Gems, dragons, bears, penguins, and no dwarves

This week in development

The games I’ve played this week have got me thinking a lot about trading games. And I’ve got vague ideas about what could be done with those mechanics combined with a hidden role element.

Maybe something a little like the house favour tokens in Dogs of War.

This week in games

So many games last week!

There was just the two of us on Wednesday, but we managed an impressive amount of gaming in under 90 minutes.

We started off with Splendor. I won the first game quite spectacularly, but Matt did much better in the second. He denied me a lot of diamonds early on and ended up winning with 18 points to my 16.

Then we had a quick couple of games of Tsuro. Matt won the first game and then the second was a complete draw.

We finished off with Love Letter (I think this is the first time I’ve played the original!). I started off strong, but some wild guessing in the later rounds ended in another loss.


On Friday, I had another 2-player session with Alex. We decided to stick with stuff we knew.

We started with Bärenpark, as you can’t get more relaxing than that. To spice things up, we tried out achievements for the first time. Alex managed to grab the first bear statue and get a couple of the achievements first, so beat me by a few points.

Next up was Concordia, and my losing streak continued. I made a foolish mistake and got stuck down one end of Italy, meaning my usual exploration strategy failed and Alex proceeded to grab as many cards as possible, leaving me way behind when it came to scoring.

We then had a couple of game as Inis, so Alex could get more familiar with the game. In the first game, I managed to push Alex out of the capital territory, where he’d built up a bunch of sanctuaries, then a perfectly timed epic tale card allowed me to jump to a far-off territory and grab another sanctuary for the win.

The second game was much less dramatic. Alex managed to get the exploration card in hand on every round, so easily occupied six territories and the game was over.

We finished up with Long Live the Queen. There was some back and forth until I took a risk and moved my princess away from the guard. Unfortunately, the next roll activated the sniper across from her and it was over.


Then on Saturday, it was time for games in the pub with a completely different set of friends!

We started off with Hey, That’s My Fish!, which I still swear is far too ruthless  to be a game for kids. Emma’s love for penguins seemed to spur her on to a win in both games we played.

Then I jumped at the chance to finally play a full game of Ethnos with three ages and six races. It went down particularly well (especially orc bingo) and we played another full game. Now all that’s left to try is 5 or 6 players and to finally play a game with dwarves (who have been conspicuously absent so far).

This week in everything else

I still have no computer. I checked on Thursday and it apparently is going to be replaced, but they haven’t contacted me yet to say it’s ready to be collected. Browsing the web on the media PC connected to my TV is getting pretty tedious.

But it’s meant watching more TV! And Into the Badlands has restarted. I wasn’t thrilled with the way the last series ended, but the first episode of the new series was excellent and had me sold from the start.

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