This week, I got to play Heat: Pedal to the Metal, Red7, Captain Sonar, and Sagrada.

Heat, at least the base game, felt too balanced. Every time there was a turn with a speed limit, everybody would bunch up one after the other. We added the car customization module, which helped a lot with letting players get ahead, but then also made the game feel like it was stacked from the start. I don’t know if I would play this again.

Red7 and Carl Chudyk games in general are great. I love the multi-use card design in all his games, and it really makes me want to play Innovation/Mottainai again!

Captain Sonar has been a perennial favourite of mine, but it’s hard to find eight people willing to play it. After one game, two people said “never again” and four people really enjoyed it. Too stressful for some, probably?

Finally, Sagrada. I love how pretty the game is - those dice look delicious - but the gameplay personally feels a bit flat. Our group is too nice to deny others in the dice drafting. :)

Only managed to play Libertalia this week! We picked up Vaalbara a while ago which is oft-described as “Libertalia-lite”.

Can now confirm I agree with that sentiment! The game can be surprisingly nasty with “take-that” mechanics which took me from a healthy lead going into Round 3, to only scoring 1 point and coming 3rd in a 4-player game!

Board state must have been somewhat difficult to read for some folks as they often attacked me for no reason (no actual loss from the card they killed) other than I was ahead from the first two rounds. This maneuevre actually cost the player the game as they’d have won had they denied the other player points instead!

Regardless, I did have fun and the plethora of cards made each new round exciting to see what combos we might pull off!

First 4 player round of Viticulture. A bit to complex for my friends to enjoy it first try, but they want me to bring it again next time we meet.

We tend to play most things only once since everybody is so eager to show off their latest catch. I guess I contributed to that by bringing Cascadia last time and Viticulture this time.

Maybe I should stop that …

I played two games of Ravine back to back. Game 1 was like a Bear Grylls episode; here’s exactly what you need to do to survive, light a fire, find food, find shelter, make a weapon, get rescued, ezpz. Game 2 was like dropping a toddler off a cliff and yelling “good luck” as it tumbles inexorably to a very early grave. Lots of madness, very little opportunity to even get a foothold, zero fire and almost no resources. Chaos and death. Both were fun.

Ideally, my third game will be somewhere in the middle!

Akropolis - my first city building board game. It was a gift and I went in not knowing anything about the game.

I wish there was some interaction between players instead of each of us just building our own cities. Pretty fun game nonetheless for occasional play.

First few plays of First Rat. Very simple rules, on a first glance it seemed almost too simple. But there is a lot of fun strategy in there thanks to all the upgrades you can get on the way. Plays very fast, quick turns peppered with some “ok, I really have to think this through” pauses. Overall we both love it, an easy to get into euro but plenty of variety to make it fun to come back to. Worth noting that other than the variable setup the game has zero randomness. It’s a pure battle of rat-wits.

We tried two small card games: Piepmatz and District Noir (also known as Throne and Grail). Both have interesting card flows and use majority based scoring systems. District Noir reminded me of Coloretto and I think Piepmatz has some similarities to Hats. Card quality is great in both but the oversized cards were not a great choice for District Noir since sometimes you end up with a long row of cards on the table. Not a big deal though.