Tuesday our group met. First we played some weird memory game about being an orchestra conductor which was really bad. Then we tried the 5th mission in Port Royal Big Box… twice… in vain. We ended the evening early because:

On Wednesday we met again to play DnD. My character had an emotional reunion with a lost family member and we encountered our first gelatinous monster.

On Friday there was a public game night in town which I attended. The group I landed with first played two rounds of Frantic - a domestic UNO alternative but for some of them it was too chaotic so we cut the game short. We then played Ricochet Robots and the ladies at the table completely trunced me out of the gate. But after about 4 rounds I got up to speed and managed to race ahead after all. From this we moved on to X-Code where we managed to win the 4 basic missions and the first mission of the blue box. At this point we believed that the evening would wind down soon so we snuck in a quick game of Shark Attacks - where I finally did not come in in last place! Only to then learn that the game night would go on a bit longer this time. So picked up Las Vegas as well. I hadn’t played so many different games in one setting in ages and really enjoyed it. The evening also served as a nice way to cap off the organizer’s 5 year run in hosting these game nights.

Glad to see Terraforming Mars getting some love…

The size can make it a bit intimidating but there’s literally something for everyone. There are kids games, family games, party games, advanced games, super heavy games, roleplaying games, wargames and probably some I’m forgetting now. There are toys, accessories, fan stuff, everything.

I went alone for many years, I’ve gone with my GF, I’ve gone with friends. Every experience is a bit different but I’ve never not had fun. The only negative thing I’ve ever experienced was some people hogging a table for a game I really wanted to try but most booths now are pretty good about queueing up.

One thing you have to understand though is that Essen is a fair not a convention. While you can play games, you won’t necessarily get to finish them. Some booths have time slots and will tell you to wrap it up when yours is over. And if you play with strangers some might only be looking to “get a taste” for it and then move on. But if you’re “stationed” in Essen for the night there are several hotspots where you can go to play properly.

we also got out at midnight to watch the Perseids. We’ve been doing this for a few years now and never seen such an intense shower. Like you said, we also saw some fat ribbons across the sky. Not a whole lot but very impressive one. We also had a lightning storm on the other side of the valley.

I never considered using normal binos to look for Andromeda. What magnification do you have?

Regular boardgame nights returned from summer hiatus. The full group assembled for 5 player coop Great Wall. The game has amazing table presence and pretty interesting mechanics but absolutely no balance.

• Some leaders are just vastly better than others (pay a chi to make one additional damage vs get a massive discount when you recruit.)
• Missions have massively different difficulty levels and some are nigh on impossible for 5 players.
• Events are just ridiculous. Their immediate effects are ok but their ongoing effects are just way too punishing. Still the basic gameplay loop is compelling and we’re probably gonna play this on occasion.

On the weekend my sister also hopped over for a visit and we played:

• Thanos Rising - I basically had one decent turn, the rest was all a wash and with only two players pulling we had no chance.
• Earth - First time for my sister but she quickly took to it. This was the first game where I dared to take one of those terrains that forbids you from taking a particular action (growth) and I got by quite decently. Getting another card on every plant action was well worth the tradeoff. With enough card draws, I could fuel a lot of compost actions and on top of it I got lucky and drew the terrain that gives VP based on composted cards. All in all I won with a commanding lead. But after initial confusion over the common scoring cards (fauna) it was nice to see that everyone ultimately got the hang of it and scored at least 3 of them.
• Würfel Ligretto - Early morning we decided to wake ourselves up with someting frantic. So frantic in fact that one of the dice tumbled off the table and somehow into the kitchen installation. But we were ultimately able to find and retrieve the bugger and complete the game.
• Moving on from that we played Shark Attacks - a push your luck game where I consistently have less luck than everyone else. At least this time I lost to my sister instead of my GF.
• Pharaon - We capped the visit off with this game that I had kind shelved for a while. GF wasn’t in the mood for something heavy and just watched leaving it at a 2p setup. I must say I vastly preferr this game with less players. While I apprciate that it does go to 5 players and works it just becomes soooo much thighter. Spots per player are 7.5, 5, 6.25, 5 (from 2 to 4 players) and more importantly with 5 you might not even have the opportunity to go in a particular sector if everyone else prioritizes it.

I can’t blame you. It literally took us pretty much weekly sessions for over a year to reach the final scenario. That’s a daunting comittment. I actually low key burned out on the game a few times during that period. But it always pulled me back in again.

I grew up with the Ravensburger box of classics so, board games were always a part of my childhood. They quickly captured my imagination and I began to draw roll and move boards, explaining to my mom what should happen on each space.

When I got older the whole family got into games and that turned into a nice sunday tradition.

Eventually I got sucked into BGG and never financially recovered…

The discovery texts in the book just broke up the pace so much. Spliting the party made the down time insufferable and the “combat/diplomacy” mechanic was horrible.

We’re a group of 5 so someone would had to sit out every time and after one play I told everyone I would be happy to be that person…

Yeah. It got recommended to me as an easier Tzolkin. Well, it IS easier but not anywhere near as interesting and every game feels sooo samey.

Hoping to borrow Ares Expedition from a friend soon. Played it once in Essen and wasn’t wowed. Gonna be tough beating TFM after that…

Had it not pulled a Wii

A good expression for the situation. Wingspan’s success is definitly to a large part because of it’s accessibility. Every problem you have (no cards, food, eggs) has an immediate, guaranteed and obvious solution. Everything you CAN do improves your position. And if you play on the blue side there is barely any direct competition in the game. There’s no way to shoot yourself in the foot. There is no requirement to plan ahead.

But it does have some potential to plan ahead, optimize and compete for those who want to.

It also doesn’t fall into any of the typical setting tropes like fantasy or sci-fi that might put some people off. It’s production values are pretty enough to catch some eyes.

There are better sober games and there are better drunk activities than Munchkin.

If you’re at a point where you’re having fun with Munchkin you’d be having fun without it as well…

After seeing what the scenarios with different win conditions looked like I am GLAD most were just “kill all monsters”.

As for session length we always played just a single scenario (unless we lost the first super quick). It took us a good year maybe one and a half to play through the campaign. IMO the problem is less the session length and just how much of a time hog this game is in general. We’re talking 150+ hours dedicated to a single game.

If you integrate the digital into an analog game, it’s no longer an analog game. It’s now a video game with a physical dongle. Looking at you LoTR:JtME!

Much of my group are on vacation and another had to babysit unexpectedly so it was a two player evening.

We first played Firefly (respectable business people I think) and it was pretty tight the whole game. What threw me off at first was just how unimportant a big payday is in this scenario. For the first part you really just need to get one mission from each of the non alliance folks done. You’re almost automatically swimming in cash afterwards. Enough to do some shopping in the line up to the final two stages. We both were reasonably close to each other with me having somewhat of a lead. Then I brain bleeped. After moving all the way to the fringes of space I traveled back to the core, to where the second stage was starting, forgetting to actually turn in my 4th mission in outer sectors. So I then had to fly back out and back in again. All the while the nav decks were getting dangerously small. There’s a bad card somewhere in them in 2 player and every turn became an agonized will it hit me or the other player game? Then luck swung hard and smacked my friend with BOTH of them one after another. This put me clearly ahead again and thanks to my extended crew quarters the final two stages were a breeze.

We still had about an hour to spend so we whipped out Factory Funner, always a blast but I don’t get to play it often enough as my GF doesn’t like it and neither does one of our group. My friend started designing this nice and well structured factory, leaving room for connections, while I again just slammed everything the first place where it fit. This turned out to be costly for me at times as about halfway through I was forced to place over a dozen pipes to make a new machine fit. But my friend’s plans also didn’t work out quite as well and I was actually able to place more machines than he was. After the last round he had a commanding lead but the interconnectivity bonus came in clutch for me once more, allowing me to jump ahead in the final scoring.

On the weekend I had the saturday for myself and invested it in translating an RPG system to German. I am now close to having a pretty comlete wiki for it. Once that is done I can start putting effort into the campaign details.

Thanks! I have Galaxy Trucker too.

In my current draft you can basically say “here is what one player get’s to do in their turn” and tell the framework to make a machine that let’s every player run through that in some kind of sequence. For now the sequence is fixed. But ultimately all that GT needs is a recalculation of the order after every card. That’s relatively simple to add with a post-action trigger.

Bot factory has a turn order track that is read from right to left. It has roughly 10 positions that are separated into 4 regions. You can not choose a similar spot in the same region as your previous turn. Additionally, there is a worker that will always move from one section to the next, occupying the next available slot. This is the AI-worker and essentially a fifth player with special rules.

That still doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with turn structure. When do the players actually move from one spot to another? If it’s just a normal WP game where you get your turn and move your worker and the only restriction is that you can’t put it back to a similar spot then that’s a simple sequential set of turns. The other possible explanation I see is the WP spaces also functioning as an action track.

It’s kinda crazy that this still needs to be said. I remember TB railing against it and he’s been dead for 5 years now. So it’s been what? A decade?

That’s what I’m currently doing. But I’m not yet sure if a straight FSM is such a great fit. There’s not good mapping for the concept of turns in a single level FSM. You can do it of course but if you have multiple such models or nested instances where each player gets to react to specific actions on each player’s regular turn, each of them is gonna push the the properties needed to manage that into the shared state.

So I’m currently at nested state machines. This way the implementation details for alternating between players can be hidden from the higher level states.

oh nice! The 5 tribes is probably gonna be a variant of the “action track” system.

Not quite sure I understand the “Bot Factory” example. Is that more than just a simple sequential structure and the restriction is only about what you can do this or next turn?

Burgundy: That’ll also be interesting. Could do that by transitioning straight to the next applicable phase, or could keep the structure simpler and just auto-terminate any phases where the player has nothing to do.

Thanks!