Played a bunch of new stuff yesterday, so time for some mini-reviews.
7 Wonders - Duels - This is a two-player only version of 7 Wonders. There are quite a few differences, and it makes it almost a different game. There are multiple paths to victory now (military, science, and then the standard cultural one). It also doesn't use the same card-drafting mechanism from the original game, but rather a kind of pyramid where you can only buy the cards that are fully exposed. It plays quicker than the original, and we'll never be going back to regular 7 Wonders when it's only two. A really enjoyable filler game perfect for opening/closing a night.
Harbour - This game from Scott Almes can best be described as "Tiny Epic Le Havre." Another gateway worker placement game with only one worker. You play as a harbour-master, and are trying to buy buildings that all have various special actions on them. There are several resources, and a pretty decent supply/demand mechanism where commodities lower in value after you've sold them. There can be a bit of wheel-spinning in this, as players are trying to build up their resources in order to sell enough to buy a building. Due to this, it might go a little long for what it is, but it's still only about 30 minutes or so.
Descent: Journeys into Darkness (Road to Legend) - Having picked up Mansions of Madness, I was excited to see if the app integration on Descent was as good. I've always wanted a solid campaign-based dungeon crawler game that worked well for two, and this seems to scratch that itch. The app seems to be more robust than the MoM one, although I still wish there was an "undo" button. Some of the rules seemed a little bit wonky with monster activation, but we may have been playing those wrong. The game is also a little fiddly with spawning monsters and keeping track of health on them. We both still really enjoyed it though, and I'll probably pick up some of the expansions later on and try out the "Delve" mode. There's also a new campaign coming out later this year that requires one of the big box expansions.
Eminent Domain: Microcosm - This is a two-player stand-alone version of Eminent Domain that plays in 10-15 minutes. The mechanisms are different enough to not completely replace the original game, but still feels similar to the original. The only thing that's wonky about this game is the end game scoring. It seems that almost every card had a "1 VP per X" on it, so it takes a bit of time to go through all of that, because some of the cards will count multiple times.
The Gallerist - Heavy! This is a Vital Lacerda game about running an artists' gallery. While being a pure Euro, it is still highly thematic and all the actions really tie to the mechanisms well. I tried to do a rules explanation of this after having watched Rodney's "Watch It Played" and also rahdo's run-through. I'm pretty bad at explaining rules, especially if I haven't actually played the game yet. I think it might have been better if we had just jumped in and started a practice few rounds and explained the actions as we went. Hindsight, 20/20, I guess. After we finally got started, things started to go pretty smoothly after about an hour and we sped up quite a bit and didn't really have any problems doing the actions or making decisions. We didn't end up doing a full game, because we were in about 3 hours (with my long-winded rules explanation), but I think our next game will go a lot quicker and we can probably bang it out in two hours or so.
estiny which is awesome. That was a big mistake I made was not getting her into Netrunner from the jump because it would have been really fun. Basically we're alternating decks playing each side to account for any balance issues. For a while there she was stomping me in starters where I was playing with a handicapped one-die Rey (to account for the point difference) and now I beat her Luke/Ackbar with a rush Jango/Veers that was a ton of fun (and way faster than our other matches). Looking forward to trying the other side of that because using Ackbar's focus to deal six damage just with Luke's starting dice is insane. She was able to take out Jango but thankfully Veers and all his upgrades survived.
