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My weekly online meet up was scheduled for Wednesday evening, but in the end we brought it forward to the afternoon and locked gaming horns over at BGA for a second run at Beyond the Sun, and I have to say that I enjoyed this play much more than I did the first. I am still not one hundred percent au fait with the rules, but I now have a decent idea of what is going on even though I lost 63 to 55.
The game felt nice and tight with two players, with hefty competition gonig on to grab planets and make our ways up the tech tree, and this latter is where my strategy fell at the final hurdle, as I was simply unable to get everything lined up properly and develop that Level 4 stuff. I did manage to send my ships out with some success and keep within a sniff of victory to the end, and would happily play this again.
My opinion will need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but I wonder if this is one of those games that probably plays best with three in terms of additional interaction but which can still feel a little long at that player count, so two is still something of a sweet spot. Anyway, it has fallen right into my target area of gaming, even if it is not innovative and fresh enough for me to have put it onto my watch list. Yet.
We then did that classic twenty first century thing. Both of us have unplayed copies of Conspiracy: Abyss Universe on our shelves so we decided to get in our first play online instead, even if it was handy to have the printed rules to hand just in case anything needed to be sorted out during the game. As it turns out, the rules are pretty easy to learn, but the game itself is slightly heavier than I had suspected, the inverted pyramid of placement leading to some interesting decisions, especially regarding the five different discard piles. As points are awarded for the largest contiguous group of a single colour in your tableau there is a real incentive to snaffle those cards that your opponent might need...but then you need to place all of them yourself, which can cause trouble to your plans. Again, it is early days, but I suspect that there is some real depth of gameplay to be found here.
We ended with three rounds of Can't Stop, which seems to get tighter each time we play it, our different decisions somehow causing the games to be more meaty and involving as we add more plays. I won our mini-series 2-1, although for the last game Dylan was sitting on my lap and giving me hints while trying to distract my opponent with his cuteness, so really it was a win apiece for the three of us.
Happy gaming!
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Meepleonboard
When I am not putting notes on paper I like to play. Here are my scribblings.
- [+] Dice rolls
