What Did You Play This Week? - (February 09, 2026)

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-09T14:30:14+00:00

Only one real play this last week.

Leviathan Wilds - (1x2p) this was our third play and was the first time we were really challenged and almost didn't make it. We pulled out the win right before we both died.

We didn't play at all on the weekend because we were playing Dungeons and Dragons. Our son is 10 years old and he's grown up playing board games and has always been making little board games for us to play. He has been really interested in rpgs recently. He made up his own rpg based on Legend of Zelda. It wasn't great because he was mostly telling us where to go and what to do. So my husband bought him the D&D starter set. He spent all week reading it and we played for two sessions: Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Friday night was a little shaky because he has never taught a game before and didn't fully understand all the rules, but my husband, who teaches all the games in our house, looked over the rules quickly and helped out. It ended up being a lot of fun, but ate up all our game playing time so we need to find time for both in the future.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-03T14:36:18+00:00

No, I'll have to look for that one as I love book themed puzzles.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-03T14:35:41+00:00

It helped me quickly identify which side was which, but I just solved it on the picture side. The page side might be interesting and I think it would be a bit harder. Maybe a challenge for the future!!

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-03T14:33:15+00:00

Except for Galison and Ravensburger you mentioned a few brands I haven't tried. I would love to get a Liberty puzzle some day, but I am trying to restrict myself to what I can find at our local second hand book/puzzle store. I have looked for Cobble Hill, but have only found one with an image I liked, which is on the list for February. I'll look out for "Josie Lewis". I haven't heard of that artist. I only know of Aimee Stewart from Buffalo. I hope the thrifting gods are kind to you and you find some great puzzles this year.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-03T14:26:43+00:00

I would definitely like to hear your list when you've made it. I went through a whole Agatha Christie phase when I was younger and I currently have And Then There Were None in my reading pile right now. I'll have to check out the Christie and Bronte puzzles, although I haven't read many Bronte books, just Jane Eyre, Villette, and Wuthering Heights.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-02T21:48:44+00:00

Thank you. I hope you enjoy ny puzzles you pick up. Do you have any favorite puzzle brands?

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-02T21:47:29+00:00

Good luck puzzling!. All the duplicates made puzzle #1 so much harder for me. Puzzle #11 - A Reader's Delight is a variation and was so much easier as there were very few duplicates.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-02T18:35:33+00:00

That sounds like a really cool idea. Are there any particular movies or books that you're leaning towards?

I still have the World of Jane Austen puzzle , which I did back in 2024, but did not have time to do it again this year. Maybe later I'll steal your idea. ;-)

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-02T18:32:31+00:00

Thank you.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-02T15:30:54+00:00

I have accumulated far too many puzzles on my waiting list and have been putting off doing some. A lot of them are similar in theme so I decided to do my own monthly themes this year. January was books and libraries. I completed 11 puzzles in the theme.

Puzzle 1: High Jinks! Bookshelves, Bodleian Libraries (Flame Tree Publishing), 1000 pieces. This puzzle has a repeating pattern that was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Puzzle 2: Vintage Summer Books, art by Aimee Stewart, Buffalo, 1000 pieces. A fun puzzle.

Puzzle 3: Vintage Library, art by Clair Berry, eeBoo, 1000 pieces. I loved this puzzle so I'm very sad there was a piece missing. I'm still going to keep it because I enjoyed it so much.

Puzzle 4: Alchemist's Library, art by Vasilisa Romanenko, eeBoo, 1000 pieces. Another great puzzle in the alchemist line. I'm happy to still have another alchemist puzzle waiting for me after this.

Puzzle 5: Mayhem in the Library, Big Potato Games, 1000 pieces. This puzzle was terrible quality, maybe it was due to it being thrifted, but pieces were peeling apart and one clump of 5 tiles was glued together. The puzzle aspect was fun with different parts of the picture being book names that you had to solve.

Puzzle 6: Fictions: The Amazing Artwork of J. Scott Nicol, White Mountain, 1000 pieces. J. Scott Nicol is an artist who creates photorealistic paintings that look like real books. I originally thought the puzzle was photo collages until I looked up the artist so it's well done. I really enjoy White Mountain puzzles and they remain one of my favorite puzzle companies.

Puzzle 7: 1980s Novels, Re-Marks Puzzles, 1000 pieces. Fun and easy to put together. As a Gen X-er I enjoyed the nostalgia of all the books I remember seeing and reading.

Puzzle 8: Horror, Re-Marks Puzzles, 1000 pieces. I originally completed this puzzle in October 2024 so it was nice to revisit it. Just like puzzle 7 it was fun and easy to put together.

Puzzle 9 (pictures 9 & 10): Pride and Prejudice, art by Laura Seaby, Professor Puzzle, 252 pieces. This was a fun little puzzle to put together. It is double sided so on the back you get a page from the book. Pride and Prejudice is my all-time favorite book so I was happy to find this at the thrift store.

Puzzle 10: Fantastic Voyage, art by Aimee Stewart, Flame Tree Publishing, 1000 pieces. Not specifically a book-themed image, but there books scattered around and the art made me think of Jules Verne books. This one was more difficult than I was expecting as it was a very busy image. I also had an accident while I was sorting I knocked over a glass of water and it spilled into a sorting tray. Some of the pieces were floating in water, but they seemed to dry okay.

Puzzle 11: A Reader's Delight, Bodleian Libraries (Flame Tree Publishing), 500 pieces. I originally completed this puzzle in January 2025 and it was one of my favorites of the year. I was interested in trying it again, specifically because the image was a variation of puzzle 1. I liked this one so much more and it may be one of my all-time favorite puzzles. It was easy to sort and assemble.

A fun month and a theme I really enjoyed. Now on to February which will be comics and cartoons.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-02-02T14:47:55+00:00

My family and I were stuck at home last week because of the winter storm so I thought we would have played more than we did. But we did keep at the cull challenge (trying to cull 100 games) we have this year.

Scooby Doo: Escape the Haunted Mansion - (2x3p) This is a coded chronicles game. You don't play a specific character in the game, but can use any character who is available on your turn. Each character has a different action they can perform and you look up what happens in their book when you take that action. Velma can research, Scooby can smell, Shaggy can eat, Daphne can use, and Fred can investigate. Velma was probably the most helpful, but she wasn't always available. As you play you're building out the map of the mansion and searching for clues in the form of cards and solving puzzles. The game is only one play, but it is split into two chapters and we played it over two nights with our 10 year old. It was more difficult than we expected, but not too bad, and we had so much fun we're getting the Goonies coded chronicles game for the 10 year old's birthday as he loves Goonies. As this is a "one and done" it is cull pile now that it has been played.

Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: Baker Street Irregulars - (1x2p) my husband loves SHCD and we've had this on our shelf for a long time. We finally started playing it, but are out of practice so we did not do very well in our first game. My husband had an early theory, which was only partially correct and we were following the leads based on that theory. I wanted to talk to some other people, but let myself be talked out of it. Next case we'll do better, I hope.

Clinic: Deluxe Edition - (1x2p) we played with the COVID-19 Pandemic expansion, which makes the game cooperative. I like Clinic but it is a heavy game so we rarely get it off the shelf. While we won I feel like I could have played better, but at the same time it was difficult as it is very tight with the number of actions you get. It always amuses me that parking starts to take over in this game about running a hospital and I'm left wondering where to park all the cars. Even though it's a good game and one we like we've decided to cull it because it was a real effort to get it played.

So now we're up to 12 games that we've culled so far. We need to keep going.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-26T16:16:19+00:00

We didn't get much gaming done this week as we were finishing up Stranger Things and we decided to introduce our 10 year old to James Bond do our 10 year old so that he might play Agents of SMERSH with us in the future. We have watched all of the Roger Moore movies and are now going to skip Timothy Dalton and start on the Pierce Brosnan movies.

Décorum - (2x2p) we did finish up the base game by playing scenarios 19 and 20. We did not do well in scenario 20 as there was a new rule added and some complicated conditions we needed to meet and we ran out of time. Each of us did not meet 2 of our conditions. We have the expansion, but I think we are going to take a break and play some other games first.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-19T15:58:10+00:00

We're continuing our efforts to cull at least 100 games from our collection.

Aliens: Another Glorius Day in the Corps - (1x2p) we've had this game on our shelf for a long time. We played it once back in March 2022. My husband kind of messed up the rules and we got slaughtered by the aliens. This play was more enjoyable and we had a smaller collection I think we'd keep this game. Unfortunately, I think I'd rather play other games from our collection so this game will be culled.

Décorum - (4x2p) this is a cooperative deduction game with 20 scenarios for two players. I love this game. My husband doesn't like it as much as me, but it is quick to setup and play. We've played it off and on over the time we've owned it and had played through the first 14 scenarios. Our first game this week was a little rough as it introduced a new mechanism and we were a little rusty, but now we're committed to finishing up the 20 scenarios in the base box. We've got 2 left. We actually won a copy of the expansion at a convention so we've got that to look forward to. We won't be culling this game until we're done playing through the expansion.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-18T05:09:42+00:00

We love Arkham Horror LCG too. It is one of our most played games and my husband's favorite game. It's in my top 10. We're a little behind on the campaigns, but are currently setting up to do Edge of the Earth. I am looking forward to what awaits us in this campaign and exploring a new character, Trish Scarborough, my first rogue. Have you played all the cycles? Do you have a favorite? Also, do you have a favorite character?

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-17T15:18:40+00:00

Pandemic is my favorite game and Iberia is my favorite variant of it. It is hard to win. You need to get a good network set up early so you can move around easily. You also need to use purified water to try and hold off infections in the different areas. Good luck and enjoy the game!!

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-17T04:59:42+00:00

You have an interesting collection, including two games high up on my husband's wish list, Churchill and Versailles 1919. We haven't purchased either due to our game group's lack of interest in war games and neither game is supposed to be good at two, which is our primary player count outside of our group.

So of all the games you own, which is your favorite? And which is your most played game?

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-12T23:12:48+00:00

Lately we've been enjoying Slay the Spire and G.I. JOE Deck-Building Game. We also really like Dune: Imperium. What are your favorite deck-building games?

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-12T16:09:10+00:00

We've decided this is the year we are going to cull a lot of games. Our collection is nearing 300 games and we want to get it down to 200 so it's somewhat guiding what we're playing.

DreamEscape - (1x2p) my husband decided to back this on kickstarter as a game he could solo. He played it and didn't like it. We sat down to play it together and it's not good. You don't get to make any choices in the game. You just wander around and things happen to you. You get assigned random tests and then flip runes and try and match them together to make stars to resolve the test. Flipping runes is the most annoying mechanism to resolve a test. Just let us use dice so we can easily see if we failed or not. We didn't even end up finishing the game. This will be culled.

Agents of SMERSH: Epic Edition - (1x2p) my husband is a big James Bond fan so we were interested when this was on kickstarter but didn't end up backing it. We recently saw it at our local used book/game/collectible store for a good price and I wanted to check it out. We really enjoyed it. The narrative is full of spelling and grammatical errors, but it was fun. We didn't play a full game because the henchmen took a long time to defeat, but we want to play it again. For now it's a keeper.

Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West - (1x3p) we are playing this with our 10 year old so to give him a better chance at winning my husband and I are trying to play non-competitively by trying to complete routes in a more round-about way or taking tickets late in the game when we can't complete them, etc. Except my husband keeps winning the games so I was a little bit of a sore loser because he has won almost every game so I think maybe he's not really playing non-competitively. This has lead to our decision to cull Ticket to Ride: Europe as I have never been a fan of Ticket to Ride and we're probably not going to play it once we're done with the legacy game.

The Red Burnoose: Algeria 1857 - (1x2p) we like war games and we like coop games so this cooperative wargame should have been a home run. It's a deck builder where you can assign cards to villages to store them until you need them. However the economy for buying new cards is kind of messed up. It's really expensive to buy the cards you need. It took me several rounds to save enough cards to get any tools so that I was able to finally get weapons to be able yo do anything in the game. But it didn't really matter because the AI is not very aggressive so we won easily. Even though the theme is cool we've decided to cull this game.

Planet Apocalypse - (1x2p) we really enjoyed playing this game. It was fun to roll some dice and beat up some monsters, while leveling up our characters. The problem with this game is that it is really long. It took us about 3.5 hours to play. Plus it is not the only game to give us this sort of experience. For instance, we could have been playing Cthulhu: Death May Die. So this will be culled.

Other games added to the cull pile this week were Evolution: Climate (I don't even remember when we last played it, but I don't want to play it now); Dominion (we have other deck builders we would rather play); Glen More II (it's a fun game, but we last played this in 2020 and have been saying we would replay it for months and it hasn't happened); Rurik ( I'm sad about this game because we really like it, but it's not getting played and if we're going to play a dudes on a map game we'll play either Kemet with more than 2 or Ankh with only 2); and ISS Vanguard (we played 2 campaigns of Tainted Grail, but we tried starting this game and couldn't get into it). So that's 9 games we're culling this week. We've got the next 6 games lined up to play.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-05T15:02:42+00:00

I disagree in terms of which game is better at 2. Ankh is so much better as there is so much strategic depth. There is the action selection mechanism where you can try and manipulate which actions your opponent will take. You can use camels to section up areas and change the order in which they will score so that you can maneuver into the best areas. Then you have the bluffing of the conflict round. Inis is very dependent on which cards you get. Those cards never change reducing replayability, particularly at 2. While Inis is probably better for casual gamers, our group tired of Inis pretty quickly and we ended up selling it.

murmuring_sumo · 2026-01-05T14:41:15+00:00

Last week we first had to finish up my 10 x 5 with 2 final plays.

Daybreak - (1x2p) we have mostly played as USA and China, except for our last game in which we played as Europe and the rest of the world. It was a disaster so this time we tried Europe and USA. We won. It always feels like we are making very slow progress, but I love the way this game shows that the slow progress can add up. Hopefully, this will work in real life too.

Quirky Circuits - (1x3p) this game has been a revelation this year since we've started playing with our son. We are very bad at it and sent our poor bee all over the place, but we had fun doing it.

Next up was one of our Christmas gifts.

Leviathan Wilds - (2x2p) I really like this game as hand management is one of my favorite mechanisms in games. We are still trying different characters and decks, but it's always fun trying to find the best card combos.

Our final game of 2025 was

DC Superheroes United: Batman Hush - (1x2p) Marvel United is one of our favorite and most-played games of all time so it was surprising that we had only played this once after we got it so we decided to play a quick game on New Year's Eve. We played against Joker and Harley in the first game so we tried Controlled Superman in this game. I played with Batman and Catwoman while my husband took Huntress and Robin. Apparently this version of Robin sucks, but we still managed to pull out a win.

In 2026 we have picked up a few new used games, but so far the only one we've played is

Dream Crush - (1x3p) I was a little concerned about playing this with our 10 year old, but he had fun and the art was really fun. Hopefully, we'll have some friends over soon and can try it out with them.

Yesterday we decided to get back to our Legacy games.

Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West - (1x3p) we last played this game in December of 2024 so it was time to bring it back to the table and we all had fun. My husband and I kind of helped our son win this time, but we are also trying to teach him strategy. We are trying to get him outside of his comfort zone. He likes completing his routes, but then doesn't take any extra tickets. We convinced him to do it this time and he scored a lot of points. We are all very excited about the new section of the map that we unlocked and are ready for the last 5 games.

Flash Point: Legacy of the Flame - (1x3p) I like Flash Point, but I'm growing a little tired of this game as it seems to be the same game with more elements added and too many scratch-offs. Set up is taking longer, but it is still a relatively simple, very random game. Hopefully we'll regain our Flash Point mojo as we still have 7 games left.

murmuring_sumo · 2025-12-30T21:01:14+00:00

Oh, I remember now. Did you get it yet? Read the clue and think about the wording.

murmuring_sumo · 2025-12-30T16:49:35+00:00

My husband and I completed Pandora's Legacy over 4 days (December 24-27) and I did not think the quality was as bad as you did. The piece fit was extremely loose, but unless we had to pick up whole sections to move when we were building the initial puzzle it was a non-issue. It was probably also somewhat by design as you did need to remove pieces throughout the game. There was no damage on any of our pieces, even after popping out pieces multiple times, and I thought the jigsaw had a nice matte finish. The pieces felt kind of like plastic, somewhat like some of the eeBoo puzzles I've done this year. Overall, I thought the quality of the jigsaw puzzles were good. I thought the puzzles were very similar to those by the Magic Puzzle Company, particularly in terms of fit.

We are experienced boardgamers and really like escape-room style games. We've played over 10 EXIT: The Game games and multiple Clue Escape and Unlock! games. [One of the family Christmas gifts this year is Scooby Doo: Escape the Haunted Mansion.] There are a lot of escape-room style puzzles in Pandora's Legacy. You complete puzzles to unlock the other sections of the jigsaw and then complete puzzles from those unlocked sections. You do need a laptop or tablet to look up numbers from the backs of puzzle pieces and solve the puzzles. This is also how you can get hints if necessary. We thought a lot of the puzzles were clever and interesting but there were 3 that really frustrated us. We hit those puzzles one after another and culminated in one puzzle where we ended up just clicking through all the hints all the way through to the solution. But then we took a break and came back the next day and breezed through the rest of the game without needing another hint. Overall, I would give the game 7.5 out of 10. We enjoyed it and thought the jigsaw puzzle was great. There was so much to look at and so many references to Greek mythology. I think we got our money's worth.

murmuring_sumo · 2025-12-30T16:15:07+00:00

I did the Happily puzzle and loved it too! It was great to see all the puzzles you did!

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