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As I am typing this, I am also checking my ongoing game of 18Chesapeake in which someone just dumped a company on me and I’m furiously calculating if I’ll survive the oncoming escalation of rusting locomotives. I like using 18xx.games as it really can automate a lot of the more tedious calculations out of the game and just get to enjoy the backstabbing and route laying part of 18xx games. And this week, a friend noticed Feudum is on Tabletopia and Deep Print Games posted that their space version of Mombasa (which is in our opinion very underrated) Skymines is now on Yucata. So it seems like it’s a great time for people to enjoy games online.
Luckily, we also enjoyed loads of games offline! On Monday we played two games of Run. While we played it before, it was during the deluge of new games we got at Spiel and we played this one when we were a bit too tired to enjoy it. I happy we tried it again because it’s a very clever and short hidden movement game for two players. It’s less abstract than Fugitive as it has a map with things moving around, but it isn’t as big as Letters of Whitechapel or Sniper Elite. The production design is also great as the tiles are designed in such a way that accidentally cheating can’t happen, so you’ll know you have only your deduction skills to blame if the runner gets away. Like Mind MGMT this game also gives you new powers, or takes powers away based on how much you’ve won playing a certain role to make sure the games are always tense and exciting.
On Thursday, we played a very close game of Starship Captains and we’re wondering how we always end up so close while the game seems fairly random. While the first player scored six points more than second place, the difference between second and last place was only 1,5 points. We hope this one gets an expansion to smooth out the slightly jarring balance between being a gateway game while also requiring you to play as hard as you can to get anywhere, as it has loads of great ideas that we would like to see explored a bit more.
On Friday we played 5 Towers, which worked well as a warm-up game while waiting for the last player to arrive, it’s also has more easter eggs than any other game we can remember which resulted in a lot of disrupting “look it’s that thing!” while people we trying to figure out if pushing their luck was the best way to go. We also played Whirling Witchcraft for the first time in a while but we’re very happy with the Golden Standee we awarded it in 2021. The whole game is about producing so many resources it won’t fit on the player board of the player on your right, which results in a joyously frustrating moment at the end of each turn as you notice the player to your left is giving you even more frogs than you anticipated. This is a great game if you are looking for something light to get people interested in modern board games.
We also played Wormholes which was fun but I feel like we need to play some more to understand its rhythm and see how strategic you can get. All five who played did enjoy it though, which is great after we’ve been trying to get it played by a bigger group for a year and a half now. It’s a pick-up-and-deliver game in which you ferry passengers from one planet to another, the twist, however, is that you are also able to create wormholes and you can use other player’s wormholes as well. This causes travel times in the game to become a lot shorter after a few rounds and, because of the haphazard-way routes tend to link together, the fastest way to get from A to B can suddenly be a very non-straightforward affair.
Lastly, we felt like solving a murder so we grabbed Chronicles of Crime 1900 and we crushed it! We scored 120 of 100 points, we’re not sure how that works, but the citizens of Paris can sleep safely in the knowledge that justice is served! I personally still think this is my favorite murder mystery format, with Suspects being a close second. The app allows the writers to create more robust scenarios that react to your actions during the game which helps with the immersion. The 1900 cases also include some light escape room-style puzzles, which are a bit on the easy side, but work well in the genre.
This week we’re playing with some new people we’ve known for quite a while but never realized they like board games as well, so that should be fun! We’ll also, if the post office is willing, be receiving some games we wanted to play for quite some time, so that should be exciting as well. 🙂
Chris
Asking the weird questions I see.