I've played so many board games this year I'm not even sure where to start.
Oh, I know where to start! We finished Pandemic: Legacy Season 1. If you have a regular group of people to play with or maybe even just a partner/spouse, this is such a fun experience as it's an ever evolving game of Pandemic where the rules and mechanics change month by month. We got a good 16 plays out of it before finishing the campaign.
Firefly Adventures: Brigands and Browncoats is another one that we've gotten a bit of circulation with in my group. It's a coop game where the clock is constantly ticking as you try to finish a job, grabbing as much money as you can before leaving. It usually results in things falling apart and some improvisation, which makes it feel a lot like the show.
Finally got a play of Scythe and it was...okay. I liked it more than I thought I would but it felt very slow and lethargic as you slowly stretch out only to discover half of what you need is in a place you probably won't be able to get to or someone else reaches first. Maybe on another play the puzzle will reveal itself, but it felt like a lot of time was spent waiting to execute plans that would take a series of moves that might just get undone by one player and given how long each turn might take, it felt tedious.
Fate of the Elder Gods is a tight little worker placement game. I like that it's simultaneously about getting what you want while also making other places either completely blocked off or less enticing to the next player. The spell system gives you a way to mitigate some of that so you never feel truly locked out of choices and gives the game a lot of flexibility.
Watson & Holmes plays up to 7 people in a game of deduction as you venture to various sites surrounding a crime and try to answer key questions about the case. It was a fun first game but some of the wording on the cards were a bit suspect and misleading which makes me hope future cases are better written.
Finally got the chance to play a game of Eldrich Horror. It lived up to my expectations. The game oozes theme and a lot of times you're forced to make choices that you know will probably suck but if you don't do will likely cost the whole game which made losing at this game a fun sequence of things gone wrong which feels in the true spirit of cosmic horror.
The 7th Continent has been sitting on my shelf unwrapped since I moved back in with my parents and I finally decided last week to crack it open. What a disappointment. I played a good five hours and the game never hooked me. The initial story hook didn't go anywhere in my hours of play as I explored the island and found the game played as a rather bland survival game with a unsatisfying card action system where I lost by a random card draw instead of something mechanically interesting happening.
Also so much of the game is managing all the cards and shuffling up cards and spreading out this whole map of cards on the table and then discovering you have to go around something which means you shift all the cards down the table and then end up at some dead end. It's just tiresome and the physical act of playing never felt satisfying for what I was supposed to be doing. I love exploration games, but I'm not sure it translates well into this card system The 7th Continent built.
Last night I finally got a play of Hardback in and this game was a lot of fun. I had played Paperback before, which is good, but this one felt like it had more interesting depth to it and I love the push your luck mechanic of drawing more cards but then having to use the extra cards you draw in your word. This is a superb spelling game and I hope to get more plays out of it.
There were a few other games I played and a handful of replays, but that was most of the notable new games I played that I had something to say about. As for the future, I sorted Rising Sun into one box yesterday and I'm hoping to get a play of that sometime soon because it's been hard for my group to get enough people to play for a long enough time. I'm also looking at playing some Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective by myself because while I love playing games with other people, I'm wanting to try solo experiences more as i'm not always in the mood to play games with other people every night.