New to Me – December 2024

It’s a new year, and coming up on my 8th blog anniversary in March!

One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday’s Blog in Review post was the fact that, in those 8 years (or at least since I started, which I think was almost near the beginning), I have not missed a “New to Me” post, no matter what my internal posting struggles have been.

Some have appeared quite late in the next month, but I made it!

Of course, I’ve skipped months during the COVID lockdowns when I didn’t actually play any new to me games, but if one was played, it was recorded here!

Which brings me to December, when I thought this was going to be a month that I had to skip.

I had no new to me games as of December 22!

But then Abi and Cal came to that Sunday’s game day.

Lo and behold, I now had four games to write about.

Thank you, guys.

Not only that, but while two of them are brand new games, two of them are really old.

Older than me!

Ok, nothing’s that old, but they did come out in the first decade of the century.

That made the Cult of the New to Me very happy.

So happy that they decided not to rebel as a late Christmas gift to their dear leader.

(That’s me, if you couldn’t guess)

There’s always January, though.

All four were very good games that I would like to play again (some more than others, of course).

So, without further ado (all of my ado was stolen by a mad computer and used to simulate building a civilization anyway), let’s get started!

Civolution (2024 – Pegasus Spiele) – 1 play

Designer: Stefan Feld

Artist: Dennis Lohausen

Players: 1-4

Civolution is a game that attracted me from the Heavy Cardboard playthrough, so much so that despite the cost, I bought the game.

Sadly, it’s in with a bunch of pre-orders that haven’t arrived yet, so I don’t have my copy yet.

But I played somebody else’s!

However, since I already did a “first impressions” post, you can go read my thoughts there.

The Gang (2024 – Kosmos) – 2 plays

Designers: John Cooper, Kory Heath

Artist: Fiore GmbH

Players: 3-6

The other 2024 game that’s new to me, and boy is it fun.

And quick!

The Gang is essentially “cooperative Texas Hold ‘Em,” which does sound weird.

But it makes sense.

Basically, you’re playing a game of Texas Hold ‘Em, complete with the Hole Cards, the Flop, the Turn and the River.

However, after each part is dealt, players will use the information of how strong their hand is to try to deduce how strong it is compared to the other players.

The hands will be ranked one to however many players there are, and each player will take that round’s coloured chip with the rank they think they are.

If you think yours is really bad (or really good!) you can take the chip that somebody else took or you can take it from the table.

You can even take it back if somebody takes the one you chose.

Once everybody has settled on a chip for their hole cards, the 3-card flop comes out, and everybody re-evaluates.

The same happens after the Turn and after the River.

Once it’s settled after the River, everybody reveals their hand and you check to see if you got it right.

You can play best of 5, or whatever you want, and you can also include the reward and penalty cards too, if you want.

The “theme” of the game is that players are conducting a casino heist.

If you successfully deduce the order of all of your hands, then you take a penalty card to make the next round harder.

If you succeed, you take a bonus card that will help next round.

However many rounds you play, you can determine the winner from that.

This was fun.

It does help if you know poker and how things work, especially relative strengths.

I am not that familiar with it and my first hand, my high Hole card was a Queen but my other card was something like a 3.

I didn’t think I had a great hand, so I took one of the lowest chips.

Later on, I still just had Queen high, but when Cal explained that (given how things were playing out, as you can’t reveal anything about what you have in your hand) having a decently high face card actually is pretty good right now, I realized that I was playing wrong.

Suddenly, I was taking much higher chips, which kind of made others think that I now had a pair or three of a kind or something.

That being said, you don’t have to know a lot about poker to like this game.

I enjoyed it, and would love to play it again.

Dance of Ibexes (2004 – AMIGO) – 1 play

Designer: Wolfgang Kramer

Artists: Oliver Freudenreich, Wanjin Gill, Jiyeon Lee

Players: 2-8

If you know how to play 6 Nimmt and all of its variations, then you have a step up in knowing how to play Dance of Ibexes.

This is 6 Nimmt but with tiles and some interesting scoring additions.

Which makes it even more chaotic!

But for me, even more fun.

Instead of playing numbered cards onto rows, players will be adding tiles to rows on the map, and the number of spaces on a row will differ!

As with the other game, each player secretly chooses a tile to play, and then (from lowest to highest), the tiles are placed on the board, in a space next to the closest tile in value without going above it.

If there is no space after that tile, then it will go to the next open row, that player gets the points (yes, points are bad), and then gets to choose one or two of the removed tiles for their hand prior to discarding the rest.

If a row has started with certain icons on some of the spaces (like the 44 row in the picture above, with the last space showing two tiles), then that requirement is in effect until those spaces are covered.

In that case, you have to choose and play two tiles instead of one.

But some of the rows actually have any points gained actually removed from your score!

The Eagle spaces will give anybody who puts a tile there that many points.

Play continues until somebody hits 60 points or somebody has to draw a tile out of the bag and there are none left.

If you don’t like your tiles (you start with 6), you can always take 1-3 points to draw 1-3 tiles.

Of course, if you are out of tiles, you automatically draw up to 6 without having to gain points.

This was a fun game with lots of laughs.

I love the twists on the original game and for some reason, the tactile nature of the tiles and the board felt better than the card game.

It isn’t quite as snappy as the card game, though I guess that depends on how you play the card game (how many rounds, etc).

It’s still a 30-minute filler, but don’t expect it to fill that 10-minute block of time that the card game can.

Patrician (2007 – AMIGO) – 1 play

Designer: Michael Schacht

Artist: Design/Main

Players: 2-5

Patrician is an area-control game about building towers in city districts (not that the theme really matters in this case).

Players are master builders trying to impress the vanity-laden families of the city who believe that taller towers are more prestigious to them.

The map is divided into areas with different tower height requirements.

Playing is very simple.

Each player will have three cards in their hand, each with icons corresponding with one of the areas on the board.

You play one card and put one (or two if there are two icons) tower pieces in one of the two spaces in the matching district. If you do have two icons, you can split between the two spaces.

Then you take that district’s card to your hand so you’ll always have three choices (until the end of the game, of course).

As I said, each district has height requirements.

The V district can only support 5 tower blocks, but the trick is that there are two tower spaces and each one has to have at least one block.

So you can’t have a 5-block tower and no second tower. Maximum is 4 and 1.

Once a district has been maxed out, whoever has the most blocks in the tallest tower gets the bigger scoring token (ties are broken by whoever’s block is the highest) and whoever has the most blocks in the shorter tower gets the smaller scoring token (same tiebreaker).

In Ferrara, red gets both scoring tokens! In the blue district next to it, red gets the highest token but white (due to tiebreaker) gets the lowest token.

There’s also a bit of set collection with the family likenesses on the cards you’ve played, getting 6 points for each set of 3 pictures of the same family.

Patrician is a really quick (18 minutes for us!) area control game that is fun but you have to make a few choices on how you play your cards. Building in a district by playing one card may actually get you a card that doesn’t fit your plans at all, since you have to take the card that’s on the district (which is randomly drawn off the deck when the card that is there is taken).

There are a few cards that mitigate that issue, and there are also some cards that let you move the tops of towers to the other tower in the district.

It’s very light but it’s a good introduction to area control in a very bite-sized chunk, which is nice.

I’d definitely play it again.

So there you have it. Four new to me games in one day.

And they were all pretty good!

Though one was clearly above the rest.

What new to you games did you play in December?

Let me know in the comments.