I took a quick look at Mercurial, sounds neat! I hope it makes it into retail too. Did it work well with 2? Sounds like with the low player interaction it should. How long did the plays take?

Two plays of Coimbra. Great little euro if you like dice and card drafting and track-based income. Sits somewhere in the neighborhood of Tiletum and Lorenzo Il Magnifico. My only complaint is that the symbology is a little unusual and can take a while to get back into after a break. But maybe it will be easier next time. I lost both plays but really enjoyed it regardless.

One play of Gizmos which is a comfort game, always happy to play and we get though it pretty quickly these days. I found a cool draw engine and got lucky with the draws so I was able to jump ahead and finish with 4 level 3 buildings and a bunch of VP tokens that were doubled by one of these buildings.

A quick play of Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Charmers which is another comfort one, a roll & write with lots of combos and cool dice drafting. This and the original game have popularized the two-sided scoretrack that Ark Nova uses too.

Picked up the Open Doors expansion for Taverns of Tiefenthal. Punched and sorted it and managed to fit everything into the expansion box (which is smaller than the base one). Studied up on the rules and looking to play it very soon, maybe today.

Online I’ve been having fun with After Us which is a unique deck-builder with some mild programming elements. When you play your cards you place them next to each other on the table and the way their edges connect determine how you will be able to use them.

The Duel map in the Barrage KS is something I will definitely check out. My favorite designers but I have been skipping over Barrage (which many consider their best) because from what I understand the standard maps were not great for 2p.

How is this going for you and the rules of Ark Nova?

Plays surprisingly smooth now that we are into it! Overall it’s a lot less messy than I first thought. Lots of mechanism but they work well together and make sense so easy to remember.

…when you release an animal, you also loose the tickets…

Haha, we made that mistake too! But the way it works makes thematic sense. And I guess in some situations it could be used to get yourself back under 25 appeal to allow playing cards with that requirement.

Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game is a different kind of beast but it’s really cool too. The way the enemy reveal works is very thematic and the various Objectives make a great use of the Legendary enemy-river system.

Never had a chance to play this but I researched it a bunch and I almost picked it up a couple times. Looks like a fun dice-chucking romp. It uses the tile based map reveal that Sub Terra and now Clank Catacombs has too. Sadly it seems to be out of print now and according to a BGG comment the publisher may have lost the license for this one too.

Having 2 players only is a great excuse to play Memoir! Which scenario did you play?

Several games of Ark Nova, we both like it a lot. In the last game we put the reference sheet on a music stand to save some table space.

We also played a few games of Mille Fiori with a 2 player variant from BGG, it makes the 2p game feel a lot more competitive. I’ve been thinking about other types of drafts that could be applied to the game.

And finally we played a game of Lorenzo Il Magnifico, an older favorite. We played a base game in preparation to try to expansions for the first time.

Nice. I wonder what would be a balanced coin cost for the broken version of Harbinger. 5 or 6 maybe?

Here are some of mine:

• The Nova Luna rules seemed so intuitive that I kinda skipped the whole section on how to properly complete tasks. We ended up playing by considering the 8 neighbors including diagonals and no chaining. It kinda worked so we played several games this way before I noticed. The actual rules are a lot cooler of course.
• In the 2p Teotihuacan variant I missed the rule that you are supposed to move the dummy dice after each eclipse.
• In Cubitos for some reason I assumed that the first player die couldn’t be re-rolled
• In Evergreen I thought that the first player gets to choose which of the remaining cards they put the leaf token on. This one kinda works too.
• In Tiletum I interpreted the map spot bonus with the “3 heads” as getting 3 Character Actions. The actual rule is a lot cooler since you trigger all Characters in one of the houses.
• In our first couple plays of Orichalcum we refilled the Action Board after each pick. The correct way is to refill only at the end of the round which makes the draft a lot more interesting.

Have any modern games try to use a similar mechanism? Kinda like how Trajan uses Mancala for action selection, Challengers and Tea for 2 are a bit like War and Nanga Parbat vs Tic-Tac-Toe.

Micro Dojo 's action selection is vaguely similar to the second half of Nine Men’s Morris in the way the moves are constrained but it uses shared pieces and a 3x3 board rather than the grid.

Worth clicking through for his discussion of the picks though, especially if you are not familiar with all the games. The podcast version is a good listen too.

Everybody submits up to 3 games. Once all the votes are in everybody gets to veto a single game out of all the submissions. And then random pick from the remaining ones.

Another way: everybody submits 3 games and then do an approval vote between all the options. This means that everybody can vote for as many games as they want (no ranking, just a list of games they approve of) and then simply count the approvals for each game.

We got in a couple more plays since my previous comment, definitely a lot smoother now! Down to about 1-2 rulebook consultations per game :)

BGA practice is helping a lot too with clarifying subtleties.

The games from the Nerdz Day sale have finally arrived so we had lots of new stuff to get through.

• Ark Nova: First play had a rough start because I haven’t spent enough time with the rules beforehand so some of it didn’t click until the second half of the play. The game really stuck with both of us though and we are very much looking forward to our next try. I think it will play a lot more smoothly once we are solid with the rules. Got in some BGA plays too since.
• Orichalcum this is a fun one too, spatial puzzle combined with some light engine building. Only concern is that the 2p rules are a bit fiddly, might try some changes to streamline it a bit. It doesn’t feel good to discard half of the card-tile (and sometimes monster) combos that we carefully assemble in the draft area and the turn-order check is very easy to forget.
• Flamecraft fell a little flat, feels both too little and too much (table hog!) at the same time. Will have to see how it fares after a few more plays.
• Mille Fiori is neat and looks really good on the table. Feels a bit like a roll & write but with nice tactile components. The shared board play reminded me of Faiyum a bit. We are planning another play soon with a 2p variant from BGG that tightens up the board.

We also got some expansions that we’ve yet to try. And the biggest project to tackle is the LOTR LCG. Watched a bunch of videos and studied the rules so I think I am almost ready to dive in. Will try solo first, I want to make sure that I have a very solid understanding of it before we try the co-op.

Edit: turns out we made a pretty big rules mistake in Orichalcum, we were refilling the draft board after every pick! I think it will be even better once we play it right :)

I am guessing that it may be referring to this. Note that the post is on the Stonemaier site so it’s their side of the story. Some searching also turned up a later analysis in a BGG thread.

In a hindsight given the extremely wide distribution, HUGE number of copies sold and many followup products all of this doesn’t seem very relevant.

To be fair I was expecting a lot worse from a videogame website. It may not be the absolute top 10 but it’s a plausible list of some of the most complex games that the average boardgame player is likely to encounter.

For comparison, BGG search for gameplay weight over 4 and at least 100 votes
(which needs to be taken with a grain of salt too but it’s what we’ve got)

Yes, we play at 2 and I like it a lot at this count. The main thing you miss out on is negotiating about moving the Provost but on the plus side you can keep a closer eye on your opponent’s strategy and you can plan ahead more since things are a less chaotic.

We played a couple games of Caylus 1303. In the first game I went all in on bundling and milking point generation tiles and managed to win without building any residences or monuments. In the second one my partner stole it by grabbing the 20 point monument last turn.

It’s really cool that despite being one of the earliest worker placement games Caylus has held up so well. Still feels quite unique.

On BGA I’ve been enjoying Knarr a lot. Simple rules but crunchy decisions. I love the way you can destroy part of your engine but get permanent upgrades or points.

This happens for a lot of physical products too, KS is very often used as a hype and pre-order tool rather than actually kickstarting projects.