Re: What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

"C'mon Rommel," usually works at my house, but I only use it on my brothers.

Although thinking about it a little, it might work on the folks at the table who didn't get griped at. If you've got a really good friend who's also annoyed about slow play, maybe you two can nag each other about slow play to get the rest of the goofuses at the table to speed up a little bit. Give it a try and report back.

Shellhead wrote: One of my friends is Strategy Guy, and it kind of backfires on him. He buys a new game, reads every available strategy article, soundly thumps the rest of us, then wonders why people sometimes lack enthusiasm for playing the game again at a later date. It doesn't bother me, because I would rather lose at a good game than win at a bad game.

Hello, I'm Mr Strategy Guy 2. I'm sorry.

I actually had a similar issue yesterday. A girl who joined our club recently asked to play Pipeline. It looked like one of those euros I tend to hate but another member had recommended me to try it out. And I actually liked it quite a bit. Even better, I went and played extremely well, winning by about 733 points to my opponents, which were in the 200s.

I didn't think too much at the time, but apparently the girl who brought the game felt bad about it. It was her third or fourth game and she felt the more she played, the worse she was doing. And there I was, playing the game for the first time and crushing everybody. I didn't think much of it at the time, but she took three actions to turn 1 cube into a medium-quality barrel. I bought 7 cubes in one turn and raised half of them to the top of the table. It must have hurt.

When she later told me she didn't enjoy the gamer because she did poorly I felt bad because I didn't know what to do. I know from experience people feel bad about asking for strategy tips and I offered, but it was clear hearing tips from "Mr I smashed others with no experience" was not it.

PD: We once invited a guy to our regular group to play Rising Sun with us. He scored a total of 0 points during its whole runtime. Even worse, one of the regulars scored over one hundred points, looping the track and passing him. We never heard of the poor guy again.

Ah_Pook wrote: If I was coming into a group of sharks and playing a game for my first time and I got destroyed then whatever yknow. But I just don't get why you would want to do that in a learning game where everyone is playing it for the first time. All is going to do is make people not want to play the game with you ever again I think. You're skipping the entire fun exploring the design phase of that game also, which I personally get a lot of enjoyment from.

Sometimes I've been a shark because I just wanted to play the game so much I played a "real game" instead of a "learning game".

This happened to me, to some degree when I brought 1870 the table. Sure, I didn't set out to be aggressive, but I did dump a company on another player and didn't collaborate with another because I think it was in my best interest to do so and trying to win, even with constrins, was fun. I love the game and don't play it often so I was just excited to play it. I think I should have curtailed my expectations and focused on teaching. I just got ahead of myself.

Ok, so Pipeline. Pipeline is another entry into the now growing genre of hybrid economic+modern euro games. I'm not fond of this genre because it trades the interaction and skill of economic games in favour of worker placement and other generic mechanics. And while they are often sold as being simpler and more accessible than the economic games they take ideas from, the truth of the matter is that they are all more complex. City of the Big Shoulders is more complex than any 18XX I've ever played, for example. I mean, most economic games were already eurogames, I can't think of any that isn't with the exception of Silverton.

Anyways, the idea of the game is that you buy low-quality cubes and then run it through a pipe system to turn them into more expensive ones. You only have one action per turn so there's an unusual need to be efficient and balance capacity with cash flow.

That's...surprisingly nice. Games of this kind tend to have very strong bounds on both actions and cash flow. This is not true here. You have a very strong bound on actions, but you can make them very very efficient and snowball hard through them. This made the game fun for me. I liked trying to press hard, go into debt and then start pumping out cubes with my well thought-of engine.

The difference between Pipeline and the typical euro is that your choices matter. You can do very poorly or very well in this game. It's not one of those titles in which no matter what path you take your scores will be close. I can imagine a good palyer getting twice as much money as I got in the same time and I got almost four times as much money as my opponents.

It's still multiplayer solitaire and the pipe system is one of those "obfuscation" mechanics. But there's more to it than there is to more games of this kind. I left the table, not only wanting to play again but wanting to play and do better next time. That's good for me.

On the topic of sharks and/or try-hards: if I bring out a new game that I know "strategy" about due to reading forums on BGG or here, I always let everyone know the gist of what I've learned. I will actively warn people something like "I read that the big scary-looking monsters in Rising Sun are usually far inferior to those upgrade cards" or something like that. And certainly if I'm experience and we have new players, I'll give tips when starting out or if obviously bad looking moves are made. It's not usually until towards the end of the game do I deliberately stop giving advice, unless it's clear the player doesn't want it earlier. And we'll often, as a group, tell someone when they need to take-back an obviously dumb move. It seems like some groups really frown on this behavior, but it's never been a problem for mine.

Now I don't seek out strategy guides or anything, but I research enough to know more then someone who just breaks out the rules. There is fun in discovering the game. I absolutely hate Chess, and similar strategic games, because I hate to memorize moves or look more than a turn ahead. So there's really no appeal to be that guy.

This is an excellent discussion for a very real problem. I destroy anyone I play even remotely new I play in Twilight Struggle. I consistently wreck my friends in Splendor. It can be very off-putting to a certain type of gamer.

To be clear, I'm terrible at many other games.

We're well into The King's Dilemma. The concept is simple: you are the King's council and he has a dilemma to deal with, so he places his trust in you to reach a decision.

You can vote yes or no and support that with some of your power. You can abstain to gather power for the future, or you can abstain to take the role of impartial (ha!) moderator and break ties. Usually you'll have an idea of how the vote will affect the Kingdom in a general sense, but not the specifics. Your houses all have their own agendas, and at the end of each King's reign (by death or abdication) you'll be evaluated on how you achieved it and put the new King in the seat.

$80 is steep, but I think many people will be well served by it. Votes have real weight. Bribe another player to throw some power into a vote they don't care about! Get the negative outcome you want, but bribe someone else to take responsibility for it! We's been having a blast with it, even those who were skeptical going in. Ultimately, it's a choose your own adventure where you're voting on what pages to turn to, but the "legacy" aspects of it work very well. The game makes no pretenses: the campaign will be played to its conclusion (an estimated 15 games) and then you're done. Not that the game tells you how to win the campaign - you just gather two kinds of long-term points and at the end you'll find out what purpose they serve.

I'm hoping the box's "Dilemma Card System" logo means there are other ones in the works. I'd love a version of this where you're different subsystems of an AI reaching decisions for the primary system.

Erik Twice wrote: PD: We once invited a guy to our regular group to play Rising Sun with us. He scored a total of 0 points during its whole runtime. Even worse, one of the regulars scored over one hundred points, looping the track and passing him. We never heard of the poor guy again.

Maybe he went home and killed himself.

cdennett wrote: And certainly if I'm experience and we have new players, I'll give tips when starting out or if obviously bad looking moves are made. It's not usually until towards the end of the game do I deliberately stop giving advice, unless it's clear the player doesn't want it earlier. And we'll often, as a group, tell someone when they need to take-back an obviously dumb move. It seems like some groups really frown on this behavior, but it's never been a problem for mine.

I do the same. When I'm teaching a game that I have serious experience with, I'll always let people know, give them tips on how to approach strategy throughout, and point out different moves that I'd consider advantageous. Like when I was teaching Tyrants of the Underdark last week, I kept pointing out and describing the use of cards as they came up in the market, pointed out advantageous moves on the board, suggested long-term strategies, and so on.

I'll be in that situation in a couple weeks at U-Con here in Michigan. You can host games and a lot of people simply teach/GM them, so that they have a group of players that they just kind of play overseer for. I'm not interested in that. I want to PLAY these games, so I'm running a session of Star Trek: Ascendancy, a trio of Tiny Epic games (Kingdoms, Western, Mechs), and Big Trouble in Little China. I'll be playing in all of them (Big Trouble doesn't matter, since it's a co-op) and explaining my moves as I perform them throughout each, showing people how what my approach is and what steps they might take afterwards or even before. I'm not concerned with winning. I've won before. I just want everyone to enjoy the game with me.

I think narrating why you are doing moves is great. In my experiene, other people learn faster when you show them what they can do and why. For example, the moment you start buying shares and then selling them just to trash someone's stock price in 18XX everyone starts doing it.

Regarding take-backs, I allow and welcome most take-backs. If no information has been exchanged or we are learning and the take-back wouldn't be messy, I allow it. I don't think there's a point to playing games where you win because people didn't notice or weren't experienced to know.

Anyways, I spent the whole day gaming.

First, Cosmic Encounter. One of the players didn't like the game the first time we played because he felt lost. Hence, this time I tried to be clearer in my explanation, keep it at 5 players and include only green aliens. Our setup was Trader, Sorcerer, Warrior, Pacifist (Me) and Void which was a lot of fun.

It's interesting because these are some of the simplest designs in the game, but they pack a huge amount of strategic value. I know many people see Cosmic as a party game but for me the strategy, the hand management and shifting alliances are also part of it. I managed to win by sneaking past Trader with 3 cards in hand (a 40, a Negotiation and a flare!) and using the Negotation to beat the overpowered Warrior.

Second, we played Skull King which is a trick-taking game. I'm awful at them so I was happy to finish somewhere in the middle. So far this is my favourite in the genre. There are a couple twist, the most important of them is that players simultaneously reveal how many hands they plan to win and are punished if they don't. I'm told this is actually a traditional mechanism but I love how it shiftes player interests, how it creates a bit of collusion, of thinking about what the other players might do. A lot of fun, I laughed a lot.

Draftosaurus seemed dumb. I like drafting as a mechanic, but I didn't see the point to the game.

Hyperborea. This one was lacking. You have a deck-building mechanism driving a dudes on a map game, one that doesn't have much conflict between players. It works, but it isn't interesting. I think it's one of those games where you have an interesting control mechanism but the actual thing you control isn't very fun.

Also, six characters, only one woman. Look, if there were a third less women in the world you would notice, you should notice it in the games you design too.

Samurai. This was my first time playing this game! It's very tense and I found myself quite absorbed. I love how the game is not won based on VPs but on majorities. I tied for the win, which seemed unlikely! Would love to play again. Sadly, the edition at the club (Hans in Glück) is very ugly. They clearly spent a lot on the pieces but the board is unpleasant to look at.

Razzia! I'm told this is a Ra variant. The guy who taught us to play is a big Knizia fan (hence Samurai) and he creamed us. He got 29 points, the second best at the table had 16 and the rest of us had between 3 and 9 points. Ouch! Fun as a filler but it didn't grab my attention.

Terraforming Mars. I almost lost a game I started extremely strong by not closing the game. People think I'm great at boardgames and I might be, but I do have a weakness: I'm greedy and tend to overbuild or aim for the flashy play instead of doing the mundane winning play.

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I purcharsed the Board Game stats app. I love checking out this kind of stuff and it's very well-made.

I really like Samurai, but it seems to be one of the less-appreciated Knizia designs. Unfortunately, there's so much competition for table space in the Euro group I play with that Samurai probably wouldn't get played, but the only other way to play it would be 2-player with my girlfriend and we've tried that and it simply isn't satisfying (too much tit-for-tat (i.e. who places first, wins.))

Sounds like a great CE game. I've never played Hyberborea, but it sounds much like Tyrants of the Underdark. Have you played that? Are they similar? I'm toying around with an article based on Tyrants and wondering if I've missed an easy comparison. (And, of course, every time I hear/read "Hyperborea" all I can think of is Conan.)

I haven't played Tyrants so I can't say. Note that while I said "deck-building", Hyperborea is actually "bag building" with coloured cubes randomizing which actions you can take, there's just not much of a design difference IMHO. It's really an euro but it felt

I also thought of Conan when I heard "Hyperborea", even though I have never read or seen anything related to Conan I know the name of the world is similar.

Tyrants is kind of the game that kicked Hyperborea out for me, actually. Hyperborea was real hit or miss. Tyrants is consistency great.

Granted, Hyperborea felt more interesting when it came out. There really wasn’t anything else like it and it definitely does more “new stuff” than Tyrants. Unfortunately doing “new stuff” does not always translate into being fun.

rocketkiwi wrote: We're well into The King's Dilemma. The concept is simple: you are the King's council and he has a dilemma to deal with, so he places his trust in you to reach a decision.

You can vote yes or no and support that with some of your power. You can abstain to gather power for the future, or you can abstain to take the role of impartial (ha!) moderator and break ties. Usually you'll have an idea of how the vote will affect the Kingdom in a general sense, but not the specifics. Your houses all have their own agendas, and at the end of each King's reign (by death or abdication) you'll be evaluated on how you achieved it and put the new King in the seat.

$80 is steep, but I think many people will be well served by it. Votes have real weight. Bribe another player to throw some power into a vote they don't care about! Get the negative outcome you want, but bribe someone else to take responsibility for it! We's been having a blast with it, even those who were skeptical going in. Ultimately, it's a choose your own adventure where you're voting on what pages to turn to, but the "legacy" aspects of it work very well. The game makes no pretenses: the campaign will be played to its conclusion (an estimated 15 games) and then you're done. Not that the game tells you how to win the campaign - you just gather two kinds of long-term points and at the end you'll find out what purpose they serve.

I'm hoping the box's "Dilemma Card System" logo means there are other ones in the works. I'd love a version of this where you're different subsystems of an AI reaching decisions for the primary system.

I really wanted to review this game but struck out on a review copy. Can't convince myself to pay the $80 when I know scheduling 5+ players will be difficult. Maybe when it's on clearance. Totally my type of game though.

I've played a few games of Tank Duel: Enemy in the Crosshairs, GMT's latest release. This is pretty much Up Front but just tanks. Well, it does have abstracted infantry and AT guns as advanced rules, but they're very much secondary.

I don't think it's as deep as Up Front and spends much of its mechanical real estate simulating stuff like your tank exploding versus being on fire, crew moving over to fill other positions when a say your Gunner or Driver dies, and an interesting terrain system complete with stuff like hull down and bogging.

I dig it quite a bit, but I also think it's a tiny bit repetitive. It's a game that really lives on its narrative. For instance, in my last play I had a T34 take an objective hill in the center of the battlefield and gain hull down. It was a terror and dropped 3 Panzer IVs before eventually being flanked and removed. There's quite a bit of drama in checking for penetration, hit locations, and then effects. Hits can bounce of course but when one does go through, usually at least one crew member is wounded or killed outright. So there's a decent amount of volatility.

The downfall of the abstraction is that battles seem to be exclusively move forward, gain objective or cover, and then shoot. Repeat if you die, because you just respawn.

I hate that you respawn because it removes the possibility of valiant last stands where your Panther withstood an assault from a KV-1 and a flanking T-34. Instead, respawning promotes a bit of a generic rush forward and fire mentality. There are pluses of respawning of course, especially in a 90 minute game where you could get unlucky with a catastrophic hit and die in the first 10 minutes.

There is subtlety such as going into terrain, flanking, acquiring targets versus spotting them, etc. but the formula largely feels familiar even upon your second play.

Despite the complaints, I'm digging it quite a bit. It moves very fast once you get comfortable with the complexities and quirkiness. It's brutal at times and shocking. It has wonderful moments where you throw an enemy tank into mud because he was vulnerable and left himself moving at the end of his action, then you nail him with a strong fire card combo and watch the sucker light up.

The details tell a wonderful story as you pull cards to check for stuff like crew bailing out after an explosion or fire or you fight off an approaching tank when you've lost your treads.

I think this one has a specific audience and doesn't have the broader appeal of some of the best wargames, but it does present a compelling experience. It also scales well and you can do 4 on 4 with little fuss.

We played through the rest of Adventure Games: The Dungeon and very much enjoyed it. We ended up with around 35-39 points. I do not remember exactly, but we were not in the top two categories of scoring. We thought it was very fun and far superior to the recent Exit wave. Reasonably good puzzle design for a game where that is not the primary focus and the narrative and atmosphere are worked together fairly well. I have to agree with Charlie that if the recent Exit wave is representative of where they are going, they should just focus on more Adventure Games. I know they are different designers, but the space seems similar enough to the Exit line.

We also played the first segment of Adventure Games: Monochrome Inc.. It has a fairly different feel from Dungeon, while not actually changing much of the core setup. I'll have to see where it goes, but it is initially another strong entry.

At home:

More survival hijinks in a brace of plays of This War of Mine. The first attempt is woeful; we fail to make a hatchet, the cold makes us sick, a poor choice whilst scavenging does for one of our crew and wounds another, then two rampaging mobs in a row result in a TPK. When this game kicks you in the pants it kicks you real hard real quick. The second game is the polar opposite; we get a quick hatchet build, cover up all the holes in the walls and start burning books. Some thugs make the mistake of picking a fight with us and we have just the right Narrative Action cards to take care of them and steal their weapons. We now have the kind of arsenal that would put a 'prepper to shame and comfortably sit out the last few days of the war barely needing to scavenge as we're able to trade for enough food to keep us alive. When this game gives you a hug it gets real over-friendly real quick.

I'm starting to remember why I ended up selling it the first time around. Still, the lad is really getting something out of it and we have a stack of scenarios to play through for a bit of variety which should keep us going.

Spirit Island with Serpent, Keeper and Ocean facing off against the double threat of Guard the Heart and Ward the Shores, no Invader as the mix of scenario cards looked hard enough as it was. It actually turned out to be pretty straightforward, probably more to do with our mix of spirits than anything else. Keeper was able to stymie the invaders attempts at expansion so guarding the heart wasn't much of a chore and Ocean quickly set down warding patterns on the coast which helped to defend against minor ravages. At the same time we were picking up lots of push and gather powers in order to feed Ocean which also complimented our strategic needs perfectly by keeping the bad guys exactly where we wanted them (or rather away from where we didn't want them). A nice clean stage II victory, and a really fun setup to play.

K2 - Lhotse So I finally managed to conquer this horrible clime in solo play, pat on the back time. Broad Peak is still my favourite in this set though.