Setting a date for a game day/night, we’re bad at it! We have several communications going on at all times trying to figure out when to play cool games with cool people. Once a date is proposed though it’s nice to have a quick check with our calendars together, which is something that we forget to actually do than we would like to confess. So this comic is a big sorry to all those friends who are still waiting for us to respond when we should play New Angeles/Galactic Renaissance/three-player Undaunted, Pandemic Legacy Season 0, and Vast: Mysterious Manor!

This week we were successful in planning some game nights though! We played a rare weekday game of Crisis, our first game of Fall of Magic and six games of Mists Over Carcassone. Crisis is still a wonderful economic worker placement game that can be quite brutal. I’m pretty sure I’ve come in last in all the games of Crisis I played but that is because I somehow always end up with a bread/resort strategy which ends up being too narrow to keep up with scoring in the end. Looking at our scores, we think we’re ready to scale up to hard mode the next time as well, so we got a great reason to play it again soon.

We were a bit nervous about Fall of Magic because we aren’t that great at storytelling games but we had a great time. It’s fascinating that games like this are driven by improvisation and discussing with your fellow players what you want the game to be like instead of its rules. Because the game makes you put your character at a location, it became mostly a story about what our fellowship did in the off-time in our journey. The resulting story was a lot more introspective that your standard fantasy roleplaying game. This gave us a lot of room to explore our own characters and ask questions about the world we are shaping. My character ended up becoming a sort of strange traveling scholar troubadour while Rachel played an 8 feet sandstone golem with a sculpted raven on their shoulder. Our other players played a talking fox and a midwife which was part of a powerful midwife cult that might end up becoming an adversary later on. Now that we have a direction and some fleshed-out characters, we all agreed the next time we wanted to have a bit more interaction among the different characters so we can really form a team to help the Magus get to the end of their journey.

This Saturday, we played six games of Mists over Carcassone, which is a stand-alone co-op version of Carcassonne. It’s super easy if you already know Carcassonne and it’s a really nice family-level game to introduce people to show how much fun co-op games can be.

This week we’re returning to Mice & Mystics and this Saturday I’m playing my third game of War Room, the last games were a blast but we didn’t get to finish our previous two games. This time we made teams in advance and we’re discussing our opening turns and general strategy over Whatsapp, using the TTS mod. So maybe I can tell you next week how we got to finish our game!