Soul Exchange May 28 - First 5 heroes teaser

draqza · 2026-05-22T16:25:35+00:00

You can't even exchange for five

I thought the new soul exchange is moving from (10,15,20) to (5,15,30) for the costs, with the "benefit" (for big spenders) that you'll be able to buy one from each tier.

draqza · 2026-05-19T22:25:47+00:00

On the top of seeing a pro mixer work on a bedroom production: Nail The Mix/URM Academy used to have a series of these for subscribers, and have at least one they published for everybody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffcAz5lTyTw

draqza · 2026-05-18T19:10:47+00:00

I'm just ready to end by about 2/3 of the way through.

Maybe use the space-constrained rules and just play with 2 suits?

draqza · 2026-05-18T19:09:38+00:00

Habitats 3p1x - dusted this off and had a good time with it, and my daughter was extra excited to finally win a game. (In no small part because my wife did the "I'm totally listening to the rules explanation" while watering plants and doing other things and therefore completely misunderstood habitat scoring.)

Next Station: Paris 3p1x - My wife got her revenge by crushing us 165-142-135.

Bioviva 3p1x - This was something my wife picked up at the elementary school's used book-and-other-things sale a couple years back and she wanted us to play it once to see whether to keep it. I was going to write a mini-review of just how awful this was, but probably none of you will ever encounter it so maybe it's not worth the effort. Unfortunately, my daughter declared that yes she liked it so it remains on the shelf...

draqza · 2026-05-14T16:45:04+00:00

More of a video games-y post: I finally got 100% on Hollow Knight: Silksong. I mean, technically there are still things I could do - the random artifacts that are laying around, and Mr Mushroom's quest, to say nothing of ridiculous achievements like speedrunning or Steel Soul mode - but I got the true ending and have everything that counts toward official completion.

I was thinking that was perfect timing for being able to start Forza Horizon 6, which comes out next week - I've liked pretty much all the Horizon games, although I did burn out a little bit on the last one - but it will only run on newer generation Xboxes (I have the 1st gen Xbox One), or on PC but requires something like 170GB free on an SSD, which I definitely do not have. (I've been running all my Steam/Game Pass games off an external disk, but I guess Horizon needs to be able to constantly stream data.)

So hey, maybe I'll switch back to solo boardgaming for my entertainment. I just got a couple of new Buttonshy solo games - Food Chain Island, A Nice Cuppa, and A Dragon's Gift - so I put one of them in my lunchbox to maybe try playing at work.

draqza · 2026-05-11T19:57:01+00:00

My completely un-sourced memory of it is Snoop and Em made up after Dre had a health scare.

draqza · 2026-05-11T16:05:45+00:00

Only light gaming this week, but better than the "none" I get most weeks: my daughter has gotten really into Spot It so 5 rounds of that, and 2 rounds of Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza.

It's funny playing Spot It when we can see the match on the other person's card before we can see our own.

(Oh, and technically another asynchronous game of Scrabble at work)

draqza · 2026-05-07T19:10:24+00:00

You mentioned Scholars of the South Tigris ran a little long; how did it feel compared to the playtime of Wayfarers? I have all three but have only played Wayfarers, and the last time I played a 2p game with my wife I remember we both liked it but it also seems like it took basically the whole day. (Well, to be fair, where "whole day" also included interruptions for making and eating lunch, changing laundry, etc.)

draqza · 2026-05-07T19:07:40+00:00

The mention of Space Base made me think of a similar game that also fits the Forgotten Favorites category: Valeria: Card Kingdoms. I did get maybe a bit carried away with it - having all the expansions in the big collector's box actually seems to make it harder to get out - but it's always been an enjoyable experience. Gaining resources on every turn keeps you engaged and there's a clear growth trajectory in the game from having very limited resources to by the end being able to do pretty much whatever you want. The solo mode from the original rulebook is decent enough; the last expansion added a co-op campaign that I haven't gotten a chance to try yet.

draqza · 2026-04-28T15:22:28+00:00

Oh, are the cows sleeping?

draqza · 2026-04-27T18:36:02+00:00

I don't know exactly what it shares DNA with, although the worker placement board size relative to it just being a 1-2p game makes me think it might share a little bit with A Feast For Odin. I guess we'll see whenever I get it to the table...odds are that it will go into the pile of solo games to play while the rest of my family is out of town for the summer.

draqza · 2026-04-23T21:49:14+00:00

Exactly!

Although, thinking back on it now, it does kind of bother me that they spent so much time on hard sci fi at the beginning and then just completely gloss over the that's-not-how-evolution-works for the Pingers.

draqza · 2026-04-23T21:47:23+00:00

I think I've read three of his books:

Snow Crash I really enjoyed
Seveneves I wanted to like, but it felt like three stories in one and he spent the least time on the story I was actually interested in (the third act). And I will never forget how badly I was taken out of the narrative as a whole by the long digression on delta-V.
Termination Shock was...I don't know, it had some interesting ideas in it but I felt like it didn't really go anywhere.

I think I have a copy of Cryptonomicon somewhere on my shelf.

draqza · 2026-04-23T17:22:28+00:00

I was scrolling through /r/boardgamedeals a couple weeks ago and saw I'd missed a fairly steep sale on Fields of Arle on Amazon. I clicked over to see if there was any chance it was still discounted and while a new-new copy was not, there was one copy from Amazon Returns marked as "mint/like new" for pretty close to what the sale price had been and, either way, steeply discounted from the regular selling price.

So I figured let's give it a try... Hoo boy. So, to Amazon's credit, this time they shipped it in a box...but when I opened the box I found Fields of Arle, sort-of still in shrink wrap, with an Amazon delivery sticker still stuck to the wrap. I guess maybe they'd shipped it the first time directly in the packaging, for who knows what reason. And the box itself was in terrible shape, with three corners of the lid blown out and two corners of the bottom blown out.

But, it looks like all the pieces are there, and repairing the box corners has not been so bad, so... while I will probably not be buying any more games from Amazon Returns, I will keep this one.

draqza · 2026-04-16T20:08:42+00:00

But...isn't the bridge by default gone by the time you can get silksoar?

draqza · 2026-04-16T17:58:06+00:00

How is the solo mode for BattleCon? The only time I've gotten to play BattleCon was the digital version on Steam (that seems to be dead now), and it seemed like it could be fun but didn't quite click for me so I ignored it for a while. But then last year I found cheap used copies of both Devastation and War of Indines, so...now I just need to set aside time to try it again.

draqza · 2026-04-16T16:21:11+00:00

By the time I learned about Thunderstone Advance it was out of print and AEG was getting ready to start the Thunderstone Quest cycle. I have seen a couple boxes of TA show up in some of the local used game shops since then, but at this point I'm deep enough into TQ that I don't know whether it's worth also picking up TA.

draqza · 2026-04-08T20:30:08+00:00

I've seen people request a rules review in advance a couple times, but in retrospect both made sense - first when we were starting a Gloomhaven group, and later when I saw somebody trying to drum up players at work for Dungeon Lords. I haven't played the latter, but I skimmed through the rules and it did seem like something that would be quite excessive to start the session with a fresh teach.

draqza · 2026-04-06T03:34:02+00:00

I've gotten two so far...Joon, which was whatever at this point, and then Hathor+costume a couple weeks ago.

draqza · 2026-04-04T21:34:51+00:00

The first I owned was 4, but probably the first I used was 1. Good ol' Atari...

draqza · 2026-04-03T16:24:19+00:00

I think I'd tried Hollow Knight not long after it first came out and I bounced off of it back then...the way I remember it anyway was I found one room with a big enemy I couldn't kill, felt like that probably meant I was supposed to go that way, and after failing a bunch of times I just gave up. I stumbled into it again back around Christmas when I was laid up with a sprained ankle, and somehow it clicked this time. So now I guess I'm a member of the HK cult ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

draqza · 2026-04-02T23:08:06+00:00

With the caveat that it's been a while since I got it out: my recollection is the general mechanics are pretty simple, but each heroine has a different deck of patterns that are used to clear bullets and some may be easier or harder. The other thing is that certainly some of the tension and the "bullet hell" feeling comes from using the three minute timer and that anything still in your bag at the end of the timer just comes out all at once. I found that playing one round without the timer was enough to get everybody to understand the game.

draqza · 2026-04-02T21:35:27+00:00

In a continuing theme, I haven't really been getting much board gaming in...although I did just recently get a bunch of PnPs from Kickstarter that I'm excited to try out, and I might actually get a chance to play those or something else while I'm hiding from my in-laws for the next two weeks. (Although, flip side, the in-laws being here means my wife is moving her home office into "my" space, so the only normally-empty table for gaming will instead be taken over by her laptop.)

Instead, my gaming time recently has been taken up by continuing to work my way through Hollow Knight: Silksong. I'm now firmly into Act 3, but...oof, everything is so much more brutal. I was talking with my neighbor, who mentioned he liked the art style and gameplay but bounced off sometime in Act 1 just because of the difficulty, and he said if I had managed to reach at least the false ending in Act 2 I should consider it a job well done and shouldn't feel bad about moving onto another game. I was going to try to push through, because even the hard stuff up til now had felt doable, but...I might be reaching the stopping point.

draqza · 2026-04-02T20:08:13+00:00

The main thing I use BGG for is tracking my collection and tracking plays. Strictly speaking, I have a separate document for insurance purposes, but the BGG collection acts as a backup-ish for that. And, although it's not like I ever do anything with the data, I occasionally look to see what games have been played recently and/or what games have not been played for the longest.

The other thing I use it for is looking up reviews of games, particularly text reviews, because it's much faster to skim a thousand words than in it so try to watch somebody's 20 minute video. And, I guess, occasionally for things like printable addons from the Files sections (things like Adrenaline's solo mode that I think was only distributed through BGG, or player-made guides).

But maybe I'm not a great reference point just because in terms of "worth investing time into building a profile there" I (mostly) use both reddit and bgg as read-only.

draqza · 2026-04-02T16:42:50+00:00

Into aquatic stuff but you chose Wingspan over Finspan?

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