Update time:
Arkham Horror: The Card Game was a dud. The last mission is absurdly hard and the story was the most generic Lovecraft tale I think you could have come up with. I feel like when you play the Eldrich Horror board game you have an interesting story to tell when your character fails, here I felt like when I failed it was because I didn't have the right cards or drew unluckily from the bag. So I took damage and died. It's a mechanical failure that never lent itself to advancing the story.
I played some solo Viticulture and this is a tight worker placement game with your own board management as you try to fill your vineyard and fulfill wine orders. I lost every time I played it but I greatly enjoyed it and think it might have been more fun with multiple players. One I'll go back to for sure.
Race for the Galaxy is a game I've played a couple of times before but never talked about here. It's a quite good card game that captures the feel of managing a space-faring civilization exploring space and building economies but with a tableau of cards instead of a sprawling map. I'm not great at this game, mostly because I get so lost building my own engine that I miss picking up on how predicting what other players are going to do might give me a way to strategize better. It's a game with a lot of depth and one that you can easily play in less than an hour, making it highly replayable.
Sprawlopolis is part of Button Shy Games, a company that specializes in games that are only made up of 18 cards and a rule sheet. This is considered the best of the bunch and it's easy to see why. You get to lay out cards one by one to make city zones and roads that score points based on three rules that govern how you score points. The rules are on the back of the cards you play, so there are 18 ways to score, in addition to two basic rule scores, meaning that the likelihood of getting the same three rules again is quite small. It plays quick, it's a great solo game, and it's also a lot of fun coop. It shows how much game you can pack given physical limitations.
Fugitive is a great hidden movement card game where you are either laying down a card one at a time per turn or trying to guess which cards are on the table. A handful of simple rules and three decks that split the search into three sections make for a tense game that I think I enjoyed a lot more than the hidden movement games I've played that involved a big board like Hunt for the Ring or Fury of Dracula. It keeps the tension up the whole game and it moves fast and furious. This will probably become one of my go-to two player games.
Air, Land & Sea sees you battling over the three titular battlefields. Win two out of three and you win the round. The twist, you or your opponent can concede at any point, giving less points to your opponent if you feel like you are most certainly going to lose a round. I never go to this layer because I wanted to learn the game best and played out the games. It's fun, it's quick, it's not something I'd own but I see the appeal.
GoodCritters is a game I mentioned here before but forgot to talk about when I've played it in the past. Finally played it with my family and it was a big hit. It's a negotiation/voting game where you split money and then vote on whether or not the deal goes through. The added twist is you can also steal money from another player or skim a card off the top of the stash. You play until the fuzz show up, then you all scatter and count up the loot to see who ended up with the biggest haul. Lots of great tabletalk makes this a great filler game and one I think a lot of families will get a kick out of.
Vindication is another game I've played before but not mentioned here. You build strange combos to gather companions to do one of four things: fight monsters, gain traits, earn relics or control territories. The smart play is to do a couple of these really well but it's easy to try to either go all in on one strategy or spread yourself too thin over three or four categories. What makes this game great is each choice means your not doing something that could turn out to be equally rewarding in the long run. You've got to learn when to cut your losses and pivot out of something someone else has got a monopoly in to take over another part of the game. This second play-through helped me appreciate the depth a lot more. I also think the art design is gorgeous and it's got an interesting world design that is this kind of strange fantasy world set in the times of dinosaurs. It's crazy.
Everdell Is a worker placement engine building game where you are building up a town of woodland critters in order to get the most points. It's great to look at, has this cool tiered board and blends the theme and mechanics perfectly. You've got 15 slots to fill over 4 seasons of play which gives you two strong limitations on this game that help give it a good scope without getting too crazy. I adored a lot of this game as it takes what I love about both worker placement and engine building games and marries it into this focused experience.
The only problem is there's a rule that the game ends for any given player at a different time. Once you are out of actions or decide to pass you are done, calculate your score and then have to wait for all other players to get to that point. I ran out of actions and then had to spend 30 minutes slowly watching my friend play out his last season. It was anti-climatic and rather boring to just sit there and watch him take turn after turn. In the end, he only won by two points which was quite impressive. I want to play this again, possibly either as a solo game or with more people to see if it plays better. I hope it gets better with multiple plays because it was promising until that dud of an ending.
Tapestry falls into that "I like it but have no real desire to play it again" camp again. Too small to be a point salad game, too big to feel like you're competing for the same strategies with opponents. Also does the same thing as Everdell which is quickly becoming my pet peeve which is having the game end earlier if you're more focused in how you play, meaning you sit there for an extended period of time waiting to see if your friends beat you. Makes sense that this is designed by the same guy who made Scythe, but Scythe feels a lot more focused and tense to me than this game. I feel like that game scratches the same itch and plays a lot more elegantly. And I'm not even that big a fan of Scythe.
I'm playing online fairly regularly so I'm sure I'll have more updates soon. I bought Tussie Mussie, which is another 18 card game that I can play solo or with people. I still haven't cut open Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective which is a game basically made for quarantine life as I can spend hours trying to solve cases. I'd like to play some more Friday and Onirim and might consider buying another solo game soon. Buying games that require multiple players feels foolish right now since it's just me and the parents now. All my siblings now live out of town although a couple are within driving distance. I've got Castellion, Sylvion, SUPERHOT: The Card Game and Tiny Epic Galaxies on my list of solo games I might pick up soon.