We got Love Letter: Jabba’s Palace to the table! We didn’t actually play though as we were busy talking, oops!

Haha I came to post this after doing this at work on a VM.

Our usual players were moving house this week, so they were pretty occupied! I was worried this meant that no games at all this week, but some other friends came round for Bonfire Night, and they brought Cascadia.

I haven’t played before, but I have heard of parallels to Calico, and I can see why! I think Cascadia has another layer of gameplay to it that made it a more enjoyable experience for me. Whilst the interactivity was very low (hate drafting being the only way to do anything), it was interesting watching the other players shoot for different objective sets.

Fun time, but took us longer than it should because we kept getting distracted!

I love how broken all the civilisations are in CE!

And absolutely love Radlands! A very tightly designed game without much overhead!

Thank you!

A smaller, more focused group this week! This meant Gloomhaven: JOTL again! My partner and I got engaged earlier in the week, so we chatted too much to finish it in one session - so our friends came back on Saturday to finish it off!

It didn’t actually take us too long to finish the encounter, so we played a game of Mondo. This is a ridiculous real-time tile laying game in which you’re trying to ‘close out’ biomes on your board. Always good fun and super accessible!

I had a brief panic that I had booked a hotel for the wrong weekend, but I’ve just checked and I’m okay!

This’ll be my first UKGE! Very excited!

Simple games for us this week!

We played Nacho Stack, a small little dexterity game. We manage to stack some of these in some pretty clever ways that made the second phase of remove the cards hilariously difficult. Silly, simple fun!

And then we played a few rounds of Skull to see the evening out!

It was a week of lighter games for us this week.

We started with 2 plays of Tsuro with 6 players, each of which resulted in 3 players winning! We were surprised how avoidant of conflict most of us were in this.

Secondly, we then played a game of Roll for It! to see the night out. I’ve never played this, but really felt like it needed some rerolls as in Yahtzee or Poker Dice. I spent far too many rounds rolling 1 die waiting for my number to come up only to have to wait for 5 other players to do their thing!

All a learning experience for the next time!

The coins are a worthwhile investment early on, but we managed to get some good objectives that means plenty of points all around!

Ooo I didn’t know this! One of the few times I wasn’t being a rules goblin, so I gave myself over fully to the owner! We only had one Goblin card come up anyway, so nothing too drastic.

Thank you!

We played Cartographers this week as we babbled on for a bit too long without any thought as to what we’d play.

We played it previously as a group about 2 years ago, so it was nice to revisit it finally. A simple flip-and-write game with some element of interfering with other players (namely the player to your left). A nice fun puzzle to share with the other players!

I’m not asking everyone to learn the game off the bat - but if I can point them to someone who’s rehearsed, edited and highlighted important rules before it even hits the table then that’s all I need. Just some level of exposure so I’m not being torn 5 different ways by a Q&A session over which components are what.

It’s not unreasonable to ask your players to do some of the rules legwork if at all possible.

Something I’ve always found difficult about these large games is getting the rules across to the others. My regular group are all gamers - we’ve all dabbled in the bigger games and can parse dense rulebooks. But the onus always falls on one of us to learn the rules and try to teach the others. I’ve sent “How to Play Oath” videos to countless prospective players who see the 30 minutes runtime and give up on the idea. Those that didn’t watch the video said the game only started to click after 4 plays. Which is a hilarious amount of Oath.

Only managed to play Libertalia this week! We picked up Vaalbara a while ago which is oft-described as “Libertalia-lite”.

Can now confirm I agree with that sentiment! The game can be surprisingly nasty with “take-that” mechanics which took me from a healthy lead going into Round 3, to only scoring 1 point and coming 3rd in a 4-player game!

Board state must have been somewhat difficult to read for some folks as they often attacked me for no reason (no actual loss from the card they killed) other than I was ahead from the first two rounds. This maneuevre actually cost the player the game as they’d have won had they denied the other player points instead!

Regardless, I did have fun and the plethora of cards made each new round exciting to see what combos we might pull off!

You’re absolutely correct on Captain Sonar. I got this to the table at our local cafe when we had 8 people, but I think too many members of our group have anxiety for this to land properly. Too much pressure I think!

We were on holiday this week, so had to pack quite light.

We played a single game of 6-player In Vino Morte as we waited for food. This game is still insanely easy to bring to any table and is guaranteed fun for 10 minutes at a time!

We also took along River Wild, another Button Shy game. This was a great brain-burner to play with my morning coffee, even if I didn’t so particularly well at all!

My partner’s parents brought along Greed, a push-your-luck dice game from the 80s. Whilst it felt like it did drag on a bit long, there were some interesting rolls that kept things interesting! Probably liked this more than I should have purely because I won!

And finally, we cracked out the deck of cards to play Sevens. A simple staple, not too much to say here!

Agreed!

Thanks for the discussion (and lesson) to get me thinking more about the game!

Great, thanks for clarifying!

I’m afraid that this is probably still prevalent here (wasn’t looking for it, but I do recall a few feelings)! Depending on your prediction, you may only be looking to win one or two tricks, and if you’re positioned in seat 3 or 4 from the trick leader, you often find yourself having to play high beat the first few players only to be trumped by seat 5.

I also wonder if the prediction mechanic aims to keep the leader rotating so as to mitigate seating bias. You’re unlikely to get stuck with 1 leader that keeps trumping the hands as most people are aiming to win 1-3 tricks.

Interestingly, our games have always been won by players that just had 1 extremely good round. In other words, I suspect there’s an element to try and optimise the round in which you lead.