A few months back, I got Scoob to take a look at my current Super Dungeon Explore rules, that I thought I'd pretty much finished last year.

We played two games, and while the rules worked fine, and the games didn't run on too long, there are still issues.

Primarily, we couldn't even complete the first level in either game, and both times got pretty much stomped.

Yes, I know this game is very heavily reliant on dice rolls, but level one is supposed to be proper easy mode.

Now I'm sure I could just tweak the enemy power levels down a bit and the hero levels up a bit, but I've had a few more ideas that will need a while longer to implement.

So once again the game has found itself on the "needs more work" pile.

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While we played a few games of Secret Sith Lord over the last couple of years, I always got the impresson that most people still preferred the original Secret Hitler.

And because it didn't seem very thematic to continue to call the Separatists "fascists", and the Loyalists "liberals", I decided to print up an updated version of the original game.

There are a few components I can re-use from my old version, but some things really needed the update.

And also, Star Wars sucks now, so it's best that nothing reminds me of it.

There was one recent 3D print that I wanted to get cleaned up and finished first.

This is because, when we finally got around to playing Gareth's copy of Doctor Who: Time Of The Daleks last year, we saw that it did not come with the Davros miniature that it was supposed to.

So it was always going to be one of the first things I printed when I finally got around to dabbling in this side of the hobby.

Luckily, there was a free model out there in the wilderness, and it has printed fairly well.

Thankfully, all it needed was some gold paint to make it fit with the ones from the actual game. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that it's supposed to be on a base.

So, once I sort that out, the game will finally be a complete version.

I found out a bit back that Black Sonata had a new expansion last year. Like before, the designer has released a print and play version for free, so I snapped it up.

To use elements of this new expansion, I would need to print a new version of the board. This is because, when I made mine, I took out some of the colours that would now be required.

After that, it was the remaking, printing and cutting of the darkest lady cards, the blazonry cards, and the new tokens.

My laminator definitely didn't help me here, as it scrunched up my first print of the new board, and also scuffed up several of the new tokens. Stupid thing.

A few of the indirections cards have colours on the back, but most have a compass, that can only be used in certain dark lady routes. I wanted all of the indirections cards to be usable in any route. To this end, I scrapped the idea of using the compass cards, and instead printed different combinations of colours to use instead. This led to me sitting down and working out where each card could fit in certain routes, and required changing the letters on many of them to account for this.

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After a load of printing and cutting, it was time to get back into the game, to try out some of these new modules.

For my first little foray, I used the darker ladies from the first expansion, along with the rendezvous module for the first time. In addition, I swapped out just 5 stealth cards for new indirections cards from the second expansion.
As it turned out, the random 5 I drew were all ones I'd edited myself, with three of them being harder than the official ones, as they give 5 possible locations instead of the 3 or 4 on the official ones.

I went around the city during the dark lady's first rotation, noting down her possible route, while learning about the rendezvous point. I was able to work out that the rendezvous location was a residence, but could only fully deduce part of her route without starting to search.

I hampered myself big style in two ways. Firstly, I got all the way up to six clues, but when I properly studied my info, I could have fully deduced the the identity of the dark lady after just 4. What a muppet.

The second big oopsie was during the end game, with just a few cards left in the stealth deck. I'd positioned myself at Bishopsgate, as I knew I needed to confront her at a residence, and this was the only place left on her route I knew for certain had such a landmark.

Imagine my horror, when I rotated the stealth deck, to see a fog card at the point she came to join me in Bishopsgate. This meant I had already searched for her at this point in the stealth deck earlier in the game, and I had not written it down to remind me. As you can only search for her once at each point, with that specific card being replaced by a fog card, this meant I could not confront her here.

There were just 5 steps left in her route before the game was over, and the only one of these that had even the slightest chance of being a residence was in two turns. The stealth deck card (one of my own concoctions, no less) showed a blue or green location, which at this point could be either Cornhill or Bishopsgate. With my only chance now to stay in place and hope she came back to me, I rotated the deck 2 more steps, and then confronted her.

Gladly, it turned out alright in the end, and she had come right back to me in Bishopsgate. Not the smartest dark lady. But I gladly took the win.

With just 4 cards left in the stealth deck, and 3 in the fog deck, this would have been just 10 points. However, I got 15 more for the rendezvous, and 2.5 points for adding 5 indirections. This meant I ended with 27.5 points, making me a golden lad.

But then it was time to get really dark, with the introduction of the darkest ladies from the latest expansion. In addition, I added in the blazonry module, so I would need to deduce the symbols on her shield before I could confront her.

To help me out a little, I went back to a simple route, and then promptly scuppered myself when I missed writing down one of the initial steps when making my notes. There was much confusion when I got to the end of the 26 card deck, and I'd only written down 25 locations.

As I needed to seed a lot of blazonry cards into the stealth deck, I had already replaced many of the cards, so figuring out my mistake on the second loop through the deck was also a bit of a challenge.

Nevertheless, early in the third rotation, I'd got 4 blazonry clues and 6 dark lady clues. I decided to knuckle down and see if I could figure them out.

Turns out, there was enough info to figure out what I needed, but it took some serious trial and error, and evaluating all of the possible options.

Though I'd got the solution far earlier in the stealth deck compared to my other games, it took so long to crunch the solution, that I spent far longer playing this one.

With 18 cards left in the stealth deck, and 3 cards left in the fog deck, plus the blazonry and darkest lady, this gave me 39 points, making me a golden lad again, just 2 points away from being a fair youth.

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I returned to the floor for my latest attempt at playing Crystallo.

This time, things went a little more in my favour, and instead of failing the first stage with just one bond left to release, I was able to succeed with just one card remaining.

In addition, I had managed to gain all of the battle items, so I went into stage 2 with 11 cards to trap the dragon with.

Luckily, my available cards all had plenty of the different coloured orbs, and a nice selection of different crystals, so I was able to defeat the dragon with one card remaining.

In the second stage, I'd also picked up an extra two treasure cards, making it 7 in total, and giving me the title of Wealthy Knight, and bagging me 1400 points.

A bit of a step up from my first attempts at the game.

Over the last few months, we've really been trying to catch up with our board game backlog.

Not only have we been playing games that were brand new to us, but we've also gone back to a few games that we haven't played for quite a while, and thought they deserved another attempt.

As such, there's been a lot of learning and re-learning of rules over this time. I'm not sure my tiny brain can handle much more.

Perhaps we shouldn't keep buying so many new games...

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Way back in December, Gareth and I went on our first little exploration of Dune: Imperium.

While there were only two of us, we threw in a third force as an extra, to give us extra turns and more opportunity to learn.

Mistakes were definitely made during the run, but as far as I remember we'd got the rules down by the end.

Not gonna lie, though. I've already forgotten pretty much everything. We really will have to try and find the time to go again.

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It was time to get our smuggle on as we played the classic game Sheriff Of Nottingham for the first time.

Thankfully, the game is so easy to play that it didn't take long for all six of us to grasp it, and really start psyching each other out.

I somehow got 2nd, though I was over 30 points behind the winner.

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Not sure this game will get many more plays out of us, but at the very least, we could give There's Been A Murder its second chance on the tabletop.

We aced the first game when I (somewhat dodgily) cottoned on to who was holding the murderer, and played a card so that I could pass them the informant.

The 2nd game turned out to be our first loss of this game. This was because the murderer was forced to be put back to the bottom of the draw pile, and when it came out again it went straight into the hand of the player who was holding the witness. Oh well.

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The annals of our first attempt at playing this game never made it to this 'ere blog, but after a couple of years, it was another game that deserved a second chance.

We could only squeeze in one game, and we only played on easy mode, but two people had never played before, and the other three of us had only played it once a very long time ago.

This resulted in an easy win, and we didn't take a single point of doom. There was definitely some luck involved though, as we got all of our predictions correct, even when we had a few numbers to choose from.

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This very fast card game was the next new game to hit the table.

In Game Of Thrones: Hand Of The King, players have to move the spy character along the columns and rows to gain the allegiance of different family members.

At the end of the game, whoever has the most influence with the most families wins.

In our case, my brother-in-law handily won both games.

I think we quite liked it for its simplicity and speed, but I'm wondering if it would play better at two players rather than four.

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Another long forgotten game got another chance on the tabletop, after we first played this thing back in September 2023.

It was a game I'd really been looking forward to playing again, as it's based on my favourite game from the Resident Evil franchise, in Resident Evil 2.

Now of course, after all this time, none of us could remember how to play. In addition, the rulebook is all over the place in how it presents its rules, so we were constantly finding new things that we were supposed to have been doing, but hadn't been.

Because of this, we made the game far easier on ourselves than it was supposed to be.

But at least by the end of it, we were able to figure it out.

Let's just hope it doesn't sit on the shelf for another 18 months until we whip it out again.