Board Games!

[Isis]

That was a big family game for me growing up.. I would never play it again but don't wanna rain.

I like the tiny plastic easel

[Isis]

Oh my god power grid is even more miserable than I suspected who chooses to do this??

[Isis]

The numbers are wayyyy too big I need an abacus just to play.

I did play it five player and five player gaming is inherently bad.
Buying power stations is the interesting part and the game needs some amount of auxiliary noise to make that good but calculating a resource cost connection cost plus second to arrive cost then subtracting the income value to determine if you even ought to fully power is just toooo many excel spreadsheet cells

[Isis]

Its the first time I've seen someone pull out a calculator during a board games exempting endgame scoring for point salad games, that's more sequestered yknow

[Isis]

I'm dating a board gamer whose family likes light board games. Imma just blog here about it. We've played a bunch the past few months. We play 2 player a lot I'll write the ones I've played 3+ first.

Ticket to Ride Europe

- this game still feels like bad Splendor to me. It does a pretty good job of accommodating 5 people. The Europe board allowed for lots of end runs if blocked. Blocking in ticket to ride kind of feels bad because your opponent didn't even know you had a route card, they just did it randomly because they also have a route card, it feels more meaningful to me if someone blocks me in another game where we both wanted something generically good, or my especial need for the resource was faceup.
This game does a great job of accommodating 5 people and having a low barrier to entry and not leaning on politics or commerce to generate gameplay and I like all those things. Splendor is just even cleverer at accomplishing those things, perhaps losing out on flavor.

Sushi Go, and roll, and party

- this game is fine. All the variants are fine. You draft cards and choose between cards worth a point or two outright or cards that are worth 5 as a set of nothing alone. It's blindingly light.

Calico

- you arrange color hexes on a board and score points for the shapes according to rules. You keep having to draft one hex from a pool of 3 in the center, forcing pivots.
This is one of those games where I feel like each player in each seat will think a bit about what they want to do and will all settle on the same decisions or decisions that would tie but they will have thought enough for it to be gaming. But that might not be exciting. The way the special bonuses work I have trouble believing the players who are forced to "make lemonade" can best a player who didn't. There's probably more agency than I'm recognizing. This is a step up from sushi go and ticket to ride for me. I do actually kind of prefer how you think things out and say "well, face up, I can't score any better than this" in contrast to punts due to hidden info in ticket and to a lesser extent sushi. I will write a lil negativish about anything light hehe.

Cascadia

- I usually win at this, I won at Calico and got wrecked at sushi go for bias checks. Anyway this is also building a hex map like calico but it's unbounded and spreads out whoa! Also you draft a token (but they're paired with the hex you pick) and arrange those on your board. The scoring rules are a little more complex.
You tend to be perpetually on the verge of playing a turn thats a +0 instead of a ~+3 and spend tokens to find a single thing that won't whiff you on that manner, but like Calico there's probably additional complexity of I tried to look at blocking plays more. There's a +2 bonus for having the biggest of a type of region so the interactivity in deciding whether to contest or "give up" is nice. It's funner than Calico, but much less cute.

Parks

- So parks is like. What if you had Candyland, then told every player they could stack the deck always, then put coin tokens of various types on each space and assigned a weak income to empty or full spaces. Do you go fast to get the good coins before the other players, or do you go slow to just farm a ton of weak money? I mostly did the second one and tied for first but it really feels like you're getting away with something. It plays really well with five people. There's also like little income improvement items you can buy giving you like the lightest possible amount of tableau building you can add to a game without adding zero tableau building. It's really reasonable to look at other people's resource pools and guess if they will leave the space you want open.
Wingspan - nothing about the flavor for this game would make you think it's a tableau builder, but, it's just a really good tableau builder. The money you pay for cards with comes from a dice pool. There's interaction in competing for goals and sometimes making sure to draw birds because good ones are available in the pool. My girlfriend loves this game to death and I enjoy it plenty enough to say yes every time. The length and tableau size makes you say "engine", but barely makes you say that, which is a good place to be with design. We mostly have played this 2 player. I would be tempted to say it actually suffers as you add players because it becomes optimal to ignore the contested goals and play synergistic point engines instead?
Ban the cards that let you discard one thing to get 2 food if you buy this game, they're inexplicably busted despite evenhanded balance everywhere else.
2s:

Clank!

- you build a deck that is good at generating move points to move you around, skill points to keep building the deck, and attack points to move into rooms blocked by enemies, then you grab some stuff then leave.
A deckbuilder with a board has been more enjoyable than the dominionlike deckbuilders because of the experience delta and also maybe because dominion is more often grinded out on a rapid online client.
The worst part of clank for me has been.. clank. Clank is cubes in a bag that randomly come back out at random times to represent a dragon attack, your actions can manipulate the number of unfavorable cubes in the bag. It constantly feels too abstract and unclear what the risk is or how the cards would manage the risk over the long term. It's not that I don't have agency it's just if you asked me how much I reduced my chance of getting damaged when I played sneak I'd probably be off by 20% when I answered and that doesn't set me up to have fun.
I don't know if I've ever won at clank at all, I've lost with strategies that both take lots of dragon damage and don't take much. I'm not filled with a desire to do better like when I lost 6 games in a row of Wingspan.

Innovation

- my cousin and a friend of mine love innovation, and I like the game, although I feel relative deprivation about the expansions I've tasted online and can't nudge my cousin into. My girlfriend is much more medium on it though! She dislikes the variance and/or the way that variance is presented. She didn't lose every single round or anything, because I can play 300 games online and still suck unlike some people on this forum. She's still interested in playing a game of it here and there. Maybe it will grow on her. I'm tempted to introduce echoes early to invert the logic of "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Echoes let's you tableau build inherently good stuff so it could improve her feeling of agency.
I bought 4 aetherworks marvel before it started top8ing so maybe I'm a variance tolerant person.

Heart of Crown and Tanto Cuore

- these are both dominion clones, the kind so close to Dominion DXV gets mad. My flavor preference is so strong I don't trust my biases in assessing mechanics very much. Heart of Crown is about supporting a princess's coronation and Tanto Cuore is about hiring a bunch of maids, complete with the first edition instruction manual saying that the winner is the "King of Maids", and I find Tanto Cuore a way less appealing concept.
Both games play with the concept found on "Island" in Dominion, the idea that the bad cards in your deck can maybe leave for scoring. If they 100% left for scoring it would be bad, but both games are clever about making it a mixture and leaving some dead cards in your deck and removing some.
Heart of Crown has a special mechanic where the first time you "buy a victory card" you toss some silvers/golds. It kind of makes that "super early 8$: gold or province?" moment happen in every game and I kind of like the idea. Maybe after working out a well understood formula for when to flip it is just kinda the same again, but I'd like to dream it interacts with silk-roadish stuff differently or something.
Mostly I win over and over at these games which reduces the fun some. I've played like over a thousand games of dominion. It's just so much.

Argent: the Consortium

: this is a worker placement game with a bit of tableau building and a special system for slowly learning what the point salad rules truly are.
I was excited to play this after playing online with scummers a little bit 2 player argent didn't go so well. My girlfriend doesn't really grasp building a strategy that meets the complex point salad rules and said so, and it is not very way to wrap your arms around it.
On my end, I was getting more out of it, but both defensively and offensively I was a little disappointed with how the attacking effects work in 2 player instead of 3 players. Sometimes the counters are too direct. Other times there's a queen of the hill contest to attack the same space over and over again which is not a game ruining dynamic but it's not as fun as other stuff I guess.

Ark Nova

you build a zoo and manage your reputation points fame points empty enclosures filled enclosures kiosks the cards in your hand your partner zoos your workers your action upgrades your ecology projects and your X counters. And the break track. And your cash on hand. And your special enclosures. And your research associates. And your endgame bonus card. And the sequence state of your action card queue. But other than that there is nothing to think about.
I read the rules, played for twenty minutes, felt a lot of cognitive load explaining the rules and going through the first few turns, then when I got to trying to resolve some kind of rule where the rulebook seemed genuinely ambiguous my headache started swelling stronger and I couldn't Google it like normal I just said I felt miserable and asked to abandon the game. I've never abandoned a game like that before. The breaking point was an ambiguous rule but I think all the other stuff put me on the precipice.
It'd be nice to have a different person teach it. My girlfriend wants to try the game again.

Everdell

- this is our collective second favorite duo game now, right after Wingspan. It's a worker placement tableau builder with cute mice. We house rule the husband card to not be heteronormative, recommend. There's lots of choices, lots of interaction in terms of blocking, and you can build little engines or also manage to forgo them and just point salad really well.

I'm surprised/confused by Chevre's take that you can't catch up from an early start in this game. The game has an income phase after your first two worker placements and after your first nine (or, next 7) worker placements. Generally it is only possible to get 1 resource point off income for the very first harvest, and you can reinvest that for the second harvest, but it is a pretty small snowball. I've had no problem whiffing that 1 resource point and setting up for a card combo or something instead and catching up. I supposed if you missed income for second harvest that could hurt you, but that one feels late enough to have that energy of "I'm willing to buy a province and draw it 3 times this game" if victory cards are what's on offer instead.

The modest income makes the game have that barely engine feel I like in birds. It's such a fun game and it feels fast.
We have a lot of house rules for base game:
1 VP instead of one card for second player (we tied twice with this rule, it is working well, previously first player was winning a lot)
Crane costs 2 stone
Innkeeper only reduces cost by 2, we haven't actually played with this yet.
Husband and wife always play as wife's text, then husband's text, also if you need to swap one of the cards with a card in the center to make sure your couple is gay you are encouraged to do that.



I'm sure I forgot a game.