Something I've always found difficult about these large games is getting the rules across to the others. My regular group are all gamers - we've all dabbled in the bigger games and can parse dense rulebooks. But the onus always falls on one of us to learn the rules and try to teach the others. I've sent "How to Play Oath" videos to countless prospective players who see the 30 minutes runtime and give up on the idea. Those that didn't watch the video said the game only started to click after 4 plays. Which is a hilarious amount of Oath.

Only managed to play Libertalia this week! We picked up Vaalbara a while ago which is oft-described as "Libertalia-lite".

Can now confirm I agree with that sentiment! The game can be surprisingly nasty with "take-that" mechanics which took me from a healthy lead going into Round 3, to only scoring 1 point and coming 3rd in a 4-player game!

Board state must have been somewhat difficult to read for some folks as they often attacked me for no reason (no actual loss from the card they killed) other than I was ahead from the first two rounds. This maneuevre actually cost the player the game as they'd have won had they denied the other player points instead!

Regardless, I did have fun and the plethora of cards made each new round exciting to see what combos we might pull off!

You're absolutely correct on Captain Sonar. I got this to the table at our local cafe when we had 8 people, but I think too many members of our group have anxiety for this to land properly. Too much pressure I think!

Last week saw the arrival of a kickstarter game I backed a couple of years ago, Mercurial!

As a result, I've seen 3 plays of this in the last week; one solo, one 2-player, and one 4-player.

Very much enjoying this title so far! The designer has opted to use iconography on the cards instead of any words. Whilst this slows the initial couple of plays down, you soon learn the language it was designed with and you can begin to intuit cards quite quickly.

Something I forsee possibly being an issue for some people is the lack of player interaction. It falls into the same space as Wingspan in that the only interaction one can really have is drafting a card that another player wanted.

The art is beautiful, vibrant, evocative, and most of the time you feel like you are manipulating the elements as you flip and convert your dice to your needs!

Second week in a row that we brought Cat in the Box to the table, but this time with the full capacity of 5-players!

We've now had a few plays of this game, and I think it's been cemented as one that we actually need to add to the collection. It's had us howling and shouting at each other like no other game has for a while, but it's light and snappy enough that you don't feel like never speaking to these people again!

Last night, we played Greed with my partner's family. This dice rolling game has you banking dice to try and race to 5000 points. Each roll must score points, or else you'll bust for the round and accumulate nothing. Not a complicated game, and very little decision making space (to keep rolling, or to keep scoring?), but it was fun! I'm probably saying that because I won at my very first play of it.

This morning, I brought River Wild to the table. This is a solo game in which you're trying to create "protected lands" to score points. Additional objectives are printed on cards which score bonus points if met! As with all Button Shy games, there's fewer than 20 cards, which means the game is tight and doesn't take too long.

5 players this week, so we brought out Hansa Teutonica. Don't think I have anything to say about this game that hasn't been said before: it's visually drab, but mechanically great. One of our players hoarded routes to gain extra actions per turn, so we were expecting a runaway lead from him, but he was second by a clear margin (and I was only a smidge behind him)!

Board-game agacent, I'm putting together a gang for a local Necromunda campaign starting next week. I've played a couple of games with a friend, so I'm looking forwards to getting more skirmishes in!

Last week saw delivery of my Mothership TTRPG pdfs, which coincided quite nicely with the physical fulfillment of Hull Breach, an anthology for Mothership. Both are wonderfully presented and give just enough information for the GM to run wild with the toys in the sandbox.

Full group was around this week, but we chatted and caught up for far too long, so we settles for a couple of games of Sushi Go Party. We haven't played for a couple of years, but it's still a fairly fun time!

We also had some friends visit this weekend, so we took them out to our local board game cafe. We played a couple of games of Diamant, with the women of the table absolutely wiping the guys on points. We then tried Secret Identities which has probably been the most fun I've had with one of these style party games. Abstract clues and deductive reasoning made from a maddeningly good time - we're very tempted to grab a copy for our collection!

As it was the first time for a while that we've visited the cafe, we were finally able to switch put our rentals. So we temporarily have, and are looking forwards to trying:

• Cat in the Box
• Glow
• Blitzkreig!

For a film of this scope, $20M is tiny! They manage to save quite a lot by filming the entire thing within a short window, and keeping the number of VFX shots needed to a minimum.

And it was only made on a roughly $20M budget! Truly my favourite film of last year, so I'm glad it blew your expectations away!

Rather than come in aggressive, why not educate? It's easy to forget that there are genuine needs for disposable items when you don't encounter them every day.

I tend to follow the game's set-up process and then watch a How-to-Play video, if one exists!

I'll then try and parse the rulebook with the knowledge from the video, and if I have the time, I'll even try a couple of dummy rounds by myself to get a feel of how it should work.

I can wake up, and go 10+ hours without meeting/requiring a single human need, but as soon as I then acknowledge that I should be doing those, all the sensations hit me at once.

Nothing quite like having to prioritise all base needs at once!