Under the weight of continued replay year after year, and with even more play than usual recently while my Thursday group has been suffering some new-game-rules-reluctance ennui, I’ve upped my rating of Terraforming Mars to a 10. It’s the 22nd entry to my personal hall of fame (out of 3157 games). Fwiw, we always play with Preludes and Venus, usually on the Elysium/Hellas maps. I’ve read up on the other expansions but don’t really feel the need to add more. It’s a game I’m always happy to play and I love the theme. Big ups.

I didn’t know Patty Mills was born Down Under until just now.

Otherwise, in recent new-to-me gaming, a conversation on whether 8’s are my new 7’s appears to be imminent.

CAPTAIN FLIP (2024): Rank 1883, Rating 7.0

Draw a tile, decide whether you like its effect and VPs. If not, flip it and accept that that’s what you’re getting. Place it in your tableau, next player’s turn. Once you know the tiles it’s a matter of setting up so you’ve got places to put future good tiles and bad tiles. Remember any flip sides you’ve placed (warning sign: memory game) in case you draw a ‘flip adjacent’ effect and you have a hidden side that’s better (or worse). After a few plays, I felt the problem was that it doesn’t go anywhere (this again?) and it didn’t generate enough banter or joy to continue.

Rating: 6

EMPIRE’S END (2023): Rank 2343, Rating 7.0

It uses the Geschenkt bidding mechanism through rounds of auctions – ie keep paying resources until someone caves and takes the painful card that’s up for bid, which in turn messes up their tableau, covering up better cards with a consequent loss of VPs. Card order and turn order turns out to be rather important re how often you can hold out and is fairly influential in the final analysis. It also turns out that a bidding mechanism that works in a 15 minute game isn’t substantial enough to carry a 60 minute game.

Rating: 6

HEGEMONY (2023): Rank 63, Rating 8.5

The tag phrase says it all: “Simulate a whole contemporary nation in this asymmetric, politico-economic euro”. To play well you need to know the rules for each class (worker, middle, capitalist, govt) and to understand the ramifications that changing each of the 7 policies (it’s a series of auctions each round *sigh*) will have for each class. And then ponder whether the other players have a solid enough understanding to act as expected or will the economy (and your game) sink into the morass through accidental and unintended consequences. As a simulation it can be admired; as a game it was interesting to learn and work through but it felt more work-like than enjoyable. I’ll admit I was a little shocked to find this in the top 100 (the barriers to entry seem high) but there you go.

Rating: 7

DAYBREAK (2024): Rank 1061, Rating 7.7 – Leacock / Menapace

A nice co-op with a resonant theme. It’s all about the card play to reduce different types of dirty emission resources, increase clean energy production, generate protection resources against crisis (aka epidemic) cards each round, move tokens/cards around between players, etc. Each player has 5 card effects in play and can stack cards behind (to have their Terraforming Mars type tags magnify that stack’s card effect) or add a card to the top of the stack to get a new effect in play. Much of the game is the consideration of the best card play sequence because you can activate effects before they’re covered up and then activate the new one. Most games can be won without really chatting much with the other players – it’s quite solitaire. You can afford one round (out of 6) of less useful cards, but 2 rounds will be a struggle because if you’re not close to winning by round 3, the increasing number of crisis die rolls and crisis cards at the end of each round can become overwhelming. Once grokked, the difficulty can be ramped up, but all this does really is increase your dependence on good card draws. It’s seen quite a bit of play – the card play decisions are inviting, there’s a trade-off to be made re not meeting energy demand, and there’s a higher-than-normal feel-good factor in the win. We’ve been enjoying it.

Rating: 8

HERD MENTALITY (2020): Rank 2652, Rating 6.7

This is one of those stupidly simple bigger-group games that turn out to be a fun laugh-filled 20 minutes. It’s kind of the opposite of our other favourite in the category, Just One. Read a question and score a point if your answer (after simultaneous revelation) has been written by the most players. If your answer was the only one unmatched, you take the cow meeple and you can’t win as long as you have it. The game makes for easy banter with all the why’s and what’s and it was called for multiple times at a recent gaming weekend.

Rating: 8

MIDDLE AGES (2024): Rank 4454, Rating 7.2

A re-do of Majesty: For The Realm which works well and gets the same rating for being an upper-end light-weight Euro. In the biggest improvement, it adds an 8th tile type and now the two rightmost tile types allow you to change the scoring conditions in your other categories, allowing you to smack down more specialised strategies. This effectively replaces the end-game category scoring (as you score more intra-game). The change I’m more ambivalent about (it’s just different is all) is the tile gathering rule which is now Kingdomino like, but we’ve seen both stay-first and go-last strategies do well so it is what it is and the game now takes 5p well which makes it a nice go-to on BGA when there’s a call for something light-ish but with nice decision making.

Rating: 8

RIVER OF GOLD (2024): Rank 3613, Rating 7.5

Nice mid-weight Euro. There are only 3 action types – build (your collection ability), collect (money, resources et al) and satisfy contracts. Your die roll each turn dictates where/how you do the action (so one of the things you need to collect is dice wibbles) but you get the whole round to plan your best move so the game ticks along nicely. There are global contracts to compete for. Gain the most influence in regions to score them. Fulfil contracts. It all happens in fewer turns than you expect so you need to prioritise within your dice constraints, which nicely makes the game. I enjoyed it and would happily play again. May the die be ever in your favour.

Rating: 7

SPLENDOR DUEL (2022): Rank 120, Rating 7.9

Just like Splendor but for 2p. Get resources, buy cards that give you purchase discounts ongoing and gradually transition to buying cards that give you VPs. It was fine in the same abstract-y way that Splendor is but, honestly, it’s been a little while since I played and I’ve already forgotten any specific twists that make it work better as a 2p so that gives an indication of where it sits for me – same rating as the original.

Rating: 6

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Larry:  I think Splendor Duel is much better than Splendor.  The latter game is kind of a snoozefest that I can play competently in my sleep (but why would I?), while the Duel version is a genuinely interesting challenge, while still being easy to learn.  Score another successful re-implementation of an established game for the very talented Bruno Cathala.

Ben:  

Captain Flips power is both its weakness and selling point. Its quick! Rules take less than 3 minutes but the game play doesnt really satisfy over time. Its enjoyable moment but theres no invested time in so theres no lasting feeling of enjoyment.

Hegemony is basically the opposite of Captain Flip. Its a deep and mature experience that takes over an hour to teach and 5+ to play. Its enjoyable to heavy gamers but would be murder to lighter-fare gamers.