Week in review: Week to 7 March
Mar. 8th, 2026 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. We had a long board game meet on the public holiday, where we played Unfathomable, in which the crew and passengers of a ship under attack from Lovecraftian sea monsters is trying to get safely back to port, unaware that some of the people on board are secretly working with the monsters.
(It's a newer edition of a game that was originally created as a spin-off of Battlestar Galactica, with the ocean liner and sea monsters replacing spaceships and Cylons. Now that the licence has expired, the original edition is apparently something of a collectors' item, but I've had the opportunity to play it a couple of times. On the whole, I think I prefer Unfathomable, which may be partly to do with the fact that I've always been more into Lovecraftiana than into Battlestar Galactica, but also because the newer edition has tightened up some of the rules and has more legible cards and things.)
On this occasion, I was a loyal crewmember and we got the ship quite close to safety before it accumulated too much damage and sank, partly as a result of one of the undercover monsters breaking cover and going on a rampage with the explosives and other weapons he'd been spending the game accumulating. (The second undercover monster never formally declared himself, but after the rampage it quickly became apparent which side he was on.) I had had my suspicions about that player, but most of them were to do with how often he'd been re-reading the section of the rulebook on how the undercover characters worked, which since he was a first-time player I decided it would be unfair metagaming to act on. I don't think I regret that decision; it meant that he had a fun first experience, and while we didn't win we also had an entertainingly memorable time in ways it wouldn't have been if we'd caught him before his rampage.
After Unfathomable, we played a game of Citadels.
. On the weekend, we played a couple more games of Ticket to Ride Legacy. At the start of one of the games, when we were drawing the routes we'd have to try to complete, I got one that ran all the way from the top right of the board to the bottom left. I didn't quite manage to complete it in time, partly because I tried to pad my score by taking on a few more routes that overlapped for part of the way; filling in the non-overlapping bits slowed me down just a bit too much.
. I've started a new jigsaw puzzle, and completed most of the edges. I like the artwork on this one better than the previous one, and the introductory booklet doesn't set my teeth on edge the same way. It seems to be the case, now that I have two data points to compare, that each puzzle in this series has a big complicated picture with lots of little incidents going on within it, and the introductory booklet tells a story that's intended to suggest interesting things to look for in the picture. The trouble with the one I did previously was that the picture was telling a story of its own that the author of the booklet appeared to be completely oblivious to, so that I spent the whole time I was reading the booklet going "What? No, that's clearly not what's going on"; this picture doesn't have that problem, or if it does I'm equally oblivious so it doesn't bother me.
. I've completed the story campaign in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The final boss fight went pretty smoothly. The bonus actions from the new buddy system came in handy on several occasions. The important thing, as I kind of knew already but it was reinforced by the intermediate boss fights, is to keep in mind what the primary aim of the mission is and not get too distracted by random monsters. On the whole, I've decided that I like War of the Chosen and that changes it makes generally improve the game and help the player learn how to play it well. I still think the zombie horde mode is tedious and unnecessary, though.
One of the other DLC includes a set of bonus missions that are supposedly set in the years between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, with a framing device where one of the characters from XCOM 2 is telling stories about past experiences. I've been trying those next, and it's an odd experience, because the locations are in a lot of cases recognisably recreations of locations from Enemy Unknown, and likewise for some of the equipment and weapons the soldiers use, but some of the other equipment and weapons -- and all of the enemies -- are the versions from XCOM 2, which shouldn't exist yet at the time the missions are set. The narrator will occasionally say something like "It was twenty years ago, my memory may be off on some of the details", but that doesn't really cover it.
(It's a newer edition of a game that was originally created as a spin-off of Battlestar Galactica, with the ocean liner and sea monsters replacing spaceships and Cylons. Now that the licence has expired, the original edition is apparently something of a collectors' item, but I've had the opportunity to play it a couple of times. On the whole, I think I prefer Unfathomable, which may be partly to do with the fact that I've always been more into Lovecraftiana than into Battlestar Galactica, but also because the newer edition has tightened up some of the rules and has more legible cards and things.)
On this occasion, I was a loyal crewmember and we got the ship quite close to safety before it accumulated too much damage and sank, partly as a result of one of the undercover monsters breaking cover and going on a rampage with the explosives and other weapons he'd been spending the game accumulating. (The second undercover monster never formally declared himself, but after the rampage it quickly became apparent which side he was on.) I had had my suspicions about that player, but most of them were to do with how often he'd been re-reading the section of the rulebook on how the undercover characters worked, which since he was a first-time player I decided it would be unfair metagaming to act on. I don't think I regret that decision; it meant that he had a fun first experience, and while we didn't win we also had an entertainingly memorable time in ways it wouldn't have been if we'd caught him before his rampage.
After Unfathomable, we played a game of Citadels.
. On the weekend, we played a couple more games of Ticket to Ride Legacy. At the start of one of the games, when we were drawing the routes we'd have to try to complete, I got one that ran all the way from the top right of the board to the bottom left. I didn't quite manage to complete it in time, partly because I tried to pad my score by taking on a few more routes that overlapped for part of the way; filling in the non-overlapping bits slowed me down just a bit too much.
. I've started a new jigsaw puzzle, and completed most of the edges. I like the artwork on this one better than the previous one, and the introductory booklet doesn't set my teeth on edge the same way. It seems to be the case, now that I have two data points to compare, that each puzzle in this series has a big complicated picture with lots of little incidents going on within it, and the introductory booklet tells a story that's intended to suggest interesting things to look for in the picture. The trouble with the one I did previously was that the picture was telling a story of its own that the author of the booklet appeared to be completely oblivious to, so that I spent the whole time I was reading the booklet going "What? No, that's clearly not what's going on"; this picture doesn't have that problem, or if it does I'm equally oblivious so it doesn't bother me.
. I've completed the story campaign in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The final boss fight went pretty smoothly. The bonus actions from the new buddy system came in handy on several occasions. The important thing, as I kind of knew already but it was reinforced by the intermediate boss fights, is to keep in mind what the primary aim of the mission is and not get too distracted by random monsters. On the whole, I've decided that I like War of the Chosen and that changes it makes generally improve the game and help the player learn how to play it well. I still think the zombie horde mode is tedious and unnecessary, though.
One of the other DLC includes a set of bonus missions that are supposedly set in the years between XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, with a framing device where one of the characters from XCOM 2 is telling stories about past experiences. I've been trying those next, and it's an odd experience, because the locations are in a lot of cases recognisably recreations of locations from Enemy Unknown, and likewise for some of the equipment and weapons the soldiers use, but some of the other equipment and weapons -- and all of the enemies -- are the versions from XCOM 2, which shouldn't exist yet at the time the missions are set. The narrator will occasionally say something like "It was twenty years ago, my memory may be off on some of the details", but that doesn't really cover it.
