by TheGargoyle
I asked GMT and got this reply:Georg, Plans are in motion to offer the SGBoH rules as a downloadable pdf. Thanks! Tony CurtisManager, GMT Games LLCNow we just have to play the waiting game. Damn hard to play that one.

by TheGargoyle

Related Item: Holy Roman Empire: The Thirty-Years War

That little area near the big pile of red counters? Münster. My home town 🙂 – I think I need to get this game …

**Jaipur** goes into our bag whenever we leave home for some restaurant or some similar event. It’s packed away quickly, can be played with almost no space (we even played it on the plane to and from our vacation, using two small plane tables as the so…

It’s the favorite game of my wife and a solid 9/10 for me, too. We enjoy it two-player (although we use the number of epoch counters from the 3 player game nowadays, because otherwise it is too speedy for her with me rushing through the card stacks) an…

Aside from our usual plays of **Paperback**, **Waggle Dance** and **Progress: Evolution of Technology** I got **Polis: Fight for the Hegemony** just recently for cheap (there was a hint on that here on Reddit even!) and actually got a first learning pl…

by TheGargoyle

Well, I really like the resource acceleration, because it is normally not available in Spirit (and neither in Lore, which are the two spheres I use in my Noldor deck). Sure, Galadriel works – I use her currently in the deck – but her downside is a bit of a bummer (not being able to do anything than sitting there looking pretty, drawing a card and reducing the threat). Arwen can do her own questing in the early game when not enough allies are out yet, for example. With Fair and Perilous, she can do some mean beating, too, if needed. Of course, Galadriel brings even more to the table with elven lights, because due to her downside you usually don’t have her exhausted before the end of the turn, so she can do her job to activate some Dunedain dude and therefore finally brings her own weight to the table without the need of Nenya. But in the end I think I will like Arwens flexibility – especially in the early game and by providing a discard outlet right from the start of the game – a bit more.

by TheGargoyle

Well, Northern Tracker is a Dunedain with quite nice base stats and a great effect on questing. Arwen allows to have him be a super-defender or super-attacker after it quested and did spread some progress on locations in staging. The Tale of Tinúviel works on allies, too 🙂 – to me many of the cards in this pack open up flexibility (like Even Light allowing Arwen to be either a resource-generator or a card-draw when using the generated ressource from discarding Elven Light to return it to hand). It’s almost like she is a Gandalfs Staff on a hero.

It depends on the games you have in your collection (or wether you want to invest in new games more suitable for solo playing). You can play many multiplayer games solo by just playing multiple hands yourself – for example conflict simulations without hidden information can often be played like that and provide lots of fun. I myself do this often to learn games, even if it is one with hidden information, because that way I don’t need to drive my wife into madness by trying to figure out a game together with her. For example I did this with The Golden Ages – even though there are some hidden information in the goals and future leaders it worked astonishingly well playing two players on my own. Another game I played like that was Tiny Epic Kingdom – you lose out on the war part much, though, because that is a bidding mechanic that of course falls flat if played solo. Then there are many games with included solo rules. Those range from “beat your own highscore” to more elaborate automated opponents up to stuff that almost reaches AI levels. Those can be really lots of fun to play, because you as a player still play the game, but the opponent itself often only plays a reduced variant of the game, tuned to give it an edge over you so you really need to fight for your win. The beat-your-own-highscore solo variants on the other hand are something I do not enjoy, but I know others really dig them. But for example the solo variant of Lord of the Ice Garden is quite fun to play against, as is the solo variant of The Gallerist. Both provide deep and engaging play with only a minimum overhead for the solo play. Then there are games that provide specific scenarios for solo play, sometimes even boiled down to the classic “win this situation in 3 turns” you might know from chess (Neuroshima Hex for example does something along those lines) which can be fun, but don’t provide much replayability. I’m not a big fan of these. The next category would be coop games – you can play almost any true coop game (exceptions exist like for example Hanabi) solo by either actually only playing as a single player or playing multiple hands (simulating multiple players by playing them all yourself). I enjoy for example Gears of War that way, either playing it with just one COG or multi-handed with multiple COGs. Another game I tremendously enjoy is Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. I usually play it with just a single hand and deck – it’s actually my top game of all time and one of the most played ones, too. One-vs-many games sometimes provide alternatives for the overlord player to be automated (some of them fan created) and are a mix of coop and automated opponent. Descent for example has some scenarios with automated overlords. The gold standard are actual solo games, designed and targeted at the solo player. Those often provide the most rewarding play, because them being solo games means they are streamlined for that single player, while for example multi-handed coop sometimes adds a bit of clutter and fiddlyness to the play. And the good thing of explicit solo games is that they are really balanced for that style of play and often provide the best replayability. There are hybrids that are really great solo and still provide multiplayer, too. Stuff like Friday, Hostage Negotiator or the State of Siege games from Victory Point Games, with the new edition of Dawn of the Zeds being an example of a hybrid that is still designed in it’s core as a solo game, but can be extended to coop play with multiple players. There are quite many of those games – VPG for example does tons of different solo games with different themes.

Yeah, Ricky is the boss of solo gaming for me. Made me to buy far too many solo-able games with his videos. All of them enjoyable, too.

Col, didn’t know about that one, thanks!

I’m waiting for **Falling Sky** in February, because that’s thematically much more in my line of interest than all the other ones. I wish there would be more ancient conflict based COIN entries in the making.

great! I had my eyes on this one, but didn’t spring for it so far, but for that price it is a no-brainer for me.