I am absolutely guilty of trying to excite my friends to try very impractical games, or game variants, and will happily aid others in organizing game days around those kinds of games. We’ve run Artemis with two simultaneous starships in our house, I’ve played several 12-hour-plus games of War Room, and a friend has recently bought Blood on the Clock Tower, for which I hope he finds a date to run it soon! The same friend also bought a copy of The Campaign for North Africa, which I’m less eager to join, however. 😛

But enough about my dreams of joining a Blood Bowl Sevens League, my side project of making a semi-automated version of Cataphracts, or playing the sixteen-player version of Challengers, and let’s talk about what we did play this week.

First up is Middara. This session was mostly an “acting” session, as we read the story bits together and voice all the characters (badly). After we finished the story bit, we played an included mini-game called Abraxis Battle Dice. It’s a simple push-your-luck dice game that is part of Middara, like Gwent is a part of the Witcher 3, or Triple Triad is a part of Final Fantasy 8. I’m pretty sure Middara doesn’t go as deep with it as the aforementioned examples, but it is pretty fun to see an attempt at a small and side game inside a big RPG. We’re still looking forward to every session, which is quite a feat considering we’re already 19 sessions in.

Because it was getting too late to start a new sidequest in Middara but too early to call it a night, we played a game of Raccoon Tycoon. If you’re looking for a lighter market manipulation game that feels big, this is a great pick. The art of the different animals is very charming, and the building you purchase can give you some bonkers abilities that feel overpowered when you read them, but seem to be balanced against each other. I enjoy it a lot and hope it hits the table a few more times this year, as I do think it’s a shame we haven’t played this in three years.

Another night, a friend came over and brought Fit to Print, which has been on our want-to-play list ever since it came out – as we think Peter McPherson’s other games, Tiny Towns and Wormholes, are very good. When our friend explained to us the rules, we thought it would be like the building phase of Galaxy Trucker, but it turned out even more stress-inducing! We loved it, though, from the slightly too many things you need to take into account to the single-player elimination just before scoring (the player with the least advertising income goes bankrupt) made it a chaotic and joyous real-time mess. The newsroom variant described in the back of the rulebook, in which the different phases of each round are played simultaneously by teams of two (preferably in two rooms at the same time), sounds wonderful and I am, as in the comic, thinking about doing an impractical gameday to get it played.

We finish that same night with a game of Robot Quest Arena, which still rocks. The rules of the game are instantly understandable for anyone who has played Star Realms, Legendary, or Ascension and you can start battling each other’s robots within minutes. I get that the price point is a bit of a barrier for a lot of people, as the production of the game is on an obvious crowdfunding level of pretty, but it’s such a crowd pleaser for everyone we’ve played it with so far.

This weekend, we played another game of Agricola! Who thought we’d be playing it so often, many moons after we bought it back in 2010? Although we’re not playing our own copy, but our friend’s copy and he has all the expansions and extra card decks. It’s been fun discovering the different decks and how they change the game!