I did hate on the site, but the game is one of my all time favorites.
I was pretty decent with the strategy the first 7 expansions, but I don’t know much about the last 5. (Yes 12 expansions!). Always liked 1v1 the best actually, but willing to donk around in 3+ games with expansions I don’t know what I’m doing.
The new expansions are extremely different. I’m trying to get a handle on them and how the rules work.
I’ll probably stick with the cheaper subscription with enough people registered. Seven expansions + base is enough for a good game.
I’ll try to give Dominion Online a try, too.
Not really similar, but it is a card drafting game - I played Ethnos the other day for the first time, and my wife and I both enjoyed it. Random races each game so they’ll all play a little different, and after playing a set of cards (of either matching races or matching colors), you discard the rest of your hand, so it can force some tough choices.
Actually it sounds pretty similar based on your description.
Haha, well I guess my assumptions about Dominion are wrong!
To be fair, your description wasn’t super-detailed. So I’m sure there are differences.
Here are the rules in 3 minutes
It gets more complex with the latest expansions. This is a useful description for the base and early expansion sets.
EDIT: Ethnos seems like a mix of Dominion and Ticket to Ride. Cool.
Got a lot of similarities to Spire, with the Draw 5, discard every turn, reshuffle at the end of the deck and add cards as you go to make your deck better. Ill check this out.
Has anyone played So Clover? It’s a lot like Codenames, if you enjoy that. I think it’s the second-best game of its type after Codenames and probably better for a casual non-gamer group.
The idea is that you have a clover-like thing into which you put 4 cards, then you link each side together with a single word which you write. After removing the cards from the board you add some number of additional cards depending on how hard you want to make it (I don’t even know what the base rules say, we use 4 extra to make it hard) and then the other person has to try to reconstruct your words. For example, here’s one my friend did me while I’m isolating:
The answers here are: turtle=moist+reptile, roast=sunday+pepper, computer=fast+virus, drone=radar+honey (because of drone bees). You’ll notice if you slot all the cards in, that all works out. Hopefully that’s clear. Here’s another one for you to do:
Don’t mind his spelling of “diaper”, he’s a moron. Here’s one I set:
Think I understand the rules, but I don’t think I’d be good at that.
Stilton: Strong/Cheese
Hangover: Illness/Head
Orders: Device/Waiter
Bumbling: Feel/Bar
Feels like “orders” should be an illegal clue with one of the possible words being order.
I assume by Feel you mean Fool, in which case Feel/Waiter and Cheese/Illness are correct, other two wrong.
Stilton: Cheese/Town
Hangover: Illness/Morning
Orders: Head/Waiter (originally I put “maitre” for this but since “maitre d’hotel” literally means “head waiter” in French this felt like cheating)
Bumbling: Fool/Detective
This is an example of how you can get a bit screwed by random cards turning up. Like when i set my words the card with “Order” on wasn’t available to me (hence why I didn’t avoid the clue “Orders”), and neither was the one with “Bar” which is unfortunate when I’ve set “Hangover”. I think the official rules have you only adding one red herring card after you set your puzzle. We add 4 because the game is too easy otherwise.
My family plays a lot of Ticket to Ride - I read there’s a new Ticket to Ride Legacy game coming out.
Bunch of reviews out there, ranging from lightly positive to glowing. I’ve played a couple Legacy games (Pandemic and Charterstone) and enjoyed them, this will be the first one playing with youngsters.
I’d love to know what you think about it, or about Legacy games more generally. I’ve been reluctant to go down the Legacy game path because I don’t like the idea of eliminating replay-ability and I don’t have a consistent group of people that I’d play with (even less so when my fiancée and I move across the country in a few weeks). She isn’t enough of a board gamer to justify buying something $100+ for just the two of us.
I’ll let you know, ships early November. A couple reviews I read said this plays fine as a 2 player game.
I had a great time with Charterstone, which we played as a group of 6, and Pandemic Legacy (I’ve only played Season 1). The trouble we ran into with Pandemic, was just scheduling and getting all 4 of us together and remembering the rules that were unlocked in the prior session. Weirdly, Charterstone we had more luck with, with more people.
Pandemic you can definitely play with 2 people - I think you can either play one character each, or two characters each. I’ve considered playing it again - the first box I bought didn’t come with the Story deck. Their support took forever, but eventually they sent me an entire second copy of the game with all the components. I can probably re-create the Story deck, mostly (some stuff I may have to print off the internet).
Yeah we got about 6 games into Pandemic Legacy and I had the same experience where it was tough to keep all the changes straight from game to game
We finished Ticket to Ride Legacy of the West about a month ago. We had a lot of fun with it - 12 sessions, the first two are pretty normal TTR games with a smaller board, each session after that adds a bit more of the map and usually a new mini-game that lasts for at least a couple of games. It can add a little confusion because there could be 3 additional rules to track within a game, on top of the normal rules. There are some good mechanics to keep the players that may fall behind in the game in the campaign and give them a better shot at winning the next session. Never feels unfair, though.
You definitely could play it 2 player, but it might not be the best - I personally find 2 player TTR only good on boards meant for 2 players (like Nordic Countries or Switzerland).
It was worth the ~$100 for me, we got 15+ hours of good entertainment out of it. My wife and kid love TTR though, (I think it’s fine). If they publish a season 2, I’ll probably get it. We can play TTR with the board we created, they include rules on how to do that after the campaign is over.
Edit - there was one card that I got - there are secret cards you collect through the game that give you skills/advantages/points - that I thought was overpowered. We nerfed it in our game. Honestly I think it was bizarre it got through testing, I read it and immediately thought “This can’t be right.”
A new game I bought for Christmas that we quite like is Forest Shuffle - you build a forest with trees, birds, animals, bugs, etc. It plays well 2 player, it’s a small box (which I like!) and every game seems a bit different.
To prevent forest fires:
Looks like that one is on Board Game Arena. I’ll give that a shot sometime soon.
Went to a board game convention this past weekend and played this for the first time. I’ll give a full TR later, but I liked this one quite a bit.
My wife and I were looking for a 2 player game to play on Parental Leave and Patchwork has been a big hit for us.
Easy to understand, enough complexity and variability between plays, and from set up to boxing up one game probably takes 25-35 minutes.
