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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Our usual players were moving house this week, so they were pretty occupied! I was worried this meant that no games at all this week, but some other friends came round for Bonfire Night, and they brought Cascadia.

    I haven’t played before, but I have heard of parallels to Calico, and I can see why! I think Cascadia has another layer of gameplay to it that made it a more enjoyable experience for me. Whilst the interactivity was very low (hate drafting being the only way to do anything), it was interesting watching the other players shoot for different objective sets.

    Fun time, but took us longer than it should because we kept getting distracted!




  • A smaller, more focused group this week! This meant Gloomhaven: JOTL again! My partner and I got engaged earlier in the week, so we chatted too much to finish it in one session - so our friends came back on Saturday to finish it off!

    It didn’t actually take us too long to finish the encounter, so we played a game of Mondo. This is a ridiculous real-time tile laying game in which you’re trying to ‘close out’ biomes on your board. Always good fun and super accessible!




  • It was a week of lighter games for us this week.

    We started with 2 plays of Tsuro with 6 players, each of which resulted in 3 players winning! We were surprised how avoidant of conflict most of us were in this.

    Secondly, we then played a game of Roll for It! to see the night out. I’ve never played this, but really felt like it needed some rerolls as in Yahtzee or Poker Dice. I spent far too many rounds rolling 1 die waiting for my number to come up only to have to wait for 5 other players to do their thing!







  • Something I’ve always found difficult about these large games is getting the rules across to the others. My regular group are all gamers - we’ve all dabbled in the bigger games and can parse dense rulebooks. But the onus always falls on one of us to learn the rules and try to teach the others. I’ve sent “How to Play Oath” videos to countless prospective players who see the 30 minutes runtime and give up on the idea. Those that didn’t watch the video said the game only started to click after 4 plays. Which is a hilarious amount of Oath.


  • 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!




  • I believe it got picked up for retail, so do keep an eye out!

    Because of the very low player interaction, it worked really well still! I scored 71 whereas my partner scored 69 - so it felt competitive also.

    We had to cut out 4-player game a little short as we’d started late and it was running on a bit, however I was teaching the rules to the other 3.

    Our 2 player game was probably close to 2 hours, but again there was a reasonable amount of rules clarifications from trying to parse the icons fully!


  • Last week saw the arrival of a kickstarter game I backed a couple of years ago, Mercurial!

    As a result, I’ve seen 3 plays of this in the last week; one solo, one 2-player, and one 4-player.

    Very much enjoying this title so far! The designer has opted to use iconography on the cards instead of any words. Whilst this slows the initial couple of plays down, you soon learn the language it was designed with and you can begin to intuit cards quite quickly.

    Something I forsee possibly being an issue for some people is the lack of player interaction. It falls into the same space as Wingspan in that the only interaction one can really have is drafting a card that another player wanted.

    The art is beautiful, vibrant, evocative, and most of the time you feel like you are manipulating the elements as you flip and convert your dice to your needs!