Been a long time since I've been able to play games with my regular group. but we were finally able to meet up the last two weeks. It was so nice to play larger games, which my family aren't really into playing.

Last week we learned Raiders of Scythia. It's a worthy addition to the Raiders series, and nicely streamlined. I had a decent combo where I could raid Persia at will, avoiding wounds and getting discounts. But when Persia was used up, things slowed down. Ended up in third place in a relatively close game. Didn't help that, in the back half of the game, pretty much anytime I wanted to buy an eagle or horse, either the action wasn't available, or the animal I wanted got purchased

Finished the night playing Fantasy Realms. It's one of our favorite wrap up the night games. In this case we played with the new suits from the Cursed Hoard expansion, but not with the cursed items. While it is annoying that the new cards don't match the artwork from the originals, it is kind of nice getting the extra card in hand and extra game time as the trigger is twelve discarded cards instead of ten. We really didn't do anything with Outsiders and Undead. Came in third.

This week we played Lost Ruins of Arnak. It's a nice worker placement crossed with a deck builder. The action economy is tight and, based on how this game played out, moving up the research track as quickly as possible is essential. I came in a distant last as I couldn't get any real action economy after the first couple of rounds. It also seemed that every time I needed certain cards in my deck to come up, they wouldn't come up that round. I thought it was a decent worker placement game, possible even a good game to introduce players to worker placement. The theme is fantastically implement though.

Next we tried the Kickstarter release of Tutankhamun. A nice little game of tile selection and planning to try and score majorities. But this version was waaay overproduced. With everything being shiny, and stretch goal components that literally add nothing to the game (they don't need to be used, and actually get in the way), while providing a bag that's only barely large enough to hold tiles, but not large enough to draw tiles to build the river.

Once again we finished up the night with Fantasy Realms with the new suits. And once again no one really did anything with the Undead and Outsiders. Those cards just aren't impressing us so far. But I did win with a score of 329, so I can't complain about that. Got a pretty decent deal at the start, and some good cards came up for me as the game went on.

#boardgames