping most monsters at bay, which helps a lot, but then a Servitor of the Outer Gods shows up that’s a bit too big for him to deal with. I take a gamble and let my posse of allies soak most of the damage.

When I finally am able to play Ambush to finish the adventure, the Great Old One, Tulzscha, is in play, blocking sanity gain. So, I have to wait for that to wear off first. And wouldn’t you know it, I get hit with a Government Cover-up which discards my Ambush! I have to now spend a sanity and reshuffle my discard and deck to try and draw it back out again. At least by this time, almost half my deck is in play, so I won’t need too many turns to draw it. Finally drew it, played it, didn’t get slammed, and could finally complete the first adventure.

All my allies are gone; I sure am alone in the world!

But with some sanity regained, I can start anew and build back up. Sadly, as soon as I visit the sanitarium to get back some sanity, a big monster swoops in while I’m vulnerable and hits me for 4! It takes a bit of time drawing into the second adventure, Arkham Horror, and in the meantime, I’m trying to manage my sanity and get some allies and artifacts in play. Some nasty monster attacks keep wiping out my allies, but better than me going insane. Things are looking up when Houdini returns with his gun. Unfortunately, the event, Succumb to Temptation, causes him to snap for a moment and attack me!

The pieces have been slowly falling into place, but my sanity is low. Houdini and Samuel Winsor have been helping to keep the enemies off (with the help of Faithful Hounds). Winsor was able to turn a couple of locations into a temporary Church so I can shed some unwanted Phobias, which helped a lot. I had to make sure I was indoors as often as possible, trying to dodge Agoraphobia which could drain me pretty fast if I hung around outside too much. I also had to get rid of a Portaphobia while briefly stuck at a location with a portal. But I finally made it to the Arkham Gazette and complete the second adventure!

Ended with 15 adventure points and only 3 points from remaining sanity for a total of 18 points.

Xia (+Embers of a Forsaken Star)

We’ve played this a few times now, and my thoughts mostly remain the same.

It’s a fun game but extremely old-school—to a fault. Random at every corner, with events and die rolls playing a huge part in who wins. This recent game was very kind to me and I won by a healthy lead and was, for a while, around 5 points ahead of the others. But a catch-up event entered play to give the other players money and energy for being behind (again, luck playing a huge role in the game).

But at least the game isn’t overly long, though I suspect the expansion sped the game up. We’ve never played without the expansion and I never would (nor would I recommend anyone do so). They really should have just done a second edition with the expansion included; nearly all of the things I enjoy were added or greatly improved with the expansion.

That said, the titles are a little disappointing. They always seem to be either really difficult to pull off for only 1-2 fame, or they’re a huge risk when a safer option is already available by doing something else. I also wish there was a little more customization that lent to specialized strategies. Let me equip my ship with mining gear to reduce or even remove the danger from mining, or something. There are shields, but of course, those are a roll of the die as well.

The missions are also not as good as they could have been. Requiring specific tiles to be in play just doesn’t work that well (at least at low player counts); players have to aggressively explore for quite some time for missions to be playable, even when other strategies are by then opened up for exploiting.

Overall, a second edition could have really smoothed the many remaining rough edges the game has, but at least the expansion more or less makes the game feel finished.

Xia (only ever with the expansion): 7/10? 6 is maybe too low?

Heat

We’ve played this several times and tried all the modules except the campaign. So, we recently played through the campaign in one afternoon (since the game is only about an hour, it’s easy to finish in one session).

While skill and knowing when to take risks can noticeably improve how you do in the game, the card draws and random boosts still can sometimes be very kind to you or ruin your day. But at only an hour or so, the level of randomness feels fine; it’s just not a number-crunching strategy game.

However, the sponsor cards increase the randomness in the campaign. And overall, we felt that Heat is more fun as a one-off game rather than the campaign. The sponsor cards are neat, but their randomness (not to mention the thematic disconnect of getting new equipment installed on your car mid-race) was a bit of a let-down. The events are pretty neat, giving extra little goals.

But overall, between the randomness of sponsors and less customization (1 upgrade in game 1, 2 in game 2, then 3 in game 3), the campaign was just not that interesting compared to a single game. We might try some house-rules to add the campaign stuff to a normal game but with a bit less randomness.

Heat (with any modules except campaign): 8/10.

Pokémon Splendor

All of us had played Splendor, though never as a group, and didn’t have any particular thoughts on it, but two of us are Pokémon fans and were much more interested in the Korean version of Splendor. It’s still crazy that it’s not available internationally. There must be some strange licensing roadblock, because that’s just leaving millions on the table for no reason.

Two of us really enjoyed this version, and my brother said it was fine (which for him means it’s a good game, I think; he’s really bad at expressing his thoughts, and we’re often thinking he doesn’t like a game that he then claims to like because his responses have always been, “It’s fine.”) The evolution mechanic is really satisfying, not to mention it adds more theme. The rare and legendary Pokémon are also more interesting than the tiles in Splendor (nobles?).

Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would prefer regular Splendor, but it sounds like everyone who has played both prefers Pokémon Splendor anyway. If only it was easier to get.

Pokémon Splendor: Maybe 8/10?

Star Wars: Unlimited (Shadows of the Galaxy sealed)

I really enjoy limited formats, and since I never have the opportunity to draft, sealed is the easiest to do. Unfortunately for SW:U, the first set sold out before I could get a booster box (like, literally the same morning I went to go buy one). So I had to wait for a reprint or set 2. Since the reprint took forever to go out (and prices are of course inflated), I ended up getting a set 2 box when I saw one for a great price at $60.

We opened the packs and built on gameday, but the photo of my deck was after getting back home. None of the packs had anything too crazy, but my friend opened a foil legendary Rei unit (and a second legendary). I first considered a Cad Bane deck since I happened to open a hyperspace variant, but wasn’t too sure if my pool had enough to make him work, so I also took a look at the options for the Rei leader. Things seemed to come together a little easier, so that’s what I went with.

The deck I ended up building is a Rei blue/yellow deck focused on little guys she can hand out experience to with some good utility cards for support. A few cards are off-aspect for the deck, so I pay a bit extra, but they seem still very playable with the extra 2 cost. Granted, this is my first time playing SW:U sealed, and first time playing with the majority of these cards, so I’m going on limited knowledge.

There are some neat combos that came together for the deck, especially the Survivors’ Gauntlet which could move the experience tokens from Rei around, allowing her to just keep adding more out (since she can only add experience to a unit with 2 or less power; they’re no longer valid if they reach 3 power, but the Gauntlet can move the experience, bringing the unit back down and valid again). I also ended up with a massive Grit wookie. My friend’s deck is a Fennec Shand yellow/green deck with lots of capturing and ambush.

It’s a fun deck, but I think I can make Cad Bane work by double-dipping into bounty hunters to go along with underworld since I ended up opening a bunch of underworld bounty hunters. The downside is that I only have a few ways to get bounties on the enemy units, so a few cards might whiff on their abilities. But there seems to be enough synergy from the rest of the cards that it might still work.

The plan is that we play these decks a couple times, making adjustments if we want, then maybe make trades between the pools and re-tweak and play some more. Then we open the other half of the box and do it all over again. After that, pool everything together and make a couple constructed decks (kitchen-table limited/constructed, of course; I’m not buying singles right now).

Star Wars: Unlimited (sealed): 9/10

Village Rails

Toward the end of the year, I had been looking at what other games either haven’t been played in a while or that we had only played once. Village Rails was really good the first time we played it, so, since it was short enough to play with other games in the same day, I picked that for a return.

I still really enjoy it. It’s a smooth combination of economic game and tile-laying game. For me, this is way more engaging than Trailblazers (a much lighter tile-laying game mentioned above). There’s more going on, more decisions to make, but it’s still a fairly snappy game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. For some reason, though, my brother doesn’t like it; he says it’s not interesting. The other two of us really enjoy it, though.

I managed to get the purple track icon on all 7 train lines which was very satisfying.

Village Rails: 7/10? Or an 8?

Ark Nova

This qualified for both, “haven’t played in a while” and “only played once”. This was my brother’s choice of game.

For me, it’s not bad. But I find the cards not as interesting as Terraforming Mars or Everdell; there’s very little engine-building in AN, and we all found that sometimes we had a hand of cards that mostly was either not playable or not helpful. The cards are so strict in their requirements, the middle card market seems often superfluous. Even if we had access to the whole market from the beginning, we’d rarely find anything that helpful in there. But that could drastically change from game to game. It was definitely clogged with difficult and expensive cards this time.

All the mechanics are good, I enjoy what the game does, and I prefer this theme to TM or Everdell, but the difficulty of finding cards that let you build into anything that feels like an actual strategy is just more tedious than I think it should be. Maybe the Cards action is the first one you’re supposed to upgrade, and then just draw a lot early on. But then wouldn’t every game have the same start? Why not just give everyone a larger starting hand so we have more interesting decisions from the beginning?

I really want to like this game more.

Ark Nova: 7/10.

Gùgōng

It’s been five years since we last played this one, so this was our friend’s pick. He was curious if five years of gaming has changed how we feel about the game. Did it age? Have our tastes changed too much?

Two of us ended up still really enjoying the game, but my brother wasn’t enjoying it as much. But Gùgōng has a lot more opportunities for an opponent’s move to really mess you up, which my brother hates. It happened to me too, costing me several points from the wall and slowing me down since I couldn’t spend intrigue to refill my workers; it severely hurt my last round. But there were still other things I could do, even if they weren’t as good. The points weren’t that far apart in the end.

It’s a shame what happened to Game Brewers; they made some great games. At least my friend backed nearly all of them (just the Euros).

Gùgōng: 8/10?

Altered TCG

I’ve been getting my friend in collectible card games this year, and he’s been really enjoying them, but Altered was one that he was more interested in because of the theme (people from the real world dropped into a strange fantasy world, isekai-style, where the objective isn’t to fight but to explore this new world). I had been a bit unsure about it from previews, but it was on BGA, so we gave it a go.

We both agreed that the starters feel a bit uneven. A couple of them are a little too basic; the blue deck practically plays itself. But also, some match-ups were brutal with one deck totally wrecking the other. The first two games left me feeling pretty lukewarm on it, but it was quick, so we wanted to try all the factions and see how we felt.

I ended up enjoying Muna, Yzmir, and Bravos the most. I also like the playstyle of Axiom, but I’m not really into the technology theme of them. Lyra seems interesting as a theme, but neither of us were really into the dice-rolling of the starter deck. But it seems you can build a non-die-rolling Lyra deck.

Our first in-person game was Muna vs. Yzmir. A pretty close game, but my anchored plants won the day. We haven’t decided how much we’re going to get into Altered, but it seems pretty fun for casual play, and it’s still pretty quick in person. I’m just worried that the lack of secondary market (because the official marketplace isn’t open yet) and lack of wide availability could make the game DOA.

Altered TCG: 8/10; likely to go up with customized decks (might have to try sealed, though it takes 7 boosters to play sealed).

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