A small thoughts thread: what are you playing and how is it going?

[The Predaking]

Played some more Stray with my middle child. I should say though, it's a family spectator event when this game gets played.

Made it out of the slums and got the weapon. Hate that it got burnt out though.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Right now I'm playing the waiting game with my steam wishlist, because apparently the entire world figured out it was the summer sale about 2 minutes after I remembered.

Later though: atom fall and maybe the new runescape single player game. I dunno, we'll see.

 

[Ceir]

We've been playing Flash Point fairly frequently at my FLGS board game nights, and I finally picked up a copy of the base game myself. I love co-ops, it's great for solitaire, and for as simple as the mechanics are it delivers a pretty thematic game - probably the most important thing for something in my solo collection. There's a few spots where the rules are a little muddy, and in reading up and watching some videos I realized just how many house rules we'd been working with in the FLGS group, but it didn't knock the game too askew.

Last solo I played, I set up the easy 'house' map, medium difficulty number of hazards, 4 firefighter team. Since it's co-op regardless of number of players, there's one way to win (save 7 victims) and multiple ways to lose (4 victims die, running out of damage markers means the building collapses, the outside chance of the entire firefighting crew dying...).

I got lucky with the initial rolls to place points of interest, they all wound up in one corner of the house - and they all turned out to be people. I was able to get in, breach a wall, and haul three victims out in the span of about six activations. Of course, while I was doing that, half of the building became - as they say - 'fully involved', with a couple of hazmat explosions blowing out doors and cracking walls. And then I had to go into that mess to get the other points of interest that may or may not have been people. Took a couple of fatalities, and one firefighter got KO'ed for a turn by an explosion, but I saved enough victims to win the run.

Definitely eyeing a couple of the map expansions, I'm not too fussed about the miniatures. House rulings aside, last game I played with the FLGS group was on the High Rise map in hard mode and good lord we lost that quickly. Chain reactions, busted elevators, flare-ups that took out a whole cubicle farm...it was messy.

One neat thing that I swear I've seen before but can no longer find is photos online of someone's giant-size game at a convention - all built out of Lego. It was scaled to Lego fire trucks and ambulances at the old 4-stud-wide City size, the map was built so the walls and doors were breakable, and they'd custom-painted the minifigures. Super neat.

 

[Videomaster21XX]

I randomly learned about "Chronicles of the Wolf" and how it was a love letter to Castlevania games, so I got a physical copy and dived into it.

Yeah it's not bad. Controls are fine. It has some weird flickering issues when I open menu's or see this one water ball monster. Either on my TV or handheld mode. I'm using the Switch 2, so not sure if that's the issue.

It's pretty fun, but when you get to the final castle area. It likes to do these 'instant death traps' and it's getting a bit old.

Like a couple if you are reading things, you get warned about them. But then there was this one room I saw these two statues that usually tell you what is to your left or right, but they looked a bit different, and upon walking up to them, they turn you to stone, and it's just 'Game Over'

There's just a bit TOO much of that I feel.

 

[Ceir]

Picked up a copy of Star Trek: Captain's Chair since my last post. It's a VP-acquiring deckbuilder with some neat mechanics, the gameplay is pretty standard daisy-chaining engine mechanics to claim cards and gain VPs, and there are a couple of options for solitaire mode. The base set has six characters: Picard, Shran, Koloth, Sisko, Sela, and Burnham; and I've done at least basic run-throughs with the first three in Stupid Bot solitaire mode, plus trying a two-handed game of Picard vs. Shran that came out closer than I expected. (Stupid Bot basically turns it into a solitaire puzzle for 'score as high as possible', as opposed to the actual automata that plays cards and actively opposes you.)

It's dense and crunchy for its size, lots of keywords and icons and if/then/when mechanics; and it's a Wizkids game so everything's maybe just a little too overengineered and fiddly. I'm not normally big on deckbuilders like this, but for me it's the Star Trek factor - I wouldn't have gone for the original game it's based on, something called 'Imperium'. But I do appreciate the variety in what you get, they're not afraid to pull deep cuts for cards, and the expansions look like some more fun characters - more TOS, Lower Decks, Disco, and Enterprise rep.