Was reading up on Race to the Raft just a few minutes ago. Didn’t realize that it plays so quick, that’s great to hear!

It depends, I get some games right away, others can be a struggle. It’s such a great feeling when a difficult one finally “clicks” though!
In general I try to take advantage of all available tools:

• Rulebooks of course, both printed and PDFs. I have about 15GB of rulebook PDFs at this point. Being able to do a text search in the rulebook can be invaluable so when a PDF is image-only with no searchable text I run it through an OCR tool like ocrmypdf to (hopefully) fix it up.
• How-to-play videos. We had a thread listing some good channels earlier.
• A good digital implementation can be extremely helpful, especially the ones that preserve the “interface” of the game like BGA and Yucata usually do. When available I always try these even if I plan to play mostly in person because it’s a great way to make sure that I got the rules right. With new games I take it slow and make sure that I understand everything that happes. When I want to experiment I sometimes play hotseat with myself.
• That reminds me, playing a game against myself on the table can be very helpful too to make sure that I am solid before I try to teach it.
• Also, this might sound obvious but just unboxing and organizing the game and getting familiar with the components can give a great headstart before getting started with the rules.
• BGG forums for the game, especially the rules sub-forums. The Files section can have helpful extra material too like FAQs, teaching guides or player aids.
• A good podcast episode like the Decision Space deep dives can be helpful too or at least get me excited about learning the game.
• I sometimes make setup and rule summaries. Just writing these down can help to clear things up in my head. Wrote about this in another thread earlier today.

I love small, short games, too many favorites to choose from! So instead of all of those I will mention Khôra which is not small but every time we play it surprises me how quickly it goes. The box says 75 minutes but it’s more like 25 or maybe even less.

Example summary for Tiletum:

setup

• board:
  • populate action wheel with action tiles (optional) and bonus tiles
  • 3 bonus tiles for king track (no tile for last round)
  • bonus tiles for map spots based on player count
  • town and fair tiles on track, fair order marker on the picked towns
  • cathedral tiles and random build reqs. Remove unavail cathedral
  • contract and character markets
  • 10 dice in bag (2p)
• players:
  • markers on score track, turn order track, king track (p1 on bottom!)
  • place houses and pillars on their spots. There should be 2 of each left for each player as their available supply
  • 1 of each resource
  • 1 gold for p1, 3 gold for p2

play

• prep: draw, roll and place 8 dice (2p)
• action:
  • p1 flips and applies corruption token
  • dice values +/- for 2 gold. affects action and # resources
  • pick die, get bonus tile and resources, perform action
• king: points, bonus tile, player order. bottom wins tie. from negative snap to 0 after
• fair: merchant or house in town to qualify
• cleanup: refill wheel tiles, rotate wheel

Tasks (free actions) at any time:

• gain a resource for 2 gold
• fulfill contract
• place crest (food cost). Apply bonuses
• build cathedral (only 1 of each type!)
• use helper tiles from storehouse

Important:

• many house spots are only for higher player counts. With 2p there is at most 1 spot in each city
• some house spots have bonuses
• players can only get 1 cathedral piece per type!

(should add a section about scoring too)

The app version is a good way to learn it too, it has a tutorial and various solo and multi-player modes.

Radlands is a 2-player only card battler. You fight in multiple lanes and try to destroy each other bases. The cards have relatively simple abilities that can combo together and you can also use them for discard effects. Water is a resource used to pay for playing cards, managing your water and your card draws is very important. Cool art, good card quality, not too expensive.

Don’t know about specific sales but the Hot Deals - EU sub-forum on BGG might be worth checking out. There is also TableTopFinder for checking prices of specific games.

If you like Splendor and often play at 2 then Splendor Duel is definitely worth checking out. The new draft and new win conditions change things up quite a bit. I still like to go back to regular Splendor too though when I am in the mood for that pure Splendor goodness.

NerdzDay is an annual sales even by Gamenerdz, a US online retailer. It’s very popular because they often include some very good deals and the store has a relatively low free-shipping threshold and an easy to use customer hold option (which means that they can can hold your orders until you pile up enough to qualify for the free shipping)

I am jealous, mine are still sitting in the queue. Last year it took almost a month.
Which day were you able to release the holds?

For impulse, I will guess some of the smaller ones since we tend to take more risks with those. Canvas and Radlands perhaps? (Both of those are great btw) And maybe Splendor Duel, guessing you already had regular Splendor so you were hesitant about getting Duel too.

I don’t have any great advice but I am curious about your partner’s feedback, what is it that they dislike about the game? Is it this game in particular or card battlers in general?

Thankfully it seems like a relatively boring week, I can focus on playing instead of FOMO-ing.

That’s a lot of plays! How many of the games were new to you?

BTW, how about creating a weekly deals thread? Similar to the weekly recap one. There is !boardgamedeals@lemmy.world but it’s pretty dead. Maybe it would get more eyeballs as a regular thread over here.

Worth noting that for those who are not in a rush that you will probably be able to find a much better deal if you are willing to wait.

Agreed about Sea Salt & Paper, very fun and addictive! Cabo used to fill that spot for us but Sea Salt is even better.

There is also the most recent one: GWT: New Zealand. All of them are standalone and share a lot with the base game but add their own twists.

I have Living Forest on the table. My partner also asked for The Taverns of Tiefenthal which I still like more and more after every play so I am happy to oblige. But we change our minds all the time so will have to see.

Edit: won the Living Forest game with Lotus points, I think that’s my favorite way to win. Love building up to that “this time I’m gonna get the 12” turn.

That’s a great pick! Yeah, it will be definitely interesting and green :)

Agreed about Inis and Cairn is decent too but it’s still a small sample size. Will have to see how Galactic Renaissance turns out.

My picks: On the lighter side Phil Walker-Harding. The game might be end up being light but it will be very likely enjoyable. On the mid-weight side it’s probably Simone Luciani or Daniele Tascini or possibly someone else from the Italian-style euro designer group (T-series, Grand Austria Hotel etc). I’ve liked pretty much everything I’ve tried from them so far.