What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Wrote a lot about that game here at the site a couple weeks back. Didn't get much response, but it's there if you're interested.

Oh those are rad! I think I was in too much of "moving mode" when you actually posted them, so I'm glad you pointed them out again.

I've played two games as Prince John and Captain Hook. I'm really impressed how the game does asymmetry without too many extra rules. I mean, it's challenging to see how to play some of these characters, but it's not a matter of internalizing rules and process like in, say, Root. It's way more intuitive than that.

Right. Each deck plays differently, but the overall rule structure is really quite simple. The problem is having people interested in playing the game often enough to get the hang of both their character and everyone else's. It's not complicated, but it does take some repetition.

Game 92 (!!!) of Spirit Island with my partner. Loss to Scotland, my spouse's Starlight Seeks its Form lost containment.

Rocky Mountain Man and Hood Strikes North in the house this week, excited to solo those.

I recently picked up a copy of Wir Sind Das Volk and discovered an online rules enforced version through Boardgamecore (originally created to play Antiquity). I set up the game with my main account and a dummy account.

I realised in order to teach the game, it would prudent walk through the End of Decade sequence first then teach the core mechanics. I really enjoyed my first playthrough and dig the unique elements of the game.

Played Anachrony last night, just a little solo two handed game to learn it. Out of the heavy Euros I’ve played lately, it is up there with the Lacerda stuff. It seems pretty awesome and I’m really kind of taken with it. I kind of balked at it since it’s one of those confusing Kickstarter product lines but Dan Thurot’s review got me to take another look.

It really kind of reminds me of Argent in that it’s a wild, sprawling worker placement game with very specific setting and contexts. The idea is that this massive asteroid is heading to destroy the planet in the future but these fragments of a mysterious element are discovered that enable time travel. Turns out the asteroid impact sent these elements back in time. So using mechs (exosuits) you go out of your Path’s capital to do stuff and get ready to evacuate when the crash happens.

Now, the REALLY neat thing is that time travel is actually a mechanic. You can get stuff from the future. So if you want an extra Exosuit for the turn, you put a marker on the timeline. The future you sends it back and poof, there it is, no cost unles it was a person and you have to give them a drink of water. In later turns, that time warp can cause instabilities and anomalies, which mess with your buildings, if you don’t send someone back to actually take whatever it is to the past. So you are technically taking out a loan, but it really does create a narrative where you have to “fix” time by actually doing what you already did. Or not- you can risk the anomaly!

It’s pretty complicated but it it’s not so much of the nested complexity in Lacerda. It’s more in that there is a lot of stuff. The box isn’t very big but it it is just busting out with pieces. There are four different worker types, tons of buildings, six different resources, etc. It is sprawling, like I said.

It’s dumb that the solo mode isn’t in the base game box though...you can print it or wait for the expansion that has it to hit retail.

I’m looking at getting the all in big box on it, this is one of those once every few years kinds of wingding batshit crazy games like Duel of Ages or Archipelago.

See also Sidereal Confluence.

I’ve been interested in Anachrony but I already have Argent snd they seem too similar in scope and type (not detail) to have both.

Played a game of Civilization: A New Dawn in my ongoing quest to get around to the games I couldn't easily play for the last three years. I know this one has gotten lots of good buzz over the last few years, but bear with me here...

Back when the game was announced, I was really skeptical. For one thing there are a LOT of Civ games out there on all sorts of different scales, and even though I really like the genre as a rule (Through the Ages and Clash of Cultures are favs of mine) they do tend to sort of run together. The other thing was the previous Sid Meier's Civ board game from FFG, which was good mostly, but had those overbaked parts that a lot of FFG games circa 2011 tended to have. I just couldn't justify having that game in my collection when Clash of Cultures is already there, you know?

But A New Dawn did something that I didn't think was possible: it feels more or less like the Sid Meier game, but it manages to cram it into an hour or two. It does sacrifice quite a bit of mechanical detail, but it manages to hit the beats of newer iterations of the computer game. Interacting with city-states is a big one, along with managing trade routes. One cool effect are the control tokens, which manage to make it feel like you have expanding borders. It does all of that by sacrificing mechanical process. Nothing takes several steps to accomplish. You begin the game with the ability to plop down a new city right away, the ability to research more science, a way to trade, and a way to expand control. All of those things are about a single card play away, which picks up the pace so much.

I have read and watched a lot of stuff that is disappointed that conquest doesn't play a bigger role in the game, and I sort of see why someone would feel that way. Military is normally such a huge emphasis in games like these. But I kind of loved the way military was handled. It feels like it's on the same scale with the rest of the game, which is something that FFG did not pull off in its first pass at this license. It is quick, pretty low-stakes, and encourages defensive reinforcement and picking low-hanging fruit. It even manages to make barbarians a compelling way to engage with combat without making them an enormous hassle.

I only played a two-player game, with my son at that, so I know I didn't see all this game can do. With more people I feel like the diplomacy cards would come into effect, and having more space to stretch out and trade with would feel nice. The whole thing does feel abstracted, but it functions because it gives off a civ-like vibe, rather than hitting the marks of the genre every time. I had hoped that A New Dawn would slot into a collection already heavy on civ games, and because of its innovative design choices I wasn't disappointed.

Yeah, I looked at Anachrony and Trickerion somewhat recently (I think they were examples of "stuff harder to teach than Oath"). They completely passed me by on their first releases.

There was definitely a point in my life where this would have been my jam, but I sort of bounced off them with the realization that even I have some toad limits. I'd play them, but I don't think I need to store them just in case.

san il defanso wrote: Played a game of Civilization: A New Dawn in my ongoing quest to get around to the games I couldn't easily play for the last three years. I know this one has gotten lots of good buzz over the last few years, but bear with me here...

Back when the game was announced, I was really skeptical. For one thing there are a LOT of Civ games out there on all sorts of different scales, and even though I really like the genre as a rule (Through the Ages and Clash of Cultures are favs of mine) they do tend to sort of run together. The other thing was the previous Sid Meier's Civ board game from FFG, which was good mostly, but had those overbaked parts that a lot of FFG games circa 2011 tended to have. I just couldn't justify having that game in my collection when Clash of Cultures is already there, you know?

But A New Dawn did something that I didn't think was possible: it feels more or less like the Sid Meier game, but it manages to cram it into an hour or two. It does sacrifice quite a bit of mechanical detail, but it manages to hit the beats of newer iterations of the computer game. Interacting with city-states is a big one, along with managing trade routes. One cool effect are the control tokens, which manage to make it feel like you have expanding borders. It does all of that by sacrificing mechanical process. Nothing takes several steps to accomplish. You begin the game with the ability to plop down a new city right away, the ability to research more science, a way to trade, and a way to expand control. All of those things are about a single card play away, which picks up the pace so much.

I have read and watched a lot of stuff that is disappointed that conquest doesn't play a bigger role in the game, and I sort of see why someone would feel that way. Military is normally such a huge emphasis in games like these. But I kind of loved the way military was handled. It feels like it's on the same scale with the rest of the game, which is something that FFG did not pull off in its first pass at this license. It is quick, pretty low-stakes, and encourages defensive reinforcement and picking low-hanging fruit. It even manages to make barbarians a compelling way to engage with combat without making them an enormous hassle.

I only played a two-player game, with my son at that, so I know I didn't see all this game can do. With more people I feel like the diplomacy cards would come into effect, and having more space to stretch out and trade with would feel nice. The whole thing does feel abstracted, but it functions because it gives off a civ-like vibe, rather than hitting the marks of the genre every time. I had hoped that A New Dawn would slot into a collection already heavy on civ games, and because of its innovative design choices I wasn't disappointed.

Thanks Sam. This one is sitting unplayed along with the expansion. I keep reading good things which is heartening, just waiting for the right time to get this one going.

I practically got into board games chasing the white whale of the shorter length civ. One thing I've learned is that too many - and this could be applied to a lot of game types, not just civs- try to cram everything into the box. To me one of the features of board games is that you have to abstract things away. Some seem to think this is a limitation but I feel like it's one of those limitations you should lean into to get creative; that the limitation is actually a strength of the medium. Done well, abstraction gets to the heart of whatever the thing is in the first place.

This is why for me all those complex systems with tonnes of gears and cogs and stuff just don't do it for me. They genuinely feel at odds with where the strengths of the medium lie.

Yeah, New Dawn might be worth the time for you then. This is a design that definitely feels like it wanted to give that arc of civilization-building in an actual map-based board game without as much overhead. Whether that's something people actually want is very open for debate. I can see someone really preferring the first FFG Civ game, just because it feels more like it's trying to recreate Civ IV. But there are a lot of games that do that kind of stuff, civ games that are sprawling, complex, and long. A New Dawn is NOT that game, and I feel just fine having it on my shelf with Clash of Cultures and Through the Ages.

I bought a copy of New Dawn used, literally in a parking lot. I've liked it a lot so far, but I've only played it three times. Like Sam said above, the sub-three-hour Civ game was a gaming Holy Grail, and to me New Dawn looks pretty close to getting there. That action bar, where actions get better over time, is an awesome mechanism, and I don't know why nobody else has 'borrowed' it yet.

My girlfriend was kind enough to test Phantom Division with me yesterday. The game is playing really great, although I was testing a new enemy that made the game EXTREMELY difficult.

Later she requested Runebound. It took some rules scanning to regain familiarity, and per standard procedure, she obliterated me. The game went through almost the full set of turns, and I'm not joking when I say that my character didn't achieve anything significant after the 3rd turn of the game. It was very demoralizing to have every monster I faced beat my ass, often in woodland so it was harder to heal, etc. I do still really like the way the game works mechanically. If the expansions were readily available, I'd buy them.

This weekend I've been playing close to ten hours of Sleeping Gods with the five-year-old and we are having a pretty good time. The basic premise is that you are the captain of the steamship Manticore, and you and your crew have been transported to the strange Wandering Sea during a storm. Here you learn that in order to get home, you have to find totems and use them to wake the titular sleeping gods. So you sail around on a book of maps and explore the world using a book of paraghraphs.

I control the rules and we agree on what to do and where to sail, and I'm very impressed with his ability to stay focused. Also impressed with the quality of the game. At first it seemed a bit like your average fantasy world, but it quickly turned out to be something quite different. The world gradually becomes more and more exciting, and I foresee some pretty tough choices up ahead.

We have played two-thirds of a game (you go through an event deck three times before the game ends and you get an ending depending on - I think - your amount of totems. But we have only explored a fraction of all the places, and I can imagine that you can easily play three or for full games before you've seen it all. I'm already regretting that I didn't pledge for the expansion, but at least the small dungeon expansion was included, and I think we'll add that next time.

So far it looks like quite the home run when it comes to story gaming.