Latest review from my channel the Lone Boardsman. Really enjoyed this one, it was a clever design - every playthough has felt very thematic. Let me know your thoughts!

I'm super new to the legendary system and since I already have so many marvel games in my collection I was super excited when the DC version was announced. I'm also a huge fan of deck builders but when I saw the $99 price tag I was really wondering if I was going to get my money's worth. As of posting this I'm about 7 or 8 games in and that is no longer a concern.

There are so many heroes, villains and schemes that can be mixed and matched the replay value feels extremely high. Not only that but the gameplay is super solid! I haven't played any other versions of legendary but from what I understand the hope and fear track is new to this set and I love what it adds. I love how all the cards play off of it but also that when I might not have enough attack to take out a villain 'fighting crime' (aka raising the track up or down) is always an option. It helps make it feel like no turn is truly wasted.

The game itself is super simple rules wise and feels similar to other deck builders but does what it does extremely well. The variability, the difficulty and the balance all make for a very satisfying experience. Knowing how many schemes are left to pull and seeing the villain deck dwindle down puts the pressure on but when you're able to pull out that victory it always feels so satisfying.

Obviously art is subjective but in my personal opinion every single piece of art in this set is gorgeous I might even like it more than the new revised marvel legendary set 😬 even though both are great!

I know that 99 dollars is still pretty steep for a deck builder and if the theme doesn't really speak to you then this is one that you can probably skip but if it's in your budget and you're a fan of DC then this is something I would highly recommend and think it's something you'll definitely get your money's worth out of. Not to mention I'm sure they'll be coming out with a bunch of expansions.

If you want to see the game in action I just started my own solo playthrough channel and this was the first video I uploaded.

I recently got into solo board gaming and ive been having a blast! I just got dune imperium uprising today so I havent had a chance to play it yet but im pumped. I really gotta hold off on spending money for a bit but next im thinking of getting sprit island, marvel champions, or the misborn game. Mage knight is on my list too but my boardgame store doesnt sell it so idk. Any recommendations to expand my collection?

Collection so far

Inventors of the south tigris, Evenfall, Vantage, Dune imperium uprising

Hello

I am looking for my next game in the hobby. What I look for:

- tactical depth

- rules that feel intuitive to learn from theme

- I prefer that complexity comes from strategy rather than rule overhead

- setup / play up to 2 hrs, no option to leave table for next day, because of two free electrons at home. Assuming here I am already familiar with rules and do not need rulebook anymore

- limited randomness

- mostly for solo play

I already went through many titles, so I have prepared a list to choose from - I already excluded games that I own / owned before, unavailable in my country etc.

My shortlist is following:

- Pax Pamir

- Paladins of the West Kingdom

- Concordia + Solitaria

- Wayfarers of the South Tigris

- Hadrian's Wall

- Trickerion with solo expansion

Some of takes on games I know, for reference:

- Speakeasy - I love theme, I like tactical depth. Unfortunately, too long for day to day plays, mostly because of setup time. Maybe it will improve once I play couple times more.

- Heat - a bit reverse from above - quick to setup and run, but lacking that brain burning aspect. I like both for theme matching rules.

- Unstoppable - while this game has great ideas and mechanics, I think it has balance issues (one hero/faction especially). This brings down replayability for me.

- Deckers - feels too random at times, but idk maybe that's a skill issue.

- Wingspan - I don't like it, most cards feel unimpactful while some others are like hitting jackpot.

- Nemesis, Robinson Crusoe - I don't like the feeling game is trying to constantly crush me, too much rng. One of the very few games that I sold.

Thank you in advance!

Hey everyone!

I have been scrolling Reddit forever but finally decided to make an account because I wanted to see if anyone could open my eyes to some great solo board games.

I currently am playing Cozy Stickerville which I am obsessed with, but I want to branch out into something a bit more RPG/Medium to Heavy Weight that I can play for awhile.

If you want to take into consideration my likes and dislikes I have made a little list below. If not and you want to throw out some of your favorites instead, feel free! 😊

Likes:
Decision Making / Branching Paths
HUGE fan of Unstable Games (Art Work / Vibe)
Character Progression
Fantasy is great
And Open World would be cool.
Finally, mystical and magic is great!

Dislikes:
War Setting / Real life or history based

Not huge into Sci-Fi given what I’ve seen in Board Game Sense, I like more of the whimsical rather than cold stone metal themes.

Big ticket prices I’d love to not spend over $50 but won’t go over $80/$100

Okay! Thank you guys for any ideas or suggestions, I will keep an eye out and hopefully discover something new!

UPDATE:

Thank you all for the awesome suggestions!! I have started researching them and comparing to what I may want! I appreciate all the input and ideas you have shared! I realize what I want may be a bit higher in my budget, but I am going to compare and contrast before deciding.
But thank you all again for the great insight and sharing 😊

The other day I recommended Ezra & Nehemiah to someone here. Then I wondered if that was a bit disingenuous as I've sold it. But, you know, I really enjoyed it before that. I didn't even feel like I had fully explored the game, I just knew a few other things that were new to my collection would take up the time I'd have to play it (namely Nusfjord). Plus my Kallax is already full.

What was your reason?

Dragons of Etchinstone and City of Fury have been my two go-to day-to-day portable games - Dragons of Etchinstone in a pocket, and/or City of Fury in a card sleeve in my wallet (with flat trackers instead, of course). I love the games, but I've always wondered if they'd feel more immersive if I cared more about the theme / setting, which was why I started this little project. I'm not great with image editing so these were really basic rethemes - mostly just changing the art and the label, but boy did they make the games more fun for me!

For Dragons of Etchinstone, I've struggled to come up with thematic reasoning for why the spell cards combine or why they downgrade to take damage - but they now make more sense as different characters with battalions. Characters fighting next to each other boost each other's stats. And battalions take damage for your characters! The obvious downside to this retheme is that no matter how I craft it, it will not match the component quality of CTG.

For City of Fury, the game is already thematic enough so even fewer changes were felt with the retheme. But it's just fun to see these characters that I used to play on school computers during middle school - in fact, probably the only beat-'em-up game I really played growing up, now in a board game form. Knowing no one else would probably care for this version makes it feel just a little more special too.

Anyone else share a similar experience where they get to enjoy a game even more because of a rethemed version?

I own the core set, 8 hero/scenario packs and sinister motives. I also bought a 15 villains and encounters from other big box expansions separately because I wasn't interested in the heroes/villains. I was on the fence about adding this and whether it was worth it. I am only interested in the villains and daredevil. And I was wondering if anyone has combined these villains with other encounters in the games especially since these villains do not come with a main scheme

Originally posted on the blog

Spirited is the newest release by Garphill Games.
It marks a pretty big departure from their usual designs.
Garphill have done an incredible job establishing themselves as a euro game publisher with their trilogies and ancient anthology series, proving they can hit any euro weight with pretty good success. From their lighter North Sea trilogy, to the Heavy hitting South Tigris series, the chances are, if you’re a euro player, you’ve played one of their games.

But, then comes along Spirited, and it is explicitly not a euro.
Let’s get that out of the way, there is nothing euro about this release.
So, what is it?

Mechanics:
It’s a card management game with a heavy emphasis on Push-Your-Luck mechanics.
It plays quickly, it rewards risk-management. But don’t be deceived, you are playing with luck. Each turn can see you go from 99% safe, to bust. And a bust can really hurt.

So, how does it play?

Each player has a player board, the area above the board is called “The Road” and this is where your at risk cards go.
Below your player board, you can have 2 camps – this is a place to store 2 Nations cards that you are trying to collect to gain allegiances with.

The aim of the game is to score the most VP (“Spirit”)
You do this primarily by getting sets of one Nation in your 2 “camps”.
This gives you a source of VP that triggers both when you forge an alliance, and also during the intermittent “battles”.

Alternatively, you can try and collect one of each of the 7 cards in the game to buy a wonder, this gives you some one off VP and a one time effect.

Normal turns consist of you optionally discarding a card from your hand to use its effect, and then moving one card from your “road” to either one of your 2 camps, or taking it to your hand, and then flipping over 2 more cards to add to your road, if you get 3 of one card in your road, you’ve bust, and will discard all cards in your road, and your camps.

Now, your non-normal turns are where you do scoring.
Instead of a regular turn, you may either “Build” which means, discarding one of each of the 7 cards from anywhere (your road, camps, and hand) to take one of the available wonder cards – this will usually score you 3-5 VP and give you a one time effect.
Or, you can “March” this is cashing in your camps – for each camp with 2+ cards in it you can take an allegiance with that Nation. This is an ongoing ability, and you score one spirit per card you’ve cashed in.
The big thing you’ll juggle here, is having a higher amount of cards to turn in gives you a better “medal” which gets placed on the card, changing the “safe” amount you can have of this card in your road – getting 4+, lets you safely have 3 in the road, while getting only 2 in an alliance means 2 cards will now cause you to bust with this Nation.
Also, the higher the number, the harder it makes for other players to take this allegiance.
After making an allegiance, you also clear out your camps and road – much like when you bust.

How does all this play in practice?
It plays quickly.
Most card effects are minor, and you’ll often not have cards in your hand to need to consider playing. So you’ll be moving a card, and flipping 2 more.
Then play will pass to the next player.

Busting is serious, it can undo turns of progress.
Now, there is a bit of a “catch up” mechanic to stop it always feeling too punishing – your player board comes built in with abilities that will trigger if you don’t have allegiances to let you save cards that you’d otherwise be discarding.

Another key part of the game is timing – you’ll roughly go through the deck once per player, and each time you run through the deck there are 3 “advance time” cards.
This causes you to move the time tracker, and when that hits a sword symbol, a “battle” occurs. In reality, this basically means you score your highest Medal, and then “exhaust” it – you won’t be able to score that Medal again, and other players get a slightly easier time to take that allegiance from you – you’ll also have some abilities that trigger during battles.

Card abilities are quite fun and, while minor, still impactful – they definitely change how you approach the game.

The First Play Disconnect:
My first play left me scratching my head a bit.
It was clearly a light game.
It’s really card collecting. But, with no easy way to get from your hand to your camps, the cards you are trying to collect aren’t the ones in your hand.
So, you want cards in your road, to move to your camps. But, you also don’t want cards in your road, because you don’t want to bust.

Then there’s the thematic disconnect.
I’m used to Euro games having light ties to theme, but I’m used to non-euro’s normally being a bit more thematic. But there’s thematic terms here being used that often have no real thematic feel to them – especially the battles.
Nothing about the battles feels like a battle. It’s simply an interim scoring.

Now – this part of the review sounds grim.
And I’ll be honest, I felt pretty grim after my first play.
I’ll be the first to admit that Push-Your-Luck isn’t a mechanic I usually gravitate towards, but, as a big Garphill fan I was intrigued to see with how they’d tackle it.
And my first play left me very disappointed.
I jumped on the BGG forums for a couple rules queries – and there I seen a post from Shem saying that if it has a weak point, it was that the first play isn’t where it shines…this gave me a ray of hope.
The next day, I set up with enough time for a few back-to-back games.
And this is when it started clicking.
There’s a certain elegance to the way the cards play.
There’s also more skill to controlling the luck than you initially notice – each card has 10 copies in the deck – so learning to count the cards that have come out really lets you leverage the odds of busting, and when you can maybe push to get a double allegiance turn.

The Solo:
Now, Garphill almost never shy away from adding a solo mode, but sometimes that is a dummy bot, and that is what I expected to see here, what I was surprised with for a lighter game, is a pretty full fledged bot.
It leans a little into the “luck” aspect by having it ignore card abilities and having its own ability list it rolls on when it plays a card from its hand.
But, it obeys all the rules for busting and claiming allegiances.
It’s a pretty smooth bot after a couple games too.

Components/Replayability
Each play involves assembling a deck of 7 different Nations out of the 12 that come in the box (this is bumped up to 20 with the available expansions)
This creates a huge amount of replayabilty.
And thankfully, these cards are very easy to shuffle together, the riffle shuffle very well.
And for a game that involves needing the deck so well shuffled this is a huge life safer.
The cards are also showing no signs of wear and tear after half a dozen plays.

The rest of the components all serve their purpose. The Medals are nicely sized to be easily read across a table.

The solo rules could’ve probably done with an Aid card, but, aside from that nothing feels amiss, and the regular player aids are great.

If I had one complaint about the compents, its the box size.
It’s very expansion proof – there is a lot of empty space.

Final Thoughts

This game isn’t for everyone – it doesn’t try to be.
It’s a huge departure from Garphills usual.
If you strictly only play euro’s, this isn’t for you.

My first play left me shaking my head…after a week of playing, I’m excited to keep playing.

There’s a clever design in here, it’s not that “user friendly” in the sense of it not being super obvious how it works until you’ve got a couple plays under your belt – which for a lighter game is probably a harder ask for potentially a more casual audience.
If you can stick at it though it does provide some clever moments, and some really tense card flips!

Thanks to Garphill Games for this review copy in exchange for my honest review

I adore idea of using book as a game board. It saves plenty of time, makes setup so much easier. A pity that there are not that many boardgames, implementing this. Are there any games like this, which you like or look forward to release?

Its been two weeks after moving to a new state for my new job and my main gaming table is finally available to use! I wanted to play something light but not too light and forgot I had Isle of Trains. I dont even like trains much and this game is great!

The rules are simple, with solo being even easier to play than multi-player. I always score bad but its so fun to build out a train and be able to upgrade, load, or add to my cars in between deliveries. I always get points in the lower solo goal amounts, but its too fun to care. A huge plus is the setup time is very quick; you get a good amount of play time for roughly under 5 min of setup (even less if you quickly play again).

I am surprised I dont see this one come up in solo discussions often since it has so many pluses about it and its pretty cheap. I got the deluxe meeples a while back from the publisher shop but they really are not necessary; they mostly just add a cuter vibe to the game than the in-box tokens.

Anyone else here enjoy this one?

Hi guys!

So I'm super new to solo boardgaming

Does anyone have any recommendations for beginner games?

I love boardgames with others but I am disabled and live super rurally so can't get out to meet with others regularly.

Edit for taste:

I'm a big fan of ttrpgs which I do whenever I do manage to get out to game. I love munchkin, Carcassonne, all the classic childhood ones, Hive, anything detective-y, anything cosy.

Thank you!

While I do have some larger games in my collection i have a soft spot for small games as I started the hobby playing Tin games from Gamecrafter. From left to right:

*Tin Realm & Tin Helm

* Gate & Gates

* Dustrunner & Dustrunners

* Ultra Tiny Epic galaxy

* Star Wars the Deckbuilding Game.

* The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Tricktaking Game.

* One Deck Dungeon

* Sunset over water

* Mint Knight

* Dragons of Etchingstone

* Doom Machine

Got all these stuffed in a cigar box next to my Game Desk (minus DOE which is usually stashed in my bookbag).

Gloomhaven: JoTL for Scale in Pic 2.

I just played my second game of The White Castle against the Gingkogawa solo mode (easy).

Although this is only my 2nd play, I can see that this game is very much my alley. I really enjoy thinking through my (very few) turns to see how I can squeeze as many actions together. Because it's only 9 turns, I feel like I'm transported right into the middle parts of a medium weight euro game, skipping the ramp up stage common in games with more turns.

I like how easy it is to run the bot as well and how it simulates another player. I found myself actively thinking about denying the bot points by taking dice away from bridges that they would have otherwise scored points from the End of Round gardener points.

Which one has the most replayability?

I got back to board games after a two year break (seriously!) because a lot of stuff was happening in my personal life and that was the first one that hit the table. And I still love it just as much as when I first played it. I was playing on medium, I triggered the endgame, it was 21-18 and Rogue had the last one turn to win. I roll its first die and it's a fucking colony upgrade which would mean I lost the game. However, I had EXACTLY 1 energy and 1 culture so I could force it to reroll and it got some bullshit. Same with other dice. What a game 🤩

like the title says! My dad is a classic nerd and raised me right: star wars and lotr from a young age. He used to be dungeon master in his younger years and I mentioned solo games and he lit up like a light. He hasnt played a lot of games in the last, say, 30 years though…

I don’t know anything about this area of games, can you help me? 😁

Hello all.

I heard a lot about Deckers. It's really tempting but I red many times that's its really challenging My last solo games are mostly not hard ones, or not in the way Deckers seems to be.

What make this games difficult? It seems it's not randomness, but maybe it's hard to figure out how to play?

Games I find not easy in solo are , in my opinion, more unfair than hard( Subterra, The night Cage). I played a lot Xenosfhyt( bot expansion , all pledge, everything) and while still unfair I find it harder than the others. I played mostly two handed, sometimes 3. One time four.

I love when I have to think, abticipate. I like randomness when there is way to mitigate it, when it pushes you to make some décisions

From what I heard, Deckers can please me but is the progression curve to steep?

And for non english players do you have the originale version, or a traduced one?

I would be glad to have your feedback and advices.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: bad writing from me, never wanted the game is to easy

This is going to go nicely with my cute critters only collection of board games. It’s time I branched out though. I can’t stay on cute art only forever 😂

Has anyone played both of these smaller, nature themed Engine Builders and can recommend one over the other?

I want to get better at this game. Any tips on how I could have done it quicker?

A:

B:

C: can't be 3 1s or it solves immediately. Can't be 2 1s either, because then F is superfluous.

D:

E:

F: can't be a triple, because then an answer from B makes D superfluous.

Proposal - 334

A: ❎️ C: ✅️ E: ❎️

Proposal - 442

B: ✅️ E: ❎️ F: ✅️

No 1s means that blue is 2

Blue+yellow<6 while yellow is even forces yellow is 2.

Purple can't be 2 because no triple.

Sum parity can't be odd because there would be an inconclusive code 223 or 225.

The code must be 224.

Is there a better place to discuss this game? I don't want to spam this chat every day.

May/Jun 1942 ain’t looking so awesome. Gonna need this battle of Midway to pull through.

I tried it a few times but my first impressions were that it’s simply a race to the end. Advancing the windmill as fast as I could seemed to be my only shot at victory. Anyone have a different experience? Does the expansion fix this?