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Mycelia Board Game Review

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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

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19 Aug 2019 16:18 #300915 by mc
Just on Sherlock Holmes, I believe there's one or two other cases with smaller errors in them. There are files available to download the pages that have the fixes thst you can just slot into the casebook. They did the whole page so you don't know which entry has the error if you don't look.worked okay for us on case three.
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19 Aug 2019 17:17 #300917 by Ah_Pook
my nephew and i tried out Horrified, which was pretty dang fun. we played vs 3 monsters and it was super easy, but thats okay. next time we'll ratchet it up to 4, but even with it being easy we both enjoyed it. doing cool monster impressions and "accidentally" siccing monsters on each other during the monster phase... good times. im not sure the legs itll have honestly, but im looking forward to trying out all the monster combinations, and seeing if it gets harder (ie hard at all even a little bit) with more or different ones. think this one will be a mainstay for Halloween gaming for the forseeable future, even if we dont end up playing it much outside of that.
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20 Aug 2019 08:29 #300931 by charlest
It's kind of crazy how different groups feel the game's difficulty is not at all similar. We actually lost at 3 monsters on our second play (won our first play with 2 monsters). I wonder if we were playing poorly or the monster combination was difficult.

Perhaps it's player count too as we played three player.
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20 Aug 2019 08:31 #300932 by edulis
One of the dad's in my 10 year old's 4H class asked me out of the blue if I play X-wing. He apparently saw me wearing an FFG t-shirt from my one visit to Worlds. We ended up meeting up and playing two games of X-wing and having a few beers. Both of us were pretty rusty, but it was fun.

Now the X-wing stuff is out on the table and the 10 year old and I are in the middle of a match. I am looking forward to the 2.0 huge ship rules that are due out this year.

Other than that a fair amount of Evolution. The kid has requested the flight expansion, anyone have an opinion on that?
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20 Aug 2019 09:17 #300934 by dysjunct

edulis wrote: One of the dad's in my 10 year old's 4H class asked me out of the blue if I play X-wing. He apparently saw me wearing an FFG t-shirt from my one visit to Worlds. We ended up meeting up and playing two games of X-wing and having a few beers. Both of us were pretty rusty, but it was fun.

Now the X-wing stuff is out on the table and the 10 year old and I are in the middle of a match. I am looking forward to the 2.0 huge ship rules that are due out this year.

Other than that a fair amount of Evolution. The kid has requested the flight expansion, anyone have an opinion on that?


FLIGHT is fine, more of the same to a decent game. PM me your address and I’ll mail you my copy — my base game is with a friend and I haven’t played in years.
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20 Aug 2019 10:24 #300940 by Sagrilarus
Made game night for the first time in weeks and got roped in to a Kickstarter title -- Nocturnium. Name makes no sense with the game but who cares. Solid mechanics with a couple of added flavors. A bit rough in a couple of places, giving it that Kickstarter not-quite-finished laquer that we've all come to recognize. I won. It was fine.

So the queation comes -- would I play it again? Sure. But GenCon just ended so there will be 20 titles like this on our table in the next three months. By December it will be just one more box on a very large shelf.
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20 Aug 2019 13:17 #300946 by Shellhead

Sagrilarus wrote: Made game night for the first time in weeks and got roped in to a Kickstarter title -- Nocturnium. Name makes no sense with the game but who cares.


BGG currently lists over 100,000 board games and expansions, so it seems likely that most of the good names have already been taken.

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20 Aug 2019 13:38 #300947 by edulis

dysjunct wrote:

edulis wrote:
Other than that a fair amount of Evolution. The kid has requested the flight expansion, anyone have an opinion on that?


FLIGHT is fine, more of the same to a decent game. PM me your address and I’ll mail you my copy — my base game is with a friend and I haven’t played in years.


Thank you that is very generous. Her birthday is coming up and I bet she would love to get some special mail. I sent you a PM.

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22 Aug 2019 09:13 #301023 by charlest
I was sent a preview copy of Cryptic Explorers, which is currently on Kickstarter. I'm not getting deeply into the KS preview business as I agreed to write an unpaid review, but this is a game I was very much interested in due to its black metal/Cave Evil-ish vibe.

My group loved it last night. It's a harsh dungeon crawler (one vs. many) with multiple modular parts. Each board ("Realm of Death") has its own rules and objectives, each of the three Goddesses changes up the enemy mixture and asymmetrical power deck, and each player controls a squad of multiple Cryptonauts. It reminds me of Street Masters and Power Rangers in how it combines three distinct modular components to form a unique scenario each play.

My players spent a good twenty minutes picking out their squads. You definitely don't have to do this, but there were over 30 individual characters and in a game with two good guys, each fields a squad of three. This was awesome as each Cryptonaut is pretty unique and features multiple special abilities (you start with one available and unlock the others through play by collecting souls).

Play is relatively straightforward and nothing new in the dungeon crawl realm, beyond that gnarly squad structure where you form synergies and a balanced group. It had a really neat vibe and the objective of collecting information on death is really interesting. I also like that it's sci-fi but very weird. Two of my players are backing this on the spot and want to play again.

They wanted to play again but I foisted Bargain Quest upon them, which was very forgettable. It would make a solid gateway game and has a killer setting - running shops and selling items to adventurers - but it was a little bland and there wasn't a great deal of strategy.

We also got in the Alice in Wonderland Unlock scenario which was great. Tons of great puzzles and some really neat stuff going on in the app. Loved the Cheshire cat one the most.
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22 Aug 2019 10:04 #301027 by Vysetron
Cryptic Explorers looks/sounds rad as hell, holy shit. I'll keep an eye on it.

I took some time off from everything, including the internet for the most part. Games got played.

Horrified is fine. It's an above average coop for sure. What it doesn't do particularly well is invoke its license. After several plays we felt like we'd seen all it had, and since none of the monsters are particularly fleshed out we're probably right. That said it's an excellent production and fit for mass market shelves. Prospero Hall is really good at what they do.

Camp Grizzly came out and kicked ass, as it does. We played twice. On the first Otis was completely impotent. The only damage dealt was when Karen got run over by a car during the finale, but we all managed to win anyway.

Second game though. Second game was a great one. We were slowly picked off one by one, culminating in a wounded Sherry scrambling to collect our vital items and just barely managing to overcome Otis during the finale with a 9 on her chainsaw roll VS Otis' 8. Perfect final girl scenario.

We played Magical Athlete after as a palate cleanser and it was the best. Because it always is. Magical Athlete forever.

Xia! 15 point game, so we really got to dig in. Our winner effectively got there via space terrorism. Multiple "Boom!" missions, capping off with buying another ship at the end just for the fun of it. So many fun moments throughout. Every time we play this I just want to play it more.

Friday the 13th (AKA Poison) came out as a restaurant game. It's a good'n. It's basically "Knizia does 6 nimmt". The game isn't simultaneous but you're still playing numbers to columns and trying not to take things. The twist, because it's Knizia and he can't not have a twist, is that the columns are divided by suit and if you take the most of a suit you receive no points for it. My wife loathes 6 nimmt for some reason because she's convinced it's entirely random (she is wrong) but likes this one, so it'll be sticking around for a bit.

I also want to bring Dicey Dungeons to everyone's attention. New game from the guy who did VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. It's another digital take on a solo board game that uses its digital-ness to its advantage. Short roguelike runs with tons of twists on a simple, but solid core. Really impressed at the amount of variety packed into this one. My favorite gimmick is the Robot's - you effectively play dice blackjack to power your abilities.
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22 Aug 2019 18:24 #301035 by Rliyen
Had my friends over for Game Day on Sunday and we had a blast.

First game we played was Elder Sign with the Gates of Arkham expansion, which I told my wife, "the game's now Arkham Horror without the board." Our GOO was Yibb-Tsill. The expansion made everything harder and, of course, everyone got et.

The next game we played was Nova Cry, a game I've tried desperately to get to the table for ages. My friends picked the game up easily and off we went, seeking out strange, new worlds. Finding enemy captains, and blasting them to pieces. We had a lot of captain duels, but only one ship battle. Eddie ended up winning the game by reaching a planet, Nathan was second, and I was third.

Eddie then wanted to play Boss Monster. Nathan sat out while me, Trish, my wife, and Eddie played. No one died, but I was able to secure the deaths of many newbie adventurers, with an early expansion of my dungeon. By the time, we reached the halfway point, I won.

The last game of the evening was Dragon Rampage. Nathan asked for a long dungeon, which we agreed to. Nathan played the Barbarian (Ragnar), Eddie the Paladin (he always chooses him), Trish played Lena Hedley (the Elf), and my wife played the Imp (the Dwarf). I played the Mage (aka Coaster Head).

At the beginning, Ragnar think killing dragon too difficult. Dragon big, Ragnar small. But, big dragon cannot reach Ragnar in time if team act as distraction so Ragnar can get to exit! Lena, the Imp, and the Paladin took turns wailing on the dragon, whilst I grabbed as much loot as I could, along with gold. I also kept my position in the race to the exit somewhere in the middle, so I wouldn't get dinged for being last. During all this, we made jokes about giving advice to using wild dice for more dragon icons. With Ragnar being Ragnar, people making fun of the sigil on my forehead, and Lena turning the dragon into a pincushion.

The gang beating from the Terrible Trio proved to be too much for the lizard and it died, with Ragnar being two steps away from the exit. OUCH. RAGNAR REGRET NOTHING. Trish ended up winning by scoring the most hits on the dragon, along with killing said dragon, with 23 points. I had 20. Nathan, due to being the closest to the exit when the dragon died got hurt the most, 13 points. While Eddie and my wife ended up with around 15.
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23 Aug 2019 02:32 #301036 by Michael Barnes
Reviews coming on these; but some hot takes.

Escape the Dark Castle is GREAT. It is every bit the game that the stupid Choose Your Own Adventure game was not. The B&W aesthetic is awesome, the crude 1980 fantasy art is awesome, and the Fighting Fantasy-influenced gameplay is awesome. It’s a very “low fi” game in a few ways, but that is also what makes it awesome. I played it solo six times today. I made it to the boss one time but got completely squished. The publishers sent me EVERYTHING including this hoss ass box to put everything in. It’s great. It also comes with a metal token that says YOU on it so you know who “you” in the text refers to. Also, black metal skulls. And sleeves for everything good god. And best of all- GOLF PENCILS AND A PAD.

I want to just love Core Space but folks I don’t know. It is very much like Earth Reborn. Not necessarily in the gameplay, but in the wonky complexity, painful setup, and game information hidden in indecipherable rebuses. There are some really cool ideas- like wandering NPCs, crates that you actually put little tokens in, and an escalating threat level. And the terrain is stupendous- it’s all cardboard held together with plastic clips and there’s a ton of scatter and cover stuff. It’s enough to play Kill Team with. And it’s NICE to have fully painted scenery out of the box! But it took like 45 minutes to set up and then about another hour to get a handle on the rules. That’s without including the hour or so it took to punch and glue (optional) everything. And the rulebook is not great...some of it is downright badly written and poorly organized. Why am I looking on page 59 for how to equip my team to start with? Why is it not clear at al how to use event cards? I’m still not sure if NPCs marked on the setup start there or if they are spawned later. I will say this- it is a MIRACLE it all fits back into the box. I punched it and was like “well shit, this is going to need storage.” But nope, it went back in without disassembling any of the scatter pieces. I’m looking forward to playing it again but- I kid you not- next time I’m just drawing the map on a flip mat.

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23 Aug 2019 03:03 #301037 by mads b.
Escape the Dark Castle looks great and it has some pretty cool encounter cards. But even my kids found it a bit boring after a few plays and we sold it off.

I think it lacks a coherent narrative, and maybe also a sense of danger in the early encounters. In Dungeon Quest you now you can always draw a dead end, a bottomless pit or maybe even a corridor, so all turns are exciting from the get go. But while the events of EtDC look great and tell some cool stories, they rarely have that much of an impact and the choices often seem like they doesn't really matter. For all of its cool art and the dark story and interesting choice of characters it ended up being a pretty bland affair as a game.
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23 Aug 2019 08:18 - 23 Aug 2019 08:19 #301038 by charlest
Core Space is fucking excellent. The rules are nearly as simple as Warcry (although they are poorly organized and laid out to teach, as opposed to play). Setup does take awhile and was my biggest complaint in my review.

Still, Core Space would be my game of the year if Pax Pamir wasn't 2019. Earth Reborn is my favorite game though so...

If you're playing it solo you lose a bit of the tension. The semi-cooperative aspect produces some excellent drama and stories.
Last edit: 23 Aug 2019 08:19 by charlest.
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23 Aug 2019 11:15 #301047 by cdennett
If you think you like Escape the Dark Castle, I'll tell you how to ruin solo/2-player games:
Warning: Spoiler!


This game never really grabbed me, and once I tried out the above, I sold it as quickly as I could (luckily got my money back on this one).

I found Unbroken a more interesting solo experience at this game weight, though the aesthetic wasn't as good. But that one is dealing with a shit publisher situation...

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