Catching Up on Games (12/1/25)

This will be the last big catch up before the annual End of Year wrap-up and new Top 100, so there’s a lot to go through!

La Granja

My friend and I had played this before on BGA, so we were looking forward to playing the physical copy. However, something about it was… less fun this time around. It’s good, but there’s some strong randomness with the available actions as well as the card draws. Depending on your strategy, you could be locked out of critical actions by the roll of the dice. And while the crates give you a bit of flexibility to adapt to bad rolls, those are pretty hard to come by.

So, for now, it’s good, but we’re not entirely sure how we’ll feel later if we come back to it.

La Granja: 6/10? I’d be willing to play again, but I’d be equally okay just moving on from it.

Endangered

This was one my friend wanted to get to the table for a while. I only knew a little about it, so had very little expectation.

It’s certainly not a heavy game, but we all enjoyed the card play and building out the actions. That was the real meat of the game. The dice mechanism was fine, too, but we had more fun puzzling out the cards. I was surprised by how much was out for the game (which my friend had already bought), so we’ll see how different the other animals get.

Endangered: 7/10 (first impressions). Pretty solid co-op.

Fire & Axe

It had been a while, so I wanted to get this back out before the end of the year. It’s a shame there were never any expansions (though I’ve been drafting an idea for one); it feels ripe for something to add a little more complexity. I still enjoy it, especially for how this game approaches the Viking theme compared to most Viking games (which usually lean much more into fantasy), but it is showing its age. Lots of dice rolling, limited ways to mitigate, limited strategies to pursue, lots of optional negative interaction. My friend was much less enamored with it than before.

Fire & Axe: 7/10. A classic that is showing its age. Not one to bring out too often.

BattleTech CCG

Previously, our first BattleTech game was cut slightly short, so I made sure we’d have time for the full game this time. My friend was still getting the hang of it (he’s had a hard time wrapping his head around the combat and attacking/defending with only some ‘mechs, and what strategic decisions are involved), but things were clicking a lot better this time.

I recently bought a bunch of the fan-made cards from the Tactics II sets, so we’ll get to play with real decks next time.

BattleTech CCG: 8/10. Gets better with each play.

Robinson Crusoe

My brother was looking forward to this scenario (Encounter at R’lyeh), but we all felt it was pretty disappointing. It really didn’t feel like a Cthulhu-esque scenario. No monsters, no cultists, even the artifacts were a bit meh. The wind is a bit spooky… There were also some problems with how some of the rules for it were written (like Friday seeming to have no way of losing sanity).

And if it wasn’t bad enough, my friend discovered that the BGG upgraded bits he bought were packaged incorrectly, and he had duplicates of the wrong pieces and he was missing very important pieces. He was not happy.

Ah well, maybe the next scenario we play will be better.

Robinson Crusoe: 7/10? I feel like I’m still figuring out where this lands, and a weak scenario didn’t help.
Encounter at R’lyeh scenario: 4/10. Pretty bland and had some issues.

Sweet Lands (solo)

I had been looking forward to this all year. I had to get it to the table ASAP when it came in.

Learning it actually wasn’t that bad. The rulebook is very well written and laid out (with the exception of one super out-of-place rule in the appendix that’s nearly invisible). However, it’s a big game with loads of pieces. I just used bags initially until I could figure something out. I then bought some extra token boxes that fit pretty well and make set-up/tear-down a lot faster. Though, there’s nothing to help with the player setup; it just takes time putting all of the player pieces where they go.

As for the game, it plays very smoothly for how heavy it is. The iconography is solid, and everything is laid out in a way to help follow everything and understand how it works. The game has such a natural flow to it that it’s easy to get into, but it’s so crunchy with a million decisions, that it’s certainly not a fast game. Tons of depth.

I look forward to getting this out one more time before the end of the year. I’m also excited to see what the recently announced expansions will do.

Sweet Lands: 8/10? (first impressions) This could easily climb with more plays.

Spirit Island

This is one of my friend’s favorite games, and he had been anxious to play with us to see what we think. I knew all about it, of course, because the solo community in particular wouldn’t stop talking about it for the longest time.

I had seen some stuff on it very early on and just wasn’t that interested. Even watching a play-through in prep for gameday left me kind of meh. But playing it, the card play is really the highlight of the game, and that part just doesn’t seem to show well. You just have to play it.

That said, I didn’t love it on first play, but I enjoyed it more than I expected. It was disappointing how flavorless the colonists were; this could have been a generic fantasy game with an army of mindless zombies or orcs or whatever. My friend owns a ton of stuff and showed my some modules that were meant to give the colonists more personality and identity, but he said those weren’t great.

I did really enjoy getting new cards, though, as getting to draw four cards to pick from felt kind of like opening a booster pack of a TCG and drafting a card.

Spirit Island: 7/10 (first impressions): I’d play, but it’s not yet one I’d pick.

Sweet Lands

This was my immediate pick for gameday after it came in. However, I worried the game might be too much for my brother, and he did end up having a lot of really bad analysis paralysis. The game went really long, and he was getting frustrated at times.

Other than that, still enjoying the game. Might need to be a 1-2 player game for us, though.

Sweet Lands: 8/10. Still hoping to play more solo before year’s end.

Arkham Horror LCG

This was my brother’s Halloween pick during October (though it didn’t land on Halloween). We played the Loup Garou scenario since it’s a one-shot and not a campaign. It’s a neat scenario with the usual heavy amounts of atmosphere. I wouldn’t mind playing this one again. I didn’t have time to make a deck for it, though, so I’ll have to put something together for when we do our next campaign.

Arkham Horror LCG: 8/10. A favorite of the group.

Valheim (solo)

This was another one I had been looking forward to. I play the video game a lot (and I’ve posted bits of my play-throughs on here in the past), and the board game seemed to avoid the pitfall of being overly complicated in order to adapt every idea from the video game.

I ended up playing a couple of times before I had a chance to pick it for the game group, so I did the first two scenarios (not on the same day). It definitely has a lot of the feel of the video game; going out exploring, gathering resources, crafting and building upgrades, taking on bigger enemies. But something I’ve been really enjoying are the events. These add a lot of flavor to the adventure, whether it’s things from the video game like find abandoned houses, blueberry patches, wild animals, or it’s creating whole new encounters and challenges. I also appreciate that there’s not enough time to make everything you want, so you have to pick and choose, and every game will end up a bit different.

Valheim: 8/10? (first impressions) A solid adaptation that plays very smoothly.

Trickerion

It had been a long time since this came out, and we had only played it once, so my friend really wanted to play it again and see if his first impressions (which were extremely high) were correct. It’s definitely one of the brain-burniest games we’ve played, which does make it harder to bring back out; you have to mentally prepare yourself for it.

Somehow, all three of us had been aiming for the exact same level 3 trick since the beginning of the game (I guess it was for Halloween, because it was Séance). But I got to it first, forcing the other two to change plans. But that was enough to secure me the game since I was able to perform the trick multiple times for huge points.

It’s a neat game, and I enjoy it, but it is pretty exhausting.

Trickerion: 7/10. A solid but exhausting Euro.

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