u/CatTaxAuditor

I picked up a copy of Feya's Swamp on the pedigree of Helge Ostertag and the art. Got to play it twice within a week I'm happy to say it's totally worth it. It's pretty quick to learn, feels like there is some depth to carry it past a couple plays, and does a good job of indirect interaction.

For components, it's pretty standard wooden bits in bright colors, with the turn marker being the only screen printed component, but the printing being functionally useless with how they're lined up. The setup is fast, but between the main board, round board, player boards, and guide cards, it eats up a lot of space.

The early game is pretty open, though my experience so far is that pretty much everyone goes in for building as their first action. After that, the waterways are still pretty clear, but you have less to work with, you clan powers and income scaling with building more. Even early on, you have to be thinking about the objectives and race cards, as you'll be edged out of them if you aren't moving towards them from the start.

The late game flips that. The swamp gets choked with settlements, but you develop the sails and capacity to do more despite the board becoming a maze. The races have most of their top spots claimed, so you get into optimizing and finding where you can grab up whatever points you can. Sequencing your actions and trying to get to opportunities before others becomes much more important.

My favorite facet of the game is choosing who you deliver fish to. It allows the table to govern, to a certain extent, the points everyone will score from celebrations. If a player is in last, you are more incentivized to sell them your fish, rather than the one who might catch you with a few bonus points. And other players can check your lead if you're winning by selling exclusively to each other. It is a great bit of indirect interaction that makes sure you aren't fully heads down the entire game.

All in all, a great game. I look forward to trying it at two players to see if the quality holds.

Just writing up games I played in person, not the full set from Board Game Arena. Unless it’s noted as a First Impression, I’ve played each of these games at least once before. I’m not including a quantitative rating on any of them because that’s just not interesting to me.

Whale Riders – Continues to be the poster child of doing more with less. To play well, you have to balance buying goods and filling orders with moving back toward the home port to buy the pearls there. It’s simple enough to teach in less than 5 minutes, while still having enough nuance to be interesting more than a handful of plays in. We played the expansions once and hated them though.

Xia: Legends of a Drift System – A maximalist sandbox game in the weirdest system in space. The game really shines letting you pivot your strategy at a moment’s notice. Given the size of the game and the number of different systems, you need to react to what is happening then and there, whether that means trading, exploring, or going pirate. I went full pirate for the first time and had a blast (literally). Played with Embers of a Forsaken Star.

Patchwork – This game got less interesting the more I played it and then started getting more interesting once I came back to it after a break. I am starting to understand the interplay between cost, coverage, and button income better approaching it with a critical eye leading to my wins, but I still lose near constantly online. Played twice in a row.

YINSH – One of my favorite abstract strategy games, but I refuse to dive deeper into the optimized strategies. I’ve watched high level play on BGA and it’s terribly boring looking. Still fun playing from the middle of the board making big flippy moves. Played and lost twice!

Furnace – A short but crunchy engine building game. It has one of my favorite auction mechanics, wherein you win a compensation for your losing bids times the value of that bid. I love this concept so much with how it leads to strategically losing. The player powers from Interbellum are a nice twist on the otherwise relatively simple gameplay.

FlipToons – I love this game more with each play. It feels really random at first, but the game does give you a surprising degree of control if you play it well. The art is goofy and fun. The powers can sometimes cascade together for a huge synergy.

Unspeakable Words – A weird word game of trying to roll over the number of angles in your word. But if you lose just enough sanity you can just make up words to try to win before you die. My letter draws lent themselves to just a really smutty slate of words. Fun, but not something I’d want to play so frequently the charm wears off. First impression.

Dune: Imperium – Uprising – This game is just so good. I didn’t get it the first few times I played, but it’s clicked at this point and I find it amazing. Theme, gameplay, player interaction, all great. My only criticism isn’t that money becomes obsolete, but maybe just how quickly it can become obsolete. But Uprising has some ways to turn it into points in the late game if you’re lucky.

Power Grid – Absolutely loved it. Most satisfying game I have lost in a good while. The auction and the market for resources works well together. The art is nothing to write home about, but that’s fully not the point. Overall I feel like I had the tempo of the game a bit reversed, but it has me excited to play again. As an added benefit, it’s a relatively higher weighted game that plays up to 6 which is somewhat uncommon. First Impression.

Best game I played on BGA: Five Tribes – One of my top 5 games of all time, the best in the hobby at mancala.

Worst game I played on BGA: Toy Battle – Mid in just about every way. The fact that they’re toys is charming, but the game is too light for what it is to me.

Didn’t get to play as many games as usual because we moved to a new house in the middle of the month and have been super busy with organizing and cleaning.