Catching Up on Games (6/25/25)

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Distilled

I’ve had my eye on this one for some time. It looked pretty interesting when The Dice Tower played a prototype during the campaign.

It’s a pretty straightforward game, mixing an economic game with sort-of-deck-building. But the neat thing is that you re-build your deck every round. There’s quite a bit of push-your-luck, though. And the market offers can also be quite random. So, it’s not exactly a crunchy strategy game. But none of us have minded; we’ve all enjoyed Distilled quite a bit.

  • Distilled: 8/10 (First Impressions) Really smooth and unique economic game.

High Frontier 4 All (Co-op)

My brother chose this one but decided on the co-op mode. This made me happy since the co-op mode more or less gets rid of the auctions. They’re technically still there, there just isn’t a reason to out-bid each other; you always get what you need for free.

That said, while there are things about the game I like, the economy of the game feels tediously slow for no reason, and that’s without us even doing auctions in co-op mode (it’s even worse playing normally). Some of the location numbers, while I’m sure are realistic, seem pointless; like destinations in space that have a 1-in-6 chance of doing anything with almost no reason to bother stopping there in the first place.

  • High Frontier 4 All: 6/10 Not really for me.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition (Co-op)

We haven’t touched this one since first playing it. We were all kind of “meh” on it, but my friend wanted to try the co-op mode and see if maybe that was fun enough to keep it.

It’s better, but not by a large degree. It still feels like Race for the Galaxy with Terraforming Mars’ resource system stapled on; not as smooth and quick as Race, not as robust and interesting as TM. We also didn’t enjoy how the actions worked at 3-player where the “dummy” deck randomly bans an action each round from being picked. It completely wrecked us toward the end, banning the action we really needed to take.

  • Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition: 6/10 Meh.

The Quest for El Dorado

We’ve previously played the original version years ago, but this was our first play of the new version (not that much has changed).

Two of us still enjoyed the game, but my brother only got frustrated with the difficulty of moving around. He refused to go the long easy route and stayed put for multiple turns (in my way) until he had the perfect hand.

Well, two of us will explore the expansions.

  • The Quest for El Dorado: 7/10 A pretty breezy race/deck-building game.

Near and Far + Amber Mines

It’s also been years since we last played this one. We had started a campaign, but didn’t get that far into it. I left the option open for us to just pick up where we left off (there’s not much of an ongoing narrative, anyway), but we ended up just picking a cool map and playing without the campaign. It worked fine.

I really like the additions from the expansion. The mines are way more interesting. The magic is fun and lets you customize your party more, and the town and enemy changes are nice without being huge differences. The writing is still pretty average with none of the stories being memorable, but it’s not as awful as Gloomhaven’s writing.

I also really enjoyed Now or Never, but that one is so damn big and incredibly long.

  • Near & Far: 8/10 Nothing unique except the particular combination of mechanisms, and it honestly works great as a result.

Finspan

We skipped over Wyrmspan for the moment, but we’ll definitely play that one as well.

Finspan is definitely lighter than Wyrmspan based on what I’ve seen. And it feels looser than Wingspan. You draw tons of cards, but you have fewer goals that care about what cards you play (no personal goal cards in this one). So, you’re mostly just looking at what combos you can make and which fish are better to play.

I really like the other changes (growing the eggs into schools, the added spacial puzzle of moving the fish and schools around, getting cards back from the discard), but it feels a little more aimless than Wingspan since you’re not really building toward goals; just building.

  • Finspan: 7/10? (First Impressions) I still enjoy it, but maybe a touch less than Wingspan?

Let’s Go! To Japan

We had some extra time, so my brother picked one of our go-to fillers. I tried to force myself not to over-value the experience track which hasn’t worked out for me so far. Well, my strategy of emphasizing raw points didn’t work either! I know, as a card game, it’ll be quite random anyway, but it’s driving me crazy that nothing I do ever works!

  • Let’s Go! To Japan: 8/10 Great drafting game with a great theme.

Age of Steam (Osaka)

This time, it was just two of us playing a map that’s likely too cut-throat for my brother. My friend and I don’t mind that kind of gameplay.

This was the Osaka map, a much more challenging map. I got myself a bit stuck in the corner early on, but I was able to extend the network out before my friend closed me off. The 2-player rules were interesting, blocking off the actions we take for 1 round. And with two actions already removed, it was quite a fight in the auction every other round when the big actions became available again. My friend managed to lock me out of the north (apparently without trying) which sealed the game; I wasn’t able to make the big deliveries I needed to keep up.

  • Age of Steam: 7/10 Works really well at 2-player with the right map.

Sky Team

My friend and I have played this a bit on BGA, but this was our first game in person. There’s a few rules that are tough to get right (partially from not-great graphic design), so there was a bit of learning curve. But eventually, we were able to win.

Dice games aren’t usually my thing, but I think the co-op nature of this one makes it work better for me.

  • Sky Team: 7/10 A pretty neat co-op.

Altered TCG

Back to new decks. We played twice, but I forgot to get a picture of the first game. First game, I played Axiom. It was pretty slow going, but once the deck got the right pieces in, it was a tough grind. My friend’s expeditions were stuck for a good 3 or 4 rounds while I slowly caught up. My bugs were unstoppable! Until they were stopped, and he won. I forget which faction he played, might have played Yzmir both games.

Second game was Yzmir vs. Yzmir, but the decks felt very different. I tried to do some spells shenanigans with cards that like casting spells, but I’m not sure I have enough of them to make it work? I won mostly from having some strong control spells, which I suppose gets the job done!

I wish the permanents were better. It feels bad playing a 5-6 cost card that does nothing until later, especially if I’m basically forced to wait a couple of rounds more to play just to ensure I can play other cards with it and not just hand my opponent a double-move.

  • Altered TCG: 8/10 Still enjoying it, but I think an 8 feels more correct for me.

Star Wars: Unlimited

We had been playing a lot of Altered lately, but I had gotten an amazing deal on the starter decks and a booster box of Jump to Lightspeed, so I wanted to get this back out. These were the decks we previously made from our sealed pools of Shadows of the Galaxy (I skipped Twilight of the Republic; not really the era I’m into).

After a couple of games of our previous decks (my friend’s first win, too), we combined our two pools from the box (12 packs each, essentially) to make full decks. I wanted to see what I could do with Cad Bane, combining my bounties and underworld cards. There were a good number of underworld bounty hunters to fit into the deck, too (I would have liked to open more, though). Really enjoying it, especially after watching more of the shows, so I know more of these characters.

  • Star Wars: Unlimited: 9/10 Great game.

Rococo

This is another one my friend has owned for a while that finally hit the table. We’ve never played the original, though.

It’s a pretty neat, fairly tight Euro with a bit of deck-building(ish). You won’t get many cards over the course of the game, but it’s pretty easy to also cull old cards and customize your deck. There’s a bit of an economic element to the game, but not many ways of affecting your income. It’s more about spending wisely than setting up some kind of money-making engine.

Other than the card play, which is pretty neat and feels different, there’s not much else that jumps out for me. It’s just pretty solid all around, but definitely has that older Euro feel to it with more interaction than most modern Euros. To some extent, I suppose the area majority is different just for the fact that many modern Euros seem to shy away from that kind of competitiveness. There’s also no way to reserve an outfit you want to make; until you make it, it’s always in danger of someone else grabbing it first.

  • Rococo: 7/10 (First Impressions) A solid old-school Euro.

Shackleton Base

I hadn’t heard of this one, so it was totally unexpected to me. This was my friend’s pick after hearing about it in some of the board gaming YouTube channels.

I appreciate the level of restraint they had with the design. Lately, it seems like every Euro needs to be either super heavy with a million pieces or more light-weight. It was nice to see a mid-weight Euro that doesn’t take up the whole table.

That said, I thought it was okay. A mix of worker placement, some light area majority, a bit of economics, some contract fulfillment. A bit of a mishmash of familiar mechanics like many Euros recently, that just didn’t click with me. Mechanism soup, as my friend put it. Apparently, some of the advanced corporations do more interesting stuff at least.

  • Shackleton Base: 6/10 (First Impressions) It’s fine…

Distilled

I was conflicted on what to pick next, and part of me was considering buying a copy of Distilled, but I thought, “We need to play it more before I can decide.” So, why not just play it again?

We tried one of the other recipe cards, the European Spirits. While the different recipes didn’t actually change up the game all that much (as we suspected), the characters, goals, and market seemed to do enough to give us new things to try. It was a tight game (we were all very close), but with so many random elements, it did feel a bit like the winner wasn’t up to us, it was up to card draws.

That said, we still didn’t really mind. The game is just fun, and the scoring hides the points gap well enough that you won’t really know how things stand until the points are scored at the end, making the last round still engaging.

  • Distilled: 8/10 Still really fun and unique.

Star Wars: Unlimited

After Distilled, we had plenty of time for some SW:U. Oh… we had no idea this game would be such a bloody, dragged out, slugfest.

It was the same two decks as last time. I kept what was probably too slow of an opening hand with not much in the way of early units (but bounties!). It didn’t help that my draws for the next couple of turns were 3/4 non-units with only 1 unit. So, I spent the first several rounds just trying to wrestle control of the board while my friend had no shortage of units to play and lots of ambush to take out whatever I played.

But my bounties were paying off, at least. However, my base was getting worn down pretty quickly. I was up to around 20-25 damage by round 5 or so. But once I had enough resources, I was finally drawing a lot of units to help stabilize. Eventually, my friend was running out of gas, and I had units that weren’t immediately dying, and I crawled to a victory at 29 damage on my base (I was at 29 for a couple of rounds, just barely holding on). It must have been around 20 total rounds or close to it.

This game was probably around an hour, easily our longest game of SW:U, and our decks were getting really low. You can see how tall my discard pile was. His was worse because I also kept discarding his cards (yes, I’m that guy).

  • Star Wars: Unlimited: 9/10 We’ll never forget this match! And we’ve gotten a lot of play out of one booster box.
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