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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • Last Wednesday we played a 4-player game of Evacuation by Vladimir Suchy - we all were new to the game but all came prepared having watched a how-to play video.

    The game is a race to evacuate your people and economy from earth, which has become uninhabitable, to a new planet. During the game you will have to dismantle you local economy on earth, transport people and infrastructure and build up on the new planet. You will have 4 years to do so and each year is divided into 7 different phases. The action phase is by far the most time consuming as you will use the resources generated to buy ships, build building, settle people and conduct research. To perform actions, you will need to invest your generated energy and as the game progresses and you dismantle your economy on earth you will need to carefully plan to have enough production already on the new home for the next year. Its a balancing act and rather challenging. Each action has a specific value and in the next phase you add all the values together to advance on the progress track which unlocks moving certain aspects of you economy and settling new biomes on the planet.

    While the game only has 4 turns, the phases are long enough and filled with decisions that it does not feel like you need to min/max too much. This is something I never liked about Arnak which is also from CGE. While overall I thought it was an interesting game it feels a bit over-complicated. I would not mind to play again but would not buy it myself to add to the collection. Towards the end of the game everyone is basically performing the same actions (or at least the 4 of us were). Might be possible to play a different strategy but in such a complicated game it can be hard to come up with the alternative strats. The final advancing on the progress track in year 4 feels more or less pointless.

    Furthermore, we also played 2-player Castles of Burgundy which we actually tied in score :D and a game of Ark Nova which was a bit of a slaughter. However, we finally found a good way which avoids shuffling the cards of Ark Nova and makes playing a bit more fun.













  • I played a 2-player session of Dungeon Petz - I had never heard of the game before but a friend of ours invited for a session. While I am not a big fan of Auction and Bidding, having had to many terrible session of Isle of Skye I was a bit hesitant at first. In the game you are going to grow cute little monsters, supply all their needs and then sell them. The game only consists of 7 turns but still takes some time to play and at least in this first game, it did not feel like I had to min/max from the very first turn. There is a lot going on during each turn where you have to make interesting decision. With each monster added to your care, you will have to supply their needs and care for them. Each level adds more needs as well and so as the game progresses, it becomes more and more challenging to take care of all your pets properly. For me, the game shines in the stage when you assign cards to the needs of the pet. There are four types of cards and depending on the monster it could be it needs 3 red, 2 green, 1 yellow and 1 purple card to take care of them. Behind each type of card you can have different effects, the card might indicate that the animal is trying to bite you, is hungry, wants to play, is full of magic and risks mutating, needs to take a shit or is getting sick. You will have a hand full of cards of these different types and will have to assign them, carefully thinking ahead so that the animal is not getting away, sick or shits all over the place, while fulfilling the auction and selling requirements for this specific turn. Some auctions will grand bonus points for each food consumed or magic played for this monster in this turn. It starts really easy but once you have 3-4 animals of various levels, it can get really challenging. Overall, I like the game and would play it again (maybe with 4 people this time).




  • I found that selling the game on “public” spaces like ebay or local variants will often be sold at a heavy loss. Unless you are selling something not so common, expect many offers for the same game, often 60% or more reduced. At the moment we still have the space and so decided to hold onto them for now. We have offloaded some of the less played games to our house in the village and only can play those whenever we are there.