All the Meeples of the Rainbow.

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In My City, I love to Promenade to the Cafe and pretend I am Sherlock...

Posted by Steph

Weekly Update

14 Sep 2020

Steph Hodge

(punkin312)

United States
Tennessee

Well, it's no Ginkgopolis...

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Hia Everyone!

Join me Wednesday at 5 pm CDT while Michael and I playthrough Cascadia! Be sure to follow & Subscribe for notifications! Other games will be played too! If you have suggestions, just let me know!

Some games just get to the table the moment they arrive to the house and in this case, I was super excited to play My City. New to me!

The hot new Knizia title that is also a legacy-style game, how could I not be excited to play this?! Polyominoes and legacy game what a perfect combination!

I don't want to get too spoilery, but I will explain the basics. Players all have the same set of tiles and the original starting board. They recommend you play the game in chapters and each chapter is played over 3 games.

As you play through the chapters, you will open envelopes and find new rules and stickers. I have only played/opened the first chapter so far so only know the contents of that envelope.

During the game, cards will be revealed one at a time and players will have to place the matching polyomino shape onto their board always adjacent to a previously placed tile. Once all players have placed all the tiles or passed the game ends and you tally up the score. Empty tiles or rock tiles will be negative points, and open trees are positive points.

As the games go on, you will get new rules and new ways to score more and more points. Each game lasts about 30 minutes so they pretty much fly on by!

Michael and I were able to complete chapter one with ease. The rules are super light and easy to understand.

He did better and won 2 of the games and I managed to win 1 of them. What is cool about the game is when you win, you get a sticker that could possibly hurt you in later games. The losers will gain a sticker that could help them score more points in the later rounds.

Each time you win you will fill in some bubbles on your board and over the 24 games you collect them when you can. The player with the most filled in after all the games will be the champ!

So for now, I am losing this race, but we have only just begun! Seriously loving it so far! It is right up my alley with ease of play and trying to figure out the best placement for the tiles. I can't wait to continue the game!

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Back in November I learned Art Decko and it was time that I got this game back to the table! Michael hadn't played before so we went through the rules and I could re-learn it.

Promenade is a deck-building market-manipulation game. The cards you acquire will all have a value that will be increasing as the game goes on.

Each turn you have 2 actions you can do. You can buy art cards from teh galleries, display art in the museum, or haggle by discarding one and drawing 2. It is all fairly straight forward, so you will want to increase the market value of the paintings you have collected so they are more valuable and that will help you display paintings in the museum and you will just gain more points at the end of the game.

Michael and I enjoyed the game so much we immediately put it on the Livestream - see below. We explain the video and play through the whole game.

So Michael was very good at manipulating the board to his favor. he would collect all the right cards at all the right times and just know how to trigger the most points. Here I thought I was doing very well with my collection of cards. Yeah, not so much that first game he was able to beat me by like 30 points. During the Livestream I really thought I would crush his soul... so you will just have to watch and see how it played out!

Fantastic game and I am so pleased that Rio Grande Games has decided to pick it up and make it more well known! Hopefully, that comes out later this year!

The pile of new games I have has gotten incredibly large! It is always easy to find a new and interesting game to play and this time we happened to try Café. New to me!

Café is a cube-pusher. You will be collecting cubes which are coffee beans and basically transforming them into an end product for customers. They will have to be collected, dried out, put through the grinder, and then dispersed to the local shops or your personal warehouse.

I like the flow of the game which involved drafting a face-up card and you will have to place this new card on top of an existing card covering several squares. You might lose some spaces, but you need to place these cards strategically to help boost any given action to take.

Each round once players draft their new card, they will get a number of actions equal to how many coffee cups they have in their display. The actions they can perform are Produce beans, dry beans, grind beans, or deliver beans. All of the beans on their bord won't populate if the produce beans action is take, but any group of bean spaces on the board can. So the larger the group is the more beans you can potentially produce. When you go to dry the beans, the dry spaces if connected can all be activated at the same time and each space can hold only 1 color bean.

The whole time you are looking to gain new cards to your tableau to make the big connections happen so you can perform the action better.

Michael and I ended up playing the first game wrong so we had to scrap that and start fresh. We had played it wrong where we thought we could produce beans multiple times on a space before moving it to the drying area. No, once any space has a cube on it, you can't add more cubes to it at a later time.

So we fixed our play and started anew. It is challenging to find a good balance of actions and making sure you produce beans and getting them to dry etc. Ideally, you can send large batches of the same colors to dry and move through the process from the start, but you want to be evenly balanced with all your bean colors as that is how you will score for beans in your warehouse at the end of the game. There are also local shops you want to try and deliver to in your spare time, so you want to place them optimally so that you won't want to cover them up later on.

Michael ended up winning 32 points to my 21 points. I wasn't doing well enough since I focused too hard on getting red beans!

I like the big puzzle when trying to place the new cards down. So much to think about. Straight-forward rules and solid gameplay. Not sure if there is anything new or exciting about it, but I liked it well enough. This is one I would want to play again.

I was looking forward to playing a Sherlock game, and asked Michael to play Sherlock: 13 Hostages. New to me!

The Sherlock games have always been very interesting to me. I might even go so far as to say they are my top favorite type of crime-solving/escape-the-room games. I think the system they have in place is very unique. I love that you just open the box and shuffle up the cards and get to work.

The game actually plays out in 60 minutes or less and you have to decide if each card is worthy of keeping as evidence or not. Everything about it is just brilliant.

I particularly liked this new 13 Hostages case. We should have done better than we ended up doing, but we had forgotten a few overlooked details and picked up a few cards that weren't important to the case at hand.

I think we scored middle of the row so it was like a 50% accuracy. We will have to improve our skills for the next few cases coming up.

Still, I always enjoy the experience and will want to continue playing whatever Sherlock games come out in the future! Definitely a series of games not to miss!

Spoiler (click to reveal)

Last year I learned Ohanami and fell in love with it. This year, Pandasaurus picked it up to publish in the US! It pleases me! I think it is coming out soon if it isn't already out.

I definitely wanted to bring it back to the table since it has been too long. Like so many great card games, it can be overlooked since it is in a small box, but I still have a lot of love for it.

Ohanami is a drafting card game where you are building up columns of cards. Over 3 rounds, you will collect cards. The blues score each round, the greens score in rounds 2 and 3, and the greys and pink only score once the game is complete. Sure, if you collect a lot of blues in the first round, they essentially add up to be worth 9 points per card as you score 3 points per blue per round. Could be awesome, if you make it work. The greens are worth 4 points in rounds 3 and 4. The greys are worth 7 points at the end of the game. The pinks have a set collection scoring and the more you have the more points they will be worth.

The catch with the game is that you can only play cards at the start of a stack or at the back and each stack has to be in ascending order. You can only have 3 stacks.

You want to get the best colors so you can score as well as possible, but you also are looking at the numbers and trying to make your stacks work out where you won't get locked in. It is a tricky balance and one I love to work around.

In our game, I was getting all the pink cards early and often. Michael suddenly switched to pink cards in the final round, and I needed those cards to really top off the big score! I hardly scored anything in the other rounds, so I really needed the pinks in order to make it work.

Michael kept that victory away from me and he won with 170 to my 159! One more pink and I would have tied him! Soooo frustrating!

Loe this game and am excited to play it more. There is a beauty and elegance to Ohanami that is fresh and inviting. A game I will always want to play more of.

In case you missed it, here is Steph's Hodgepodge of Gaming from Friday!

New to the Collection:
Last Bastion

Thanks for following along!

Happy Gaming!!!

-Steph

All images in this post are copyrighted, owned, and controlled by Steph Hodge Photography, unless otherwise noted.
Please contact me if you would like to purchase or use my images in any way.
Disclaimer: I am a contract Employee of BGG. I review games that are provided by the publisher. I am not compensated for my blog content.
Thank you.

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