Arkham Horror LCG, solo 2 handed

My play tracker says that last scenario of this was my 250th play of Arkham LCG. Pretty remarkable for a game that I put down in disgust after playing it like 3-4 times with the truly shocking base game product and didn't play again for several years.

I guess it's appropriate that a milestone number is being played on the old Dunwich campaign, which when you play it these days really shows its age in several ways. First, some of the scenarios are just terrible. The one pictured I played today is a poorly designed scenario that serves to absolutely blank out certain investigators and approaches to deckbuilding. I hope you brought your static boost and resource spend boosts to try to hit sky high difficulty numbers like 6-8! Really a pretty bad experience all the way around. In general, going back to Dunwich (I'm doing Return To) shows off how the team didn't really know what they had on the their hands; it's quite clumsily designed, and not only because of one-off stinker scenarios like this one. They didn't really know that they would have like 10 years of expansions to grow into, or the directions they would go, so the encounter decks are often just quite unconditional fuck yous---I got a card I just don't think they would have made in the Return To train scenario (Essex), a notorious scenario in general, which makes all players unconditionally lose an action and then some other punishment for some arbitrary damage limit. That's just not the kind of encounter card they would make later in the game's life. It isn't fun to just get a card that says "fuck off" with not even a slight possibility of mitigation or preparation. It's weird because this unfun gotcha stuff is paired with an otherwise easy difficulty, since the modern card pool is so flexible after 10 full campaigns or whatever.

#arkhamhorrorlcg #fantasyflightgames #maxinenewman #natefrench #therewillbegames #boardgames #bgg #boardgamegeek #tabletopgames #tabletopsimulator

Glory to Rome, 3 players

I had never played Glory to Rome before, but I like Innovation so I figured what the hell. There are some subtleties of the card flow that took me the better part of two games to get---the hand/stockpile/pool/vault distinctions are crucial and the way cards flow between them, and which actions flow which direction, are the game. For the two games we played, the stockpile was essentially empty or immediately swept up whenever something entered it, which made for two very constricted games where several the actions were almost useless unless you led with them. It was impossibly hard to fill the stockpile. Broadly, though, I thought the game was pretty brilliant and would definitely play it again. The card powers were suitably strong, but not so game busting as Innovation. The game is also bruising and you have to keep just the right vigilant watch of your opponenet's tableau without needing to memorize every card at all times entering it. That is a tough line of fun to walk in this sort of game.

Like any Chudyk, when you lose in this one you LOSE. Bad. Someone locks the shit out of you. One game we had someone pouring stockpile into their vault and running completely away with it. In the other, someone had a complete lock on the game by having a bigger hand and the x2 clients power and going on a building blitz straight from their hand. It was brutal.

Good games.

#glorytoromeboardgame #carlchudyk #edcarter #cambridgegamesfactory #therewillbegames #boardgames #boardgamegeek #bgg #tabletopgames #tabletopsimulator

Arkharm Horror LCG, solo 2 handed

I wrapped on a playthrough of Innsmouth last week, the last mission is quite strange (shot here is from the one that is second to last). Still didn't get all the flashbacks, getting the one from the Riot is the third mission is really tough for me as I am just not quite that efficient a player despite the hundreds of plays. I hadn't run a bless team before so this was fun, and Book of Solomon is really an MVP if you can pump enough bless into the bag. The book is really good with a weak to the mythos guardian or rogue, as you can just infinitely heal everything. I was using Carolyn, so that added extra value by giving out resources whenever she did it. This was a really fun team that wasn't overpowered and showed off what makes Arkham so special---it's a maleable card pool that lets you approach even the most bog standard investigators (Nathaniel Cho) from an odd direction. He generated all the bless with ancestral token and tried to use Blessing of Isis to recur his good spirit events. That part didn't quite work but was enough.

I like playing Arkham with my full physical cardset and/or 2p, but playing it solo on TTS is such a perfect weeknight high quality filler game. Besides making the deck, it doesn't require that much from me mentally and my mastery of the rules means its a super light load. Simultaneously, it offers 100x the game of an equivalent length game I would be playing as filler.

#arkhamhorrorlcg #fantasyflightgames #maxinenewman #natefrench #therewillbegames #boardgames #boardgamegeek #bgg # tabletopgames #tabletopsimulator

Feast for Odin, 2 players

One way to get a sense of how much your mind is sapped by work is to play a casual game after work on Friday. We both scored our most miserable score of all time in Feast, barely covering 2/3 of our home spaces and scoring in the lower double digits in the sort game. Ah well! I did not get much value out of going sheep this game at all, needless to say. Shearing sheep being 3 workers for 3 four square green tiles return is not good value. I forgot that sheep themselves can be upgraded to green, so if I ever do animals in the future, I'll upgrade out in midgame or something. I don't know that animals are really that viable in Feast.

#feastforodin #zmangames #uwerosenberg #therewillbegames #boardgames #boardgamegeek #bgg #tabletopgames #eurogames