Catan has sold over 40 million copies, which is more than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club! Honestly, we played it both a lot as kids, so we’re not too excited about playing more Catan but we have to make sure we stop ourselves before we comment on that when people say they enjoy Catan. Why close a door on a potential new gaming friend when we could keep our personal opinion about a game we just played a bit too much in our youth for ourselves? (We will never miss an opportunity to show our dislike of the Catan card game though ;))

This week, we played the private investigator co-op mode of Cosmoctopus, which is a nice twist on the base game. Our opinion of Cosmoctopus is that it isn’t a ground-breaking design but it’s a fun and cozy mish-mash of other games that even more casual gamers can enjoy. The pink octopus and the wonderful art certainly will attract a lot of people, so maybe it’s the perfect game for you to help some Catan players to try some other games. 😉

We also tried two other Buttonshy Games and played some more Circle the Wagons.
Skulls of Sedlec is a fun set collection game in which you place your card in a pyramid shape to score points. It hasn’t got as many hard decisions packed in eighteen cards as Circle the Wagons but its novel drafting mechanic that allows you to ‘dig’ for cards and short playing time means it has earned its spot in our hiking deckbox! We also tried Liberation which is a thirty-minute mini-version of Star Wars Rebellion and it made a strong first impression. On the other hand, it’s the sort of game that requires a bit of card knowledge and maybe even a meta between the players to really see if it’s good, so we’ll let you know after some more plays.

I also played a game of 1830 this weekend. While I have played it two or three times before on 18xx.games, this was the first time I played it in real life. While we had a great game with loads of company dumping and track shenanigans, it is quite a long game so in the future I think I’ll stick to shorter variants like 18Chesapeake or 1889 as I feel they give a very similar experience in about half the time.

We haven’t gotten any real gaming plans for this week except for a Heat championship this weekend. We always wanted to do a Grand Tour for Flamme Rouge using the companion app, so this is something we have been looking forward to for quite some time.