Do you remember? The 21st night...

It is a little bit of an effort sometimes, especially when you finish late, to remember to log everything, get the scores down whilst they’re still available and no-one’s wiped the board yet - but how much you record is up to you. I generally stick to time and date which is automatic if you log at the time, I keep who played, where we are, who won and what the score was (if score is a thing). For co-op games I usually record what campaign scenario or what difficulty level we played on, and occasionally I log which characters people played as if that’s relevant.

At one point I was going to try to defeat every Bullet Boss solo using every Bullet Heroine… but that goal has some exponential reach to it!

That preamble all said - what did I play in September? In chronological¹ order we have:

Agemonia, Unstable Unicorns, Toy Battle, Terraria: the Board Game, Mythologies, Century: Golem Edition, The LOOP, Favor of the Pharaoh, Wyrmspan, Cascadia: Alpine Lakes, Wingspan Pocket, Revenant, Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition, Rick and Morty: The Rickshank Rickdemption Deck-Building Game, Enchanted Ivy, Honeypot, Tiny Mountain Goats, Twisted Cryptids, and Dungeon Team!

And technically I’m writing this in September, so it’s possible that by the time the month is truly done I’ll have added A Place For All My Books to the list… . So here’s the first benefit to my keeping stats - I didn’t realise until right now that I had played as many as 19 different games this month!

Let’s give you a brief insight into all the games I played this month and lead into my Top 5 Games I Played In September That I Want To Tell You Something About.

Mythologies was Nat’s choice of game to take home from our trip to Edinburgh for Tabletop Scotland, so obviously I had to learn how to play the game there and then! I had great fun playing, even though we were on a Travelodge hotel restaurant table that was really too small for us, and we were eating at the same time…

Still, what I remember about Mythologies the most was how the game presented itself, from the rulebook, as quite a simple affair. There are 4 rounds, and in each round you’re going to be offered in some order a choice of cards from each of the 4 Mythologies in play. However, you only get 2 cards each round, so you’re going to deliberately pass that choice up twice.

First pro point - there are 8 Mythologies in the box and you play with 4, so there’s a lot of setup-variation in the base game.

The card-choosing mechanism feels a lot like a classic draft like you might be used to from Sushi Go or 7 Wonders. The difference here is that everyone is drafting from a face-up display of cards so you know what could be left in that pack, and you know what each player took first. Essentially it’s drafting but with more information⁴.

Once drafted, the cards go into your pantheon, a 3×3 board. Cards have summoning bonuses based on which row they are placed in, they have special abilities which might activate when you play them or elsewhen⁵ in your turn on some kind of trigger, there are bonuses available for completing rows and columns of your pantheon and trials that reward you in rounds 3 or 4 for meeting certain criteria.

That’s all the rulebook has to say about the game. I came away from the rulebook read thinking this was a simple, light and fast game and couldn’t imagine that there was all that much to a game in which I only draft 8 cards.

Then I played it, and found out first-hand that all I had understood was the structure of the game. I knew nothing of the special abilities of the cards, and what hoops they would make me jump through to maximise my score. I felt like I had understood that a novel is made of chapters and paragraphs but failed to consider how the words could make me feel.

Verdict - This game is a lot more than the sum of its parts and I can’t wait to play it again, and still wish I had bought myself a copy.

It’s a 2-player game that’s in the kind of mind-game arena that I like. Yes, the objective is to collect the target number of medals by controlling territory on the board, or invade your opponent’s HQ. Each turn is a draw 2 or play 1 kind of affair, but again it’s the special abilities that make this game tick. If you play a piece you have to play to a space you can reach from your HQ through an uninterrupted line of your troops - so if your supply line gets cut off you might lose access to some part of the map until it can be restored!

You can only play a piece on top of an enemy piece if it has a higher strength number - but you do only play on top - the enemy piece is not removed so has a kind of dormant strength if the captor can be dealt with.

Each player has access to the same pieces⁶, but in a random order as you draw from a shuffled pile:

I don’t think I’ve ever sat down to play this game and played it only once. It’s fun, fast, and addictive and you will want to play a best-of-three. Especially so as there are 8 maps in the box, each of which carries a different special rule to alter the flow of battle!

First off - I love Cascadia. One thing I noticed early on with Cascadia is that, because your animal population and your land mass grow at the same rate (because you always draft one tile and one animal at a time) and your land mass starts as 3 empty spaces, you should always have 3 empty spaces to play with. That restriction makes it challenging to meet the different scoring requirements of the animals, and there is the game.

I was not a huge fan of Cascadia: Landmarks, an expansion which I felt added more complexity of the fiddly kind, not the challenging and thought-provoking kind.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is definitely more complex than Cascadia, but this time the crunch is tasty. The key change is that the drafted tiles are now dominoes - 2 hexes joined together. That breaks the fundamental restriction of Cascadia, your land is growing much faster than your herd of animals, and that opens up a world of possibilities.

Cascadia: Alpine Lakes is still Cascadia, but it’s meatier in a really good way. The game is still exactly 20 turns long as forced by the number of available tiles, but the possibilities within those 20 turns have grown so expect this game to take longer than Cascadia especially if you’re used to the original!

Dungeon Team joins a long list of weird Japanese trick-taking games. Dungeon Team has the cards serve double triple purpose - they are the cards that you play to win the tricks, and the winning card of the trick gets played onto the map to provide both a corridor and a special item.

The corridors are the point - your 5×5 dungeon map starts with an entry point and a treasure chest, and you win by connecting the two with corridors. The first scenario is a very simple on-ramp, the entry point and the treasure are only 3 steps apart so if you manage to win 3 of the 10 tricks of the game with the right cards you’ll have a success.

Why the right cards? Because you see, the cards that are best at winning tricks, the 9 and 10, have dead-ends on them. The worst cards, the lowly 1 and 2, have beautiful 4-way crossroads on them. There’s the trick - you need the tricks to be won by the weaker cards to forge a path.

The played cards have special items too, we only used the map which allows a player to reveal a card from their hand, a classic co-op trick-taking trope of trying desperately to have your teammates understand just what you are really saying by revealing a certain card. Because of course you can’t talk strategy and explain it to them…

The second scenario puts the target a little further away, whilst the third, and our first failure, has 3 treasure chests in different directions to collect. I’m looking forward to continuing the journey and understanding what more of the special items do!

I did not expect to enjoy Tiny Mountain Goats as much as I did. My wife even said during the game that it wouldn’t have quite so much appeal without the word “Tiny” in there. I have no idea how Mountain Goats is any different - judging by the fact that they share a BGG entry I suspect they’re mechanically identical and just come in a slightly different presentation format.

I only even have Tiny Mountain Goats because I backed Mountain Goats Legacy and had it as an add-on.

Tiny Mountain Goats was just satisfying to play at the end of an evening which we’d mostly spent levelling up in Agemonia and we didn’t have much brain left for anything big. What I got was a simple set of meaningful feeling decisions and some cute goats to boot.

There are 6 mountains numbered 5 through 10, and you have a goat at the bottom of each. Each turn you roll 4 dice, and can add as many of them up as you like - you’re looking to make values of 5 to 10 to move up that mountain. Reach the top of a mountain and you score that many points, and each time you roll that number again you can score the points again.

Until, that is, someone else hits the top of that mountain, scores the points for themselves, and knocks your tiny mountain goat all the way to the bottom.

Obviously there’s some luck to what you roll⁷, but there’s real choice on how you combine numbers. Say you roll a 1, 2, 3 and 4. That could be two 5s, or it could be a 10. Which do you want? Rapid progress on a small-scoring mountain, or some progress on a big chunker that you might not be able to follow up on next turn? Or, if you’ve already made progress on the 9, you could just score that and chuck the 1 away.

With some bonus points available should you reach the top of all 6 mountains, this is a great light and fast game that’s very easy to get into and surprised me with genuine meaningful decisions. Or maybe that was just how it rolled.

I’m definitely looking forward to playing Mountain Goats Legacy now!

Did you enjoy my run-back of last month’s gaming? I want to do this again but I fear October may be a poor choice - with Essen and the impending launch of the Which Witch? Kickstarter campaign it’s going to be a busy month! What have you played recently? Come join us on the Discord and tell us! A game shared is a game enjoyed twice after all.

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