Catching Up on Games (3/22/26)

Vale of Eternity (plus Artifacts)

We properly finished a game this time instead of getting to 98% of the way there. It was a close game this time. My combos were slow to get going and were earning me smaller points instead of huge points. My friend had one combo he was doing all game to replay a card for 6 points every round. Artifacts definitely adds more depth to the game, but does slow it down quite a bit as well.

Vale of Eternity: 8/10. A really fun card game all about combos with a unique economy.

Wasteland Express Delivery Service

My brother was still on his pick-up-and-deliver kick, so this one came back out. This was also a close game, with my friend being just one turn behind me for winning.

Even though my brother really likes the game, we all agreed that the map didn’t need to be so modular. It’s fiddly to set up, and the level of modularity doesn’t really add that much to the game. Most spaces are just spaces to travel through. Unlike most pick-up-and-deliver games, especially ones with a more adventure theme, there’s little interaction with the map. Just occasional radiated spaces or raiders, but most of the time, it’s all easy to avoid.

Wasteland Express Delivery Service: 7/10. Fun but nothing that really stands out.

Tiny Epic Game of Thrones (co-op)

This series of games lost me a long time ago. There are some early ones I’d try, and we tried Tiny Epic Galaxies (thought very little of the base game, haven’t tried the expansion yet), but none in recent years have looked interesting. But my friend is a MASSIVE GoT fan, so he had to get this and give it a try. We played co-op since my brother won’t like the normal mode.

What a disaster. The rules are such a mess, and the co-op mode is so wishy-washy with a lot of its language. You’d swear the co-op mode was made by someone else long after the game came out, not made at the same time by the same people. So many cards were hard to interpret for the co-op mode. We played for like 2+ hours and had barely gotten anywhere. I think this is the only game we had to just give up on part-way through?

Tiny Epic Game of Thrones: a generous 5/10. Could be less tiny, more epic, and with better rules.

Vantage

I needed some RPG-adjacent adventuring, and Vantage is about as close as you can get.

For the second game in a row of Vantage, I somehow found a boat to steal (different boat, too!). This old lady ended up doing a fair amount of stealing, and just at the very end, I found some sort of thieves’ hideout (numbers are censored, so no spoilers). We escaped on a repaired ship.

Vantage: 8/10. A great open-world exploration adventure. Not particularly strong writing, though.

Star Wars: Outer Rim (plus Unfinished Business)

My brother needed yet more pick-up-and-deliver. Back to space! This was our friend’s first time playing this one.

Despite picking up Garindan for my crew almost right away, it was still incredibly slow finding bounties. Even at 3-players with the expansion cards that flip over additional bounties, it’s just so slow if only one player is looking. Clearly, FFG intended players to be more aggressive trying to accumulate crew, but that’s not how everyone plays. If my brother didn’t have horrible luck with his jobs halfway into the game, he probably would have won.

Star Wars: Outer Rim: 7/10. A fun SW adventure with some rough edges.

Revive

We had played this on Board Game Arena, and when I was considering getting a copy, my friend found a great trade for a copy. The copy was almost perfect except for one tribe board that was missing, which we later found had been hidden beneath the campaign punch-outs (seriously, who hides game pieces like that? It didn’t just fall in there; the previous owner didn’t play the campaign).

Anyway, I really enjoy how clean the game is for how crunchy it can be. You only have a few resources to track, but things quickly get tricky as you build your machine with abilities you can combo. I also really enjoy the modules you can slot in to upgrade your card slots. It’s a fun theme, too, though the game is extremely Euro, and it’s a pretty dry experience. Maybe the expansion does more with the theme.

Revive: 8/10 (first impressions). Really solid with great combos and engine building.

Robinson Crusoe

Finally, my brother was done with pick-up-and-deliver games. We tried a new scenario this time, Treasure Island. While we really liked the deck mechanic, the card draws really screwed us. We had tons of wood, but kept running out of food. Didn’t draw any healing or bonus weapons, and that ultimately did us in. We’ll have to try again some other time and actually get to see the letter. Without the letter, there’s not a lot of theme to the scenario.

Robinson Crusoe: 7/10. A fun and punishing survival game, but we’re still looking for a great scenario.

Earthborne Rangers

For once, I wasn’t the one to pick it, but I had considered getting it back out since I haven’t started my solo campaign yet.

The ebb and flow of a session is really interesting, espeically now that we’ve upgraded our decks some. The first several rounds are pretty slow and challenging as we build up, take some fatigue, and try to get stuff done. Then, we heal up our fatigue, have large hands of cards, and get a ton done very quickly. The second location we traveled to, we traversed in like two rounds, and bam! we’re off again. I wasn’t sure if we’d reach our mission’s destination in one session, but we got there with time to spare. We’ll see next time what happens next.

Earthborne Rangers: 9/10. A great co-op, but I can’t wait to try it solo for even more immersion.

Doggerland

We love the prehistoric, hunter/gatherer theme, but there aren’t many heavier games that use it; most are pretty light. And my friend grabbed a copy when it was on sale for a great price.

We all generally felt that the mechanics are good, and the map and how things work there is probably the highlight for us. It’s a highly interactive map with very clean exploration and management for animals and resources. Some of the costs and restrictions are hard to remember, and the reminders on the board could have been done a little better.

But there’s a lot of other “been there, done that” mechanics in the game. Even the worker placement is pretty basic. There’s basic set collection as well, and basic contract fulfillment for points. If it weren’t for the map mechanics and the great theme (which the game does an excellent job with), it’d be an unfortunately forgettable game, I think.

Doggerland: 7/10 (first impressions). Really solid, but a bit clunky in some areas, and mechanically not as exciting as I’d hoped.

Pages: 1 2