Here are a few more things that struck me as I spent my last few days travelling to the Gathering of Friends:

1.       Roads in America are amazingly good. Back home every drive is a game of dodge-the-pothole (because the population tax base isn’t big enough to support the distances required).
2.       That’s the last time I eat in a diner. I finally found my hamburger hidden under a mountain of fries to find a 2x2inch bun, one leaf of lettuce, one slice of tomato. Aussie burgers blow these away. This was especially heartfelt after the lows of the Great McLobster Disappointment.
3.       The other reason to hate diners is the guilt trip inflicted on you at the end of your meal re the tip. Given I have no idea what’s appropriate, and whether I’m walking out under a shroud of generous idiocy or stingy shame, it puts a cloud over every meal.
4.       Hearing the Coke ads every 15 minutes using one of my all-time favourite Aussie songs (Sweet Disposition by the Tender Trap … youtube it) is a surreal experience of Australiana shining in America.
5.       The Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire is magic. Brilliant sunshine with the road following the gorgeous Swift River featuring never-ending Class II rapids for mile after mile … after mile … after mile. I drove lots of minor roads across New Hampshire, Vermont, NY that followed rivers. So cool. 
6.       All the National Parks in the States are amazingly beautiful to me. I mean our idea of a National Park is a big rock in a desert. (Although I only truly began to feel connected to our land after I drove for day after day through the desert to Uluru to fully appreciate how significant it is to our people given the great nothingness of so much of our land.)

New-to-me games played recently include …

DECATHLON (2012): Rank N/a, Rating 6.0

Each of the 10 rounds has a different means to win, be it playing specific suits, combinations, simultaneous vs round play, etc. The worse your fare each round, the earlier you get to pick from the display to get juicy cards for future rounds. First and second get VPs. Watch and remember what others are picking and where they’re strong, pick which rounds you’re suited to and go all in, hope you’re just a little bit better when it counts, hope there are good cards to pick when it’s not your round. It was thematically nice and randomly fun to play, but the over-random does drive it down in the end.

Rating: 6

ENDEAVOR: DEEP SEA (2024): Rank 254, Rating 8.2

You want to desperately move up the tracks that give you better action cards, more actions, and movement increases, but that’s not the fun. The fun each round is using those action cards to explore the map, move, find treasure, do sonar sweeps, research areas … all of which provide the perks needed to climb those tracks. I love how the new action card choice each round builds your strategy, yet you somehow still need to improve all your tracks which provides a nice challenge each round managing those action choices to achieve. I’m attracted to how every game changes re the end-game points (ie how your placements on the map are differently rewarded) which invokes replay. The components are lovely. I’d like to explore more.

Rating: 8

 POWER GRID: OUTPOST (2024): Rank 5842, Rating 7.6

The game-play and strategies are exactly the same as normal Power Grid. The difference for variety’s sake is that the resources to fuel the power stations are all merged into one type: workers (which I guess is the half-hearted link to Outpost). A bunch of power stations are replaced with cards that provide permanent workers or techs that mostly provide discounts on things. They’re all part of the same auction, no change, and I enjoyed the new choice and valuation challenges of power stations vs techs. The bland map features variable connection costs, but it’s more obvious now that having resource types and thematic map settings helps hide just how abstract the game is, and that’s been stripped away here to its detriment.

Rating: 7

HAUNTED MOUSE (2025): Rank N/a, Rating N/a

Another card shedding game, this one differentiating itself by each player placing a card face-up in front of them which can be used by other players to help with melds. Points for going out first or second, first to 7 points wins. With no other scoring complications to make life challenging, just a straight race, it felt a little too simplistic to catch the attention and invite much replay. The cutesy artwork does its best though.

Rating: 6

HOT STREAK (2025): Rank N/a, Rating N/a

The fun in this game is directly proportional to the fun you bring to it. You have a little knowledge that no one else knows – less than 5% of the deck? – and you bet on which of the 4 characters will win the race, done by taking betting chips which are ordered from best return to least. Or you can bet on an event happening or not. The race is run by going thru the shuffled communal deck. You have close to zero agency in the game except for a few gambles. Is it a game? For every player in the game that’s prepared to ham it up and cheer a frenzy a la ‘My Fair Lady’ each time their horse, er, character moves along, increase the rating by a point. If you’re not up for concocting your own fun, there doesn’t seem to be much here.

Rating: 5

REVOLVE (2024): Rank 11945, Rating 7.5

Shedding game where each winning combination (single, pair, triple, …) stays on the table until your next turn when you can go again … unless it’s beaten before it gets back to you, in which case it returns to your hand but revolved Scout-style, so lower numbers become higher numbers. Or you can just add a card to someone else’s combination to shed a little, or pick up a combination off the table to strengthen your hand. Lots of options to improve, and choosing between options is interesting. Your score is the cards remaining in other hands which affects your decision to strengthen vs a risky shed. It’s simple, neat, fun, and I’d play more if I fall into possession of it.

Rating: 7

YAKARI: DAS KOOPERATIVE BRETTSPIEL (2011): Rank N/a, Rating 5.0

It’s co-op, move all the characters home along a simple path inside the clock and you win. Roll a coloured die to determine whether you must drop/slide/blow/flick/etc a disk onto the action board to determine which character to move or how far to move one. There’s no player aid explaining things so there were continual questions. It’s time-pressured, which I’ve always considered an artificial design element to try and make a boring game more interesting so that’s a warning sign right there. It could just as easily have been played solo and even under time pressure it was just boring boring boring. It couldn’t make me care.

Rating: 2

ZOMBIE PRINCESS (2022): Rank N/a, Rating N/a

Rebel Princess works with the effect chaos because there are enough tricks still to potentially fix up a bad hand. Zombie Princess, being a variant of Spades, requires more precision to do well and has fewer opportunities to fix things which makes the effect chaos (both round based and player based) feel closer to exasperation than fun. It’s enjoyable enough if you can give yourself over to the gods of chaos though.

Rating: 6

Thoughts of other Opinionated Gamers:

Tery:  I agree with Alison on a couple of things here. 

I loved my one play of Endeavour: Deep Sea and really want to play it again.  I loved the balance of upgrading your cards for better actions and wanting/needing to push your exploration to see what else is out there that might help you.  It was beautiful, and the icons made sense (although next time I would prefer to play under a better light.

I also really enjoyed Hot Streak, but for me the fun of this game is heavily reliant on who you play it with. I played it with fun people, and I had a great time. Did I have any control? No; as Alison mentions you don’t really know much about the cards and even what you do know can be made irrelevant. Did I laugh really hard and cheer in the spirit of the game? Yes; it was a lot of fun, as long as you play with people who don’t hate fun.

I disagree with Alison on Zombie Princess; I like the challenge of chaos affecting my play, so needing to be able to adjust my play to try to counter the randomness is something I enjoy.