Yeah, 4p feels like a lot for this game.

Vantage, 2 players

Vantage is a pretty decent success in our house. Ultimately, I got punched out in an underground fight club to end the game. My wife got up to a bunch of nonsense with fire aliens which was cool. Not sure how this would sell at like a regular game night or whatever, but in a different vibe situation it has slotted in nicely.

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Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor

Managed to kill every single unit standee the salmon colored side (The Herd) has on turn 2. Still accomplished a fair amount; losing units isn't great but surprisingly acceptable in Uprising.

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August meant work prep fired up in earnest so a very boring month, not much time for games. Mostly just some two player Vantage which is quite intriguing more than anything, unclear on its staying power, and soloing some real mainstays.

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Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor, solo

My table has stuff set up on it so I've been doing like 30 minutes of a solo Uprising game here in there in the background the last week on tabletop simulator. As always, a great time. These days I play the highest difficulty with everything thrown in. At that high a difficulty, it's a little bit swingy. I think how swingy Uprising is is overblown, people just don't like mitigating dice risk, which is mostly solved with the Aether addition in the expansion. But cranked up as high as possible, you're put in a situation that is very difficult to even dig out of like maybe 10-20% of the time with some turn 1 tough tile pulls. There's probably a combination using banes and whatnot that tones down some advanced tiles and hordes/legions but I think the game is a blast anyway so I'm willing to put up with the bad beats.

Anyway, they're running another crowdfund coming up... I'll definitely be going in and getting the stuff I didn't get. It sounds like they also might consolidate the rulebooks which is great and, if this game sounds good to you, they're incorporating the risk mitigation Aether mechanic into the base box so even just getting the base box is an incredible value. I'm looking forward mainly to this one and to the Voidfall expansion these days... I think crowdfunding in the US is entering a very rough place with the tariff situation so I'm anticipating having to pay out the nose for an already very expensive game.

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@boardgamebreakdown@mas.to You get a good amount, as there's only one player and that's automatically first player who gets two extra. There are also only 8 dice in the pool, so it resets really fast if you get gear that holds icons. I do think 1p is disproportionately dangerous early in a run.

I agree with kimu, I personally don't see a reason to two hand though it would hurt anything. 2 players, on the other hand, I think is much better than solo for both practical and intangible reasons.

Vantage, 2 players

We played some two player vantage and I definitely prefer it with two to my solo runs. I prefer it for very intangible reasons, actually---it's kind of inert without someone to share the weird vignettes and collisions of cards with. Moreover, mechanically, with two it just flows better. Having another player reading the prompt and then finishing with the result is a much better experience than doing it yourself and trying not to read ahead.

Anyway, with two we had a good run with lots of weird items and creative situations. I think it takes a strong run or two of off the wall vignettes and story hooks that you have time to pursue, along with cool tools to fill up your tableau, before Vantage gives a strong positive impression. I certainly like it a lot better than any other game by this designer and publisher.

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Jo and I played Vantage today. Minor spoiler on pic 2, but it's literally the first turn of the game, so you might see it. Or not, there are a lot of opening locations.

This is a weird game to discuss. It's impressive, a ton of fun, but also hard to recommend to others. It's an open world game that's focused on exploration. But sometimes you aren't going to find what you need to reach your goal to win. There are alternate ways to win, if you care about winning, but it's really a game that's rewarding to just play and wander. It's also impossible to fail an action, but you can lose the game. Hard to explain, but that's the best I can do 🤣. It's pretty rules light and extremely quick to set up, but there's a lot of confusing situations you can get into. You read one short passage from several different books each turn and pull a lot of cards to use and simulate exploring.

If you are interested in it, I suggest watching a YouTube playthrough. The good news is, there is a TON of content. It's possible you'd get spoiled by something in that video, but this planet is so huge and open, you may never see that part. Only watch it for a short time if you worry about that thing, you'll get a good feel for how it plays at the very least, and to be honest, if you don't think it looks fun,, it's not for you.

Good news for us is we love it. I've played solo, 2, and 3 players (Aleksia joined us once.). It can play up to 6, but that seems insane. While the reading is short, the more players you have, the longer it takes to get back to your turn. I think 4 max, but 2 or 3 has been great. I didn't enjoy it solo as much, but that was because I liked having others to share the experience with.

I tend to enjoy games from @stonemaiergames and this is another great one. But buyer beware, this may be more polarizing than many of their games, or just more polarizing than many games out there in general. But I am loving it.

#BGG #BoardGames #ExplorationGames #FamilyGames #Playing

Vantage, solo

I know it's a bit of an It game right now but I think people are underappreciating how light the game is. Mostly to its credit, since it smartly pulls a lot of friction from the genre. Putting this side by side with Earthborne Rangers is like putting two diametrically opposed levels of mechanical complexity trying to do the same thing. I'm still a little on the fence on the game but it definitely goes down smooth.

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@Mongoose29 Probably!

Captain's Chair, solo

I now have the Captain's Chair bug after bouncing off it moderately and wanting it to be Imperium, which I still think has smoother game flow. Been playing a lot of Burnham who has a really interesting and fun deck to come to grips with. While the defining feature is the two stage resource throughput the deck has, I think the other elements of it are more interesting. Especially the duty officer choices and science bottlenecks in the development deck.

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Vantage, solo

Tried my new copy of Vantage. I don't know how it's going to play with my partner, but it's very cute. The system where you add cards feels really good which is kinda the core thing for a booklet adventure game like this. Still a bit on the fence about kinda unknown difficulty tests. It's fine with me but I do think it definitely shifts its genre in a way.

The production is insane without all the extra nonsense I bought mine with. I cannot believe there's any way Stonemaier is making much money on this thing even at MSRP, it feels like pure passion project by an indulgent (of himself) business owner.

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We really tore through the new Earthborne Rangers campaign this month which was a ton of fun, grateful to my partner for going along with putting the pedal to the metal on it. Just an overall extremely high quality game month with a bunch of different players. My Arkham Horror LCG campaign is the only disappointment, the scenario we are on clanged hard and we didn't have a very good time with it.

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Uprising, solo

Absolutely buried in hordes and legions I can't stop. I would have had a chance but I made the classic mistake to explore too much, which if you have the advanced tiles and cards can do all kinds of terrible things. I spawned two legions on two explores.

I do think it's really important to play through situations when you're behind in uprising; it's baked into the balance. If you quit every time you take a bad beat you're going to think the game is "easy" since you wont play through games you might have won tooth and nail.

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Uprising, solo

Playing my first 4 turn game. The game probably doesn't need the extra turn without archnemesis, but it is letting me come back from a horrid start with chaos overrunning everything. I haven't quite turned the corner and the end is uncertain, but it has been an uncomfortable game where I've used a lot of tools I've never used before. Both factions I'm using have strong purple dice (magic) I've never leaned much into. Purple often trigger special powers... chaos jumped out so far ahead I needed to trigger the druid card I drew that saps enemy VP from the chaos faction. Uprising has a lot more wrinkles than you think to handle the kind of big swings it sometimes throws at you. Been a wonderfully interesting game.

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Captain's Chair, solo

Fitting this one on a table that isn't a dining table is... challenging. Got hammered in this game by Sela captain level bot, I just never found any point scoring groove.

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More Cloudspire. It's a bit of a slog but we are uncovering some interesting strategies
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