It’s been a couple weeks and I’ve making great progress in the 2018 10×10 Challenge. I’ve found that having a list of 10 games that I’m trying to play is making it a lot easier to get things to the table. By limiting my choice to the 10 games that are part of the challenge, I’m finding it easier to get to gaming during the weeknights. Weekends are still reserved for the longer and more complex games.
I played Burgle Bros. twice in the past week and had two wins. The added bonus has been that both plays have been with my 11 year old son. This is one of his favorite games. There are some tweaks we make to the setup of the game to make things a little more balanced and we do play the easier two-story office job instead of the the three-story bank heist. There are some killer room tiles in the game that can stack the game against you if they come out together. The Deadbolt tile requires three movement points to enter if no one else is in the room. The other challenging tile is the Keypad, which you need to roll a 6 on a standard d6 to unlock the room. If you have multiple of these tiles on the same floor or worse yet, next to each other, the game usually ends quickly. The house rule I use is to separate out these tiles so there is only one Keypad and one Deadbolt on each floor. This has increased the win ratio to something a bit more tolerable. This creates a great feedback loop that the wins makes me want to play more often. With the last two being only two stories, I’ll be looking to get in a couple three story plays in the future.
Legendary: Marvel has also seen many plays already this month. The main driver of this is that I stumbled across an online league on BGG. The league is made up of three matches during a month using the base game and a single expansion. The three matches are preset so everyone plays against the same mastermind, scheme, henchmen, and villains. Depending on the match, I get to choose one or two heroes with the last one(s) provided as part of the setup. At the end of each match, I enter in the results to the league website and see where I stand. I was pretty excited that I wasn’t in last place after the first match, but that self-corrected in the last two matches of the month. I fall in to the category of having fun playing versus playing to win. Looking back at the setup of the games, I could have selected heroes better that would synergize better against the mastermind and villains I was facing. I would suggest checking out the league info if you are interested. Prizes are also a bonus I found with the league. Aside from winners and losers help choose future matches, organized play kits are also given away. Since this was my first month playing, I’m not sure how often they are used, but I scored a sweet foil scheme card just for submitting my score. With the last place finish in the league, I also get to choose a villain group to use in a March match.
During the first four weeks of 2018, I was able to check of plays for Ex Libris, Imperial Settlers, Pandemic: The Cure, Fallout, Viticulture and Scythe in addition to the two games I went into detail about this week.
As of today, I’m 13% complete so I’m making great progres..