What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

At home:

We’ve been making our way through Undaunted: Normandy over the last couple of weeks. Like many people I daresay, we picked it up after one of Matt’s reviews which must be accounting for a generous slice of Osprey’s sales these days. I think it makes excellent use of deck-building as a complimentary rather than focal mechanism and I like the way that the terrain makes you gravitate toward moving your troops in bursts, preferring to run them from cover to cover instead of giving in to a slow advance over open terrain.

It’s an enjoyable battle of wits without bogging you down with a weight of simulation rules, although there isn’t much in the way of emergent story. Getting shot and losing cards has as much emotional drama as losing a Chess pawn and is only frustrating your plans as far as until you draw the next card of that type. The thing that saves it from being overly mechanical is that you continually need to react based on your card draw, and having to pick one card to use as a bid for initiative often puts some challenging decisions in front of you as to how you will prioritise your objectives for that particular round.

It has the same problem as other games that teach you how to play via increasingly complex scenarios in that the early ones are not particularly stimulating and do not feel balanced. It’s such a simple game that I would actually recommend jumping straight into the later ones that appear after all unit types have been introduced and taking the learning curve on the chin over a couple of the more interesting set-ups. The focus of every game is a matter of putting tokens onto objectives within a fairly limited arena so lacks adequate space for making strategic decisions; that’s perfectly fine however it does limit the appeal for repeat play. I can feel my son’s interest already starting to wane so will probably solo my way through the last couple of scenarios then it’s likely given all its due. Good and certainly so for the price, but by no means a keeper.

We’ve also started a game of This War of Mine which arrived just yesterday. The last time I owned this my lad wasn’t quite ready for it and after a few solo plays I took advantage of the buoyant KS aftermarket to cash in on it. He’s insisting that we go full horrors-of-war and include the R-rated events but I’m still screening them first because I remember some of them being really dark. In this respect it does a better job than the video game, sure the whole survivor-crafting thing is wildly abstracted but the profligacy of text and options to interact brings the stories to the fore instead of just being repetitive statements that you click through while trying to level up your workbench. It also does this neat thing where you often take cards out of the game once they have given you an event so that you don’t go back down the same pathway again.

I think that it was also a good decision to make the text into staccato incidents rather than attempting to squeeze everything into an interconnected narrative as it allows you to create your own coherent story and to take time to ruminate on the capital-M Messages that it is often throwing at you. Doing this with a teenager is particularly rewarding as it has already started a few conversations about the fake glamour associated with violence and the nature of morality in times of utter desperation. So far I’m enjoying it more this time around if only for having his company while I play, however from a purely gameplay perspective I think that it is still dominated by the same one-track strategy as the video game (i.e. make a Hatchet then board up the holes).

We’re two days in and so far we’ve stolen food from a depressed farmer, ran away from angry hoboes, threatened to axe someone in the head, and been shot in the leg by an eleven year old kid after trying to intervene in a backstreet execution. I’d sure struggle to describe this as family-friendly.

Also had time for a game of Xia over the weekend. I don’t know where I am with this anymore, I always enjoy it but dang it feels like such hard work. My heart wasn’t really in it so I just went for a pure exploration strategy. When my ship got horrendously damaged I just flew it into debris or ice and exploded – respawning with a single damage is hardly a matter of privation and it often put me into interesting new corners of the map where I could hoover up still more exploration tokens. I raced into a massive ten point lead although was still stuck on my first tier ship. I finally decided to ‘settle down’ and scooped up a couple of relics; while on my way to the station to cash them in for the win the little dirtbag set upon me with missiles and desperation ramming, wiping me out. Faced with the prospect of a long, slow repetitive grind where he would constantly hunt me down and I could only win by being lucky enough to survive long enough to grab just those last two fame points I decided to concede to his superior firepower. On reflection I think it is the fussy movement rules that is bothering me the most, particularly with the constant interrupts, and I kind of wish it was designed with sector-to-sector movement and the engines used in other ways. That way you could focus more on the fun stuff and less on the procedural part of pushing bits around the board.


At the club:

We started the night with Gravwell which was new to me, I assumed that it was a recent release yet it’s actually about five or six years old. It looks like crap but plays really well. You each have a spaceship that you are trying to fly out of the grip of a gravitational anomaly, and do so through the simple expedient of playing a numbered and lettered card each round; the cards resolve in alphabetical order and you move a number of spaces equal to the number. The thing that adds a fistful of chaos to proceedings is that you always move toward the closest ship and some cards push you away or pull other ships toward you instead of simply moving you forward. The order that cards resolve ends up making a real mess of things that you can still leverage with smart, well-calculated play. There are also a couple of derelict hulks floating around that create further complications and you can find yourself being dragged back down the titular gravwell by them if you end up being slung in the wrong direction. Definitely best with full player count, and I’m looking forward to playing it again.

Brace yourself for some German because we then played the largely pointless filler game Heul doch! Mau Mau, a simple card game where you are trying to build a stack of cards in front of you yet are constantly forced to give cards to your neighbours instead. You can also collect face down cards which kill off every card with the same value as the quantity of them that you have at the endgame. It was surprisingly fun to play although there is almost no skill or strategy involved whatsoever. Because you spend a lot of time handing cards to your neighbours I think that it would work really well with just three players.

Age of Assassins is a Japanese import replete with pasted-up cards. Ostensibly a simple drafting game where you put seven cards into two rows, three face down and four face up, then flip everything over and resolve the cards in numerical order. Every card is a character in your army/clan/whatever and has a different effect depending on where they have been placed and what your opponents have chosen to do. I was feeling really wary while it was being explained but my fears were misplaced as it’s an absolute delight to play. Trying to juggle which characters to put down with a limited amount of imperfect information and every face-up card unwantedly broadcasting your intentions is compounded by some characters causing you or an opponent to outright die and lose your score for the round. It’s the kind of game where your delicately crafted scoring engine gets a big fat wrench thrown right into it, a fast, loose, beer’n’pretzels type game that you cannot take too seriously but actually has something to it beyond merely chucking down random cards.

We then grouped up with another table and finished off with a bunch of lightweight sociable games which was just what I was in the mood for having been unable to attend most of the last few weeks: Escape, Nanuk, Magic Maze, Tempel des Shreckens – we were in a race against another table playing Whistle Stop to see how many different games we could play and managed to get through two of them just while they were explaining the rules. My friend at that table had sadface.

Jackwraith wrote: the Uzi (after shooting, move another player up to 2 rooms; not sure I understand the thematics behind that one.)

Sounds like the Uzi provides covering fire.

Played my first 2 player game of Lifeform last night. I’d played a few solo games and I enjoyed them, but the multiplayer game really is where it’s at.

I’m sure Michael or Charlie have talked about it on here, but to bring everyone up to speed, Lifeform is a game that perfectly captures Alien. Note that’s singular and not plural. A group of people stuck on a haunted house in space with an unstoppable killing machine. There’s even the cat, a malfunctioning android and a MUTHER knockoff in there.

The rules seem dense but they’re deceiving, the gameplay really snaps along once you get the hang of it. It’s card driven but it feels just right, with the humans searching frantically for the means to move through the ship and find was to defend themselves, while the Lifeform waits for the right moment to strike while the human player’s hands are slim.

I’m making this a top priority to talk about on the podcast. I love it.

hotseatgames wrote:

Jackwraith wrote: the Uzi (after shooting, move another player up to 2 rooms; not sure I understand the thematics behind that one.)

Sounds like the Uzi provides covering fire.

Yeah. I guess that's the best way to look at it, although my initial reaction is: "Covering fire? The zombies aren't shooting back...?"

Yeah, Tiny Epic Zombies. Who knew? I put aside my aversion to the words “epic” and “zombies” and found that the game is astonishingly good for what it is. I haven’t played either competitive mode, but both the 1 vs All (which I personally love) and the co-op work very well. Trying to appeal to so many different audiences typically hurts a game (see any Flying Frog game), but that’s not the case. There’s a ton of game here for $20.

That's been my reaction to all the TE games that I've tried so far. Got a 1vAll game in last night and the thing that struck me about the Zombie player is that, unlike many other Overlord/bad guy type situations, the Zombie doesn't break the rules when its power goes up. You remember those moments playing 1st Ed Descent when the Overlord would play that card that made everyone else at the table groan because now EVERYTHING was that much worse? This game doesn't do that. The Zombie has one special ability from the start and everything else is either smart card play (trying to restrict what items the other players have access to or timely introduction of an event) or just doing more of what the Zombie player already does (spawn zombies.) But those interactions are enough to still make it interesting for both sides.

Mythic Battles: Pantheon is incredible. It's like Heroscape in that you're slamming together a mixture of units in a draft, trying to make the best of them. Except you field a god and units like Cerberus and Achilles.

We played two games back to back with the same armies. In the first, I was bested by Athena who strategically stalled my advances with Theseus and Myrmidons while her Harpies and Icharus flew around gathering the precious stone shards of the gods.

In our rematch I played more cleverly, trapping Athena at the top of the map and pummeling her with Ares (who is ridiculous in combat), Achilles, and my gorgon.

The main problem with this game is setup and putaway time. Besides drafting, there's like a hundred different minis with their own sets of activation cards and stat board. I bagged everything individually and store them by type (one box for monsters, one for heroes, one for gods and troops), which helps, but it's still a big pain.

Totally recommend playing two games back to back with the same armies. It's a 40 minute game and it helps to have a learning game with your units and then a more strategic one where you can implement your understanding. Makes eating the setup time easier as well.

Did Fal-Con this weekend. I am wrecked and more than a little burned out. Here's what I played, AMA:

BANG! The Dice Game
Crossing (x2)
Expancity
Food Truck Champion
Glastonbury
Irish Gauge
Istanbul: The Dice Game
Las Vegas
Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice
Portal of Heroes
Prêt-à-Porter (3rd ed)
Q.E.
Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition
Red7
Sol: Last Days of a Star
Sticheln
The Towers of Arkhanos
Wasteland Express Delivery Service
Watergate (x2)
Wind the Film!
Wingspan

Legomancer wrote: Did Fal-Con this weekend. I am wrecked and more than a little burned out. Here's what I played, AMA:

BANG! The Dice Game
Crossing (x2)
Expancity
Food Truck Champion
Glastonbury
Irish Gauge
Istanbul: The Dice Game
Las Vegas
Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice
Portal of Heroes
Prêt-à-Porter (3rd ed)
Q.E.
Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition
Red7
Sol: Last Days of a Star
Sticheln
The Towers of Arkhanos
Wasteland Express Delivery Service
Watergate (x2)
Wind the Film!
Wingspan

What did you think of Railroad Ink? I disliked how solitaire it is.
What was the general feeling for Wingspan?

Railroad Ink was fine, nothing special.

I like Wingspan but it's not a must-do for me. It's solid and beautiful but kind of docile. I can see the appeal, though.

Mythic Battles Pantheon has been my obsession for the last three weeks now, since it arrived at my door. It really is fantastic and I am so glad I splurged.

It has me considering Time of Legends Joan of Arc 1.5, since it is also from Mythic.

Legomancer wrote: I like Wingspan but it's not a must-do for me. It's solid and beautiful but kind of docile. I can see the appeal, though.

That's kind of been my reaction. I picked mine up on a lark (ahem) because I found it sitting in the window at one of the FLGS' and they'd basically been non-existent because of Stonemaier's distribution problems to that point. It is beautiful and I really appreciate the detail/science on the cards. But, in the end, it is a pretty typical engine builder. It's fine, but I'd play 51st State every time if offered a choice.

n815e wrote: Mythic Battles Pantheon has been my obsession for the last three weeks now, since it arrived at my door. It really is fantastic and I am so glad I splurged.

It has me considering Time of Legends Joan of Arc 1.5, since it is also from Mythic.

I’m still waiting on mine. Apparently I was affected by the inventory discrepancy and haven’t received anything yet

I know what that’s like.

I played one of the most gobsmackingly bad games I've played in ages this weekend while visiting my nephew. Unstable Unicorns. Truly garbage card game.

I get why, but I hate that ordinary people are tricked into playing truly heinous, turgid games by wacky art and meme-ness on Kickstarter in a parallel board game space that operates outside of ordinary hobby games.