The tutorial segment is very weird for Remnant. My partner died before the ‘final stand’ segment of it (and before she had even seen all the control prompts) and she was shown the cutscene and dropped off at the Ward!

The game is definitely Souls-lite, and some of the bosses can be brutal (I have not finished my first run of the game, for reference), but I found it to be a fun time with friends. And it appears number 2 dials things up and addresses some of my issues with the game.

This batch of games feels so incredibly specific for me. I’ve just got through the bulk of Starfield and I’m looking forwards to playing other games alongside it, so this is the perfect batch to get lost in for the next few weeks!

Haha I came to post this after doing this at work on a VM.

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!

All a learning experience for the next time!

The coins are a worthwhile investment early on, but we managed to get some good objectives that means plenty of points all around!

Ooo I didn’t know this! One of the few times I wasn’t being a rules goblin, so I gave myself over fully to the owner! We only had one Goblin card come up anyway, so nothing too drastic.

Thank you!

We played Cartographers this week as we babbled on for a bit too long without any thought as to what we’d play.

We played it previously as a group about 2 years ago, so it was nice to revisit it finally. A simple flip-and-write game with some element of interfering with other players (namely the player to your left). A nice fun puzzle to share with the other players!

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!

You’re absolutely correct on Captain Sonar. I got this to the table at our local cafe when we had 8 people, but I think too many members of our group have anxiety for this to land properly. Too much pressure I think!

Flamecraft is an interesting one for me. I feel like you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who says that it is their favourite, however it’s undeniably charming and gets people excited to play it! And that’s good enough for me!

Titanfall 2 is well worth playing for it’s campaign. It’s only a few hours long, but it’s a roller coaster and features some of the best level design in the 2010s.

I think latest was Titanfall 3 got canned for continued Apex development :(

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!

We were on holiday this week, so had to pack quite light.

We played a single game of 6-player In Vino Morte as we waited for food. This game is still insanely easy to bring to any table and is guaranteed fun for 10 minutes at a time!

We also took along River Wild, another Button Shy game. This was a great brain-burner to play with my morning coffee, even if I didn’t so particularly well at all!

My partner’s parents brought along Greed, a push-your-luck dice game from the 80s. Whilst it felt like it did drag on a bit long, there were some interesting rolls that kept things interesting! Probably liked this more than I should have purely because I won!

And finally, we cracked out the deck of cards to play Sevens. A simple staple, not too much to say here!

Obviously different marketing preferences, but I hadn’t stopped hearing about this game for months

Agreed!

Thanks for the discussion (and lesson) to get me thinking more about the game!

Great, thanks for clarifying!

I’m afraid that this is probably still prevalent here (wasn’t looking for it, but I do recall a few feelings)! Depending on your prediction, you may only be looking to win one or two tricks, and if you’re positioned in seat 3 or 4 from the trick leader, you often find yourself having to play high beat the first few players only to be trumped by seat 5.

I also wonder if the prediction mechanic aims to keep the leader rotating so as to mitigate seating bias. You’re unlikely to get stuck with 1 leader that keeps trumping the hands as most people are aiming to win 1-3 tricks.

Interestingly, our games have always been won by players that just had 1 extremely good round. In other words, I suspect there’s an element to try and optimise the round in which you lead.

I’ll do my best to answer in my limited experience, but before I do, can I just get some clarification on what you mean by ‘Seat Binding’? A quick Google suggests you’re referring to advantage based upon where a player is seated in the turn order - is that it?