New to Me – November 2023

With a convention coming in November, I had a feeling that this New to Me games list would get pretty hefty.

Little did I know how hefty it would get!

This was a big month for new to me games.

Even better, many of them are older!

Though not necessarily better.

After last month’s Cult of the New to Me near rebellion, it was nice to play some older new to me games.

That even got me some accolades!

That was all good, because December is likely to be lean again.

These entries are going to be briefer than usual, just because there are so many of them (famous last words)

If I ever review these games (ha!), then you’ll get a bit more of a description.

So, without further ado (all of my ado evolved into an ugly spider and then was eaten by a crocodile anyway), let’s begin!

Dominant Species (2010 – GMT Games) – 1 play

Designer: Chad Jensen

Artists: a bunch!

Players: 2-6

Dominant Species is the game that’s technically not new to me, but it might as well be. I played it so long ago, and I was so new at the time, that I had no idea what I was getting into.

In fact, we played a long time, barely got half-way through the game, and called it.

Yet probably at least half of the points come up in endgame scoring!

How can you really consider that a play?

Hence its presence on this month’s list.

This is a game where the name truly fits what’s happening.

Each player is one of a type of animal in the world leading up to the Ice Age.

The animal types are: Mammal, Reptile, Bird, Arachnid, Amphibian, and Insect.

I got to be the Reptiles!

The board starts out with a tundra in the middle of it, and different terrain type hex tiles around it.

Each animal is going to be dominant on one of them!

Players will have a group of action pawns and, in initiative order, will place them on an action that they plan on doing during the round.

These actions can be anything from evolving enough so that they can live in a different type of habitat (or get better at living in the habitat they can already live in), protect an area of the board from losing that type of habitat, migrating from one tile to another, or maybe even just outright killing one of their opponent’s species (cube)!

They can also choose to expand the tundra, causing the Ice Age to spread out and make it harder for the animals to live on the tile.

And much more. Too much to go into here.

Of course, one of those actions for at least four players is going to be “Domination.”

Once all of the action pawns are out, then play proceeds from the top of the action sequence to the bottom, left to right, whoever’s pawn is in the space getting to do the action.

Again, no big details about what all of the actions are, except the Domination one which is the lynchpin of the entire game.

All throughout the game, every tile is going to have the dominance marker of the player who is dominant (unless there is a tie, of course).

Whoever chooses the Domination action gets to choose a tile where they are dominant (or maybe one where they aren’t dominant, if they still have the most cubes, but that’s not usually the best play).

Control of the tile is based on who has the most cubes (species) on it, with ties broken in food-chain order (from Mammals all the way down to Insects).

That will get you points, the number depending on the type of tile.

However, whoever is dominant on the tile gets to choose one of the cards that are available that round.

Domination is hard to explain, so I’m only going to say that it’s based on how well adapted each animal is to the element tokens that surround the tile. The number of cubes on the tile does not matter. You could dominate the tile even with only one cube (though you do have to have at least one!).

And woo boy, these cards can be devastating (though a few of them are beneficial instead).

Ok, those shown above aren’t that devastating.

But how about this one? (You’ve seen this multiple times if you’ve been paying attention to this blog).

And then imagine that card being played on this tile, the green one with a large number of cubes on it?

That is not good! That is a “fuck you” card, no doubt about it.

And many of them are.

The game ends as soon as somebody takes the Ice Age card, which is always at the bottom of the deck.

It’s really cool how the board builds out with players using one of the available actions to add a tile to the board.

And of course, taking the Glaciation action will overwrite that tile type with Tundra.

There can be a sea of white out there on the board at the end!

Once the Ice Age card is taken and the rest of the domination actions are done for that round, you score each tile again.

Straight out points, how many cubes are on it. Domination does not matter anymore.

This is where you can say that half of the points are endgame points.

That’s a lot of tiles!

As I mentioned, this in no way touches on all of the nuances of the game, because that would be a huge post in itself, but that is ultimately what you are doing.

After we hit the four hour mark and we were finishing up, I knew that there was no way I appreciated this game back in 2012.

Now that I am more experienced and know what I am doing (for the most part) when playing games, this is a classic that I would love to play again if we have the time.

Because it is a time commitment.

That’s partially based on player count, though. This game shines at six players, but it can play even just two (I can’t imagine that’s much fun, though). I think a 4-player game would be kind of cool, though, and it would probably be a bit shorter.

And even though it’s just cubes, it’s a really pretty game!

This could be a new convention mainstay game.

Codenames: Deep Undercover (2016 – Czech Games Edition) – 3 plays

Designer: Vlaada Chvátil

Artists: Stéphane Gantiez, Tomáš Kučerovský

Players: 4-8

Everybody knows Codenames, even if they don’t like it.

It’s a word game with two teams. One player is the clue giver while the rest of the team is trying to figure out which word(s) the clue giver is trying to get them to guess.

The words are either on your team, the other team, neutral, or there is one spy (or something).

If you accidentally guess the spy, the other team wins immediately.

Otherwise, you are trying to figure out all of your words.

That’s essentially it. You know it, I know it.

Codenames: Deep Undercover is the adult version of that game, with adult words.

(warning, picture may contain words you don’t want to see)

(Ok, now you’re safe)

Otherwise, it’s just Codenames.

You either like it or you hate it.

But as I said in my Bottoscon post, I really don’t see the point of these adult versions of games unless you are actually playing them as part of an adult game.

Which you could do with the basic game!

Strip Codenames, anyone?

All of that being said, if you find yourself giggling at innuendo and stuff, sure.

Go ahead and play this one.

I don’t mind Codenames. It’s kind of a fun word game.

So if this is the version that comes out, whatever.

It’s fine.

Just make sure you use Urban Dictionary when you don’t know a word rather than Googling it.

Unless you want your search history to start looking weird.

Not to mention your Gmail ads!

Caesar: Rome vs Gaul (2020 – GMT Games) – 1 play

Designer: Mark Simonitch

Artists: Dariusz Buraczewski, Paweł Kurowski, Chechu Nieto

Players: 2

This is a great 2-player game depicting the struggle between Julia Caesar and his Roman legions, and the Celtic tribes in Gaul (France and Belgium, nowadays) during the 5th century BC.

I’ve owned this game for a while now but never been able to play it until Bottoscon.

And it’s not even my copy!

But I was happy to do it.

Sorry for the orientation of the pictures, but the map was not facing me.

The game goes over 6 rounds/years.

It’s a card-driven game where you have a hand of seven cards.

The cards are actually really cool! Nice artwork, tarot-sized, and they come with sleeves in the box.

Much like most of these games, the cards come in three varieties: your events, your opponent’s events, or neutral ones.

I was the Gauls (blue) and you can see above a Gallic event as well as a Roman event.

You can also play the card for action points, which will let you move your units around the board, or allow you to place influence out.

Placing influence is the main function because you are trying to gain (or maintain) control of various tribal areas inside each province.

In the picture above, Rome has control of Sequani, on the right side of the map, because they have influence in all four spaces (you only need influence in the majority to have control).

Each of these areas is home to a Celtic tribe, and they all come out piecemeal, three tribes each round (though an event can bring out more).

Caesar, in addition to trying to subdue all of these Celtic tribes and take control of the provinces, can also send armies to subdue the Germans and even the Britons, all for victory points.

The trick is that each round, control of the provinces is determined by how many of the smaller sections are controlled by each side, and the Romans get VP based on that control. Either one or two VP each round (or none, which can happen and is not good!).

The game ends after Round 6, and the Romans win if they’ve amassed 12 VP in total. In addition to provincial control, VP can be gained by destroying Gallic tribes and subduing the Germans and Britons. This can make up for a couple of sub-par rounds.

There is a 2nd edition of this game coming from GMT games that will supposedly address a few of the issues, and having now played it, I can definitely see the issues.

My game as the Gauls resulted in most of my turns either doing the event on my card or just placing influence out on the board.

The Roman legions are so strong (especially Caesar, as he can command 6 legions in his stack, so much so that there’s an “Army Holding Box” on the map to place them).

The Gauls can’t stand up to them in a fight. You can try to pick off a stray legion or two if they happen to be isolated, but that doesn’t happen often and even when I was able to do that, I rolled badly (which isn’t the game’s fault, but still).

It just wasn’t that fun as the Gallic player.

This was my first game (other than getting run over by my friend Michal on VASSAL, where he beat me with both sides), so that could be a factor as well.

It was almost three and a half hours, and would have been longer if I hadn’t conceded after Round 5 because I knew there was no way I could prevent my opponent from getting the 2 VP in the final round to make 12.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the update kit does to the game.

The Last Hundred Yards: Volume 2 – Airborne Over Europe (2020 – GMT Games) – 1 play

Designer: Mike Denson

Artists: Dariusz Buraczewski, Charles Kibler, Liz Stephanoff

Players: 2

This game, on the other hand, was well worth the wait!

I now have all four Last Hundred Yards games, and the mission pack.

Even though I’ve never played it on the table!

The system looks amazing, though. Not chaotic fun like Combat Commander, but a bit more systematic.

This is a 2-player game where the Allied forces are facing off against the Axis forces (I have to say that now that the Pacific module exits, with the Japanese).

Each side’s units are divided into companies and platoons, and when it’s your turn, you can activate one platoon (or perhaps, if you successfully coordinate, you can activate two).

Unlike many of these tactical World War II games, it’s not a “you take your turn, then I take my turn” system.

Or at least not exactly.

When you activate a platoon, you do everything that you are going to do with that platoon.

Once you are done, you “call for reaction.”

Any of your opponent’s units that could see something that your platoon did can activate and do something.

If they didn’t see anything, they keep snoozing.

If they’ve already activated previously, then they can’t react again. So if you think something better might be coming your way, you may want to not react to the first provocation, seeing if a second one will be coming or not.

After that, any of your units who hadn’t already acted and who could see what your opponent’s units did get to react to that reaction.

It’s a chain reaction!

Once both sides have passed, if you have another platoon or company that hasn’t acted yet, you can activate them and repeat this whole process.

I love the way that firing at units is done.

You don’t fire and immediately get a result.

Instead, you determine the firepower and other bonuses or penalties, then place a modifier chit on the stack you fired at.

They are now suppressed, so if they do anything, it will be as they are taking fire. That will bring a penalty if they decide to fire back.

Once all activations have been done (meaning that both sides have passed), then you resolve all the fire attacks. The fired-on units have to make a cohesion check with the modifier that’s placed on them (so that German with a yellow three on it has to add three to its cohesion roll…not good since you want to roll low!)

Then there are assaults, if that happened during the action phase.

These can get pretty bloody, but not always. Sometimes it’s just a big loss of cohesion and one side has to retreat out of the hex.

It’s an intricate system and can take a bit of time to get a handle on. It does seem kind of intuitive once you do, though.

In our game, we actually had two companies on each side, so we did a 4-player team game. On my team, I volunteered to take the German company that wasn’t coming onto the board until later in the game, so I got to watch and learn.

It helped! It was kind of boring, but it helped.

Each scenario, like most of these games, is quite unique, usually with interesting special rules attached to them.

Many are one map scenarios, or maybe two, but there are some monster ones as well (which we didn’t play, of course).

Since this was a learning game, it took quite a while and we didn’t finish. I’m not sure how long the game would take once you know the rules.

But I’m interested in finding out.

Empire’s End (2023 – Brotherwise Games) – 1 play

Designer: John D. Clair

Artist: Kwanchai Moriya

Players: 2-4

Let’s move away from Bottoscon for a few moments and talk about one of my latest Kickstarter acquisitions.

When I saw Empire’s End, and how it used the No Thanks mechanic in an interesting way, I knew I had to buy this game.

Especially since it was designed by John D. Clair!

In this game, each player has their own empire, which has eleven tiles that consist of a couple of towns, some farms, a big city, some armies, and some roads.

These tiles are laid out in order based on the randomization of the first player (so it’s random each game, but all players start out the same).

The main board has the track that will detail what happens each round.

Often, it’s a disaster that happens!

That’s the broken pillar symbol.

Oh, and in a 4-player game, it’s always two disasters except the first two times!

A disaster (or two) are turned over and players have to bid on them to avoid taking them.

Each disaster will show what you have to bid in order to avoid it.

(Conveniently covered up in the picture above, but you can kind of see it).

If you don’t want to bid, or if you can’t because you don’t have any more of that resource (or gold, which is wild), then you take the disaster.

Each disaster says which position in the Empire it will affect (the two above will affect the Empire tiles in space 10 and 11).

You turn that tile over and it’s destroyed.

However, each disaster also has an innovation at the bottom of it.

The disaster card is placed under one of your undestroyed tiles, and it will give you that benefit when appropriate.

Other phases of the game are either Economy (when you gain resources based on your undestroyed green Empire tiles and innovations), Industry (where you can build new innovations from your hand of four disaster cards and also where you can spend hammer resources to rebuild an Empire tile), and Military (where you have to fight off the enemy incursions that are trying to take advantage of your weakness).

Military thankfully isn’t punitive for the most part. Whoever has the most swords will get the best benefits, but you can usually have enough swords to avoid the penalty.

The players who do not have the highest swords will also have to swap Empire tiles, which is one way that Empires can become differentiated after they start the same.

Yes, this is much more complicated (and juicy) than No Thanks.

But I love that it uses the mechanic of bidding to avoid the bad stuff.

After the round marker has reached the end, all players total up the VP from their remaining Empire tiles (if you lose your City, that’s 32 points you’re losing!) and adds that to the points they earned during the game.

Whoever has the most is the winner!

I really enjoyed this one, though I would need subsequent plays to give a firmer opinion.

A friend of mine didn’t like it, mainly because he felt bad for the people when we had to choose to destroy their farm or their town or whatever.

I get the feeling he also didn’t like having to manage all of the destruction.

Because that’s what this game is: managing the bad stuff to make it so you suffer less than the other players.

And it’s fun!

I want to get it to the table a couple more times so I can review it, but I may have to wait until my friend has other options to play.

Or isn’t there.

The White Castle (2023 – Devir) – 1 play

Designer: Isra C., Shei S.

Artist: Joan Guardiet

Players: 1-4

I didn’t think I’d get the chance to play The White Castle, as I never even saw its predecessor, The Red Cathedral and I’d been wanting to play that one too.

So when this one came out on game day, I jumped at it.

This is a dice-drafting game with some very interesting mechanics.

Even more interesting when you play it right! Which we didn’t do.

I must play it again.

The fascinating thing about this game is the dice drafting from the bridges in the garden.

What else is fascinating is that you only get nine actions in the game.

Nine actions!

The trick in this game, and the thing that we didn’t play right a lot of the game, is that you have to chain actions that will give you more actions.

On your turn, you will be drafting one of the dice off of those bridges. It has to be one at either end, it can’t be one in the middle.

Then you will place the die on one of the actions on the board, either the main board or on your player board.

If the die’s value is lower than the number on the space, you pay the difference in silver. However, if it’s higher than that value, you get that much silver.

The action you get to take depends on the token with the die colour on it next to the space.

So the two “4” spaces above, you can either place an orange or white die (on the left space) or an orange or black die (on the right space). You then get to do the action based on the die you placed.

If you take the leftmost die on the bridge (which will be the lowest value), you also get to do a Lantern action.

What’s that?

Your player board is going to have one lantern action available, but as you gain action cards, the ones you are replacing will be turned over and placed down there too. Soon, you may have a bunch of lantern actions you get to do.

You are also going to be wanting to put the pieces on your player board out on the main board in their appropriate spaces: gardeners, petitioners to enter the White Castle, and samurai who need to be trained.

All of this will get you points, either immediately or at the end of the game.

The cool thing about the game is the White Castle and how you move your guys up into it. This is how you will be getting action cards to place on your board.

This is the main thing we got wrong, because for example, when you land a guy in a Castle space and take the action card, you immediately get to do the white action(s) as well.

We didn’t do that!

That’s why there are more than 9 actions, really.

Unless you play really badly.

There are a bunch of other aspects to the game as well, like how turn order works by gaining cranes.

And how depending on how far you move along that track, you get more and more points.

Considering how small this game really is, there is a lot of gameplay and interesting decisions in it.

And the artwork is gorgeous!

Given how badly we played it, I really want to play this one again. If the game was this intriguing playing it wrong, I wonder how intriguing it will be playing it right!

Saboteur: The Dark Cave (2022 – Amigo) – 1 play

Designer: Fréderic Moyersoen

Artist: Alexander Jung

Players: 2-8

Ah yes, another game we played wrong (and back to Bottoscon, by the way).

Ok, we didn’t play it wrong, exactly.

Instead, we didn’t realize exactly what the point of the game was.

In the original Saboteur, players are dwarves trying to get to one of three goal cards and get the gold that’s on them.

Saboteur: the Dark Cave is a team game with a potential hidden traitor on both sides.

You already have gold. You’re just trying to get out before the entire tunnel is flooded.

The traitor doesn’t necessarily do anything bad, except try to help the other team escape (which I guess would be pretty obvious). They will score with their new teammates.

As before, the map starts out with goals (though there are 4 goals instead of 3, and they are red) that you are playing cards to build towards.

Players already have their gold. They could find another gold vein, but to take a gold, they have to reveal their team card, so if they are a traitor, everybody knows now!

If not, then that’s fine…that means somebody else could be (but there may not necessarily be one).

Our mistake was thinking that all of the goal cards had extra gold on them.

They don’t! They’re just dead-ends.

You’re only trying to find the exit.

Once the exit is found, everybody is trying to get there because the cave is flooding, making it take more movement points to move through.

If the deck runs out and nobody can play a card from their hand, then the game is over and anybody who didn’t escape doesn’t count their gold.

The scoring is really weird, based on how much gold your team brought out, multiplied by the number of people on the other team (or something like that).

I’d like to play it again now that we know how to play it right and it might be more fun.

This play of it, though, was kind of meh.

Hellapagos (2017 – 999 Games) – 1 play

Designers: Laurence Gamelin, Philippe Gamelin

Artist: Jonathan Aucomte

Players: 3-12

Oh, don’t get me started on this one…

This is not necessarily a semi-cooperative game, as it is a cooperative game until the food and water runs out.

Yes, players are stranded on an island. They have to forage for food, try to collect water (which is totally random based on rainfall cards and could be zero in a round), and try to build a raft to get off the island.

Players will have cards in their hand which may include extra food or water, or maybe a tool that will help you.

You can also, as an action, go to the shipwreck and try to find more stuff.

The rounds that there is no rainfall…well, you’re shit out of luck, aren’t you?

Each player can do an action, which can be to gather food, maybe try to gather wood for the boat.

Of course, that’s a push your luck thing, because you draw these balls from the bag and if you draw a bad one (and there are only 5 or 6 in there anyway), you get sick and only get the one wood.

Yay?

Some equipment might help you get stuff, which is good, but inevitably the food or water (or both) are going to run out.

Then it’s time to choose who’s going to starve to death or die of thirst.

Much like Cash & Guns, players will all point at somebody in unison. Whoever gets pointed at the most is the one who dies.

Though maybe, if you have a gun and a bullet, you can kill somebody instead and get a reprieve?

Once there are fewer players in the game, rounds continue, but they don’t need as much food, water, or wood for the raft.

But ultimately it’s going to be down to maybe one or two people to get off the island before the hurricane hits.

I actually wasn’t too unhappy that I was one of the first ones voted off the island, because this game was not fun at all.

One of my friends finds this game hilarious.

That friend is not me.

Century: A New World (2019 – Plan B Games) – 1 play

Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi

Artists: Atha Kanaani, Chris Quilliams

Players: 2-4

Finally (wow, that was a lot), we come to the game I played last weekend.

Century: A New World is the third (I think?) in the Century series of games that began with Century: Spice Road.

This is not a card game, though. It’s almost a worker placement game.

But you’re still exchanging resources to get cards that will help you win the game.

Instead of having cards in your hand that will let you gain resources or exchange one resource for another, you will instead be visiting indigenous villages and obtaining resources from the lands surrounding them.

Each turn, you will be placing a number of workers on a space to do that.

This space costs three workers and gives you two red cubes (do we even need to say that red is meat?)

The space below that one would let you change two yellow cubes to two red cubes.

Instead of playing a bunch of cards until you’re out of them, and then resting, you’re placing a bunch of workers out on the board, and then resting when you either can’t place any more or you want to pull them back.

You can gain more workers throughout the game, but only through various different cards or reward tiles. I didn’t get any, unfortunately, so was stuck with 6 all game.

The map consists of a bunch of those action spaces, including four villages where the goal cards are located.

These cards can be purchased by paying the resources that the card requires.

If you have room on your board, you can also take one of the reward tiles in that space (you can only have three in total). These will give you bonus points depending on what type of goal cards you end up getting (or maybe you’ll just get 3 points, or maybe another worker!)

These goal cards actually give you a bonus as well, which is a nice change. It may give you a discount for placing workers at certain types of sites, or maybe just new workers!

Exploration cards will open up one of the blocked locations on the map so it can be used.

Once somebody has completed their eighth card, the game end is triggered.

Then play continues until everybody has had the same number of turns.

Count up all the bonus points and points on your cards and whoever has the most is the winner.

This was an interesting twist on the whole Century concept, and I really enjoyed it.

It moves just as fast (or should, though our game didn’t really) as the original game.

I haven’t played the second game in the trilogy, but I would like to.

I’m not sure I need to play a combination of any of the three, though (all three can be combined into one game, or you can combine two of them).

The action space boards can be randomized for some variety, which is nice as well.

I liked this one.

I’d love to try it again (I did not do very well).

There you have it, finally!

Over 5000 words later.

What new to you games did you play in November?

Let me know in the comments.