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

The second son loves jigsaw puzzles and prefers cooperative games, so Mists Over Carcassonne was an easy sell. Still, I was not prepared for him ripping tiles out of my hand for his preferred placement.

I finally talked him into attempting the second level, and then he immediately balked at the graveyards. It’s fine. Game is easier than I’d like at this point, but I still get joy from sharing a twenty-point city with him.

A while back, I discovered that an old friend from school had moved to the Twin Cities 25 years ago, and we met up for lunch in June. We weren't close friends back in the day, but our paths crossed a lot back then because we did a lot of the same activities and classes. I talked him into playing board games the next time we met up, which was this last Saturday. He wanted me to meet his girlfriend, so we spent a while on dinner and conversation, then finally played Camp Grizzly.

Camp Grizzly is always fun, but this was an exceptional game. My friend played Jody, the moody loner who plays guitar, which was funny because my friend is a warm extrovert who plays guitar. His musician girlfriend drew Saffron, the conscientious objector, and I got Karen the mentor. For the first dozen turns, Jody kept drawing Fooling Around cards and choosing Karen because she got a chainsaw on the first turn. Jody even got the card where he is fooling around with himself in the woods. Otis kept attacking our two characters and I won nearly every single fight thanks to the chainsaw. Meanwhile, Saffron managed to go almost the entire game without even seeing Otis, aside from one unfortunate game of strip poker (thanks, Jody). We also had cameos by Morris the camp manager, John the carpenter, and the pervert who looks like Burt Reynolds. Finally, I was ousted because a camper tried and failed to give me first aid, causing two additional damage. Jody was slowly crawling towards a first aid station while slowly bleeding out (a card effect), and managed to die due to the Hellraiser-style toy card where you need to guess the color of the next cabin card you draw.

Saffron recovered the chainsaw and another item from Karen's body, giving her the set for the Barn escape. She failed to hide from Otis during the escape scenario, so he hung her up and started slowly carving her with a chainsaw. With one hit point left, Saffron managed to escape and got into her first and last fight with Otis: a chainsaw duel. She won! My friends were thrilled with the game, especially since their only other modern board game experience was a couple of games of Wingspan. Maybe I have successfully created a couple of new Ameritrash fans.

Now that I've moved back to the US I am able to play games a lot more often. Here's what has been played lately...

Worldspanner Factions - I posted about this in the dedicated thread so I won't say much here. But I did just play with real opponents last week, and it's definitely an easier teach than Duel of Ages 2 was. So at least in my experience, it was easier to get out there than its predecessors. Still great, though the intro game this past week was probably not putting its best foot forward. I think it wants at least 8 players per side, and at least a 10-turn game.

I, Napoleon - I backed this on P500 ages ago, and it arrived a couple weeks ago. I've not had as much time with it as I'd like, just an aborted full campaign and a play of the Commander Era scenario. It's a weird game, though I have enjoyed myself. I feel like it usually boils down to essentially a card flip game, where you use an event deck to tell what happens to you and then you respond in the limited ways available to you. You have the most agency during military campaigns, but those are pretty sparse at the beginning, and even then they tend to rely on just a few die rolls. Mind you, these aren't really meant as criticisms. It does provide some fun narrative elements, and I like how it focuses on Napoleon's POV very heavily. The fact that you are just along for the ride in a lot of ways makes the game easier to parse. But it's a weird decision for a big GMT production. It seems like something that would have been more at home in something small like an old Victory Point production, though the card density would probably have been too high for that. Still, I need to play more. A full campaign will tell me a lot, I'm just waiting to have a surface available where I can leave the game out for an extended period of time.

Faiyum - This was one that I had my eye on for a while before returning to the US, because I like Friesse a lot and it looked like the kind of 2008-ish Eurogame that used to be my bread and butter. I found it on Amazon for $30 and played it this weekend. I really liked it a lot. It reminds me of Brass, where there is a shared infrastructure being built that everyone uses. But it's a much smoother game than Brass, in a way that is honestly pretty rare for Euros that take 2+ hours. It will definitely benefit from knowledge of the cards, though I can see the game shaking out a lot of different ways based on the order cards come out in. Anyway, it's a great title. I look forward to playing more.

Comic Hunters - This recently got a reprint in the US. It's already infamous on BGG for its very cheap production, and it's rather deserved I think. There have also been all sorts of problems with cards being misaligned or missing or duplicated. It's kind of a boondoggle, which is a shame because I really liked the game when I played it this weekend. It reminds me a little of 7 Wonders by way of Modern Art. It's not nearly as good as the latter, but I did like it more than the former. I really like that the different cards all have actual comic book art on them, because invariably everyone will at some point say, "oh, I have that one somewhere" or "that's a great story." Pretty cool. Hopefully there's a printing in future that actually has some quality control behind it.

MLEM: Space Agency - This is one that probably won't be super popular here, but I've only had it for a month or so and I've played it a whole lot. It's basically a group push-your-luck game where you are cats on a space mission. The captain rolls the dice to move the rocket, and the other players have the option of disembarking to get a reward, or staying on board to perhaps get something better at the risk of crashing and getting nothing. It's pretty simple, but it's also the kind of thing that appeals to me, because I just love push-your-luck games. It's a Knizia game, so it has that feeling of being pretty rock-solid from a numbers standpoint, even though it's fluffy. It also has some fun little variants in the box, meaning it basically contains its own expansion content. I'm not wild about the meme-tastic theme, but it's mostly inoffensive. For a $30 game it's a very nice production, with a neoprene mat and a decent sized box to boot. So yeah, if you like things like Can't Stop, it's one worth trying.

3p game day today:

JORAKU. So trick-takers are having a moment, and it's started to branch out into pseudo- ones, or ones that combine with other things: Arcs is the clear hype train here; haven't played it yet so talk to GarySax or Charlie about it. Brian Boru predates it by a couple years. I got a chance to play it back in May 2024 and was quite disappointed -- The King is Dead 2e is a 10/10 forever shelf denizen for me, so to see a bland point salad melange was disappointing -- 4/10 for Brian probably. Joraku is an even earlier (2015) attempt to play with the form: trick taking plus area majority, in feudal Japan. It plays with the formula by making it optional to follow suit, and as soon as you play, you get to add dudes to the map or move them around or kill enemies. The winner of each trick causes the area containing their warlord to be scored, which is a small amount of points. At the end of each round (of which there are three total), all areas are scored. But the points change; as the game moves towards its end the outlying regions change from valuable to okay to worthless, and Kyoto becomes worth a boatload of points. I came in last. I'd built up in the outlying provinces and then my armies were stuck there. My opponents annoying refused to murder them, so I could re-muster them closer to the action, and I was too slow marching them on the capital. 8/10? Clean ruleset but very thinky with wanting cards to win the trick, but also needing them to influence the map.

DAYBREAK. Leacock co-op, lots of moving parts. Kind of Pandemic meets Terraforming Mars. Tons of stuff to keep track of, random elements hose you, try to survive. Never going to be my favorite type of game, but it's okay. 6/10.

HEAT with the HEAVY RAIN expansion. We played on the Japan track with three legends and the advanced garage. I was in third most of the time until Kuhrusty miscalculated and spun out in the flooded part of the track. Zipped past and took the checkered flag. Always a treat, although for whatever reason I'm not as obsessed with this as I was when Flamme Rouge came out. 8/10.

SCHADENFREUDE. Quick finisher of this profanity-inducing trick-taker. My considered opinion, now that I am only terrible at this game instead of abysmal, is that it's a much swingier experience than Cat in the Box. The main issue is that, during the first few rounds, points are kind of whatever -- there's no real strong incentive to get them or avoid them, as long as you're in the pack. The last round was as tense as any game I've played, including 99% of any CITB round. But, all rounds of CITB are at least pretty stressful and compelling. If there was a way to fast forward past the ho-hum rounds at the beginning, it would be amazing. But, they're both amazing, 10/10 for each. Kuhrusty and I both busted and threw the game to Adam, whose strategy of being in last the whole game was surprisingly vindicated.

Did a three- and then two-player game day today.

First was Villainous, because the last vestige of Prospero Hall came in the door the other day in the form of King Candy (Wreck-It Ralph) and Shere Khan (The Jungle Book.) I'm not sure if these were just fully-finished and sitting in the pipeline waiting to get through production while PH was dismantled by whoever owns Funko's game division now (Asmodee?) or if that owner is fulfilling a contract with Disney with different designers or something else. Anyway, King Candy is the weirdest villain of the 19 now available, since he drives around a track in a figure-8 on his realm and can only use actions based on where he currently is on the track. Shere Khan, OTOH, is more typical, but has a dual goal, in that he not only has to find and defeat Mowgli but has to do so while there are no Fire tokens ( Man's Red Fire! ) in his realm. I was Shere Khan against Oogie Boogie and Gaston. Gaston made serious progress, removing 5 of 8 obstacles but Oogie really couldn't get the right cards to put Sandy Claws in play, so I eventually snuck away with the win by having Mowgli sit in my realm for a couple turns while my Monkeys got rid of the fire before I devoured the little bastard.

Then I got in my first multiplayer game of the Arkham Horror card game. Those of you on the Discord might know that I found a sale copy of that and the Dunwich Legacy investigator pack and have made my way through the campaign solo once with Roland and Agnes, coming away with a fairly comfortable win. Today we had Roland, Daisy, and Wendy and we got krushed. KRUSHED. The second scenario, Masks, is one where you try to find the other cultists in town and expose them. We drew every Encounter card that could drop Doom on the Agenda in rapid succession, so we had time to expose exactly one of them before the scenario was over and we had to move on to the final one. That meant that when we found the ritual site, we had to fight our way through FIVE of the elite cultists. We got hammered. But both of the people I was playing with have been in the same situation with the original Arkham Horror, so they were fine with taking a loss to the GOOs and are eager to try again.

Finally, my GF and I got in an initial game of Peacemakers: Horrors of War. This is a Gamefound campaign that recently wrapped up. I got in on it because I was intrigued by the idea of a DoaM game about stopping war. It's a co-op, which doesn't thrill me, but it's more of an action efficiency co-op than a puzzle solver. You have two armies that are going to execute two order cards per turn. You have 1 to 4 adventurers running around the map, trying to heal/fortify/move units (and sometimes strategically poisoning a couple of them) while doing your best to anticipate/confuse/obfuscate their various orders to lower everyone's motivation to fight to the point where they'll make peace (hence, the title) without lowering it to zero where they surrender and the other side conquers them. It's all themed with animals a la Root, albeit with a South American theme, rather than North American. The first scenario is fairly simple so you can get a grasp of the rules, but the second one looks kinda fascinating (a Tuatara pirate allied with the Bears against the Macaws), so I'm definitely geeked to try again after our first plodding victory.

Played a game of Space Hulk Saturday night at NashCon. A great game as always going right down to the wire. We were lucky as the Space Marine players getting great rolls for command points and overwatch shots. At the end we had three of our twelve Space Marines left. The guys running the game had done a great job on the terrain, building 3D foam core sections with a lot of interesting things going on in the different rooms. They had magnets and steel plates holding the map together. The walls made it a little tougher to keep up with where the genestealer blips were but really added to the visuals of the game.

This weekend I had my monthly game night with my buddy Chris.

He brought by Star Wars X-Wing. I got trounced despite outmaneuvering him so, so much. It was my 4x Tie + Vader vs his Bossk and a couple of Rebel ships..the shitty one and some mid-sized ship, all from later expansions. The power creep in this game was so bad. Still, the toy factor is so good. It's a little too reliant on dice, which I normally like, but rolling 2 attack dice and whiffing 6 of 8 times just screams "broken".

Then we played Copenhagen. He, coincidentally, gave this to me for Christmas. It's such a fun race game pretending to be a Tetrissy building game. It's definitely better than Azul and Patchwork, IMHO.

Next up: Duelosaur Island. I have played this 3 times and only played it right this time, and even then I had to wind back the score track halfway because I finally remembered what I did wrong then other times. It's a very smartly and tightly designed game that isn't quite point salad, but has enough ways to win to make me think.

Then, Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game. I can't adequately describe how good this game is. For me it's a 5 out of 5 star game. This one is definitely my favorite game in the last 2-3 years after Kero, which I do like better.

They had to do several rebalance passes on x-wing, and I don't think anyone was ever particularly happy about them. ESPECIALLY the second one by Atomic Mass Games.

I was into X-Wing in FFG's first edition, but had gotten out by the time 2nd Edition came around. I liked the game and probably would have gotten into tournaments if there had been a more regular scene around me, but there wasn't, so I ended up with a pile of ships and not much to do with them. It was at that point that I decided that anything even vaguely "collectible" was no longer for me. I eventually moved my whole collection to BoardgameCo. in one of my big trades and have never regretted it.

The problems with 1st Edition were two-fold: 1. Shields ruled the day. Any ship with shields was worth almost twice what any ship without them was. Point costs were supposed to reflect that, in that an X-Wing almost cost as much as two TIEs. But the problem is that point costs don't always reflect game effectiveness and if your ships could take multiple hits without running the risk of crit effects, as most Rebel ships could, while many baseline Imperial ships couldn't, it quickly led into power creep as more Imperial ships were produced that had shields in order to keep up with the Rebel ships.

2. In that same vein, in a game about fighters, bigger, more durable ships became the order of the day because, again, they could take hits and still win the day. Tournaments were soon being won by single-ship lists like a maxed-out Millennium Falcon. When tournaments started insisting on multi-ship lists, people would shave just enough points off to include one rookie pilot in an A-Wing and still max out their Falcon. That made games take much longer and be much less interesting for spectators (and, often, players.)

Two side things were, yes, the dice and ordnance. A dice-based game is going to have luck involved. But the margins on the dice in 1st Edition and the problems with melding that much luck with a game based on predictive movement soon became obvious. In most minis games, the smart player knows not to hinge their strategy on the dice. You maneuver your units to cover each other based on what you can see on the board, so that poor dice don't doom you. But you can't "see" the board in games like X-Wing because it constantly changes, so the impact of die rolls is magnified by coincidence.

Meanwhile, many ships had points added to their costs by ordnance, but the ordnance rules were awful, despite regular power creep and cost adjustments, because releasing static attacks in a game of predictive movement is almost never constructive. Once in a while, you'll guess right or your opponent will make a horrible mistake and that bomb your ship "paid" 8 points for will pay off. But the vast majority of the time it won't and, thus, no one will ever use those ships or take those options, almost no matter how cheap they are.

I know 2nd Edition improved on a lot of this, but I just wanted nothing to do with that type of game anymore by the time it did.

Based solely on the recommendation of Vysetron, I got Mini Game Party, which is exactly what it sounds like. In the box are a collection of components that are used in 101 mini games. Each game is 6 rounds and generally a game takes around 20 minutes but if you have the full 8 players I could see it going longer.

Each round, the teams are mixed up, and players score generally based on the # of people on the other team, so lopsided teams are dealt with quite nicely.

Memorization, dexterity, etc. make up the games. It's cool and I can see it being a lot more fun with more people and more than the zero booze I had.

I used to play Magic with a coworker from a vegan restaurant where I was waiting tables around a decade ago, and I was his introduction to the hobby outside of CCGs. He won the X-Wing event at Gen Con this year - they grow up so fast!

I bought everything I needed to play Heroes of the Aturi Cluster right before FFG announced 2nd edition and decided not to upgrade.

Had another Game Day on Sunday. Nathan and Kelley were the only ones able to make it, so it made it easy for me to pull 4-5 player games in which to play. Until the backlog is cleared, I am only proffering UNPLAYED GAMES. Games that in my collection that have never been played before. Had a stack of at least 12, and we were only able to play two. One of which shouldn't have been in the pile, but I wanted to get The Boy to play with us, so it was included. Spoiler, the little peanut didn't play.

First game we played was Love is Dead aka (Dead) Dad Jokes the Game. You're essentially playing Afterlife Tinder. You try to add traits to your profile to attract a potential Boo. I was hamstrung early on by Kelley with a Red Flag, which cluttered my profile until the end of the game. In the end, Nathan won with 20 points, whereas I was dead last with 8 when my wife used her endgame point penalty card on me.

The next game was Run, Fight, or DIE!. We used the Running Late expansion, and both Kelly and Jo took a female character each. Jo had Crossbow girl and Kelley had the Dog Whisperer. They lovingly referred to the Pink Action Die as the Pink Tax. Nathan played the linebacker and I played the Phone Technician. It was slow going with Kelley and Jo being new players, but it somewhat picked up. The Mutant Boss Zombie got called at least three times and Kelley's dog saved at least three players at one point, including me. In the end, Kelley got eaten, which ended the game. Nathan again won because he hurt the Boss Zombie the most and had no damage on his character.

We then went out for a belated birthday dinner for Kelley, which was sushi.

The End.

3 player game night last night...

Alien: Fate of the Nostromo - I'm glad I didn't pay for this one. It's squarely... fine. Being attacked by the Xenomorph and essentially saying "oh no my morale" is kind of dumb. The game itself does have a lot of character and plenty of references to the film. I'm sure it was a challenge to adapt this to a main stream board game. I'd play it again, but probably not request it.

Dead by Daylight - this one vs. many programmed movement game is kind of neat, and I expect it sings at 5 players who all know what they are doing. The problem with that scenario is that we will probably never get to that experience level, and if I actually had 5 players available I'd choose a better game.

Mini Game Party - a quick end of the night game, and it was probably the high point, really. Recommended.

hotseatgames wrote: Alien: Fate of the Nostromo - I'm glad I didn't pay for this one. It's squarely... fine. Being attacked by the Xenomorph and essentially saying "oh no my morale" is kind of dumb. The game itself does have a lot of character and plenty of references to the film. I'm sure it was a challenge to adapt this to a main stream board game. I'd play it again, but probably not request it.

You're too kind. I played once and was done with it, despite the very nice graphic design. The game designer is a dumbass who shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the Alien license. He drank all the BGG Kool-Aid and decided that modern gamers are constitutionally incapable of handling character death in a horror board game. That decision destroyed the theme of the game. Might as well have made it Alien: Settlers of Catan or Alien: Monopoly.

Alien: Settlers of LV426, instead of a robber you have the xenomorph.