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

It's a fairly simple throwback wargame with no stacking, I read the rules a while ago. That isn't a dig bit it's a good picture of what it is. Don't expect development or like any economic stuff beyond which hexes you control.

The Monoliths expansion for Skytear Hordes arrived, so I’ve been jamming that. On the one hand it’s a great game. It absolutely achieves its goal of being solo Magic the Gathering. It’s punchy. Pick a deck, pick a villain, pick a boss and go. The rules are clean and get out of the way of playing the game. It’s done in twenty minutes.

On the other hand, is that what I want? It’s almost too fast. Ten turns is a long session, and you probably draw only as many cards of a 40-card deck. It’s more puzzle than game. You get the pieces you get and do your best. There’s no ebb and flow. It’s a mad dash from the jump to get the pieces into place.

I want it to be just a touch longer, to have highs and lows and swings of fortune. Ashes Rise of the Phoenixborn does that, but then I need to find time for deck building. There is a virtue to go from box to playing in five minutes.

Skytear Hordes fills a niche.

Got to play two more rounds of Primal the Awakening yesterday. It had been a while since my last play. My buddy and I continued our campaign. Due to choices we had made in what we fought prior we ended up at a point where we had to double up on an element. Fighting different elements opens up more options for you play style wise. So this was a little less than ideal. But we took on the second water monster. Boy was it a tough fight. We won in the end but it was a close thing.

After some upgrades we were ready to jump into our first fight with a crystal monster. Very different than our other fights. We had to play a lot more defensively than we had been.

Still really loving this game. Hope to get it to the table again this Friday.
It’s mashup of Monster hunter and marvel champions continues to deliver for me.

Had a games day on Sunday:
Maria- Austria went west and rushed for a quick victory against France leaving Prussia (me) free to conquer Silesia. They were dangerously close to winning and poor France was getting battered out of the game but I ended up pushing through with a massive hand advantage to crush Austria and win in 1742. I’m not sure how much the chrome Maria adds to Friedrich’s chassis is worth. It seems slightly over complex for what it is but it was enjoyable and warrants more play. It seems maintaining the balance between factions requires some subtlety that was not on display during our game.

I find something about Peer Sylvester’s games leaves me slightly cold. They’re good, bordering on impressive designs with interesting game states that just don’t seem to have enough flavour or drama to keep me invested. I feel Maria and WSVD both occupy a similar niche in that sense. I now realise this is a Richard Sivél design so I guess I'm grouping this into a similar bucket as Peer's work.

Tigris & Euphrates - Always a classic and Knizia at his best. Taught a new player who picked it up reasonably quickly. I was rushing to an early end game with a treasure advantage but a few catastrophes slowed me down and drew the game out. I ended up winning on tie breaks but it was a good and close game.

Bites - I would encourage everyone to run out and get a copy of this. It’s an absolutely beautiful production that can be enjoyed by heavy economic gamers and (I suspect) families/kids in about 20-45 minutes.

It’s fundamentally a stock game but uses a cute theme of ants stealing food from a picnic that totally works without any of the alienating economic language. The variable scoring cards can really shake up the game and I think it should be better known. I cannot emphasise how beautiful this looks on the table with its little cardboard food pieces. I over invested in apples and ended up losing to the grape and wine crowd.

LLAMA - Not Knizia’s finest but I enjoy this game despite it being totally silly and sometimes feeling pointless. I think there’s more game there than most people want to acknowledge but not enough for me to passionately defend it.

High Society - This is amongst Knizia's best. It's a perfect filler auction game. My only consideration would be is if playing this three or four times is worth the same as finding another 30 minutes to play another one of his auction games instead.

Ah, Maria. Haven't played it in years, really want to get it out again. You are (unsurprisingly) correct about the fine balance between the powers.

Had the house to myself for a few days and went through Oath and Stationfall kind-of playing against myself, kind of rules-rehearsing, just creating chaotic situations to cover as many edgy rules cases as possible. Had an absolute blast and feel confident to teach them (again). A group is on the horizon, so this is actually going to happen come fall.

On a personal side note: I made a point of going to open game nights and sessions to try and find other gamers I want to play serious stuff with and did find one person. That was hard work. We gamers are the worst hobby, period. The better and more interesting the games are, the less time I want to spend with the people enjoying them. What the hell is wrong. Some of these people don't wash. And about 25% are just psychos?

I'm more than ever convinced it's better, easier and more fun to just ask people I already like to try out a game.

Played The Great Wall last night. Played 4 player head to head. I liked it well enough. I want to play the co-op version. It has a lot to like. Rules can be a little fiddly with play windows. But not bad. A good player aid will clean that right up. I know it exists.

It has all the stuff I want in a mid to heavy weight euro. Unique and random starting powers. Other powers bough from a slate of options. A theme that is a more than lightly pasted on.

Had our 3rd annual meetup with friends far and wide:

rpggeek.com/geeklist/339787/kevincon-2024

Once again, Sag didn't send Buffy. (He is still forgiven.)

dysjunct wrote: Had our 3rd annual meetup with friends far and wide:

rpggeek.com/geeklist/339787/kevincon-2024

Once again, Sag didn't send Buffy. (He is still forgiven.)

I'll give him a stern kicking for you. You shouldn't be so easy on him.

Random thought: why is your geeklist on RPGG?

No real reason other than that's the part of the BGG/RPGG/VGG complex I use the most, so it's where the link was created when I clicked "Create Geeklist."

You can replace "rpg" with "boardgame" in the link and it will go there just as well.

So I drop in here to see if anyone plays Project Nisei, this game being the spiritual successor to Android Netrunner . I'm checking this because Android netrunner is probably the finest game on tabletop I've ever played, but it was sabotaged by misanthropic companies with too much money. Again I check in here and what do I find? I don't find dick that's what. What the hell is the matter? Allergic to fun? I expected more.

My grandpappy was right: People are pigs.

Nisei Project is a big ask of folks if they don’t have any kind of dedicated group. You will get no argument from me on its quality as a game. I played Android Netrunner for years. Still love the game. I just have nobody to play it with here and without the local involvement I have no desire to grind games online. Wish I did.

Had a game day with my buddy Friday and we got three games in. One co-op play of The Great Wall in which I was surprised that I think I like the head to head version a lot more. Less room to dive into the engine building side of the game in co-op. Still enjoyed it. But it fails the do I really want to play this over Spirit Island test for me.


We also got two more hunts in Primal the Awakening played. We are in the back third of the campaign now and just hit the top tier of gear when we stopped for the night. I decided to take my hunter in a completely new direction over pure Agro I had been running. Now I am playing hard into discard. No idea if I’ll need to retool after our next fight. But I’m excited to find out. This is still an awesome game. Hope to get more in Friday.

Played a game of Bestiary of Sigillum last night. It received a new edition last year that I picked up last GenCon as a final, impulse purchase. I've played it a couple of times since and I'm feeling a bit mixed on it. It's a 3v3 arena battler where each side picks between 36 different creatures. Each falls into one of three broad categories: intelligence, agility, and strength (support, DPS, and Tank basically). On your turn you can move or attack with each creature and use any of their two support abilities that are off cooldown. Arenas are small, only about 3 hexes wide on each side and you can only move one hex at a time unless a support ability lets you otherwise. On the board, there are two hexes where catapults are and if you have the most creatures in hexes on or adjacent, you control it and deal one damage to your opponent's castle (how you win). The only other way to deal damage to the castle is to knock out your opponent's creatures, which deals one damage and then respawn on that player's next turn.

It's...weird. There is simultaneously a lot to do, but not enough either. There are loads of status effects that run the standard gamut of stun, slow, poison, swiftness, etc., but they only last until the end of the round so their impact is real brief. All of your abilities are very strict in terms of range and how much damage they do. I had one creature that would deal damage to everything in forest tiles, which was only four total tiles on the board. They had a way to drag foes into a forest but once that's on cooldown, they mostly sat there. Maybe if I had other creatures that synergized... It's much more simplistic than it first appears. The health of your creatures only goes from two to five, so even an attack that deals more than one damage is huge. It feels like a MOBA in the sense that a lot of the strategy lies in the team-building as advanced play has bans and alternating picks like said MOBAs.

I don't know, the production is great, there's loads of content in terms of creatures, arenas, and alternate modes, and set up/clean up are really fast. It feels like you have plenty of options early, but towards the middle and end once creatures are situated around the catapults and abilities are on cooldown, it feels like working through the motions. I don't dislike the game, but I am questioning it's long-term place in my collection.

Game designer Cole Whirligig is ecstatic about some huge mess of a game he just played at Gencon:



x.com/colewehrle/status/1819562870696210903

It may be this: "
Long Description:
"John Company Second Edition" from Wehrlegig Games, broadened the scope of the original, to become one of the most poignant reflections on the means and motivations of colonial expansion in the 18th and 19th Century, using the family as a lens. With The Company Archives, Non-Breaking Space, designer of GMT Games "Cross Bronx Expressway", digs deeper into the game’s argument through an RPG experience layered on top of the boardgame play. Join Non-Breaking Space as they GM a session of "The Company Archives" with Cole, Drew and a table of Wehrlegig friends, live during Gen Con 2024. Watch the history come alive in new ways through this epic actual play."

This sounds fucking miserable to me, and I love JC2.

I’ve had a decent chunk of gaming since my last post. Played Arkham Horror 3rd edition. I rather like it. Let me say that I see it as a very different game than its previous iteration. As in 2nd is an adventure game and this is a co-op. It’s like a very chromed up Pandemic, where I’m invested in the characters and like the choice you get at game start. I think it does a few things slightly better than second. It gives a more directed narrative while still providing the random chaos that the location event cards. The mechanics of the game are more streamlined. It is also strait up whack a mole co-op. This last leads to a much more urgent feel while playing. Not that second edition lacks urgency. It’s just not as urgent. I like them both. They provide very different experiences within a very similar framework. I like the slightly tighter narrative direction 3rd provides. I can for sure see why people feel strongly on either side of which they prefer. It would come down to what I wanted from the evening for me to pick between them.

I also got in another two hunts in Primal the Awakening. We have hit the top of the gear curve but not all the deck cards we will unlock. Join us for this session was a friend so I asked him what hunter he wanted and now was the reply. So I built a controlling big hit deck from the gear options we had available. I also made a huge build change n my dual blade build to at played into discarding cards. This is a pretty big departure from the pure Agro damage I had been running. Our great hammer hunter just refined his prior build. Big hits some tanking and decent control. We decided to branch out into a new element and chose feather for our hunt. It started out normal enough. The monster would penalize us for not moving by putting cards into our deck that would prevent us from moving when drawn. Then half way into the fight we were introduced to a new wrinkle. We had to have a certain color of card in our collective hands at various counts when triggers would happen or the monster would flee and we would lose. This required us to play very differently than we normally would and made the game a different challenge. We won in the end and proceeded to our next hunt. We continued a quest chain we had been working and fought a monster we had hunted earlier in the game. It was much harder this time. It added tokens that canceled attack damage. This was a giant challenge as 2 of the 3 hunters were big hitters and I had altered my deck and trimmed attacks from it. In Primal your weapon dictates deck composition. In addition to blocking attacks the monster also had flat damage reduction. It was the hardest hunt we have had to date. Real cracker of a fight. It may be a while till we get back to this.

Then last night I got the chance to play The Bad Kharmas. For those unfamiliar with it it’s on the Teburu electronic boardgame system. It’s pretty wild and not cheap. This is a boss battler where you fight an app controlled monster. Your actions are picked on screen. The board detects where things are and what is rolled on the dice. And then things happen. It’s pretty interesting. It allows for some more complicated actions than you would see in comparative games like Aeon Tresspass or Kingdom Death Monster. I really enjoy boss battlers and I enjoyed this too. It has me considering getting the system. The second game due out for it is Vampire the Masquerade:Milan Uprising. I love the world of darkness so that’s really what caught my eye about the system. It’s a little finicky, which is to be expected when it’s the bleeding edge of something. I saw a few boardgame YouTubers did unboxing videos but no playthroughts with the released product so I am real happy I got to play with it.