What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Got it on this weekend. The most gaming I've done with my wife for about two years.

Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age I hear that this past year has been some sort of renaissance for the roll-and-write genre, but I can't ever see getting into it so long as my wife loves this so much. I won the first match on seven dice, scoring 51 before being dragged back down to 36 by disasters. I won the second match on just three dice, just kept banging out those coin dice. I finally lost a close one in the third by splitting the difference and trying some developments I never buy.

Hanabi We scored 23 points but legitimately could have scored 25 if I hadn't tossed the second white four halfway through the game. We finished the last possible set with four cards left in the deck and the white five in hand. Bummer.

Harry Potter TCG Three matches. Rush Madam Hooch jumped out to a strong start but ran out of gas as Core Hermione belted her with big potions. Core Hermione took the second game as well but against Professor McGonagall and her flock of owls. Probably could have won it, but I was too afraid of my wife's wrath if I bounced all of her remaining lessons and resources to hand. Finished it up with a McGonagall mirror. One was lightly based on the GenCon winning deck from 2016. One was my theme owl deck. The GenCon deck won.

Still happy with this game. Out of one box of each of the expansions and a handful of single packs, I have nine premade decks that I'm reasonably content with. Might order a handful of commons and uncommons to fill in the corners of a few decks, but feels like a good value right now.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game In the spirit of the Nightmare decks for the Lord of the Rings LCG, Fantasy Flight has begun releasing Return to... sets for the earlier Arkham campaigns, a chance for the designer to revisit older scenarios and cards to add variety, fix player exploits and change up a few NPE opportunities.

We went back to Dunwich for the first time since we bought it. Our Roland and Agnes team is pretty powerful to start, but it's still impressive what two more years of cards has done for our decks. Two of the three scenarios we played were still tight at the end but dealing with the challenges the encounter deck threw at us felt a lot smoother.

I have started my bi-annual process of wanting to play Mage Knight again, which of course means a total manual re-read.

I got Shades of Tezla for Christmas, so there's a new, smaller manual to read for the first time as well.

I love this game, but it will always be one of those games that takes a week of prep just to play once every two years. Duel of Ages II is like this for me as well, but both games are just so singular and cool; I can't imagine getting rid of them.

Sunday rolled around and the daughter's boyfriend shows up with his friend in tow AND a third friend. My daughter marches them all in and declares "We're here for Kemet" I set them up for King of Tokyo while I finished up some real life stuff. Then sat down to teach a table full of loud, teenage boys how to play Kemet. (Well, two of them. Daughter and boyfriend know how to play). 5 player teaching game. I managed to teach it quite well between all the loud jokes but, I will admit, I gave into the desire to romp the trash talking little suckers. Smiled at my daughter trash talking them for not having their turns planned out far in advance. I pulled my infamous scorpion in day phase 2 move to the horror of the boys, making me the big bad. The game ended 2+ hours later with me having 9 VP after they took their eyes from me to stop my daughter from winning earlier in that day phase. Total blast of a game. The kids then proceeded to play tournament at Camelot and Carthage. I think I just kinda turned the D&D "nerd herd" into board gamers.

I like the declaration: "We're here for Kemet."

"We will brook no argument. Resistance is futile. You will play, scorpion-man, or you will pay."

Alternatively, you have the Blues Brothers:

"Hey. How much for the Kemet? Eh?" [waves toward the boxes] "How much for the Cyclades?"

Jackwraith wrote: I like the declaration: "We're here for Kemet."

"We will brook no argument. Resistance is futile. You will play, scorpion-man, or you will pay."

Alternatively, you have the Blues Brothers:

"Hey. How much for the Kemet? Eh?" [waves toward the boxes] "How much for the Cyclades?"

My wife was like "That was a dream come true for you, wasn't it?"
Kind of was, never had a pre planned 5 player round of my favorite game march up and demand to be played...and I didn't need to leave the house.

This weekend I was in a group of 8 for a birthday outing, and we did an escape room in a mall in Nashville. This was the best and most high-tech escape room I have ever done. It was highly enjoyable, and we beat it with 9 minutes to spare. Beating it, in this case, meant that we stopped a nuclear missile from launching.

BUT.....

It served to reinforce something about escape rooms that has always nagged me. Every time I do one, I feel like I had a good time, but I also feel like I read part of a book. People spread out and work on separate things; this is by design and generally mandatory, due to the time constraints. There were large swaths of the escape room that I literally never experienced. The parts I did experience, I experienced partially. I think part of this was that 5 to 6 players would be the sweet spot for this 8 player room, but it's also the fundamental way that these games are set up.

They aren't re-playable, but they ARE, in the sense that no one will witness more than 40% of the escape room.

So I've been playing a lot of Legends of the Five Rings online and I think I've finally got it. And it's a lot of fun. Much more fun than I was expecting. It's a heavier game than the average CCG/LCG but very well-made. As you know, I wasn't sure if I really wanted to get into this but now I'm sure I do.

I think heavy is the right way to define this game. It's complex (two decks, your troops get discarded after X turns, 5 rings) but it's not really difficult because there's much to keep track of, but because it's not obvious where you made a mistake nor is there a clear fool-proof strategy to pursuit (Like, "attack with your creatures" or "make runs"). Very interesting.

Learning to play it online was a mistake. The main reason is that you don't have someone to tell you "hey, don't do that" or "put less fate on that character" or any other basic tips.

I should give the FFG version of L5R a chance. I love the Rokugan setting, and I ran an L5R rpg campaign that lasted 3.5 years. I liked the card game, too, but not enough to keep up with the expensive churn of expansions, base sets, and editions. The new version looks like more of a tactical game than deck designing game, which I find appealing.

Finally gave up on my so-called "regulars" and went out to the weekly gathering of boardgamers at one of the FLGSs. It's Wednesday from 6-9 (when the store closes) so it puts kind of a limit on what can be played, but that just means playing a greater variety of shorter games. I met 4 other people there who were regulars (I know the shop and some of the staff, but don't spend a lot of time there, because it's mostly an MTG locus) and had brought a stack of games in a drum kit bag that I found on Amazon for $20; perfect for modern box sizes and of which you can unzip one panel to let everyone see the whole stack and pick one.

We started with Pandemic: Fall of Rome, which isn't mine but was brought by one of the other people and which I'd never played before. I've had it on my trade list in recent months... and it won't be staying there. The descriptions I read sounded cool (Rome!) and I even watched someone's demo video and it still looked cool. I mean, it couldn't just be Pandemic with all that other stuff thrown in (recruiting barbarians, event cards, different ways to spread), right? Wrong. It's still Pandemic. It was OK, but I've been there and done that. No, thanks.

Then we moved on to a game of Villainous. There were 5 of us, so we played everyone but Ursula. I ended up with Captain Hook, whom I hadn't played before. It was a pretty engaging game as everyone learned their characters and figured out who were good targets to Fate and when people were getting close. The Queen had two wickets and two guards out when I played the Cheshire Cat on her and converted her wickets back to guards. Maleficent was stuck with both the King and Merryweather on her board for a while. Prince John wasn't getting attacked often enough to really make use of his warrants. And Jafar had a whole tableau of items and the Genie out, but took a while to find a Hypnotize. In my case, Peter Pan was the last card in my Fate deck. Sigh. I easily could have won if he'd shown up a few turns earlier. As it was, I was still two turns from moving him far enough when Maleficent started her turn with four curses in play and took the game just as they kicked us out. Was still a great game, though, and I've finally found a group of people that actually appreciated it. Stoked for the expansion next month.

The other night I got to try Root and the hype seems to be real. We used the scripted first turns, and it was a great way of learning the game. I had the birds of The Eyrie and soon had a solid engine going and took the lead. But suddenly the little fucker of a raccoon swooped in and destroyed the roost I needed to build units and it all fell apart. I made an attempt at a comeback, but the raccoon managed to win a turn before I would have done it.

I absolutely love the assymetry of the game, and I can see how one would want to play it a lot. Especially because it's not as long as Chaos in the Old World. (No, they aren't the same, but the both have the assymetry and factions you want to try because they are quite different).

After that we played a quick game of Las Vegas - an old Knizia dice game that just delivers. In many ways the game doesn't give you a lot of options on your turn, but a couple of small twists make even small decisions fun.

Yesterday we played a Gloomhaven scenario. At first I wasn't all that impressed with the enemies - they all seemed sort of samey. But the last three or four scenarios have seen us hitting some interesting enemies that require different tactics or which can just plain throw a wrench in your engine.

We capped it off with Nexus Ops which I haven't played in years. It's as much fun as I remembered and I'm not going to wait ten years playing this again. That being said it feels like a filler game. I don't mean that as a bad thing, but I don't think I would meet up with the friends just to play Nexus.

Same. I like Nexus and will usually play it if offered, but it's not something I'm going to schedule a game night around. At this point, it is kind of a filler game because there are so many others of that type that are just more enticing.

Las Vegas is a Rudiger Dorn game, but I see why you think it's Knizia. Maybe that's why I like it so much. The decision point (singular) is consistently loads of fun.

Of course it is. But its simplicity coupled with the white dice and what they do feels a lot like Knizia.

Las Vegas is mainstream now and Target has a new version.

I finally got my copy of the new Claustrophobia to the table, and...I don't know. It's Claustrophobia, so it's one of the best games ever designed, so there's that.

Positives of the new edition:
-Instinct cards are excellent - certain lines of Hero activation give you these multi-use cards which let you change a die in the assignment phase or provide a small boost like +1 defense for the coming round, really like these as they change up your valuation of die assignment, perhaps taking a less desired stat line to get a card

-Re-worked demon board. Some may not agree, but I think the streamlining of powers is a positive, they removed ones that were never used and added a supplemental new power on each demon sheet, adding to scenario variety. I really like that last bit as it provides a different feel to the game depending on the demon, even if you don't have it summoned. I also really like how you can spend a die to partially charge a power and have it roll over to next round. This is much more elegant than triggering the power to give you another die on the following round, over and over again.

-The shift in demon dice to D3's that are colored. It's a simpler yet more nuanced result set (or at least it conveys that feel which is more important than reality maybe). It allows for powers to activate on different colored dice as well as total values (such as 8+) and is pretty neat.

-I think I prefer the new aesthetic. Maybe I'm lying to myself but I like the look of the tiles more, I love the box cover that's just art and no words, love the poses of the minis and artwork of characters. Not in love with the black and white frames on the hero/demon board but I also don't hate them.

-Tile variety. All of the old effects and abilities, plus a host of new ones. Dig this.

-A huge number of re-worked and new scenarios. This game feels like a complete game plus an expansion, they didn't skimp in this regard.

-Small potato but storage is excellent. Everything fits well and it's absolutely gorgeous as a product, reminds me of Mechs vs. Minions in this regard

Mixed On:
-Minis. They're far better sculpts but the loss of prepaints sucks. If they were painted they'd be much much better than the originals. The poses and character is much stronger here than in the base game. Not just with all of the demons but with the Western Warriors as well.

Bad:
-Iconography everywhere. An intuitive game is made less intuitive and it was slow going getting back into this game. The previous version had text everywhere so very little referencing of rules. I think they leaned too hard into making things multi-lingual and it hurts the process. The demon board in particular is much less intuitive. It makes no sense the cost to summon things is not listed on their boards. The iconography is also far too small, if you have trouble reading small text you will be very annoyed at the little numbers.

-Lack of a player aid. There are more tiles and more variety (awesome), but you have to constantly look in the back of the manual to reference what they do.

-Table space is worse. The player boards are much bigger and it just eats up the table for a 2 player game. This isn't a real problem for me but worth mentioning.

-The rules suck. As someone who knew the rules of the game this wasn't really a problem, but someone who has never played this will struggle mightily. It feels like it was translated by someone who is not a poor translator but simply isn't familiar with gaming or this particular game, it uses very many precise phrases when it should be much more conversational. The ways in which it's pedantic result in odd interpretations and people overthinking several things.

All that out of the way, we played the first scenario and I died miserably as the warriors. Totally a blast and still absolutely love the game. I was being very critical of the new version as we played but once that started to fade I had a great time. I'm not sure I made the right decision in selling my old copy and backing this one, as I think overall it may be a push. Do love the instinct cards though.


Other stuff. We also pulled out Catacombs which had been awhile. Man, this game is awesome but it can be a bitch to set up once you've added a couple of expansions. So many decks and enemies and discs. We had a great time though and lost in the final room to the Orc War Chief. Had him down to 2 health at the end. Rust Monsters from the Cavern of Soloth expansion are the worst.

We closed on Flip Ships which I enjoy, but still don't exactly love. Need to think a little more on it and figure out why.



EDIT - Oh, we also played Victorian Masterminds, the new CMON game from Bauza and Lang. It's a worker placement thing where you're collecting parts and scientists to build a doomsday device. It's actually pretty neat as it has a StarCraft-like thing where you place your workers facedown on a space and on top of previously placed pieces.

Unlike StarCraft these trigger when three have been placed, the stack is flipped and it's first in first out. You all gain the resource on the space but each worker also has a special effect such as 2x the resource, destroy a building in the area, or sabotage the disc placed directly after yours (they don't get their ability).

I enjoyed how you gained special powers and benefits as yous lowly built your doomsday device, and the game was breezy as hell. No rounds, just keep placing discs and triggering stuff. For a worker placement game I actually really dug it. A decent amount of drama and chaos due to that disc system, a faint yet still neat theme, and a constant forward momentum. It's barely above gateway weight so it's not a mental grind or taxing either. I almost suggested we play it again immediately after.

On the other hand, I initially forgot to include it in my post, which may say something as well.

Reading your overview, I’m glad I didn’t back the new Claustrophobia and kept my original edition , but it sounds like they could have done the changes to the player boards (the only significant change) in a $20 expansion instead of redoing everything.