What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Michael Barnes wrote: Res Arcana is the best game of 2019 so far.

My partner and I have been playing this almost daily since I picked it up last month. It’s a great game.

I just wrapped up my first solo play of Brook City. I used only 1 cop, Morgan Hall (modeled after Dexter Morgan). Gus Ferguson's (Guy Fieri) Flavor Town drug gang was causing trouble in the city, and to make matters worse, The Syndicate kidnapped the Mayor's daughter! It's a good thing that Morgan is good at dealing with stress, because this was going to be tough.

Brook City is packed with references to past cop movies, television shows, and random internet memes. While that last part might make you groan, the meme stuff is fairly subtle, at least compared to the fact that one character is straight up Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon.

You run around town, busting criminals, gathering leads, and doing other stuff like running down hunches at City Hall. The game uses the Sadler brothers' multi-deck system from Street Masters, but instead of the "Stage" deck, you now have the "Case" deck. In my case, it was the kidnapped daughter of the Mayor. So the main criminal, Gus Ferguson, isn't really related to the case at hand. He's just another antagonist running around town causing trouble.

My cop was very good at keeping the drug dealers in line, and I impounded Gus' car a few times to slow him down while he made his pickups. You pretty much have to keep dealing with the criminals in order to gain hunches that you can use towards the real case at hand. I was able to get intel at City Hall on the whereabouts of the Mayor's daughter, and eventually was able to rescue her, having only slightly misinterpreted a couple of rules. I honestly can't say if my misinterpretations made things harder or easier.

Based on this play, I think this game is really cool, and the setting certainly makes it stand out. I think the system will scale well with more players, too. Being able to police your own quadrant of the city, for example, would make things much more efficient. Of course, with more cops comes more criminals.

Production is top notch. Black List Games knows how to run a Kickstarter, has great communication, and delivered it early! Other companies could learn a thing or two from them. One area in which they could improve is packaging... they seem to go overboard on box size, mainly with respect to expansion boxes being way bigger than necessary.

There is an expansion that I didn't pledge for, but will probably track down, from the one and only Steve Avery.

At home

Popped over to see a friend who likes to use me as a test bed for his collecting habit. Tried out Getaway Driver which has an enticing Italian Job-esque look to it (Caine not Wahlberg, of course). One player is trying to escape the city in a getaway car whilst their opponent chases them down with the police, tiles are laid and cards are used to spoil game effects or create mischief along the way. It looks very nice and has this thing where the action cards are all movie stunt-driving, where you can jump over a bridge or go up on two wheels as you careen down an alleyway. The game itself is however quite functional. It’s one of those games where you can always get out of predicaments until the last few minutes which is where everything is really decided. It was okay but only delivered a fraction of its initial promise, and where I wanted to have 60s crime-caper thrills I instead contended with procedural endgame positioning.

Then we payed Guardians which was like a grown up take on Smash Up with a hint of Call of Cthulu CCG in there. Each player has three dudes and you mix up their decks of cards with some standard starter cards. Assign them to locations and use actions to move, fight or play cards, move a control marker based on dominance and win locations to gain VP. Along the way you charge up a big single-use superpower for each of your soldiers and there are plenty of card combos firing off all over the place. It’s fairly complex with options that can suddenly swing control of a location into a win if played the right way and as a result there were plenty of moments where we completely froze up trying to figure out how to thread the needle. I like it but I think I’d rather be playing faster and looser with Smash Up for this sort of thing. Although we played it two-player it can go up to four which I can only imagine as being a mind-mangling mess, however there are characters in the game that will clearly be more powerful/usable with more players – no claims here about balance though as I’ve not played enough to have a full opinion.

Finished with some more Res Arcana. Turns out I must not be one of the Kewl Kids after all because I don’t get the attraction with this one. At its heart it’s a resource gathering game where you use those resources to either buy victory points or things that make your resources worth victory points. It’s a straight race so the player who most efficiently generates resources gets to the victory threshold first. This occasion was no different from previous plays; I had what was quite a nifty combo of making black tokens and then spamming them through a machine with some cards that allowed me to convert them into green and then eventually multiply them back into black. So I bought the special tile that turns black into VP and would have won except that my opponent was making blue and green slightly faster and hit ten points the turn before I was about to do so. I dunno, it’s fairly fun to play I just feel that it does a good job of making itself look bigger than it is and lacks any really interesting decisions beyond the draft phase. Every game so far has been a few minutes of fun followed by up to an hour of rote and inevitable activity.

Also recently picked up Star Wars Rebellion as I think that the youngling is ready to join the academy, we’re a couple of games in but will talk about it when we’ve played some more. So far we like it, and like it a lot.


At the club

San Juan which I will take any day over any one of the derivates that it spawned in its wake, more Hellapagos wherein I shot someone only to see them resurrected from the dead and then they promptly died again from starvation anyway, and El Dorado where my usual dawdling and potential-building approach sparked too late and I got caught up a few steps behind the winner (but really more than a couple of hands behind as I just didn’t have the right mix of cards coming up).

Main event was Flamme Rouge with four, a nice change as we usually have a full table of six or fold in a couple of the bots and so this allowed us to play one of the four-player tracks that we haven’t seen for a while. We chose a punishing TDF trial that featured a short hop between two steep hills and a long flat finish at the end that would be punishing for exhausted riders. We were playing with Meteo included and the difficult valley pass was made worse with the slippery road that causes riders to crash. Given this challenge I made sure to get out into an early lead with my Rouleur while my Sprinteur stayed well out of the way and held his 9 cards in reserve for a sprint finish. Some caginess at the back resulted in a long drawn out peloton and quite a bit of slipstreaming which would eventually prove pivotal at the end. Everybody came out of the final uphill stretch low on energy and yet, despite having a deck that was by now around two thirds exhaustion, I remained at the front. There was however just enough left in the tank for two of the opposing Roulers, who had spent most of the race slipstreaming at the back, to move up and just pip me across the line. My Sprinteur made a valiant finish but due to coming up from behind he was stymied by the two Rouleurs and ended up in third place instead of what would have been first but for the subtle change in player order.

Maybe I'm arguing semantics, but I wouldn't call Res Arcana a resource gathering game at its heart. I think the core of Res Arcana is engine building. There's a difference there in feel, and I think it's substantial. For instance, I can say the core of Stone Age is resource gathering (or any worker placement), but that doesn't accurately capture the same excitement of RA.

The engine building is important because the combos feel powerful and gratifying. The game succeeds because it gives you a spread of abilities and asks you to solve the problem and be creative with those powers. Its short length and quick payout ties it all together and completes the picture.

It's very similar to Jump Drive IMO in that it hits a really enjoyable engine builder feel with minimal time investment.

I agree that it is about engine building, but I feel that all of the engine building is done during the draft. After which... you run program and gather resources. Maybe I'm giving it short shrift because it just doesn't jive with me, but it's also cool that so many other people are enjoying it.

Thanks for both of your inputs. I admit that in just having seen and read reviews of Res Arcana, I'm not as excited about it as many seem to be around here, because it does just strike me as another engine building game, even if those engines are varied by the powers that the cards grant. I admit that I like the concept of weighing when to give up those powers with scoring points (when the location tiles take away your card abilities) but that just seems like another wrinkle on a very familiar model. The short game time is another interesting factor, as most engine builders take a fair amount of time, but that's also not a particular selling point to me, since I'm generally unconcerned about time length.

mezike wrote: I agree that it is about engine building, but I feel that all of the engine building is done during the draft. After which... you run program and gather resources. Maybe I'm giving it short shrift because it just doesn't jive with me, but it's also cool that so many other people are enjoying it.

Interesting because, from what I've gathered, most people don't actually use the draft (that's actually a variant). Without the draft, it's very much about figuring out how to use what you've been given. To me, it feels like there's a ton of options due to being able to discard cards for resources, as well as choosing which effects to trigger and when to scoop resources off cards. Timing also seems very important. It's not just about getting your entire deck out, but timing when to play which cards and which cards to discard or permanently keep in your deck.

Last night I played Nemo's War and I won!

wait, let me try that again

Last night I played Nemo's War and I succeeded!

wait no

Last night I played Nemo's War and I got to the finale!

Finally made it through (on the babiest of baby levels) to the bitter end without getting overrun by the imperialists. I was playing Explore motive, Sailor difficulty. Along the way I did a good amount of liberation and discovery, and I got an idea towards the balance I need to strike in sinking ships and not sinking ships.

My final score was 206, which puts me in the category of.....Failure. What the hell, Nemo's War???

Gonna try again with a different motive, though I should work some more on Explore now that I think I have a bit of a handle on it.

Thanks again to Barnes for giving up this copy!

My weekly Jyhad group has become unreliable lately, with a good turnout maybe one out of every three weeks. Sometimes the weather has been too harsh and people didn't want to make the drive on a weeknight. More recently, the weather has been too nice, and people wanted to do other stuff instead of playing cards in a large windowless room at the FFG Event Center.

So on the off weeks when we only have 3 players, we have been playing Shadowfist. It's one of the best multi-player CCGs ever, and the setting is a wild mix of Hong Kong action movies, science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and alternate reality weirdness. You may have heard that the design of Magic: the Gathering was influenced by Cosmic Encounter and Wiz-War. Well, the design of Shadowfist was influence by Cosmic Encounter and Magic. It's like a Magic variant where there is less mana but you can bank it from turn to turn, and everybody is fighting over the mana-generating cards.

The large original base set was over 400 cards and featured five factions plus a couple of characters from two more factions that were released in the first expansion. That base set was pretty well designed with flexible common cards that had a variety of applications in combos and tactical situations. As in Cosmic, it is common practice to invite allies to join either the attack or defense of a site, though it is nearly impossible for more than one player to win a game of Shadowfist. Although I prefer a more lively multi-player game with maybe five players, Shadowfist plays really well even with three players. Some heretics swear by two-player Shadowfist, but they are wrong.

Yeah, good luck with Nemo's War. I've yet to do better then failing in my 3 attempts, and that's usually with forgetting the rule that ANY task is harder when sharing a space with a warship. I'll give that game a few more tries, but it's more frustrating then fun. At least when I get destroyed in Last Frontier: The Vesuvius Incident I have a fun story to tell.

cdennett wrote: Yeah, good luck with Nemo's War. I've yet to do better then failing in my 3 attempts, and that's usually with forgetting the rule that ANY task is harder when sharing a space with a warship. I'll give that game a few more tries, but it's more frustrating then fun. At least when I get destroyed in Last Frontier: The Vesuvius Incident I have a fun story to tell.

Thanks for mentioning Vesuvius. My copy has gotten dusty in the last two years and totally deserves more table time.

Man ive almost bought The Artifact so many times, but you wanna talk something that's never getting to the table. It sounds bonkers though and I definitely want to try it.

It would have the side affect of getting me a copy of Last Frontier though.

You always make me so intrigued Shellhead!

VTES is actually seeing a fair amount of play around here. Local shops have the new preconstructed decks and I see people buying them or playing. I think that's pretty cool.

I now have 250 games of Legend of the Five Rings under my belt. It's a brutal amount because I've been playing for less than two months. I actually bought most of my collection earlier this month and got the two newly released packs today. The game has improved a lot with additional plays and I'm much more positive about it.

First, while the game is punishing and it has some balance issues, I think the game is in a solid position right now. Phoenix should be taken down a peg and Lion needs help but the rest of the clans are in a very good position right now. The release of the Unicorn pack, for example, should push Unicorn quite a bit. I must admit that moving to that clan and playing Lion less has helped me have more fun.

A new Restricted List will be released on Monday, which is great, too.

Having more experience with the game has also made it faster and less tiring. This is a very involved game and doesn't led itself to the quick succession of matches of other games. There's also a noticiable skill gap between me and my opponents and I've mostly played online, which has made the learning more difficult. But I'm really enjoying learning and getting better and getting beat by someone much better than me. It's a very fun game.

Erik, as an experienced Magic player who is also familiar with Cosmic Encounter, it would take you less than five minutes to learn how to play Shadowfist. But availability of cards and opponents would be a hassle in your area.

Tabletop Day game day today! Played a bunch of good stuff.

Hoity Toity x2
High Society
Cave Troll
Hellapagos x2
Dungeonquest
Pocket Mars
Northern Pacific
Divinity Derby

Pocket Mars was a play to win game that someone else wanted to play. It was garbage. Thankfully it was only 20 minutes. Id describe it more but it's not even worth it.

Divinity Derby was exactly what I hoped it would be. Great clever betting/racing game. Thanks for the discount dive write-up on here for pushing me over into getting it! Not sure I care about playing with the special god powers, but just the base game was cracking.