This has been another slow month. Nearing the end of the school year means a lot less gaming. Painting continues and I'm feeling almost nostalgic that I have a work bench with 3 or 4 ongoing projects again. I'm trying to get a historical project on to the table for a possible Cabin Con in August as well as a small scale historical project I'm dabbling in. I have Barons War 2nd edition to crack open as well as some Horus Heresy stuff to finish up for a Hobby Goal. On the boardgame front, we managed just 16 plays this month only 1 of which was played more than once (Tether). Of the 15 games we played 12 of them were brand new to me. We did manage another game of Heat, and Hadrian's Wall. With just one play on each of the games in this list, I'm going to probably single out singular things that jumped out to me that made me want to table the game again.
Honourable Mentions
Molly House
The latest offering from Wehrlegig Studios (John Co, Pax Pamir) Molly House is a super bespoke looking board game with a wildly unique theme. This one makes the honourable mention list because to be honest, I don't know if I get it. During the teach I found myself saying something to the effect of "I understand every moving part but have no concept of how to turn it into points or form a strategy." As we played I found myself warming to it quite significantly but will need more plays before forming a final verdict. It was not an instant hit with me like John Co, but it is a great example of a Semi-Coop done right.
Bebop
This was an offering from a Bitewing Games Kickstarter that I did not back. At the time the price point scared me off but look at me now, doing stupid shit like buying the Trickerion Collectors box. Bebop is a Knizia inspired tile layer, I'm told. So was Rebirth. From what I can tell, not being super familiar with what that means, is that you place a tile on the board. That's the game! More seriously, both this and Rebirth felt the same to me in that, I read the rules and thought "ok, I'll figure it out as we go" when it comes to scoring. My wife is not a "figure it out along the way" type so these are not her kind of game. This one was great (to me) and a lot of theme drips through. The rulebook has a selection of recommended Jazz albums to play depending on the board you choose to play on. This raises a super interesting point too about the deluxeification of games. The rulebook references the expansion (separate purchase) and shows photos of the deluxe (separate purchase) tokens. I opted to pick up the boards but not the tokens. It comes across as "this is a 100 dollar game that you may shave parts off of to pay us less" and conceptually I think that's kind of neat.
My Favorite Things
Party game done right, though not a "fun" "game." This is a trick taker where each of your cards is actually a thing ranked by another player. You give them a prompt like "favorite Marvel Movie," they secretly write down (and rank) their top 5 of that category then give those cards to you. Then you play a trick taker with those cards, guessing at that players interests. With the wrong group this sounds like absolute hell. With the right group you can use a prompt like "favorite fighting video games" and clean house because no one else at your table knows what the hell your talking about.
Top 5 of May 2025
5 Veiled Fate
Veiled Fate is from IV Studios and was sold to me under the premise that it is a "Social Deduction game that doesn't just bog down into people yelling accusations at each other." It is. I think its actually a super super interesting game. It possibly overstays its welcome a hair and it is very luck driven. Our game came down to the final flip of a coin. Though it was the 2 hours of decision making that led to the circumstances that resulted in the board positions and subsequent coin flip so YMMV. The production (like all IV games) is really really gorgeous. Was the game probably too expensive? Yeah. Will it see the table a ton? Probably not as much as I'd like. But it was a great game for a large group.
4 Rock Hard 1977
Worker placement games with 1 worker are kind of an odd duck. This one was really fun though. It makes me think of the old game Life but with significantly more agency and a game to play to boot. Players are rockstars trying to become bigger rockstars. There's a mechanic for taking "candy" to have more actions and a "sugar craving" mechanic for if you eat too much "candy." Cool kids will know what's up! Tongue in cheek jokes aside, mechanically the game is fun. It does emergent story telling right. In particular you begin the game with a day (or night) job. Miss 3 shifts and your fired. Eventually you say "f it" and get fired because now the music is more important. Discard your job to reveal that the "job slot" on your board said professional musician the whole time. You had it in you all along.
3 Ostia
Like many a FOMO based Kickstarter, Ostia came and went and I didn't learn about its existence until long after it was "out of print." This one was pitched to me as a Roman Trading themed game with a mancala mechanic. We got this one to the table and I really enjoyed it. Its a bit of a brain burner in the sense that almost everything you want to do needs to be planned a couple of moves in advance and that's just if you want to do an action. If you really want to capitalize on that action and run it to its full effectiveness you need to plan even further. My one point of contention with it is that the end game is player triggered and it can be difficult to assess who is winning. I thought I had for sure lost as my opponent had purchased 4 of the 5 end game bonus cards but the score ended up flipping wildly in my favor once we worked out the math. Would play again.
2 Iberian Gauge
Apparently there are "Train Games" (this) and "games with Trains" (Ticket to Ride). I set out to find out the difference and purchased this, Wabash Cannonball, and Shikoku 1889. This was the one that hit the table first. Despite all of us feeling like "wheres the game? How do you win when were all working together?" one player (who we were fairly certain lost) ended up miscounting her money and actually won by a very significant margin. I like mathy games. I used to adore Power Grid. Conceptually I don't even hate Monopoly. This was good. It played in a little under an hour. I would gladly play it again. Also and this seems minor but, its kind of pretty. I looked at the back of Wabash Cannonball. That game is not pretty. I think it may be the ugliest board I own actually. This isn't, so kudos to that.
1 Seti
Originally this post was just going to be "top 5, Seti, Just Seti." I did not want to want Seti. Another Euro I thought. Blah, I said. I already have Euro at home. I even bought the metal coins for Kutna Hora. Brian from one of the game groups said it was great. I found it on sale. Brian was right.
SETI is just another Euro dripping with theme but you know what, its great. I won't bog down in it right now but the short version of what sold me on it so well was that your primary scoring conditions appear on the alien races that don't show up until players collectively discover them. Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Those aliens have neat game mechanics and sub systems that interact with the game in neat ways. The actual puzzle of what to do on a turn is engaging, the long term planning is there but importantly its the kind of game where you say "I would like to do a thing, how do I get there?" then work your way backwards until you've puzzled your way to the goal and I love that.
Briefly I also want to shout out Czech Games Edition and Tabletop Merchant. I needed a replacement card for SETI because the sleeve holding the cards ripped open in transit. They have an awesome parts replacement program and it came very quickly. Tabletop Merchant was the only shop that I could find that had both Bebop and Shuffle and Swing in stock. The order shipped quick and came with a hand written note talking about bebop and telling me to enjoy. That's pretty cool to me.
I have about a 1000 figures to base next and then we can resume some drip feed wargaming content.
