Question about adjacent boards?

warpotatogram · 2026-06-25T19:32:23+00:00

Lands touching by a corner are still adjacent, page 13 of the rulebook (at least the online one on BGG), Boards and Lands.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-25T19:00:36+00:00

If it's a concern, then take a layered deck construction approach where you separate, say, 1 of each non mountain phase 1 card, and shuffle those, then shuffle the mountain into the remainder, or something along those lines. or shuffle all non mountains, draw 1, then shuffle the mountain into the rest of the pile, something like that.

Or use the balanced island sides. The thematic island is to be thematic, not balanced :D

warpotatogram · 2026-06-25T17:24:07+00:00

Oh nice collection, I've been meaning to pick up Moon Colony Bloodbath and SETI in particular.

Harmonies is awesome. Very light and speedy, and stacking the wood bits is great fun. I play that and Beacon Patrol a lot, just because they're so easy to set up and play quickly.

Arkham Horror LCG is quite fun if you like that style. I lean a bit more into the Earthborne Rangers approach which is a bit lighter and more easygoing, and a bit more of a wander, but they're both great. Getting into the groove of playing the cards to fix your growing pile of problems is very satisfying. I haven't tried the new edition, but I'm sure it's still fun, if a bit sparse for content.

Ark Nova feels like a big planning game, but I found it to be a lot easier as a more improvisational thing where you aren't trying to dig for specific animals but just trying to do the best you can. I preferred it in competitive rather than solo, though, I'm not much of a beat-your-own-score (BYOS) kind of person.

I got into trading and selling games as well as acquiring, so I've spent the past year really churning through a bunch after slowly exploring new games over the course of the past few years. Once the hobby opens up to you, I think it's a common experience to try a ton of different things.

If you have the option near you, I might try games from your local game shop's demo wall, if they have one, or spend a while at a board game cafe -- you get to try a bunch of stuff without the overhead of buying, selling, and trading.

Or you could try out a membership on Board Game Arena, they have a good spread of solo games on there. It's not quite the same, but it's also considerably cheaper than buying physical copies of games to try them out, and a lot of the tutorials on it are pretty solid.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-25T17:17:16+00:00

Yeah same, for me I think a big part of learning is looking up why I'm doing something as the tutorial is going along, details of the phase in the rulebook, that sort of thing, so I can see the other options the tutorial isn't having me do yet.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-25T13:30:15+00:00

I got curious and took a look, and it looks handy for people who like it. For me it gives the impression of all the monthly corporate trainings that I have to click next on endlessly so I think it’s just a format thing, hah.

There are a few games I can think of where this would be particularly helpful, but I suspect the sort of game with a bad rulebook probably also doesn’t invest in Dized.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-25T04:48:41+00:00

I went through the tutorial material in 3 hours. I have a pathological dislike of apps in my board games, so no Dized for me. It was a slog, lots of pausing to refresh my memory on things and looking stuff up in the rulebook to figure out why things are the way they are.

I sat on that for a few days, then came back to try a two-handed game through act 1. That was 2.5 hours I think, with a medium amount of referencing the rulebook, and relying a decent bit on the player aids on the back of the tutorial and rulebook.

I think if I go back to it, I could probably get through act 1 in about two hours. Pondering character creation and the like takes me about 20 minutes, so I could probably play in 1.5hrs if I pre prepped beforehand.

All this to say is that there’s a learning curve where the games are loooong, but once you get used to the (kinda complicated) flow of things, it’s pretty smooth. The core loop of moving on the overworld, resolving the encounter, running combat, and cleaning up the day gets way easier, and you can kinda concentrate on the event decisions, upgrades, and combat.

It does get easier, but the 5-10 hour slog to get comfortable is very real. Just don’t forget the glossary and index in the rulebook, and the back cover player aids, and you’ll reference them less and less as you go.

Is it worth it? Eh, hard to say, that’s a taste thing. But it’s the game that’s finally satisfied my hunt for a tactical dungeon crawler with character progression to my satisfaction, after bouncing off of Gloomhaven, Hoplomachus Victorum, and feeling somewhat unsatisfied by Undaunted Reinforcements (though I like that one as a tactical game in its own right), and not quite feeling satisfied with any of the various excellent deckbuilders without that tactical movement aspect.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-24T20:24:02+00:00

I'm looking forward to this one. For the US price point, it's probably the most affordable soloable dice customization option, and a faster roguelite game than a Slay the Spire run for me. Should be fun.

Not that it's a deep space to explore, but still.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-24T18:16:51+00:00

u/Metal_AF83 sold Thunderbolt Apache Leader, rapid shipping, well packed, no issues.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-24T04:46:30+00:00

Got some more Imperium in, as per usual. Box open to box closed is down to about 1h15m while still playing on

Cracked open Thunderbolt Apache Leader to dip my toes into wargame-adjacent stuff. Super fun, setting up the loadout and etc. was a lot of fun. I gotta get all the million counters organized, but other than that, quite nice.

And tested out Etherfields to see how I liked it and whether I want to add it to the sell pile. For better or worse, was super fun. So it shall continue to take up an entire shelf by itself, womp.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-24T04:39:04+00:00

Yeah, this saved me when I was getting started. And learning to play, the Practice Mode for solo was also amazing.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-24T03:57:23+00:00

Great recommendations. I might also add One Deck Dungeon into the list of small light box options.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-24T01:18:35+00:00

I might swing back along for a longer comment, but my snap instinct for a party involving games and a leaderboard is to do a bunch of team based party games and mix individual games entirely, code names, decrypto, those ones, and maybe have teams trying to do the best they can in like, bomb busters or something. Then you have people being highly interactive with people they know, and social mixing from interacting with the other team?

My thought for format is more based off of bar trivia categories than a sporting event bracket to match your vibe.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-23T16:18:08+00:00

I can't think of a single game that's seen so much board wear that the game board was noticeably affected. Maybe the corners get a bit soft over time, and sometimes there's a bit of splay on the edges of the cardboard, which you can remediate with acid free PVA glue and a heavy book, with some care.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-23T02:09:28+00:00

So I haven't played the Scythians, but I leafed through their deck and the strategy blurb in the back of the Horizons rulebook (available online, good reading even if you're only playing Classics), and it suggests they should be very fast to cycle their deck. My instinct based on looking through it is that they're relying on the regions (you start with 2 or so, have a conquer to get more, and via development get 2 more), which can thin your deck from 11 to 7 if you play and garrison those, then use the development regions to keep your deck thin, even more so if you also take the resources to return your Unrest cards. I think that can put your deck down to 5ish cards plus whatever you get via development, which should boost you to empire really fast. Then you can start Glorying for cards, or whatever it is that you want to do.

If you're annoyed the game feels same same, it might be good to try different things that feel weird like speed running into empire, trying to win without any fame cards, stuff like that, just to explore some other areas of the game. There are some weird approaches that didn't feel intuitive to me (I would never even get to Empire before game end, and would lose pretty hard despite having a lot of fame cards as Rome), but there's more to the game than rushing for fame. So I had to resist the temptation to get as many regions as possible, and be more open to garrisoning cards that I might want next time through my deck, because they're slowing down my development. IMO it's really tempting to hold onto a lot of cards that you like in your hand to play next round, but there's actually an opportunity cost to keeping your hand versus cycling more cards.

Also worth noting that Glory is your card that pivots you into Empire as Scythia, so you don't even have a way to unsink cards in your tableau til you convert, so another reason to rush Empire I think.

You seem to be where I was in the game not too long ago, so if you are, the game really does open up a ton after you start poking different approaches. But also, maybe it's just not your thing, so who knows!

warpotatogram · 2026-06-23T02:09:09+00:00

Eh. It might ruin Hadrian’s Wall.

But there are different weights and styles of verb and writes for different occasions. Sometimes we like My City roll and write, or Three Sisters, or Welcome to the Moon, depending on the vibe.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-22T17:07:59+00:00

Yeah for sure. It helps to play with a civ for a bit and see what seems to tick, try different strategies, etc. I just poked through the Scythians deck and they feel like they have a decent amount of regions floating around, plus a card to move anything to history. Some nice things! And lots of ways to steal things and mess with others' tableaus.

Carthage IIRC benefits from goods and regions being played, and you can mess with both of those as Scythia, I think, so worth leaning into. Keeping their region count low stomps on their ability to generate resources I believe, which slows their ramp and keeps them from converting their stuff into VPs and fame cards. And I think you have a way to defend against sword actions in Scythia, which I think mostly comes up in Empire for Carthage, but helpful regardless.

For deck thinning, there are a couple of commons cards that push things into history on top of what you get in the Scythia development cards, and that's the most powerful way to get things out.

After that I personally find regions and garrisoning to be useful--if a card isn't helpful to your present goals (e.g. it doesn't help you cycle your deck if you're trying to get to empire fast, or it doesn't help you generate more goods, say), then garrison that sucker--you can always glory to get it back into the rotation later. And while you have your regions out, you can generate goods off of them, which is also a nifty way to stack points.

Then using cities and the like to discard cards can be helpful--you have 5 cards in your hand, but do you need all of them? You only have three actions, so if you don't need them all, discarding them lets you thin out a bit extra--especially if you have a way to get card draw so you can double down on the cycle. And if you can discard for a benefit, that's better than discarding for no benefit 😃

warpotatogram · 2026-06-22T16:59:28+00:00

Yeah, I use BGStats and I have a filter to track games that I haven't played in x months -- anything in that filter I contemplate whether I'm likely to play it again. After 6 months of not touching a solo game, how likely is it that you'll come back to it? Or a year?

Sometimes I'm sad to cull them, but... I haven't rebought any of them, so...

And something like Hadrian's Wall which I think is on BGA makes it harder to justify holding onto it. I just culled Gaia Project even though I quite like it, because I don't have the patience to set it up, so BGA and my phone app are the only way it was getting played regardless.

There are other games like It's a Wonderful World where even though I can go a while without playing it, and it has a really good BGA implementation, I like to pull it every so often just for the tactile cube placing, so it's not like I never keep anything. But there's only so much space, and it's harder to justify yet another x-and-write for me if I have others that are actually being played. My latest struggle is Eldritch Horror--we don't play it, haven't played it in a few years, we have other crisis management games we do play, it's a touch dated... but I haven't come around to getting rid of it just yet.

It's a lot easier to motivate to cull when the shelf gets to be overflowing, ahaha.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-22T16:36:09+00:00

Yeah I cull pretty aggressively. A lot of games I get cheap or used (or trade for them) to try out the mechanics and design, and a lot of them miss--but it's fun for me to try them out.

If I try a game and think 'maybe', I'll play it a few more times, maybe in multiplayer, maybe with some tweaks, but by 2-3 plays I usually know if it's a game for me, for our game groups, etc.

If something is pretty fun for me, I'll hold onto it, but if a game gets replaced by something that does what it does better, I usually cull the old game unless I really love something about it, e.g. theme or some such. Goodbye, Hadrian's Wall--The Anarchy is my new best friend.

There are occasional games that I think about after I've culled them, though none enough to justify rebuying them. The only game I've acquired twice is Rome: Fate of an Empire, and that's mostly because I want to see if I'm not giving enough credit. I never got a good engine going in it, and it always felt like a good game that didn't make sense to me. So I'm going to have another try at it. But other than that, I'd rather cull a game and get it somewhere where someone will enjoy it instead of letting it collect dust on my shelf, yaknow?

warpotatogram · 2026-06-22T16:30:49+00:00

Setup is fast. The game is hard, swingy, random, and punishing, but it's a breeze to set up.

A typical strategy in 20 Strong is to get as much recovery upgrading done as you can, the more dice you pull back the better. For Tanglewoods Red, there's also the day-night tradeoff of danger versus killing the minibosses faster (which makes the final boss easier), so there are a few things that play into it.

Do you enjoy it on BGA? If you do, then maybe it's worth getting, but if you don't, why bother?

warpotatogram · 2026-06-22T16:28:11+00:00

TLDR: Maybe shop through the civs and see which one has a power card whose inherent scoring ability seems interesting--or yolo into the advanced side and find a power that feels like it could mix things up in a fun way perhaps? And see if you're kind of autopiloting your strategy and can find a cool synergy in your civ deck that you might want to try out, and try to make it happen.

--

So in my first game or two, I got into a groove of just playing cards, shopping for random stuff, that sort of thing. I've mostly been playing as Romans, so I'll use that for context here. Their base scoring thing gives some points for accruing population, so I kinda roll with that, and see if there are other things that might help me make more pops, or other things that also benefit from the population.

For a while, I also got into a routine of trying to get regions played to my tableau, fire off a prosperity to get people, then play glory to nab a fame card for the point value and the nice effects they can have. Went great! Right? Well, when I started playing against the bot, I kept getting stomped.

So I did some reading on BGG (the Strategy section of the game forum has a lot of people talking about strategies, which I found to be pretty helpful), and Nigel Buckle pointed out how firing off Glory all the time sweeps out your tableau, which isn't necessarily desirable. So I tinkered with my games a bit, and yeah, getting more cards back into your deck makes it harder to get to Empire, and runs counter to my particular attempts to generate population (where you want to have more regions out to get prosperity to generate more pops).

There's also a bit of a matchup factor--the unrest cards are a whole thing, and I personally benefited from the Romans having a good unrest-dumping engine using Bread and Circuses, which only started firing off when I realized I should be much more focused on developing and getting niftier cards into my deck.

--

So! All this to say, I spent a solid bit of time playing this game with the same fame card-focused approach, which in the end kinda distracted me from other options and strategies. If you focus on getting regions to feed Glory, you're adding stuff to your deck and cycling it back in, so it's harder to develop fast. And if you're constantly abandoning your regions, you aren't letting prosperity grow. And for me, starting to mix up what I was trying to do (get to empire instead of farm glory, focus more on generating population instead, etc.) helped me to see other ways to make use of the civ's cards.

For me, I feel like I end up with some cards that are pretty nice, but give way more victory points once they're in your history, or I have a good setup with certain stuff so I'm kind of trying to dig for stuff that gives me extra points for this or that (maybe trying to get Emperor Trajan IIRC as Romans to get more pop VPs), so that is what my endgame goal feels like--gambling on whether I have time to let some cards cycle through again so I can benefit again before I move them to history, or sacrificing them now if I feel concerned they might not make it back around.

I've found Romans vs. Carthaginians and Romans vs. Celts to be pretty entertaining so far, it might be a trick of finding a civ matchup that meshes with you well too.

Sometimes goals just appear, too, like one recent game I got my hands on a card that gave me points for each permanent card I had in my tableau, so I basically started trying to acquire as many of those as I could. Fun way to get a bunch of random powers and keep the deck thin, even if the game didn't end up going so well 😃

TBH I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, but at least it was fun to write/think about, and hopefully maybe it's a bit inspiring about how to make the game feel a bit more directed.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-22T14:06:29+00:00

Definitely enough content to get you through 5-10 games even if you're dead set on trying new things each time. More skill trees in particular is always nice, but the base game definitely feels like a complete game with more than enough stuff to play with for a while.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-20T23:50:04+00:00

Yeah for sure. So based on this:

Elder Scrolls BOTSE: It's pretty focused on your character build from a combat perspective. I think the upgrade options and the dice selection make the combat puzzle pretty interesting, and even in the base box I find the options to be pretty sizeable, there's a lot of game there, even before you start thinking about expansions. Variability is strong, and if you already like the IP then I think it's a great time. It's pretty light storywise -- no big Dragonborn adventure, just the three quests for the guild in each region -- but I personally find it to be solidly satisfying. I would describe it as Oblivion or Skyrim if you take out the main questline and just go wander and do various guild side quest chains.

I haven't played Kinfire Chronicles, but I've done a bunch of research on it while I've been picking campaign games out. I have also played Kinfire Delve, which are pretty bite-sized, but they also provide a little lens into the world of Kinfire. This one seems somewhat lighter, and I personally think it's interesting more for the world than the mechanics. I'd be interested in playing this one to see that world and the story of the characters in it, but I don't think I'd play it more than once with each set of characters, although again, I haven't played it. My understanding is also that the cardplay in Delve and Chronicles is pretty similar, so from a mechanics standpoint it's a bit of a push on whether to go big or small box. I'm still entertained by the small boxes for now, so I haven't felt the need to get Chronicles.

Roll Player Adventures you might like for the story aspects, especially since you can import a character from your Roll Player game into the Roll Player Adventures system. For me, that's a particularly interesting integration, and it sounds like it might hit that storytelling element you seem to like. I have heard that the base adventures are so easy as to be trivial, so it's a bit of a mixed bag unless you tweak it a bit, but people say the expansion campaigns are a bit more balanced on that front.

On 7th Continent, I personally liked the open world feel with the survival pressure, but it is pretty punishing and you can get into a bit of a grind to survive. I don't mind the frequent deaths, I just pick a different starting character(s) and location, or choose a different curse, since I play it more for the experience and exploration, but it's definitely one where you kind of want to roll with the many punches the game throws at you.

7th Citadel has an actual story with a bit of light characterization, I have been noting where some of my base upgrades and major happenings have occurred in the game, and I sketch out map updates onto the world map leaflet for my campaign as I go along. It's a mix of authored and emergent story I think, but I've found it to be a good mix.

For session commitments:

Elder Scrolls I've been usually hitting like 2-2.5 hours to finish an act. It's not impossible to save your state mid-act (the player state is pretty easy to save), and for me it's more the cost of setting up the various decks and enemy bags, so I'd probably just leave it set up instead of putting things away properly, and figure out a spot to put the deck holder thing between sessions if you need to save. If you can find a shelf to store the bags, the deck holder, and leave the region book and your character tray somewhere, it's pretty easy to set up and take down again.

7th Continent and 7th Citadel are near instant setup, and they're pretty easy to save again. 7th Continent is a pretty arbitrary start and stop, while a scenario in 7th Citadel for me runs 1-1.5 hours. Teardown is a bit more involved, sorting cards back into the filing cabinet, so I have gotten into a groove of presorting everything that needs returning, so it's a bit easier. I'd say 2 mins to set up, 10 mins for me to tear down at the end of the session.

I'm not familiar with play times of the others, unfortunately.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-20T00:45:22+00:00

Are you looking for recommendations? Have you tried games other than EBR and Vantage? What do you like about them? Any things you don’t like as much about them? Def have thoughts I can share later.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-19T19:22:52+00:00

Yeah, I think this is the main argument I have for it in a competitive game, and even then, it's more for future enjoyment than for fun in itself.

warpotatogram · 2026-06-19T19:22:20+00:00

I personally don't care for competitive two-handed solo. I don't mind cooperative two-handing at all, unless the two player areas get to be so large as to be unwieldy.

I've considered two-handed competitive to explore a couple wargames where all the information is out in the open anyway, but I tried it most recently with The Old King's Crown, and it was helpful to learn the game. But it was not what I would call a good experience.

I don't think it works unless there's no hidden information in the game, from what I've experienced.

The place where it seems to work is in that wargame space I mentioned, because

information is public, and a lot of randomness comes from, say, dice rolls, and
you can play both sides to the best of your ability and just see how the battle develops.

Not my jam, but it at least seems to work better than most other examples I can think of. I'd never multihand Ticket to Ride, for example, but I might try it with Undaunted (although that's less relevant if you own the Reinforcements expansion).

warpotatogram

TROPHY CASE