A much smaller haul than usual from the UK Games Expo this year....



Root: The Riverfolk Expansion - We got Root a few months ago, and despite only having a few plays so far, it's already one of my favourite games. While we won't get round to adding this expansion for a while, it's in short supply at the moment so we snapped it up as soon as we saw it (then saw it on the very next stand we went to for a tenner cheaper).

Corinth - A new roll & write from Days of Wonder. We played this at the end of day one with friends who'd bought it that day, and went straight to buy it on day two as we enjoyed it so much. It's just a really simple roll & write with enough interesting decisions, but easy enough to teach anyone within about 5 minutes.

Wingspan - This was the major target for the weekend. We were led to believe that it was in very short supply so went straight to the first stall we knew would have it and bought a copy - but it ended up being widely available everywhere all weekend. Played it in the open gaming area on the Saturday and loved it. It's an engine/tableau building, action selection type game that is all about getting maximum efficiency from your actions. Shares lots of elements of Scythe by the same publishers (and likely with a lot of input by the Scythe designer too) in terms of having lots of good possibilities, but limited actions to do them in. Probably the best produced game I've ever played - the 150+ cards each with unique artwork, the birdfeeder dice tower and all the other components are fantastic.

Kariba - Very quick, simple card game with cool artwork and few rules. Will make a good travel game.

Caper - Watched a runthrough of this and had heard good reviews so picked it up on the way out of the show. It's a card drafting/tableau building type game with lots of replayability due to variable setup. Looks good but haven't played yet.

The haul was small because we are having an influx of Kickstarter games at the same time as the expo so didn't want to overwhelm ourselves with games!

Recently got Villagers in the post from their Kickstarter that we backed at last year's UKGE (it's a fantastic game btw - go check it out).

7th Continent was finally delivered on the Saturday of the expo, after 18 months of waiting. We're nearly done with the first curse and so far it is exceeding expectations. Such an epic game!

Also we're expecting Welcome To in the post very soon from Kickstarter. Another good roll & write that's a touch more complex than Corinth. With Kokoro - Avenue of the Kodama we now have three roll & write games and I think that's enough as they are all fairly similar, but the three we have are all different enough to warrant having them and will all serve different purposes.

I thought for sure you typoed Karuba until I looked at the picture. I'm all about any card game, particularly fillers, but I don't think I've ever heard of this. Is this similar to any other game?

7th continent is great. My What Goes Up expansion + flying roots and creature comforts is being delivered in the next week and then we'll break it out again and go hot air ballooning around the continent!

I haven't received my Villagers yet but glad to hear it's good.

I just received Pipeline with the KS metal cubes, which are great. Watched some of the Heavy Cardboard how to play and hope to break it out in the next week.

Tiny Epic Mechs is also shipping to me now as well. I have so many KS games coming in the next year.

We had our convention over June 1st weekend and got to play a good number of new-to-us games.


Heaven and Ale - Has a unique combo of rarer mechanisms. Turn order is dictated by whomever is furthest back on the action track board, like in Patchwork. Score is your worst tracker space times your Brewmaster multiplier, so you have to work to get everything up, not just focus on one area. Pretty unforgiving, though, so beware new player playing with experienced players.

CO2: Second Chance - Got this Lacerda via KS a few months ago but couldn't find a teacher so we just broke out the manual and learned it ourselves. A good game but cooperative mode (standard) was a tad too easy. I want to play again in competitive or coopetition mode, as I think that will be more of a challenge.

Manhattan Project: Energy Empire - I've wanted to play this for awhile and I really like it. I love the metal barrels even more (those and Everdell berries are my favorite tactile components). A good worker placement where you have to place more workers/sparks than are already in a space if you want to go to that action space. You 'rest' when out of workers or sooner and pull back all of your workers at that time (like Everdell) and the game has a good balance of doing what you want vs adding pollution to your board, which costs you points. A good medium-heavy worker placement game that i'll play again and eventually own. KS for the expansion ended the first day of convention and I played this on day 3, so unfortunately didn't get in on that.

Porta Nigra - Area control game with some good mechanics and choices to make due to how the game works. I don't usually love area control, so not as good as the above games, but a good way to end the convention and it's good for an area control game. Rococo is probably my favorite Area Control game so far.


We also played a few favorites:
Teotihuacan - I really like this game every time I play it (3rd or 4th time now). I'll eventually own it.
Code777 - great deduction game that unfortunately is out of print
Terra Mystica - a classic
Clans of Caledonia - I like this Terra-inspired economic game more than Terra Mystica/Gaia Project
Downforce - a fun 4-6 player racing game...always enjoy this more than most lighter games. Even more fun when using Mario Kart figures from MK Monopoly instead of standard F1 cars.
Roll for the Galaxy
Just One - the game that I mod here in POG is always fun in person


My 11 year old daughter played every above game with me; I've fully converted her into a gamer and someone who can play the medium-heavy games. Next I need to teach her some heavy heavy games

It probably is similar to other games, but nothing I can think of. It's really really simple though, a pure filler with barely any rules.

We've only played the first, introductory curse so far (The Crystal's Song, the one that came with WGUMCD) but we absolutely loved it - had all the expansions added in, and even in a short game (3hr-ish) we got to see the flying roots and one of the rockworms. We've got the weather expansion too but that didn't come up yet. Can't wait to get cracking on the Voracious Goddess, but we wanted to wait until we had time to put some hours in, so we're waiting another couple weeks. We didn't want to have one session then have to wait a week to get back to it.

Played "The Networks" this weekend which was pretty fun. Takes maybe 5 minutes to set up and 10 minutes to explain, and the mechanics are pretty straight forward. You've got to be willing to read the cards to understand the interactions though, so probably not quite at the "beginner board game" type level.

Etherfields just went live on Kickstarter.
Awaken Realms is taking all my monnies. Looking forward to receive Tainted Grail in the next couple of months.

I'm up for something new. After 52 scenarios in Gloomhaven, it starts to shrink on me.

ugh; I wasn't wanting to back another Kickstarter, but now I gotta go for Etherfields (core, not going all-in).

I'm also waiting on Tainted Grail.


We've been playing Shipwreck Arcana lately; a good co-op deduction game. You'd be surprised how much you can deduce just by their choice of which of the 4 cards to place the tile. I'll likely run it in POG as a game in the next few weeks.

We've also been playing QE, a fun auction game where you can bid as much as you want. However, after all 16 tiles have been auctioned, whomever bid the most total on the tiles they won is automatically eliminated from the game. So you need to get more points than everyone else while not being the top spender. The bids are partially in secret so you get an idea of some peoples' spending but not the full picture. Fun and only takes 25 minutes to play. 3-5 players. I'll also probably run it on POG in the next month.

I'm intrigued.

Sounds similar to High Society, an old Reiner Knizia game. You have to bid on items of varying prices (including negatives and bonuses). The player with the highest value of items at the end wins, but the twist is the player with least money left can't win. Classic game that can be played by pretty much everyone.

I like the concept of High Society a lot, but leads to huge Kingmaker issues at the end, still an enjoyable light game.

Just got back from a board game convention.

Will have full report later this week, but not now because I'm exhausted.

I mostly blame Nichp, who is the reason I was up way too late last night because there was a person looking for players for Tapestry.

At least you got to play it

We had the convention here last weekend and my daughter and I got home at 6:30am Sunday morning.

We played Tapestry twice(I love this one), Bruxelles 1893 (an old fave of mine; check it out if you haven’t played it before), Dominant Species for the first time (great game; took 4 hours but felt fast; def want to play more times at different player counts) and the new game Era: Medieval Age that day (decent piece placement game; not amazing but serviceable)

On Thursday we played:

Ragusa: pretty fun medium game; worker placement where you never get the workers back (have 10 so each player gets 10 turns then the game is over). You are placing the workers (houses) on the corner of a hex so get the 3 hexes the corner touches: some hexes are just resource production bump and others do actions like build wall or tower or convert resources. Main appeal of the game is that when everyone already with a house in those 3 hexes gets to do that hex action again when you place yours there.

Push: fun little push your luck filler game that we played since my son was also there with us for a few hours; fun enough for him that we bought it on amazon and played it 2 more times this evening; he’s not nearly into games like his big sister so we take what we can get from him

Draftosaurus: Basically Sushi Go with wooden dinosaur meeples instead of cards and you place into a Dino zoo to score in similar ways to Sushi Go; the second game we played with my son. Light but decent.

Hadara: Fun game where you pick from 2 cards and each card costs money but then bumps you on one of 4 tracks (money, military, culture, food). I enjoyed it and would play again.

Gugong: Great Game that I’ve wanted to play the past few conventions but didn’t get to. Different action spaces on the board but you use a card to play there instead of a worker. The card has to be a higher number than the one already there or you have to discard a card to play there. Also, each card has another action icon on it (corresponding to one of the board spaces) and usually a bonus. So you get to do the card’s action and the action of the space where you played on your turn. Good fun game.


On Friday we played:

Glass Road: Second time playing one of my fave Uwe games. I really like the resource wheel mechanic and I like how the card actions work where if someone plays one that you have in your hand, you get to put it down and do one of the two actions on it also (and limit that other player to only one instead of both actions on it)

Great Western Trail: My daughter still hasn’t played this so I taught it to her and another player. Fun as always.

Carpe Diem: A recent Feld game that’s basically a tile placement game. Decent game but horrible graphic design. I play it on Yucatá.de now because they have it, but I don’t really love it; maybe my least favorite Feld game but still good enough to play online turn-based. I’d much rather play Forum Trajanum.


And then Saturday was the ones I mentioned first and we didn’t go Sunday because we came down with a bug.

Order I’d rank the new games I played:
Tapestry
Gugong
Dominant Species
>
>
Hadara
Ragusa
>
>
>
>
Era
Carpe Diem

So at some point we're going to be liquidating my dad's collection of >1,000 games, but I and my sister have to decide if there are any that we want to keep personally first. Obviously there are some favourites I'll be picking but I'd like to take some unknowns, too. I was wondering if I can get some suggestions.

Stuff I like in a game:
- cool theme
- funky pieces/kit
- not too complex, probably on the lighter side
- strategically interesting but not really slow moving
Anything that's been published over the last 40 years has a solid chance of being in his collection, so any thoughts you can give me would be gratefully received.

Can you give us like 3 or 4 examples of your favorite games that fit this?

What I think is "not too complex" or "slow moving" may not match your thoughts.

Also kokiri, how many players are in your usual game?

3-4 players, I guess would be normal, up to maybe 6.

Of the recent games I've played, roborally was pretty good. I like pandemic, but that's probably towards the high end of complexity.

I'll try to think of some more examples.

Anyone ever play The Mind? Friends are talking about it and saying it's great. Just ordered it since only $20. Curious if any poggers have played.

Yeah I’ve played it. It’s a fun light group game. How good it is will depend on who you play it with.

You can also use the cards to play The Game, if you want to try that before buying it. Just look up the rules.

This sound cool. https://boardgamegeek.com/geeksearch...boardgame&q=qe

I see both a 2017 and 2019 version. Any difference? Also is the 5 player expansion needed?

Unfortunately I'm not finding it on amazon.

I think tapestry is great but apparently getting a moderate amount of hate.

Heaven and ale nichp says last player takes the next action but from the rules I watched sounded like that was not the case. Though I have not actually played it!

I got the 2019 version of QE from the Kickstarter; I think boardgametables.com is the publisher so you can get it there

Mine has 5 players but don’t think it’s an expansion


Work is slowing down so I’ll run it on POG this month at some point

Can’t make everyone happy, but it’s a great game. It was preorders only until now so you couldn’t get it, which made some mad, but it’s now on regular order so I bought it Sunday and it shipped today. Stonemaier gets some haters even tho they are the most transparent company out there and try to cater to the gamers, not Kickstarter. They didn’t print enough copies of Wingspan or Tapestry for first run, but they didn’t know they’d be such hits and that is a huge risk to take; still faster to get than if they did kickstarter. And some people want Tapestry to be made bare bones and cheaper but the buildings are awesome and I’m glad they made it nicer for a bit more cost.

In Heaven and Ale, you definitely go again if you are furthest back on the track, just like in Patchwork.

With that many games you could open a board game bar. Or sell to someone else to open a board game bar.

I find the giant buildings a bit excessive but don't really care. The game is just fun to play.

Yeah I may be remembering backwards.