Aeon’s End Legacy

Aeon’s End Legacy, like I said above, is a cooperative deck-building game. Unlike a lot of deck building games, you never actually shuffle your cards in this game, or if you do, it’s as a punishment. Instead as you play down cards and run out of cards to draw you just flip the discard pile and draw from the top. That’s the part of the game that I normally highlight.

But let’s talk about ways that we can win or lose the game. A good cooperative game tends to give you a lot of ways to win lose the game and a few ways to win the game. Aeon’s End actually gives you a few ways to win the game as well. You can lose if the nemesis takes down all the mages or if they take out the city of Gravehold that you’re defending. But as players, you win if you do enough damage to take out the nemesis or you last long enough, keeping yourself and Gravehold alive, so that the nemesis runs out of cards to draw and that are in play.

That is a good design for the game. It is already fairly challenging with the nemesis. Plus having the secondary victory condition of outlasting makes what they can do with the nemesis more interesting. There are some nemesis in the base game and other boxes that have infinite life. You can’t kill them, you can only outlast them.

The Beer

Last nights beer was Mange Cart from Golden Road out in Los Angeles, California. It is a very light beer with mango added to it to give it a nice summery flavor. It’s not one of my favorite beers but for a really hot day it’s very good. And yesterday was a hot one.

In Minnesota where you get temps that range from over 100 once or twice during the summer to -20 for a high maybe during the winter, you drink a variety of beers. Summer I range lighter with IPA, wheat beers, and more tart ales and sours. During the winter, well, I still drink IPA’s but stouts and porters show up more often.

What’s Coming Up

Next Wednesday more Aeon’s End Legacy. Will it be chapter 3 or 4, you’ll have to watch the game to find out.

Plus a new 3 Reasons Buy/Not Buy came out yesterday as I looked at Tainted Grail. And there will be one next week as well, game to be determined.

Nothing next Monday. But the following Monday I’ll plan on covering a topic, find one to have a conversation around. I am not sure what topic yet, so let me know if you have one you want covered.

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The Games

Like I was saying, these are two small solo games. Each of them plays fast, but they do hit different desires for me when it comes to solo gaming. What makes the two of them different, I talk about that some in the video but I’ll recap here.

Onirim

Onirim is a card game that has you creating a line of cards trying to get three of a color in a row to get dream doors while dealing with nightmares. That is the basics of it then with more rules thrown in as to how you deal with nightmares and and a few cards having special powers.

Onirim is a a solo game that you need to focus on more. The card play isn’t very complex, but when those nightmares come up, you have interesting choices that you need to make. And that can really determine how well the game goes for you. I use Onirim more when I want to have a game I can focus on more. If I need something to do while watching a baseball or football game besides look at my phone, Onirim gives me more to focus in on.

A Gentle Rain

A Gentle Rain is a tile laying game where you are just flipping a tile and putting it into play. The main decision space in the game is where do you put a tile. You are trying to get a spot where all four corners line up so you can put a token in. But of course, you are matching the sides with the different flowers on them, so you need to draw the right tile.

A Gentle Rain doesn’t feel as rushed as Onirim. When I play A Gentle Rain, it is more about the experience of playing the game, flipping around the tiles and seeing what you can find. It is meant to be peaceful as you play it and that comes across. So while Onirim can help me focus, A Gentle Rain can more help you unwind. Both of them are good for clearing your head but in different ways.

So is there a better one? I don’t know that either of them is better than the other. They meet different criteria for what I want to do. A Gentle Rain works better for more people, probably, because the game is simpler. However, it takes up more space. So Onirim is better for focusing and smaller areas. Both travel very well, as well.

The Beer

So no super new beer this week. Just drank more Fantasy Factory. It is a solid IPA that has grown on me the more I’ve drank it. It is a topic I’ve talked about with board games recently and changing taste, The same hold true for alcohol. For some people, they will never like it, and that is fine. Some people won’t want to try any, also fine.

But for some people, that is going to be something that changes over time. IPA’s are a great example of not judging a whole type of beer by one drink. Some IPA’s are extremely better, some of them have a piney taste, others tropical fruits, other citrus, it just depends on the hops. And judging all IPA’s by the extremely bitter is doing a disservice to that type of beer. Or it might be that you won’t like any, but it is worth trying.

Upcoming Streams

Next Monday, I won’t be streaming. But the following Monday my plan is to stream my Top 10 Games I Want to Play. This will be from my collection of games and the goal will be to get all of these games played ideally this summer. It might end up being this year, but we’ll have to see.

I will have a Wednesday stream, looking around at my collection, I think my plan is to play Aeon’s End. It’s a bit of a bigger game, but I want to start playing through all the content that I have for that game. And like Xenoshyft which I played recently, it is one that I talked about on Monday in my Top 10 Cooperative Games. So I really want to play it again after talking about it.

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Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade

Like I said at the beginning this is a very fun game and a thematic roll and write. A lot of times roll and writes end up being very mechanical. There might be some theme wrapped around them or it might be completely abstract like Ganz Schon Clever.

Obviously, this is imitating a pinball game. And that just works really well for me. You can see more thoughts on my TableTopTakes review of Super-Skill Pinball 4-Cade.I’m not sure where it currently falls in my Top 10 roll and write games, but fairly high again. I think that the basic machine is fun, but I do like the hacker one more just because it gives you more to do and more choices. The game does a good job of simulating a pinball machine while still saying mechanically sound.

The Beer

I believe that I drank before on stream, Fantasy Factory by Karben4 Brewing out of Madison, WI. It is a good solid IPA. A good one for hot days, which is what I want around this time of year, especially with it being in the 90’s. I give a little breakdown on the loose rules surrounding the different types of Pale Ales from Pales Ales to EPA’s to IPA’s and just what that difference means.

Upcoming Streams

Assuming no more migraines, I am going to be doing my Top 10 cooperative games coming out on Monday. And then with Loki probably streaming some shorter games, maybe more Marvel United or other roll and writes so that I can watch Loki on Wednesday evenings as well. Let me know if there is a roll and write that you’d want to see played, assuming it can be played solo.

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The Game(s)

Only one game this week, but it is a game that I have had a fair number of plays of now solo. And I wanted to highlight it as an interesting roll and write (flip and write technically) game.

Metro X

This game I originally got interested in when I saw Tom Vasel play it on the Dice Tower. It seems like a good puzzle and one that is nice and easy to teach. Now, I haven’t had the opportunity to teach it yet, I’ve only played it solo, but I will say, it is a very enjoyable puzzle of a game.

In this game you have a collection of routes that you are trying to complete on your metro transit system, one side is tubes and the other bus routes. You flip a card from the top of the deck and then fill in that number of spots along one of the routes. That sounds simple, but there are a few small rules that make it interesting for me. Firstly, the routes intersect, so you fill in a spot and it can count for two routes. But because the routes interconnect if you hit an already filled in spot on a route, you stop filling in bubbles.

And then there are also the transit locations. These give you points if you get the card flipped, but they also limit how much you can fill up. Each route can only use a certain number of cards. So while you have to use the transit stops when they are flipped, pretty often you don’t want to because it’ll mean empty spots at the end of the game, and the more empty spots, the more negative points you get.

Overall a fun game and you can see my review here. I will say that while I am enjoying this solo quite a lot, I think it’ll be better with multiple players. There is a lot of randomness from the cards, but when everyone one is getting the same randomness it will be interesting to see how much score vary. In my three games my scores vary a lot, but that is because of the card flips. So it is hard to compare.

The Beer

So last nights beer was a pretty boringly named one Schells IPA. Schells is a Minnesota brewery based out of New Ulm, MN. And I was not a huge fan of their IPA. I talk about the different ways to use hops and how different hops have different profiles. I tend to like the money piney hops and the more citrus hops. This was more in line with tropical fruits. And while that can be okay, it isn’t my preferred. Mainly, the tropical fruit flavor in this was a bit muddied between a number of flavors and the bitterness didn’t match with the flavor set. I tend to want my IPA’s to be more focused on the bitter.

Have you tried Metro X, what do you think of that roll and write?

And if you are a beer drinker, what hop profile do you look for in your IPA’s? Or do you even like IPA’s?

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The Game

Only one game today, and it’s Marvel United. But there is a lot of it to be unboxed. Next week I want to play a game of it, to be determined which of the expansions to show how it works on stream. I already played the base game two weeks ago, which you can see here. But the expansions add more to the game, more complexity and more challenges. Plus there are obviously a whole lot more villains.

Marvel United is a cooperative game where the players take on a villain. Each villain has their own schemes and plans for how they play, from a very simple villains like Red Skull to a more complex one like Ronan, you have a ton of different options to face. And you have a ton of different heroes to bring in. The base game can have you playing as Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Hulk, Ant-Man, Wasp, or more. Or you have different expansions with a ton of characters.

The Expansions

• Asgardian Expansion
• Black Panther Expansion
• Guardians of the Galaxy Expansion
• Spiderverse Expansion
• Infinity Saga Expansion
• Sinister Six Expansion
• Kickstarter Exclusive Characters

Next week I’ll be playing one of those expansions.

The Brew

Local beer today from Steel Toe Brewing located in St. Louis Park MN. They have a line of beers that are all “Size” something. The stream drink was Size 7, an IPA. It is 7% ABV and 77 IBU, international bitterness units. The classification of an IPA comes from back when Britain was colonizing the world. IPA stands for India Pale Ale, and the reason it has it’s classification is that hops are a natural preservative. So when they wanted to get good old British beer to far away places, they’d load up the beer with hops in order to have it not go bad.

Let me know in the comments below what expansion you think I should play with next week.

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Something I’ve been waiting for, for a while showed up yesterday. Really, compared to when it might ship for some people, I didn’t have to wait too long, but I have the rest of the Tainted Grail stuff, the two big expansion campaigns, the Echoes of the Past character add-on, and the Red Death post any of the campaign campaigns. I am stoked for playing them and playing more Tainted Grail in general.

I got the box around 2, I want to say, and I was very patient and didn’t actually open anything to even look at the outside of the boxes until nine that night when I did an initial live stream of it on Malts and Meeples. I consider that to be pretty good patience on my behalf because normally I’d have stopped my work day to bust it open.

The Beer

Of course, I also had a beer, otherwise would it truly be Malts and Meeples? Last nights beer came from Surly Brewing Company out of Minneapolis. Fall to Pieces is a hoppy refreshing beer. I am not sure it’s the best for the winter, but it was nice last night. For me, it’s a very refreshing beer with a nice crisp taste which is generally what I’m looking for.

Do you like the unboxings? And what did you think of the lighting for the stream? I’m working on getting everything set as I want it and hopefully have a nice close-up camera set-up sometime in the future as well.

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10 – Goose Island Bourbon County

This is a big and bold beer with a lot of great barrel aged flavor to it. It doesn’t work for a light beer fan sitting at 14.7% ABV and being very dark and almost syrupy. It has hits of chocolate and coffee bitterness coming through that help balance out this big flavor. I’m generally a big fan of these darker barrel aged beers during the winter here in Minnesota when you want something that just kind of sticks with you. There are others similar to this that could have made the list as well, but because it’s a limited release it makes it feel just a bit more special.

9 – Steel Toe Size 7

Now onto more of a summer beer for me, though I will drink IPA’s throughout the year. Steel Toe is a local brewery that actually does three different versions of this be, a Size 4, Size 7, and Size 11, which refers to the ABV. I personally like the Size 7 best, the Size 4 is just a bit too light whereas the Size 11 is a bit to malty, the Size 7 gives you that good beer body while balancing it out nicely with the hops.

8 – Deschutes Zarabanda

This was one of the first odder beers that I tried and really loved, unfortunately I don’t believe it’s put out by Deschutes anymore, or if it is, it’s going to be at their tap room only. Zarabanda had a lot of unique flavors to it including peppercorn, it was just a fun one to try and something so very different. I hope, maybe, Deschutes would consider bringing this one back for a limited run at some point in bottles so that I could enjoy it again.

I also got to try this at one for the first Tryptophania’s that a local bar does the night before Thanksgiving. It’s a great even where you just show up like normal, but they’ll have a guest brewer doing a tap takeover and you’ll be able to try beers that you wouldn’t normally see on tap. They’ve had Deschutes, New Holland, and Indeed as various breweries that have done it.

7 – Deschutes Fresh Squeezed

Back to back Deschutes, but this one is more straight forward. Fresh Squeezed is just a good citrusy IPA. And most of the time when I want an IPA, I like it to have a bit of that grapefruit bite to it. Fresh Squeezed definitely has some of that. It’s an odd beer that I think works much better in a bottle than in a can. The can just tweaks the flavor slightly so that it doesn’t work as well. The only knock on this beer for me is that it’s best when it’s perfectly cold, if it gets too warm on a summer’s day, it isn’t as good.

6 – Surly Axe Man

Another IPA for the list Surly Axe Man (formerly known as Todd the Axe Man) is a pretty big IPA. Sitting just over 7%, it’s not that much stronger but it just has a good consistent flavor. It has the citrus flavor that I really love. A bit harder to find, this beer is very much worth it though and is another one that just has that great summery taste to it.

5 – Insight Crazy Aunt

Now for something completely different again. This beer is out there as a Gin and Tonic style beer. And it does taste a good amount like a gin and tonic, maybe just a bit sweeter. Canned it is a great refreshing taste but, oddly enough, not as good on tap. I actually think the slight metallic taste that it can pick up from a can cuts down on the sweetness that you still get on the tap making it a better and more balanced flavor profile. If you want to try something completely different, this is amazing.

4 – Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout

Another great winter beer, I could have gone with the CBS instead of the KBS, but the CBS (Canadian Breakfast Stout) has more of a sweet note to it with the maple syrup. This is another one of those big barrel aged stouts that really holds up well in the winter. I wouldn’t drink this beer in the summer at all just because of the darkness and heaviness of the beer, but it is great for sticking to your ribs as you drink it. If you want to try a big barrel aged stout, I’d probably start here or Dragon’s Milk from New Holland.

3 – East Lake Nicollet Nicollet Mauler Mauler

The Nicky Nicky Mau Mau as I know it, this is the double black IPA version of the Nicollet Mauler a black IPA. So you get a good malty flavor, but unlike a stout or a porter, you have less of that sweet malt backbone, instead you get more of the dark roasted malt flavors then with a strong hit of the hops. This one is another one that isn’t being brewed anymore, but I hope comes back at some point. Fortunately, I can brew an double black IPA myself that is basically the same, so hopefully this winter I’ll be able to drink something like it again.

2 – Mikkeller Brewing Raspberry Blush

Now, I’m normally not a fan of the fruity beers unless they are very sour, but this one just is fascinating and really good. It’s a raspberry coffee berliner weisse, so technically a sour, but it isn’t as sour as most sours. The coffee note balances it all out and creates a very unique flavor that I just really love. I’ve had it on tap and in cans and either way it is just really good. Definitely an interesting flavor profile, but a good side step from your traditional sour.

1 – Odell St. Lupulin

Finally, another one that isn’t being brewed anymore, which is a real shame. If I could only drink one brew for the rest of my life, this would have been it. It was light and refreshing with a great hop profile, but not one that just tasted like a summer beer but it had more depth to it than that, even if it was only brewed for the summer months. The hop profile is less citrus on this and more floral in terms of the profile, but not potpourri floral, but more hop fragrance. BRB, just found that it’s available on one of their variety 12 packs, but if you’re an IPA/EPA fan, definitely worth checking out.

Now, there are so many more beers that I could list, and I’ll probably do a top 10 brewery list coming up here soon because I can talk about more of them then. There’s the Lazer Cat (Elysian Day Glow IPA) that just missed the list as well as a massive collection of coffee beers and barrel aged stuff that I have also enjoyed. And even stuff like Light Hearted, a low ABV IPA that I’ve found that I’ve really enjoyed recently on summer days.

What are some of your favorite beers? Are there any that you think would make my list if I tried them?

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It’s been a couple of weeks, but I’m back again with more Tainted Grail. Last time I had said that I was considering playing ahead to the point where I had lost last time, but I decided that I was going to take more time and head a different direction, so I should play it through on camera.

If you’re not familiar with Tainted Grail, that’s great, and this is a great jumping off point because we’re getting going in Chapter 1 of the story again. Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is a big exploration and story driven game where players take on the roles of citizens of the town of Caunacht. Arev, the person I’m playing, isn’t a hero, but was a mercenary before running away to become a farmer. I’m going out adventuring not because I would be the first choice, but because those who would have been the first choice have gone missing in their expedition to keep the Menhir lit and stop the land from falling into Wyrdness. This is grim dark fantasy setting where everything is out to kill you and most of the things probably can.

I’ve taken on the start of the game a couple of times before but I haven’t made it too far, once due to bad luck, the next time do to rushing through the first chapter. This time I’m spending more time, with Arev, in the first Chapter, so you’ll have to see which way I go and if I can make it through the first chapter.

Last nights beer was Good Behavior form O’Dell. O’Dell makes my favorite beer, St. Lupulin. Good Behavior is their “Crushable” IPA. It is a lower ABV IPA and it certainly makes it nice and drinkable, while still maintaining a good hop profile. Definitely an IPA that I enjoyed a lot and as it gets warmer, between that and St. Lupulin, I have two really good summer beer options from them.

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Bottoms up!

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Arev travels further into the world of Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. I continue my journey into the grim dark fantasy setting that is the land of Avalon and the Wyrdness that is pushing humans off of the land. Can Arev figure out where to go next now that he’s found the secrets of driving back the Wyrdness, with Menhir, if only for a short time?

Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is a giant story driven game by Awaken Realms where you are struggling as an almost hero against the lands, the monsters, and the wary people who make up the land of Avalon. To do this you must hunt for food, but more importantly explore many a location in search for answers to the problems that are facing you. In exploring you delve into an Exploration Journal and make choices that will affect your story going forward.

I, also, always have a beer on hand. So last nights beer was Size 7, and IPA from Steel Toe Brewing in St. Louis Park, MN. I like it a lot because it’s a bigger IPA checking in at 7% ABV and 77 IBU. With it having a slightly higher ABV than some IPA’s, it isn’t too malty though, but unless you’re in MN, probably not an easy beer to get your hands on.

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Bottoms up!

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I’m back with some more Drinking in D&D. Tonight I brought up two Deschutes Fresh Squeezed IPA, but I only drank one of them. It’s one of my favorite beers, a good IPA.

The topic for Drinking in D&D was looking at the Character Sheet and what sections on the character sheet are. There’s a lot to keep track of it and it’s the basis for how you roll your dice and what your character can do, particularly in combat.

There are a number different areas that I looked at on the board, hit points, speed, initiative, proficiency, armor class (AC), ability scores, and skills. I’m going to go back and do the second half of the main sheet and hopefully the other two sheets in my next stream, which might be happening on Friday, tbd.

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Bottoms up!