Yesterday's game session was a lot of good fun. We played some well-loved games but also got to expand them and learn completely new ones. Time for the report!
First up was Apiary, mainly so we could try out the changes introduced by the Expanding the Hive expansion. It's one of those quality-of-life upgrades given it adds a few new tiles for different aspects of the game. I like expansions like this as they help to keep the game fresh without adding too much complexity to it just for the sake of it.
Our in-between was a new game called Alpaca, as the animal plays a special role within our gaming circle. I was expecting some light, family-friendly game, but was surprised that it turned out to be a small deckbuilder! And gaming friends know how much I love deckbuilders. So yeah, it was way more fun than expected.
Then the big game for the night was Ark Nova together with the Marine Worlds expansion. We've only gotten to play the full game with the expansion a few times as the game as a whole takes a lot of time to play even with experienced players. But event that expansion is in that same mold of adding a few things to the overall experience but making the game so much better.
We then played through two rounds of The Initiative, which helped bring to a close the game's story campaign mode. Thankfully. there's still a lot more game left as there's more content to enjoy. Given how the game is a celebration of cryptography and codebreaking in general, we definitely want to keep playing it. And there are still a lot of mysteries left for us to figure out and explore.
Our final game for the night was Stonmaier's latest release - Stamp Swap. I wasn't keen on getting a copy for ourselves but it was nice to at least get to try it out thanks to a friend. The game is a weird one to teach and I feel like the manual needs a bit more work in this area. There was an attempt to stress how simple the game is, but then it ended up feeling like they didn't explain certain things enough. For a quick 3-round game, I think it was only towards the end of the game that we all started to really appreciate how this system works. It's a new game, so we'll see how everyone feels about it after a few more goes at it.
Today we were supposed to have a short World of Dew RPG session but real-life complications derailed that. But at least those of us who were still available got to have a fun chat and further the Church of Dev Patel. Long story.
Overall, it has been a pretty good weekend. Now we just have to get ourselves back into work mode for the week ahead.
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