Catching Up on Games (9/8/25)

Lord of the Rings TCG

We returned to the Lord of the Rings TCG with our Mines of Moria decks. My deck was a Gandalf/Moria archers deck, and my friend had me build him an Aragorn and dwarves/Uruk-hai deck. Both decks had a copy of the Balrog, of course.

Gandalf had it rough. Somehow, I just could not find much of his stuff. On the upside, that meant finding all sorts of fun Moria toys. My deck has a handful of unique minions, including a Cave Troll, so I packed some Dark Places. Both of us had a Legolas for extra archery, and both of us ended up sacrificing him.

It actually wasn’t looking too good for me for a while. Aragorn and Gimli were slaughtering my goblins and shaking off their arrows. But things finally turned at site 8 when my friend entered the Brown Lands. Between the site, 2 Moria Archer Troops and 2 Goblin Marksmen (some were dug up out of the discard pile) I had 10 archery total which nuked the party, leaving poor Frodo to fight off 4 minions on his own.

Realms of the Elf Lords is next, and I’m probably going to go back to Nazgûl for shadow. Might stick with Gandalf and see if I can actually draw his cards next time!

Lord of the Rings TCG: 9/10 A great game, can’t wait to get it back out again.

Star Wars: Unlimited (SotG and JtLS)

We finished up playing our Shadows of the Galaxy decks (nothing will beat last time with our epic, never-ending match), then opened the spotlight decks for Jump to Light Speed and gave them a couple plays. My friend picked Han Solo and definitely had a harder time navigating the deck. Next time, before opening any boosters, we’re going to swap the decks so he can try out Boba Fett (his ship seems busted!).

Star Wars: Unlimited: 9/10 Can’t wait to make some JtLS decks.

Yedo: Deluxe Master Set

It had actually been quite some time since this last hit the table. It’s pretty long, which doesn’t help, the storage was also pretty bad, but my friend replaced the insert with something better designed to help get it to the table.

We played with our usual modules of tea house, personal powers, and specialists. Like Obsession, however, the rulebook in this one is awful. Not only are some rules misplaced, there might be missing rules! And not having a unified setup is annoying; you have to flip to all the modules you’re using to make sure you do things at the correct time (not even sure it matters?).

We had quite the race for annexes this game, and I got shut out of my black mission the turn I was going to be able to do it. We also found that with 3 players, there’s maybe not quite enough weapons in circulation among players for the weapons-heavy missions to play smoothly. We all had trouble getting the right weapons for our missions, and had missions we couldn’t do because the arrangement of weapons was wrong and no one had everything that was needed.

Yedo: 8/10 A great game with build-up to big satisfying turns, but the length, rules, and unwieldy space requirement makes it tough to bring out.

Core Worlds

Totally unplanned, I had chosen another throwback to a slightly older game. We had discussed wanting to get certain games played before the end of the year, and Core Worlds was one I really wanted to get back out. Since it had been a long time, I opted to just do the base game but with a couple of modules from Galactic Orders (new home worlds and leaders, the advancement, and events).

Sadly, I forgot about the Consoles of the Empire variant that makes the game less of a turn-order problem (so, you can’t snipe someone’s core world; they get a chance to show they could have also taken it), and I lost out on 8 points, which was enough to decide the game. But I loved getting the two war bots. I was able to conquer a core world just by sending two war bots.

At some point, I’ll have to track down the Revolution expansion. I bought the Nemesis solo mode which also comes with all promos ever released, so the second expansion is all I’m missing.

Core Worlds: 8/10 It can be long, but it’s such a great, crunchy deck builder; I still need to break out the solo mode, though.

Tidal Blades

My brother had been interested in this game or a while, and my friend managed to get a good trade for it. I remember when it came out that it looked really cool, but reviews had not been spectacular.

I think the biggest problem with the game is that the rulebook seems to convey that fighting the monsters is supposed to be a big part of the game, and it’s something you’re supposed to go do. Apparently, that’s not true? In fact, you can skip them completely and still probably do fine. I don’t know how the messaging to the player got so mixed up when they wrote the rulebook, but I kind of feel like monsters could have been a module, or just introduced in the last round. The game is ALL about the challenges. Which, unfortunately, does seem to make the game a bit repetitive?

We’re going to use the modules next time. And apparently, the long game is the only way to really play.

Tidal Blades: 6/10 (first impressions) It’s okay, but I guess we didn’t play the “real” game?

Vantage

My friend got caught up in the hype a bit, but it’s a sci-fi exploration game, which he had learned is right up his alley. I had some mixed feelings after watching stuff on it. I enjoy some exploring and adventuring, but the gameplay wasn’t really grabbing me.

When we sat down to play, apparently my friend had already played multiple times solo in secret. At one point, it seemed like we might lose early because I kept rolling hour glasses and he kept rolling hearts, so we were losing those resources a lot. My brother kept rolling blanks. We recovered enough and were able to slow things down once our tableaux got built up.

I don’t want to spoil too much, of course, but I was traveling along a river all game, and after stealing a canoe, I was able to upgrade it several times to increasingly ridiculous vehicles. I ended the game taking my airship out for a spin. While we did find that some of the items you acquire might have very niche applications, and you might just never use their abilities, the extra dice slots are generally pretty easy to utilize.

The surprise was that my friend, who was super hyped for the game, didn’t love it as much as he was hoping. He found that, like some reviews have said, when he was just wandering around exploring, he enjoyed the game more, and when he was trying to accomplish a task, the game was less fun. I ended up enjoying it more. Even though I still think the core mechanism is kind of bland, the exploring is the highlight, and the main mechanism doesn’t really get in the way.

I feel like the game would have been better had it been more like classic choose-your-own-adventure games and gamebooks, where there are several unique narrative endings to discover, rather than trying to give Euro-gamers dedicated goals to accomplish. Vantage kind of tries to do both, but I don’t think it succeeds at either all that well.

Vantage: 8/10? (first impression) A really fun exploration game that happens to have goals.

Vale of Eternity with Artifacts

We’ve previously played a couple of times on BGA, but this was our first play with my friend’s copy he had bought months ago. Technically, we ran out of time to finish since we started a bit late and I needed to refresh them on the base game and explain the couple of new things from Artifacts (my brother is also sometimes really slow in certain kinds of games). But I had a monstrous combo that got me 30 points in one turn, and I was going to be able to do it again for 27 points the next round (which would have ended the game).

The artifacts definitely added a neat layer of comboing to the game. The shelter idea was an interesting way of essentially adding another resource to the game without needing to add a bunch of new components; it’s just a small space you have off to the side, indicated with a little stick, and cards in your shelter act as a resource to pay for some effects.

We’ll have to bring this out more often, since it is a pretty quick game. We had recently played 51st State on BGA and found that the base game by itself doesn’t really offer very interesting combos, so it was nice to play VoE and get more comboing from an even smaller game.

Vale of Eternity: 8/10? We need to play more, but it’s been a lot of fun the few times we’ve played (despite not really having much theme).

Everdell: Farshore

Everdell is one of my brother’s favorite games, but everyone hates the giant collector’s box (makes it such a pain to get the right stuff out to play). Since there are now several variations of Everdell, we’ve been looking into options of what to do. One option is just buying a regular copy and only the expansions we want to play. But the other two in the group also wanted to try Farshore.

Our general feeling was that Farshore is fine, but it’s essentially Everdell re-themed and with a couple minor modules thrown in. The scrolls are pretty meh, just yet another variation of set collection to try and fix the original game’s difficult goal cards. Even the ship track ended up being a bit of a let-down. It’s just a track, and unlike nearly everything else in these games, it doesn’t have a cool thematic representation on the board; it’s just a track.

Everdell: Farshore: 7/10 It’s fine, but New Leaf did better (for me) with fixing Everdell’s issues.

Reign of Cthulhu (Pandemic)

We had time, so my brother picked this as a follow-up to Everdell. It’s mostly Pandemic with a couple of changes, so it was easy to learn.

Speaking of easy, we had an unusually easy time with it. Several times during the game, when something bad was going to happen, or we needed to get something done, someone had the perfect relic to help out. Even when two of us went insane, my friend had a relic to heal 1 sanity to all investigators. And early on, I used the elder sign to block the Innsmouth gate from spawning more cultists and shoggoths, and we happened to have a lot of Innsmouth cards come out that were neutralized.

It’s about as thematic as the system can do for an Arkham Horror-style Cthulhu adventure, which is to say, it’s not all that thematic. You don’t feel like you’re investigating anything, but at least it feels different enough that you don’t still feel like you’re just curing diseases.

Reign of Cthulhu: 7/10 The old ones and shoggoths are neat, but this doesn’t stray far from Pandemic, certainly not compared to later entries in the series.

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