It has AI, I recommend the clockwork expansion if you end up needing a challenge.
But it also has online play and there are always people waiting for new games to start
So far this month I have played Age of Steam, Cartographers, The Castles of Burgundy, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, The Fox Experiment, Harmonies (twice), A Message From the Stars (twice), Rise of Tribes, and Windmill Valley (twice).
Sky Team
A quick 2-player co-op. You and your co-pilot (or vice-versa) have to land a plane by completing pre-landing tasks as well as maintaining thrust/altitude/airspace via private dice rolls and limited communication.
Plenty of fun and a good amount of replayability as preset scenarios increase with difficulty and variables.
Just an FYI, the current Tariff situation is really hurting the Board Game industry as the vast majority of them are made in China and the publishers are often smaller companies so many reprints and new games are being postponed or canceled. If there is a game you have your eye on, get it now. It may be a long time before it gets reprinted (if ever) and will probably be more expensive.
I really like Le Havre but think it is best with 3 players. With 4 (or 5 which is crazy talk) there are rounds where you have only 1 action. True the food requirements are less but our group only plays it with 3 (we rarely do 2 player games)
I just can’t find the right pace to play the game at. With most games of this type, I can think of general development as the main activity with basic food production as secondary. I need to learn that in Le Havre, basic food production is the main activity and general development is secondary.
I have been playing Galactic Cruise a bunch and it is quickly becoming my favorite game. I got the Kickstarter but it is starting to enter retail and the version is the same. If you like thematic euro games it should take a look.
I like GC but in my two full games (4 player) I narrowly came in second. The first game winner was 203 I was 202. The second game the winner and I had 208 but they had 8 progress cubes to my 7…
I got a chance to spend most of the weekend at a local board gaming convention and learn Cities and Forbidden Island, both of which I’ll probably add to my collection at some point.
My problem wasn’t food production. It was the whole strategy of using and building the buildings. In a single player game I’m fine. But the one time I played pvp, I had no problem getting food, but a lot of the time the building I wanted was already in use, yet the buildings that I built rarely got used themselves. That said, I believe I came in second behind an experienced player because the other players got into debt.
It is an older game, but we have just started playing Castle Panic in my house. It is a cooperative game where you need to defend your castle from an approaching army of trolls, orcs, and goblins. It is easy to learn and good for kids 8 to 10+.
We just came back from BGG Spring, the convention that features (among other things) the just-announced Spiel des Jahres nominees, where the SdJ judges & some additional trainees will teach you the nominated games on a bunch of set-aside tables. Of the nominees…
Kennerspiel (I’d described this as games above the party-game level of difficulty, but not always by much):
Faraway: We liked this game a LOT and will buy it. Basically you draft 8 cards round-by-round and play them into a tableau one at a time left-to-right, but then you score them right-to-left one at a time. Winning requires some planning.
Looot. Vikings on a map gaining resources and send them back home to satisfy set collection. Reactions ranged from meh to blech.
Endeavor: Deep Sea. A worker placement game with some twists…you’re hiring sea experts, diving, conserving, and exploring deeper layers of the sea. We sucked at this and thought we’d try it again, but the jury is still out overall.
Regular old Spiel des Jahres.
Bomb Busters. I don’t like cooperative games, but this one was decent. You’re working together to cut the right wires (the blue ones, not the yellow or red ones) as a group. If you know the game Hanabi, it has some of the feel of that. We won’t buy it, but not bad.
Flip 7. A simple press-your-luck game akin to blackjack, except you’re dealing cards that range from 1 to 12 to the players one at a time, & they will bust if a duplicate turns up, and their score if/when they stop will be the sum. The catch is, there are 12 12’s, 11 11’s, etc. There are also some other action cards that can turn up. Addictive, and we’ll buy it for the church game day.
Krakel Orakel. Kinda pictionary, except your drawing is limited to some loopy lines on a placard. We did not enjoy.
We played a bunch of other games: Black Fleet, Captain Flip, FIXER, 12-Chip Trick, Wallenstein, Nestlings, PARKS, Wallenstein, Motor City, but one disappointment is that we didn’t get far in Unconscious Mind, the game where you and your fellow Freudians attempt to help cure patients through various means. It’s a technically-complex game, and it took too long for our first play to get up and running…still, intriguing.
We might be done with board games for a day or two…
