Gaming Recap - Honey Buzz, Paladins of the West Kingdom, and Titans

 Gaming Recap - Honey Buzz, Paladins of the West Kingdom, and Titans

Had a real productive day that I'm excited to share with y'all! My buddy Chad and I regularly chat (probably daily) about games - games we've purchased or played recently, that we've got on our lists, etc. These conversations far exceed the time I'm able to set aside for games. But my wife was good enough to tell me I should just go play games for as long as I like to recharge my batteries, so I took her up on that and met Chad at Game Nite (one of our Friendly Local Game Stores - FLGS) to get into some stuff! Normally, we'd play at his home or mine because I really only go to game stores to either make a purchase or play Armada. I rarely go to a game store to play a board game I can just as easily (or more easily) play at home. But Game Nite worked out as a middle point for us, afforded us plenty of space to spread out, and really worked to my benefit because I snagged the last copy of the newest expansion for Quacks of Quedlinburg! I didn't even know there was a new one! It's also worth noting this is the second time I've pulled something out from underneath Chad, beating him to the purchase by maybe an hour (the first time was getting the first copy of Beyond the Sun when it became really damn hard to find).

So we set up Titans, as that's a game on Chad's list and sounded really cool to me. Basically, it's an area control game for 2-4 players in which each player controls an army of units as well as a Titan associated with your faction. The minis look terrific, so yeah, we were both excited to get into this!

I had told Chad I really wanted to play Honey Buzz at some point, so he suggested teaching it to me so I could decide whether or not I want to buy my own copy when it's finally available again. Also, it must have been 2.5 or 3 years ago that we had a conversation (one of many) admit game mechanics in which I mentioned that my favorite mechanic is probably worker placement. He told me that if I like worker placement games, Paladins of the West Kingdom is an absolute necessity. I bought the game, and it promptly sat on my shelf. I broke it out during the pandemic to read through the rules and try to learn it solo the way I had with other games. However, I quickly became overwhelmed and put it away. So we finally broke this one out so I could learn it!

This worked out pretty well, as Chad's wife, Lisa, loves Honey Buzz and was able to swing by the store just as we finished setting up Titans. Plenty of space meant leaving Titans set up and ready to play as soon as we were done playing Honey Buzz and Paladins with Lisa. Sometimes we game efficiently. NBD.

The first thing that likely jumps out at everyone about Honey Buzz is that it's adorable. The art is fun, the components all fit the theme and tell the players that this will be a fun experience. And the game delivers on that promise. It has a high ranking on BGG, and for good reason. Basically, each player is forging a beehive through pattern building so that nectar can be cultivated and honey sold to bears and other wildlife at the market. Again, it's just sickeningly cute and I love it. There's some worker placement involved too as players send their cute little Beeples (thanks, Lisa!) off on different errands. Chad is quite good at teaching games, but this one is also easy to learn, but with plenty of game play depth to explore.

It was a lot of fun, but I can absolutely see where I made mistakes that kept me from getting any closer to Chad by the end of the game (but on the plus side, I did beat Lisa! The final score was Chad with 174, me with 103, and Lisa with 94. So kind of a big gap between the leader and the rest of us...). My biggest mistake was not building my honeycombs in such a way that I could maximize my Produce actions (in which I produce nectar), as I was only getting 1-2 Nectar each time instead of the 2-3 I needed to get to stay competitive. Additionally, I missed out on hitting the market as often as Chad and Lisa did. I was so focused on filling orders (which did get me big points and extra actions!) that I didn't take advantage of selling nectar and pollen as often as I should have in order to beef up my score a little more. Overall, though, it was a really enjoyable game, and I'm really looking to playing it again soon!

After we finished Honey Buzz, Lisa decided to stick around to play Paladins of the West Kingdom with us, so she began setting that up while Chad and I packed up Honey Buzz. Again: efficiency is the name of this game. I was really looking forward to learning this one. My friend had mentioned that he had tried every other West Kingdom game, and Paladins was still absolutely his favorite. It's a high bar, and I was just hopeful that Paladins would clear it. So we got into it. This is another game that's got a high ranking on BGG, and every decimal of its score is earned. It's a worker placement and the player with the most VPs at the end of the game is the winner. It sounds pretty standard, but the game absolutely does not feel standard. There is so much to do, and workers are placed on your own board, so it rarely feels as though a player cannot take the action they want to take because it is blocked. There is a market, as well as mercenaries who can be converted for points and effects, and these are places where players can block one another's intended moves. But otherwise, each player is operating on their own board for the most part. Therefore, it's not entirely an invalid complaint that it may feel as though it's a big game of solitaire.

There's an element of that, but to be honest, it felt like there was so much going on that I was invested in the game the entire way through. If we didn't plan on playing Titans next, I absolutely would've been happy to take several minutes to reset the game and play again now that I had a better handle on it. To me, that speaks volumes. Especially given the length of the game. It's supposed to run 90-120 minutes, and I was still ready to get right back to it after a bathroom break and short debrief. When I play a game like this for the first time, I often do one of two things: I either try to be jack of all trades and end up being master of none, or I focus too hard in one area, neglect a couple of others, and can't catch up. There's a balance to the game that needs to be observed, but will require a couple of plays (for me, anyway) to really chase effectively. I cleared the entire Development track and did a lot of Conversion, netting me as many of those cards as I could get. I was able to leverage most of the bonuses they granted, but missed two big ones. I also went in on Criminals hard, basically committing to them every turn. Mainly because I started with a card that allowed me to deal with the suspicion fallout of using them so frequently. By the end of the game, though, I had to spend my final round (and probably half of the round before that) trying to increase my attributes in order to accomplish goals because I hadn't taken a more balanced approach to hit those milestones organically throughout the course of the game. I came in second with 51 points. Chad won again, this time with 60 points, and Lisa came in third with 31. So, not bad for my first time! I expect my next couple of plays will see lower scores as I start to feel as though I've got a handle on the game and attempt to play it better, but we'll see what happens after that!

Lisa had to head home to take care of their most excellent dog, so it was finally time for us to get into Titans! We had discussed a bunch of the rules, the very impressive minis were set up, and the decks were shuffled and distributed appropriately. We were pretty sure, anyway.

So we sat down, covered a couple more things, and started to play. Aaaaaaand almost right away, we found ourselves struggling with the iconography. Some of it made a sort of intuitive sense, and some of it just wasn't even in the ballpark. We were able to look some of it up, but some of it wasn't mentioned in any one of the 6 or 7 rule books we looked through. We're both pretty experienced with games and can often piece things together when a rule book is unclear or omits something we've run across. But after exhausting the rule books and conversation, we turned on our Google machines and looked up the iconography. But the game is really new, apparently, and we just couldn't find any answers to our questions. While looking it up, I realized that while the game has a substantial rating on BGG, it's also got a relatively low number of folks who have rated it. We did manage to figure this stuff out, but by that time, our enthusiasm for the game had somewhat dimmed. And then Chad and I started battling it out, and I very quickly started losing. Not units, but battles. So I was forced onto my back foot and just never recovered. Then he took down my Titan, and we agreed there was no real way back for me. He had something like 8 or 9 victory points already to my 2, and that gap was only going to grow. We decided to call it there. My first thought was that this game needs more than 2 players.

It just seems like one of those games wherein if one player gets the upper hand, it's hard for the other player to make any sort of comeback, since the first player is rewarded for continuing to grind opponents into the ground. But my second thought is that for all the bells and whistles, the way we issues Orders to our armies seemed cool at first, but really ended up feeling like a limiting factor in the game. It's true that players shouldn't get to do everything we want to do in a game because otherwise, there's no challenge. There should be tough choices. But I was stuck in a position for two turns where I wanted to move my Titan and my cavalry because that was the only way I could use the upgrades I had. And there simply was no way I could do that. I could move an Infantry and a Cavalry, or an Infantry and a Titan, or a Titan and my Artillery, but the only unit combination that could take advantage of my technology and cards was a combination I was unable to put together for two turns. And it's one thing if I screwed myself, but it's another if I'm trying to do a thing the game tells me I'm able to do, but then I'm stymied by the cards on the table to the point where everything in front of me amounts to a zero sum. We talked about trying it again with a higher player count, but honestly, we really weren't terribly excited about the prospect. So, that was Titans.

But 2 outta 3 ain't bad. I really liked Honey Buzz, and I enjoyed the hell out of Paladins of the West Kingdom, so I call the day a win!