Only 3 of us for last week's game night. We played Cryo, Shard of Infinity, and Fantasy Realms.

It was the first play of Cryo for all of us. Even including going over the rules our host had read before, it only took us an hour and a half to play. We figure now we could probably knock out a 3-player game in an hour. And since we liked it, that's a good playtime for a worker placement game.

We didn't really know what we were doing the first couple of rounds, but after that we started to get how you get a resource engine going, handle rescuing and settling survivors. It wasn't late in the game when we understood why you may recall drones at any time rather than after placing all drones. Although we didn't do that until the very last round. Me and our host tied at 29 points (although they won the tie-breaker), and our third squeaked by with 34. Nice close first game.

We followed up with Shards of Infinity, one of the go-to games when it's the three of us. I started off getting a lot of shields and being impossible to hit. Our host started getting a lot of healing and attack. Our third was feeling left behind...until they suddenly became the powerhouse because they could draw through their deck every other round. And my shields stopped coming up when I needed them. We did a bad job recognizing just how dangerous our third had become, so I was the first one knocked off. After that, our host didn't stand a chance.

We ended the night with Fantasy Realms. Once again we added the expansion cards, and played with the cursed deck for the first time. And once again, we never really used the expansion cards. We just don't seem to be able to find any good combos that work with them.

We played two games, I think I came in last and second. The cursed deck was odd. They don't feel very cursed because you only get penalized by their negative victory points when using them. If you just let them sit idly, nothing happens. It really feels like you should have to play the negative points if you don't use them. The cards we pulled weren't the great, but we did find some good cards with a quick scan through the deck. So now we're thinking, since there's no penalty to not use them, that we should house-rule it so that everyone starts with two cards. (We drafted two cards for the second game, and that felt a little better too.)

#boardgames