We’ve been playing a bunch of Space Base. We worked our way through the Shy Pluto expansion, which is a narrative campaign that unlocks a bunch of stuff that changes the game, and we’re now on our way through Terra Proxima, which is the second, similar expansion. It’s neat – there’s enough complexity to keep the game interesting over many sessions, yet it doesn’t garble up the strategy so completely that you don’t feel like you’re ever getting better.

Sessions are short enough that even if you never really “take off” with your engine, that’s alright – there’ll be another game, and this one will be over soon. It’s been really enjoyable – the kids have pulled off some pretty epic rounds – J’s won most of the games, but K’s pulled off some pretty wild moves (including a dominant win yesterday by completely taking over one of the new mechanics) as well, and so each game’s been competitive and fun.

The expansions are just about the right length – six to eight sessions for a box, which ends up being about two weeks, roughly, for us.

While Ei-Nyung was traveling, we also played a few days of Earthborne Rangers. I think we had enough trouble really wrapping our head around the rules that the first few sessions were a bit of a struggle, and so we didn’t end up making a ton of actual progress. I think it’s got huge potential, and I am excited to try it again, but I think it’s something J will tolerate, but K’s been a little bored by. Still, I want to get a better sense of the narrative – the world is interesting, and I think the difficulty with the mechanics comes from the way they’re designed to accommodate a pretty broad set of events. So I want to see some of those events – we already did some pretty weird stuff, like diving into an underwater bubble-laboratory, where we got a quest to explore a bunch of arcology ruins. So yeah – I want to see more, but I think it will have a little inertia to overcome.

My guess is after Space Base, we’ll give Clank: Legacy a shot.