New to Me – September 2024

This post has been a bit delayed, for reasons.

Some of those reasons were me killing a whole bunch of Greek soldiers in Ancient Egypt in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is super-addicting right now.

The game, not the killing.

I’m fighting for Cleopatra!

Or something.

Anyway, it’s also been my lack of writing energy as well.

September was a pretty good month for new to me games, which made me happy after August.

It made the Cult of the New to Me happy too!

When they saw that the first new to me game I played in September was from 2012, you’d think they were attending an ancient Roman bacchanal!

We’ll have to see what October brings, with one game day already cancelled.

But we shall persevere!

So without further ado (all of my ado was used for bidding on my lumber business anyway), let’s begin!

Keyflower (2012 – Huch! Games) – 1 play

Designer: Sebastian Bleasdale, Richard Breese

Artists: Juliet Breese, Jo Breese, Gemma Tegelaers

Players: 2-6

Keyflower is one of those games that I have heard so many good things about but I’ve never had the chance to play it.

I did try it on Boardgame Arena once or twice, but it really made no sense when I was just going from the rules and trying to make sense of the interface there.

However, in September, I managed to actually play it on the table.

And it’s actually very good!

(Apologies for the weird sunlight on a bunch of these pictures in this post, especially for Keyflower. The sun chose the wrong time to shine through the windows)

This is kind of a classic Euro game with a bit of a twist, mainly that you can use the tiles that other people have placed in their village as an action space.

There are also going to be tiles out in a tableau that are available for auction to place into your village.

You’re going to be placing your meeples out there, either on a side to bid on that tile, or maybe even placed on the tile to use it before it gets placed into somebody else’s village.

The fun part about this is that there are three different meeple colours: yellow, blue and red.

Once bidding or use of a tile is triggered by one colour of meeple, subsequent meeple placement must be of the same colour and at least one more than the previous meeple allotment.

If you don’t have any yellow meeples behind your screen (oh yeah, there’s a screen to kind of hide what meeples you have), then you can’t do the action of the tile that James placed a yellow meeple on!

Even if you have four red meeples, it doesn’t matter.

Colour trumps numbers.

In essence, though, this is kind of a “trade resources for points” game with that really delicious twist.

Many of the tiles you will be putting into your village (or using in other peoples’ village) will be putting resources on your tiles.

You then need to move those resources to the tiles that will actually convert those resources into either other resources or points.

Ultimately, you will be trying to gain tiles that will give you points at the end of the game. These come out in the last round for auction and you need to (often, anyway) move the required resources onto those tiles once you have them.

It’s quite the interesting mechanic that expands the decision space almost enough to burn your brain.

I think the fact that you can place meeples on other players’ tiles to use them is ingenious.

Especially because, while you don’t get any extra bonus when people do this, you do get those meeples to your supply for next round!

That will just help subsequent rounds because you may be getting a whole bunch of meeples if you’ve made an enticing village for other players to produce with.

After one play, I’m still not very good at deciding the best way to play the game, but it was definitely enjoyable and I’m sorry it took so long to actually play it.

Comic Hunters (2020 – Arcane Wonders / Spin Master Games) – 1 play

Designer: Robert Coelho

Artist: Diego Sá

Players: 1-4

Comic Hunters has been all the rage since it originally was published out of Brazil in 2020.

However, it’s been almost impossible to get a hold of in North America..

At least until Arcane Wonders finally got the license (as a co-production with Spin Master Games, presumably so that they wouldn’t have to independently get the Marvel Comics license).

In the game, players are trying to amass the best Marvel Comics collection that they can, bringing in heroes such as Captain America, Thor, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man…all of the good ones!

Comic Hunters is a card game with multiple actions in a round.

There are some auction mechanics, some drafting, and then some set collection.

There are essentially three rounds in the game, consisting of two separate phases and then a convention, where you are going to be trying to purchase a wide variety of comics.

The interesting thing about this game is that while drafting is a definite mechanic (especially in the Store phase), the other two phases have much different mechanics.

The first thing, of course, is to discover which heroes are the most treasured, and what types of comics are being competed for as well.

In the picture above, an Iron Man collection will be the most valuable, followed by Captain America and Spider-Man, and then Dr. Strange, Thor, and Hulk.

However, you do want to broaden your hero horizons a little bit, because the Varied Collections points are based on how many different heroes you have in your collection.

What’s a collection?

At the end of each round, you will be “buying” comic cards in your hand by spending the value of other cards (Contemporary Age comics are worth one, Modern Age comics are worth two, and Classic Age comics are worth three).

In other words, if I was using the above three comics as currency rather than a collection, then the top two cards would be worth three and the bottom one would be worth one. That’s also how much they cost to put into a collection.

Another cool aspect is how the rounds work.

Some rounds have a Store (drafting) phase where you are choosing one Contemporary comic for your hand and then passing the rest.

Then there’s the Flea Market where you are doing an almost push your luck mechanism by adding Modern Age cards to a row and then deciding to take a row (you have to either take a row or add to a row, which is where the push your luck comes in).

Finally, there’s the Auction, where you will be spending your secret stash bidding on lots of Classic Age comics.

The other phase of the round is always the convention, though, where you are looking to get any kind of comic.

This has a card layout which then lets each player move a card through open spaces to another open space, and then choose a row or column where they want to take the all comics with the same hero.

Once each player has done two trips around the convention hall, it’s time to build your collection from the cards in your hand, as mentioned above.

After three rounds of all that, you total up the points for your collection, which would include the Highlights, hero tracker, and your collection, and see who wins!

This is a really fun and quick game.

Our play took an hour, which isn’t bad at all. That was with learning the game too.

We did play one thing wrong, choosing any icon (Highlight or Hero) to take from the Convention, rather than just the Hero.

And we did the Auction wrong too.

You know what that means, right?

We have to play it again!

Foundations of Metropolis (2024 – Arcane Wonders) – 1 play

Designer: Emerson Matsuuchi

Artist: Joe Shawcross

Players: 2-4 players

One of the biggest games of 2022 was the huge (in more ways than one) Foundations of Rome. It hit Kickstarter and was quite expensive, with cool building miniatures and everything.

I just couldn’t justify spending that kind of money for what was basically a 45-60 minute game that I wasn’t sure how much it would be played.

It seems that Arcane Wonders heard from people who felt like I did, because this year they’ve come up with Foundations of Metropolis, which is the same game but not blinged out like that.

You are still building a city by buying lots that you will then eventually place buildings on.

Each turn in a round, you’re either going to be purchasing one of the available lots, or you will be building one of your buildings on lots that you’ve already purchased.

You’re trying to buy lots that will form a pattern that fits at least one of your buildings, and each building will either increase your income or your population.

Once all of that year’s lots have been bought, income and scoring happens based on what you already have out there.

You want to get population because whoever has the most population does get more points each scoring round.

Though those behind do score pretty well also (they actually score what level the person in front of them is at).

After three rounds of all this, whoever has the most points is the winner!

This is a really cool game and I really enjoyed it.

I couldn’t justify the cost of the Rome game, but this is a nice substitute and plays really well.

It does have some interesting decisions as you need to decide how much you’re going for population and how much for income, as the buildings you put out there will be different depending.

It is a bit random in how the lots come out, and if somebody buys the lot that would connect your 4-square building, then you’re shit out of luck.

But overall, for an hour-long filler game, this was a lot of fun.

Xylotar (2024 – Bezier Games) – 1 play

Designer: Christopher Wray

Artist: Davi Comodo

Players: 2-5

In this day and age, trick-taking games need some kind of hook in order to be attractive to gamers.

Xylotar has the hook that you don’t even know what cards you have!

There is also the kind of backstory about a polar bar not being able to play the keytar, so a xylotar (xylophone guitar) was invented for him, and you are now using it.

Kinda weird, but whatever.

The hook for this great trick-taking game is that you will have a number of cards in front of you (depending on player count) but you don’t know exactly what numbers they are.

You know the range of number, as each colour (suit) goes from zero to some other higher number.

You also know that the cards go from lowest (on the right in the picture above) to the highest (on the left).

However, the cards you have were dealt to the person to your left, who then ordered them. If any cards were the same number, then they chose which card was “higher”, and then gave them to you to spread out.

Red is “Trump” and so will take any trick other than one with a higher trump card (for trick-taking basics, go here!)

If you’re leading the trick, then you play one of your cards. You don’t know the number necessarily! But you do know the suit.

Others must play that suit if they have it, and there’s no cheating because everybody can see whether you have that colour or not.

That can actually be part of the strategy when leading.

As is standard, highest card of the led suit is the winner, unless there is a trump card played.

You also can’t lead your highest card, though you can follow with it.

At some point during the round, you will have to bid on how many tricks you will take.

To do that, you will look at two adjacent cards. You will choose one of those as your bid and turn it over, placing it with your won tricks. The other one goes back face-down.

Scoring at the end of the round is one point per trick won, but also bonus points if you made your bid.

Whoever has the most points after three rounds is the winner!

This Summer, I bought a bunch of Bezier Games trick-taking games, and this is the only one that I’ve been able to get to the table so far.

It’s a really fun game, but you do have to have a lot of table space. You have to spread your cards out to a great extent!

Though you could layer them with one row in front of the other if you really need space.

The cards are cool, narrow cards like Space Base, and while there isn’t a lot of “artwork”, the graphic design is actually pretty cool.

It plays 3-5 players equally nicely, since there are 60 cards in the deck.

It’s nice to have a number that’s easily divisible by the standard player counts.

I definitely would love to get this to the table a couple more times and review it, if I can find a day where people who like trick-taking games are present.

Maybe Bottoscon?

Or a Sunday where we have enough people that James doesn’t have to play it.

Inventors of the South Tigris (2024 – Garphill Games/Renegade Game Studios) – 1 play

Designers: Shem Phillips, S J MacDonald

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Players: 1-4

Finally, we get to the latest Garphill game (don’t worry, I’m not going to make you drink).

Whoops, that slipped in there.

Anyway, the Inventors of the South Tigris Kickstarter just arrived a couple of weeks ago and we got a play in last week!

Two things.

One, this is definitely the heaviest Garphill game that I’ve played, with the mechanisms not being the most intuitive when you’re basing that feeling on previous games.

The actions do make intuitive sense once you get used to them, but you do have to get used to them.

Secondly, don’t do what we did unless you have a lot of time.

The rulebook suggests playing the shorter version of the game as your first game, and maybe even all the time at 4 players.

We played our first game at 4 players with the full game.

Four hours later, we were tired, but really intrigued!

In Inventors of the South Tigris, players are inventors who are inventing things, building these inventions, and then publishing them.

All using dice!

The invention cards are in your hand, and they are dual-purpose much like most Garphill games. Sometimes you can discard them for an effect that will help you, but you will often either be using them as a cost of inventing something else, or as the actual thing you are inventing.

You could invent the water-powered drum! Or the Automated Beaker!

But that’s just the idea. If you put the blueprints down but nobody does anything with them, is it really a thing?

That’s where building the thing comes in.

And then somebody (you or somebody else) can then publish the invention so that others can produce their own!

The player boards are also where you will be keeping your craftsmen, who you will have to pay when you build and publish, and where you will see just how good they become as you use them.

And then your workshops that you will be getting by sailing along the Tigris testing these danged things.

The ways to use dice in this game are quite innovative, with dice being at various stages of readiness (and some of those stages actually letting you increase their value).

There’s a lot more to this game but I want to save something for the review when I’ve got my third play in.

Let me just say that the order of your best actions and how you want to use your dice most effectively is really difficult on your first play, and maybe even on future ones.

It’s certainly the most intricate that I’ve seen from Garphill.

Just one to mention regarding those choices is whether to publish the device that you built or whether to publish other players’.

If you build one that somebody else publishes, you get 3 points and the publisher gets one point per testing die on the invention.

If you build and publish, then you only get 1 point as the builder plus one point per testing die (maximum of 4 points).

Can you test that much?

It’s hard to say!

This was definitely an intriguing game that I much want to dive into again.

Will it be my favourite Garphill game?

At this point, I’m probably going to say no, but things can change!

There you have it.

After a bit of a delay, the five new to me games that I played in September.

What new to you games did you play last month?

Let me know in the comments.