So I racked my head over this several times about whether to just do a year in review 2025 or whether to continue Stuff I Played into December. I decided to do this because I think overall the two posts can have very different things to touch upon so we are going to do them separately. Given that lets dive into this month and see what we can get out of it and who knows maybe I’m going to use this “extra” post as a way of maybe changing the format in this a little bit.
Everything I played!
Not a lot of heavy gaming but 26 plays is nothing to scoff at. And while I have not written anything else this month let it be known that I have 1 half written thing and 1 half baked thing in my head…so you know…its not that I’m not writing, I’m just failing!
The New
What is this section? Haven’t seen this before. I think that A specific shout out needs to be given to things that have not been played before since pointing these out is important. It could be good or bad or meh but I guess pointing them out specifically is useful.
Sky Team: Story time. I have given up on buying 2 player games. I just don’t have a 2nd player that is accessible and wants to board game a lot. I have a great partner and she is more than willing to play games but doesn’t like how 2 player games specifically pit us against each other (in a zero sum way) though is completely fine in games where multiple players can beat on each other since that seems less targeted. And if I ever have anyone over then it almost always makes sense to play a game with 3 or more. I don’t really just meet up with one other person to play games. Maybe I need to change this but it does preclude me from playing a lot of great two player games. So now you are asking, how did you acquire Sky Team? Well my kid and his friend have been pretty into planes lately, specifically passenger planes, well last time he went to our local FLGS (without me, I might add) he saw this game and decided to spend his own money on it because it’s about planes. That’s right my kid went to the game store and without any adult intervention picked out a well loved award winning board game because it looked cool. I feel so proud as a board gamer. Getting to the game itself, it is quite interesting. The base game is definitely pretty easy as you just have to manage your dice, the communication issues are there in the rules but you can usually make something work by just trusting your partner or in an emergency using a re-roll token. There is even asymmetry in the actions available to the players so you have slightly different priorities with your dice. The scenarios increase difficulty and shift your priorities, so far we have only done the first two airports but I think this will be asked for every few weeks so maybe we will see it a lot next year.
Verdict: The Good
The good
Assault on Doomrock: I got to introduce a new person to Assault on Doomrock and for the first time ever tried the game at 3 players. I always feel a little bad introducing this game as “We are going to play this and we are going to get ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED, and you will love it.” That is still the correct description of this. We always play “easy mode” as given by the designer and I have still not beat the game (I have had a few games that were abandoned at 3rd act due to time…but that’s another thing). This game continues to be amazing we had a very unfortunate 2nd act where we really couldn’t get any kind of decent upgrades for ourselves before going into the next fight and kinda getting demolished. Either way a good time was had by all. I find that a lot more of the classes seem to be useful at 3 players where needing to have a usable attack is not always a huge deal. The game does force you to be so…..deliberate with your actions. If you are not able to get some attacks off in some turns due to positioning or set up you just end up losing instantly. I love this game but it is so unforgiving.
Loopin’ Louie: So I play this occasionally with the kids and my son wanted a game. It is still great. We play quasi tournament rules (if you win we restart the game with the winner having 1 fewer chicken than previously and you win the game if you start the game with 0 chickens). We had a one-on-one match putting both players 180° and I got whooped….twice…and I was trying. Maybe it wasn’t my day but I just got destroyed. Felt good for the kid though.
One Night Ultimate Werewolf: Got One night to the table with some….ulterior motives (see my next post). The game is great and holds up even at 3 players we were often in situations that were set up properly that were quite confusing. I legitimately would love to have a group that could play this even if it was just quarterly because this game is so good you just have to understand what makes it good and have the correct roles set up to allow for it to get good.
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea: I mean what can I say that literally every other reviewer hasn’t said already? All the opinions are the same on this one, its amazing, its better than the space one, the mission book doesn’t matter. We had some delightfully difficult situations (one player was the only player allowed to win yellow cards due to how the missions shook out, it was wild)
The Rest (A.K.A. Kiddy Corner):
No real bad this month other than commentary from previous months but I don’t feel like just copying and pasting so that I won’t comment more on that.
Monkey Palace: This is still a pretty fun Lego game. The games tend to go in a similar way. This time we did play with the frog and butterfly as optional pieces and I think overall this causes a lot more interesting things to happen rather than just the monkey. We had to build in new and exciting ways, particularly with the butterfly that didn’t just let you build on top of the previous players highest piece, definitely an improvement to the game but doesn’t bring the game into something amazing.
Hopes for next month:
New year…same old board games. I don’t think I have anything special lined up next month but I am hoping to get something that has been sitting in my collection for quite a while to the table. It excites me, but I don’t really want to write it out as I feel like that may be jinxing the chance of it happening. I have some more interesting plans within the coming year but I am hoping to figure that one out for the end of year post rather than the end of month post. See you later!