Tobie and I were able to make good use of our Friday night by sitting down to try out a couple of the newer games at the Sietch. We started with the Pantheon edition of Santorini, which is quite a tight little experience with rather adorable card art. I had splurged for the ocean turntable which makes it possible to rotate the entire board during play. It's a rather excessive feature that hasn't seen a lot of actual use in-game thus far, but I'm still glad we have it. Then we tried out Bus & Stop, another small game from Saashi & Saashi. This is quite a gem and is probably our favorite game from the publish now given how well it plays. Think of the impact of something like Startups by Oink Games versus the rest of their catalog.
The big game for the night was tackling Cities of Venus: Lost Contact, which is the first in a series of games set in this particular story world. I wanted to finally try it given they have another crowdfunding project for another game in the series with completely different game mechanics. The game itself is okay but not as great as hoped. It has rather amazing production value but it did make me conclude that I probably don't need to back the next game in the series. Maybe I'll get it secondhand. Then we wrapped things up with 1 A.M. Jailbreak, which is another Saashi & Saashi game. This feels a lot closer to a traditional card game in terms of its mechanics, but it's still pretty fun.
Today the main thing we were looking forward to was a friend coming over in the afternoon for a proper game night. As much as we're open to meeting new people in the area, we'll always want to meet up with longer-term gaming friends.
Of course, we had to share the joys of Bus & Stop to kick off the gaming and he also shared our joy in the tight little system. Then we got to introduce him to Hamlet, which is a tricky shared village-building game that feels like a more cutthroat spin on games like Dorfromantic. Our final game for the night is Thorgal, which is a more narrative-first adventure game based on a popular French comic book character. I can see the potential for the game but it does make for a very rough first playthrough as it's quite challenging. Then again, Portal Games first blipped on our radar with the likes of Robinson Crusoe, which is an even harder game to defeat at times.
Things have wrapped up for now, but that leaves the rest of the night for me and Tobie. I guess we'll try learning more of our games to make the most of the night, or something along those lines. We still need more friends that we can drag over to add more gaming diversity haha
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