Sue painted a WizKids pre-primed Nolzur’s Marvelous Githzerai Monk for the new D&D skirmish game, Onslaught. “Onslaught comes with everything you need to start playing, including pre-painted miniatures, but on their website (https://www.dndonslaught.com/) they actually have a list of alternate miniatures you can use for each character. So I painted this guy up for my Zhentarim team. I used Black Templar Contrast Paint for the robes, and Black Legion Contrast Paint for his leather shin and arm guards. But the real star of this show was Iyanden Yellow Contrast Paint for the skin. I feel like this beautiful and versatile Contrast Paint was made for Gith skin. I did most of the spots on his skin before adding the Iyanden Yellow Contrast Paint.”
Greg decided to pull Trajan off the shelf as it had been a while and it’s one of my favourite Stefan Feld games. “I enjoy the Mancala-mechanism for choosing your action each turn, and the fact that you need to plan ahead to try to score the Trajan tiles as well as to get the action you want. If you’re not careful you can find yourself in a position where your choices are very limited and you can only do actions that you don’t particularly want to do. It’s a real point salad game, with most actions scoring you points, but you do better if you’re able to focus on just two or three of the actions. Tracy did more shipping in this game, whereas I did more military exploration and we both did a fair amount of building. There was a good fight in the senate each round as well, as we both wanted to get the bonus tokens that scored well for us. I still enjoy this game quite a bit and think it’ll be one I return to again periodically in the future.”
Greg also tried Splendor Duel for the first time. “I’d heard good things about this two player spin-off of the classic Splendor so I picked up a copy and got Tracy to give it a spin. It shares a lot in common with Splendor, as you would expect, but adds a board that holds the gem tokens and limits how you can take them so that you can’t always just take what you want. It also adds a new resource, pearls, which some cards need for you to buy them, but no cards produce. I also enjoyed the fact that there are now three possible victory conditions so it’s not necessarily just a straight race for points. I think it’s a great spin-off and since I mostly play just with Tracy it made sense to get it.”
Renee and Jenn pulled Sagrada off the shelf for a play. “It was fun to rediscover this fantastic dice drafting game in which you are juggling different scoring goals while trying to create your stained glass window. We added all the modules from the Passion expansion which adds rare glass dice and some additional private objectives. In addition to this just being such a pretty game to play, I’ve always appreciated the simplicity of the mechanics – draft dice to add to your window – with the complexity of the placement rules combined with the various scoring objectives. Cleverly using the special actions, and with this expansion, your personal special abilities, makes all the difference in being successful.”
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