New games discovered recently on BGA (2 hits and a miss)

 Ever since the Pandemic... really ever since my son was born (4 years ago now!) I've done most of my gaming online rather than in person. To be clear, I strongly prefer in-person gaming, but playing online is a lot better than not playing games at all, and in that respect, BoardGameArena has been a lifesaver!

In the past I've played on other online portals, such as Yucata.de, Boiteajeux.net, MaBiWeb.com, etc -- they all have good games, and good implementations, but none of them really stand up to BoardGameArena when it comes to look and user interface. When I started playing online all the time, I roped a couple of friends into playing with me, and pretty quickly decided not to try and get them all to follow 3 or 4 different portals just to play games with me. Instead, we've stuck primarily to BGA. It didn't hurt that about a dozen of my/TMG's game were being implemented there over the last few years! 

Sure, there are some titles on Yucata or wherever that aren't available on BGA, so being exclusive to one portal misses out on those, but that hasn't bothered me too much yet, perhaps because BGA is adding new titles all the time, and there are already a ton of great games on there to begin with.

My friends and I usually find a game we like, play it a bunch of times in a row (all asynch, which is the only way I like to play -- based on my situation I find it difficult-to-impossible to schedule a couple of uninterrupted hours to sit at the computer and play a game), and when we get bored of it, we move on to another for a while. Usually my friends don't care too much what we play, so they leave it to me to find/suggest/start games, and that means I occasionally browse the available titles looking for something interesting that I've been meaning to try. Sometimes a game comes up that I've never even heard of, and if it looks or sounds interesting I like to give it a try.

To be honest, trying an unknown game has been pretty hit and miss (and probably more miss than hit) -- I've been pretty disappointed in games like Quetzal (though it looks beautiful), The Ruhr: A Story Of Coal Trade, and Small Islands. I've found a couple of OK games such as Nanga Parbat (2p only), Ponte Del Diavolo (not bad per se, but too abstract for my tastes), and Marrakech (a bit of silly fun at 2 players, though short lived). As far as "hits" are concerned, of games I'd tried blind I could only really point to Sobek 2-player (based on a card game I was familiar with)... until recently.

About a month ago I tried a dice-and-card drafting entangled decision game from 2020 called Glow that I rather enjoyed.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a press-your-luck deckbuilding game from 2021 that I'd never heard of called Living Forest -- it has great artwork, plays quickly, and I think it does deckbuilding really well.

Those two hits significantly increased my track record for trying new games on BGA, but as a reminder that looks can be deceiving, I also had another big miss recently. I saw a new game go live called Little Factory, which a few people seemed to describe as Splendor + Res Arcana. Splendor is a solid game, even if it's a little straightforward for my personal tastes and has an endgame dynamic I don't care for. I only played Res Arcana once, and it was asynchronously on BGA, and I really got the impression it was the kid of game I'd strongly prefer to play in real time.

Little Factory is an engine building game with excruciatingly incremental turns - each turn you only do one thing: trade several of your lower value cards for 1 higher value card from the supply, or trade 1 of your higher value cards for several lower value ones from the supply. You can get buildings that you activate which let you do additional , specific trades, so that's the engine building part, except the building only works if the card it gets you is currently in the face up supply! Otherwise it does nothing. It's worth points, so that's good, but an engine building game where your engine doesn't work, or only works once, doesn't excite me.

I may be in the minority on this one, a couple of my friends thought Little Factory was interesting enough, but it was a miss for me. But looking at the last month or so on BGA, with regard to blindly trying new games, 2 hits and 1 miss is not a bad track record!