Mycelia to Vinhos
15 April 2025
The third of three catch-up posts about the new games I’ve played in the early part of 2025. This one seems to have accidentally ended up being the games I didn’t really like edition, although I did quite like some of them! I seem to have minimal photos of this lot of games too which does kind of speak to the fact that they mostly weren’t things I wanted to remember that much.
Mycelia
A game of gently moving dew drops around that I expected to like a lot but found it a bit dissatisfying. Perhaps I just didn’t get deep enough into it for the deck building to shine but I found the player boards a bit limiting and had no desire to play it again.
Northern Pacific
A train game in which you place cubes across the US representing investments and also collectively build the routes trying to make them go to the cities you have backed. Easy enough to pick up and we played it twice in quick succession but I found it another dissatisfying game.
Odin
OK, this one I did quite like! Though I forgot to take a photo of it. You are trying to empty your hand of cards, and you have to play cards that make a higher number than the previous player. The twist is that you can make numbers by putting multiple cards together, so 7 and 1 can make 71! I think there were restrictions on the card colour that made it not super easy to do that though. It was fun, I’d play it again.
Southern Rails
Another train game, a bit more involved than Northern Pacific, that has the players building rails across a different map of the US with a different kind of investment thing. I have nothing against railways, or investments for that matter, but these are never games I’m wanting to play a second time really.
Stakd
Hurray, this is the one game (in this series of three catch up posts) that I managed to write something down about just after I played it.
This was a fun game that got pulled out at the end of an evening’s gaming. Each players has a selection of pieces of different sizes. Lovely tactile pieces that are basically curvy hex grids. Each player starts by placing their biggest piece, 5 hexes in size to form the base of the stack. Then you move up to the next level. The rules are that each player has to place one piece adjacent to another on the top level until there are at least six pieces down when they can choose to start a new level. No piece can be placed so that two different pieces of the same colour lie on top of the same piece on the previous level. The aim is to be the last player who can place a piece.
It’s more complicated to explain than to play! I enjoyed it a lot. At five players it felt a bit random as to who won, I think it would be more tactical at a lower player count. But it was a lot of fun to play.
Through the Desert
There are camels in different colours, with different colours of riders. Each player controls one colour of riders and tries to control areas of the desert. I forget how the placement rules worked exactly but it felt like a mathematical puzzle. And as someone who trained as a mathematician and loves mathematics and puzzles I want to mean that as a compliment but I don’t. It feels like something I should know how to optimise and I end up not really enjoying the game. It felt pretty much like a simpler version of Huang and I don’t enjoy that much either.
Time Bomb
A quick card game. Honest, there are quick card games out there that I like but they are few and far between. This wasn’t one of them and I already completely forget how it worked. I’m not 100% sure that the game I’ve put on the image is the one that we played either.
Unlock! Escape Adventures
This was pretty fun. A co-operative escape room game that doesn’t require that you destroy the pieces so it’s replayable. We were in some kind of secret lab trying to find some kind of chemical. There’s a neat system where the numbers on the cards combine together and an app to test if your solution is correct. There were some pretty cool solutions to the puzzles. We had fun and I’d happily play more of these.
Vinhos
Vital Lacerda is a game designer with a reputation for complex and unforgiving games. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually played any of his games before this but I enjoyed this. The theme is winemaking in Portugal and I happily came dead last as I was more concerned with figuring out the mechanics than with optimising the game play. It was interesting to see how the other players (I think they had all played before) stretched the game further than I did and I’d like to try it another time to see if I can do better.
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