Water month is continuing along nicely.
Let me speak briefly about Beacon Patrol, because it wasn't new to us. We did play with the Ships and Shores expansion which adds several unique boats with special powers and scoring conditions. We don't own Carcassonne anymore (though we do have Mists Over Carcassonne) but this scratches a very similar tile placing itch, just cooperatively. The goal is to enclose lighthouses, buoys, and whatever your specific special tiles are (if you play with the expansion.) You can only place adjacent to your boat and you have limited movement points to reposition yourself with. It's fun. We're bad at it.
Aquasphere is a Feld game from 2014, that we've had but hadn't played. Water month offered the perfect opportunity to get it to the table. It's an interesting Feld designs, with several interlocking actions that support but also confine each other. It's a programming game of sorts, where you have two the three options for actions to program your bots to perform. Without research cards, you get a maximum of four programmable actions a round and that's only if you have the time to spend on that fourth. There are certain actions that earn you points during the round and some things that only score between rounds. That brings us to an interesting mechanism, the red lines on the score track that you have to spend crystals to move past. If you don't have a crystal, you're throwing away any points beyond that line. But crystals are hard to come by. Only through programming a bot (or having a particular research card) can you get them. Similarly, you only score bots up to your furthest deployed sub, but you have to program a bot and have the required time to deploy a sub. You need to plan your actions and your rounds thoughtfully to ensure you don't leave points on the table. It's a clever puzzle that we really started getting into after the first round.
