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

Had a 4 player game of Ready, Set, Bet the other night, using the app so everyone could bet. It was a lot of fun, and everyone liked it so much that it was requested to immediately play again. The second time was even better as people were very much into how things worked by then.

It's a great game, and I think it would be fun to try the traditional way to play some time, with one person (surely, me) calling the race.

I thought everyone could bet already, as that was part of the point of the game...? I know next to nothing about it, except that it's been really popular since it was released.

There are several ways to play. The default is that one person is essentially the GM, running the race. There is a variant that lets that person place some bets. I have not investigated that.

The app has 20 pre-recorded races with voice-overs, allowing all players to just participate.

Been Playing Dead Cells and Arkham Horror 3rd Edition. I quite like both games for very different reasons. I'm really enjoying the tight narrative of Arkham Horror 3rd. I know it has that Pandemic feel, but I think it works. Dead Cells on the other hand is just smooth and fast. We played around for or 5 runs. One of which was all of 15 minutes. We still made progress and it was positive. It has a good game loop that makes you want to go back for another bite at the apple. Just well done.

Primal: The Awakening, an interesting experience If you like adventure games with a unique atmosphere and you are not too demanding on the narration

Primal the Awakening is great. Recently finished my first campaign of it.

Played Freedom Five tonight for the first time. It's the latest iteration of Defenders of the Relm. It was more cognitive load than we were expecting. We played the first game in its campaign which was tutorial / easy mode. We were playing two handed and learning its rules as we went but we were done afterwards. It's cool, in that pandemic whack a mole way. But it is also very random.

We went from that to Dead Cells. Two solid winning runs against the first boss. We unlocked a good deal of new stuff. It's a pretty light game.

Met up with my regular 2-player opponent today, since we're both off over the holidays. Played a couple games of Unmatched. To be specific, Unmatched: Slings and Arrows, since we both wanted to try the new characters. The first game was Shakespeare vs Hamlet. The former's main device is Iambic Pentameter, where the cards you play attacking or defending go in a line, rather than the discard pile, and if you ever get to a point where you have 10 syllables in that line (syllables from the titles of the cards), you get an extra ability. Hamlet, OTOH, is To Be or Not To Be. It's a condition he decides on at the start of the turn that gets him a minor benefit, such as drawing cards, and a minor disadvantage, like taking damage. Most of his attack cards are also geared against opponents playing Versatile (purple; can be used in attack or defense) cards (e.g. you're one or other; be or not be, there is no try) of which Shakespeare has a LOT. So, I think I was on the back foot of this one from the outset and Hamlet eventually killed Bill the Bard. I probably spent too much time trying to make Iambic work, too, and some of the bonuses aren't even that great.

The second game was Titania (from Midsummer Night's Dream) vs the Wyrd Sisters (from Macbeth.) The former has Glamours, which set up a running condition for her; sometimes huge, like being able to move through opponents, and sometimes less than that. The Sisters are similar to Sinbad or Red Riding Hood, in that their discards go into their cauldron and they can cast spells based on the symbols on the cards in the cauldron, which then gets emptied. The standing aspect of Unmatched played out here in that more bodies are always better than fewer. Titania even has a sidekick in Oberon, but matching up with three Sisters constantly made me feel like I was outflanked. I think I probably didn't try to discard the Glamours for more immediate effect often enough, as well, so the Sisters eventually killed the faerie queen.

Then we switched to Compile, which is a card game from Greater Than Games (most well-known for Spirit Island) that SU&SD positively reviewed in early October, which immediately led to a run on it in the States. I only stumbled across it the day the review went up, thought it sounded cool, and went to Amazon to plunk down my $20 or whatever it was. I was apparently the last person to do so, because BGG then exploded with multiple threads about how it was now unavailable. It's basically a kind of lane battler, where each player has three protocols that you're trying to play cards below until they add up to 10 or more points. When you do that, you clear that lane (and your opponent's lane on the other side below their protocol) and count it as compiled. First player to compile all three wins the game. But the cards have varying values and do different things; some when played, some at the end of the turn; some constant effects. Each protocol is an example of a basic thing: Hate, Darkness. Metal, Love, Gravity, Plague, etc. It's a really interesting game and one which plays quite quickly. There's a fair amount of vagueness about the rules, though, which GTG has addressed with a FAQ and a promise to update cards in the reprints. But it really deserved SU&SD's gushing about it in their review, I think, as it's been great every time we played. I won both of those games with the phantasmal trio of Spirit/Psychic/Death in the first game, beating the more ephemeral Light/Water/Apathy, and then the inexorable Gravity/Plague/Metal, beating the dynamic Light/Fire/Speed.

Just played Moto Grand Prix for the first time in years and had a frikkin' blast! Great full-on racing game.

I'm leaving it in the car.

Four friends came over to play Firefly: the Game (10th Anniversary edition) with me. I made cheatsheet cards for each of the four actions in the game, for each player, plus another cheatsheet card indicating which supply locations were the best for getting certain things, like Silverhold for guns and shooters. None of the other players had played before, but it was a relatively easy teach with the action cards, so everybody caught on quickly. We played for six hours, then declared the winner based on strictly who had the most cash at the end.

Our winning player Becca was flying the Artful Dodger, which has a 6 move instead of the usual 5. She pulled off just two big jobs the whole game, but they were lucrative. She had a crew of 5 for most of the game, and lots of social skill icons.

Our second-place winner Scott was the leader for most of the game. He took the big cargo ship with a move of 4, and managed to load up early on with two heavy load jobs that paid decently. Later in the game, he had two active smuggling jobs involving a total of 9 contraband, but got pinched hard by the Alliance and lost it all. He still only lost by $100. Scott worked solo for most of the game, but eventually hired 2 crew when he was running contraband. He also bought a shuttle, so he was making twice as much money on the occasional Make-Work actions.

I came in third, running Monty the smuggler and his ship the Restless Sole. Flight speed of 5, but I could mosey for 2 and had an unusually secure stash for illegal transport jobs. I had a big crew that was heavy on fight and social skills. I scored one good job early and one late, but lost a good crime job when I got a warrant.

Dave came in fourth. He was running a generic Firefly and had a decent crew, but really bad luck with the Misbehave cards. He did complete three jobs, but the payoffs were just okay. He had one of Yolanda/Saffron/Bridgit cards, so he could have gotten great crime jobs from the new Capers deck. There was a warrant out for her arrest, but I was the only even thinking about seeking that bounty, but never really had a good shot at Dave's ship. Either he had more crew, or he was too far away.

Van showed up two hours late and had the lowest score, but made good use of his time playing Malcolm Reynolds and flying Serenity. If he had gotten one more turn, he would have likely won the game with a delivery that only involved one Misbehave card.

Firely: the Game really is a fun game, but the lengthy setup and takedown time (especially with the 10th Anniversary set which includes every expansion ever made for the base game) makes this an event game. You can't just whip it out at a game night or open play thing at a game store. No, you need to schedule it in advance and get it all set up before people arrive. The conventional wisdom (i.e. BGG hive mind) is that this game takes too long and has too much downtime. But we planned on playing all afternoon, and I often encouraged people to scout the discard piles if they were planning to Buy or Deal on their next turn. Anyway, we all had fun, and that's all that really matters to me.

Wow! 6 hours.... I have never played and don't know what triggers the actual end game. Do you have a guess how long this game would have actually gone?

hotseatgames wrote: Wow! 6 hours.... I have never played and don't know what triggers the actual end game. Do you have a guess how long this game would have actually gone?

There at least a dozen different setup cards, and you combine a setup card with one of the 24+ scenario cards in this edition. Since we had mostly new players, we should have played with the standard setup and the intro scenario First Time in the Captain's Chair. That scenario officially takes 1 to 2 hours, but board game designers are notoriously optimistic about play times because they have playtested their own games so many times that they play with great efficiency. We actually might have finished the game at the two-hour mark, because one of our players already had over $6,000, the target number for claiming a goal token and declaring the final go around the table. And the game would have felt unsatisfactory at the point for most of us, because that winner was playing with just his captain and got rolling quickly on his first two jobs while the rest of us were still hiring crew and buying gear. And one player was so late that he would have missed most of the game.

Instead of playing to a specific target goal, we planned to play until 6 PM and then stop and count the money to see who won. But when it got to 5:00 and I reminded people of the time, nobody wanted the game to end abruptly at 6 PM. We agreed that everybody would get one more turn after 6 PM. Unfortunately, three of us could not accomplish anything meaningful in just one more turn, so we all did make-work on our current planet. Actually, Becca won by just $100, so her gaining $200 from make-work on her final turn was just enough to give her the win. The second-to-last player had an exciting final turn, gaining extra movement during his Fly action by slingshotting around a planet, followed by multiple in-flight challenges. He managed to get to his work destination, which was a decent-paying crime job with only one Misbehave required, but he failed that Misbehave card. The very last player to go had a crime job with two Misbehaves, and he completed it and got enough money for second-place.

Some games are meant to be played within a certain time limit, and the game can wear out its welcome if the game runs long. Firefly contains various endorphin-inducing mechanics that kept the game enjoyable for the whole afternoon and even left us all wanting to play more. Movement is fun, because of the wide range of things that can potentially go wrong (or right) during flight. Buying and dealing are enjoyable because both activities offer multiple meaningful decisions that are never overwhelming because you are constrained in the number of options to consider. Working legal jobs is okay because it offers a sense of completion on each job, but the real fun is the illegal jobs because of the exciting Misbehave cards.

Game day. Showed up early, and the owner taught me Altered, a CCG that made a splash on Kickstarter. Even with basic starter decks and a lot of blank text boxes, there are some intriguing elements. Most cards are discarded to a reserve pile where they can be played again, operating like a second hand. Though it is at its core still a game of big numbers lording it over small numbers, the vibrantly-colored setting is not one of violence but exploration as the hero and their pet walk across an island. The wildest stuff, though, comes from outside the game itself. Every card can be upgraded, with a price decrease or strength buff or an extra line of text. You can only have three copies of a card by title in your deck, but none of them may be exactly the same. Deckbuilding restrictions are also based on rarity. You can only run three epic and fifteen rare cards before filling out the rest with commons. I don't understand what all is going on with it either, but every card has a unique QR code as well. Cards can be traded digitally and printed freely? There should an online play platform sometime? Don't need to get into it on the regular, but I'm glad to see innovation in the space.

As more people showed up, I joined in Expeditions, the Scythe sequel. I had played with the same group last year but needed a pretty thorough refresher on the rules. Found a better flow than last time and enjoyed the game more, but I don't need to play it again. There's something wrong with a game when I can play two hands of Dominion (two dumb hands of multiple Wandering Minstrels to dig for Bridges) while waiting for the other three players to figure out all their moves.

Speaking of Dominion, four players is wild. We piled out three in both games with winning scores of 12 in the first and 22 in the second. Crazy town. I didn't win either round, but my first deck especially felt weirdly competent and tuned.

Tiny Epic Cthulhu showed up on Friday. I was a little cagey about signing on to this one; not least because I've been pretty underwhelmed with three of the last four offerings from the TE series (Pirates, Vikings, Crimes), so much so that I sold two of them. It's also the first non-Gamelyn property in that series (Tiny Epic Game of Thrones shows up this week...) which is another kind of hesitation. But I am an undying Lovecraft fan, so I went through with it.

It's, uh, complicated. It's a full co-op, which has to meet a high bar around here. It also has a spinner(!), which led to no end of whining on the KS campaign page, in that spinners are always off-kilter and don't work and this one is essential to the game and blah, blah, blah. The spinner is fine. It works and is as random as you'd expect it to be. It's nicely constructed, which is usually half the battle with those things. But there's this weird mechanism that involves tentacles which are constantly drawn from a bag and placed on the board, on the Great Old One's mat, and on the player mats. They're everywhere and when you exceed the capacity of a track (Madness tracks on the player mats and location mats, Strength track on the GOO mat), the tentacles move to different places. Some of them go to the Shambler mat. Some of them go to the Discard mat. Some of them go to the Shambler mat and then, during a different stage, proceed to the Discard mat. Then, at certain points, all of the tentacles on the Discard mat go back to the bag to be drawn again. I understand the general aspect of it (it's essentially a multi-stage clock that players have to balance in terms of their own power vs the GOO's strength, which is used to determine... how many tentacles you draw every turn!), but mapping it out for gameplay seems to be a complication that's a step too high for a game of this size. The beauty of the TE series has always been games that have depth but which don't need an Avalon Hill-style rulebook to explore that depth. The last few entries have been failing on that latter aspect.

I played a solo game because I couldn't get anyone else around to help out on a Friday night (something about having better things to do than saving the world from demonic entities from beyond time and space.) I was the Librarian (here's where I imagine Henry Corden as Gemini from Thundarr the Barbarian : LI-BRERRR-I-UN!!) and my assistant (you always have an assistant which is another robot player in solo mode) was the Priest. We took on the suggested first GOO of Nyarlathotep and it got kind of sticky there for a while (lots of tentacles!) but we eventually pulled it off. It's not a short game, though, so be prepared to swim through it for a couple hours, which is longer than most TE series games tend to run. I'm not entirely sure where I sit with it after the first play. I like the concept and the choices about player power (each tentacle on your mat gives you more power (movement, acquiring tentacles, etc.) but get too many and there's a drawback) are in line with the choices you're forced to make in games like Cthulhu: DMD. But it still feels REALLY mechanical. Will have to try with other humans to get a better grasp of it.

I got my copy of TE:C a few days ago, and boy is that rulebook is a bit of a mess. I can't believe they didn't include at least one reference card. The "spin" phase (IE. the enemy turn) at the beginning of the round consists of 4 distinct phases and is only documented in the middle of the rulebook. They couldn't even be assed to put it on the back. There is a very small rules reference on the back with a few symbols and the user actions enumerated, but that's it. Yet they waste an entire page on a "flowchart" in the manual. First off, that should already scare you if they felt the need to include one. Secondly, the thing is WRONG in certain places, or at least horribly confusing in it's terse wording. Should have ditched that page and given us a nice turn/rules reference on the back, sheesh. Or, they give you this very informative and dense "Assistant" card that is only used in a solo variant, but couldn't also just add a similar and more useful turn structure card? Heck, the expansion comes with a replacement card for the Necronomicon that only changes one symbol type and nothing else, and is only used in some variant. Totally unnecessary. And while most of the rules are in the book and correct, they can be quite ambiguous sometimes. They've already started revising the rulebook, but they also really need a FAQ.

I played one aborted solo game (with the "assistant") before I quit part way through when I realized I had gotten several key rules completely wrong (TBF, it was my misreading of the rules). I started over playing two-handed solo (not convinced the Assistant is worth it and the rules are extra-ambiguous there), still got one rule wrong (again, my fault, the rule was in there, but it was just written in a way that I skimmed over it), and totally got my ass handed to me. I'll try it again, hopefully getting everything right for once. We'll see if I feel as bag-screwed the second time around.

This all came off as negative, and it should, but I'm hopeful there's something good in here. The spinner is quite nice, in general, for what it's worth.

Yeah, I think they realized that the tentacle rules were overly complicated a bit too late in the design and so they decided to stick the flowchart in but, like you say, it doesn't help at all (some steps are already totally obvious, others are mystifying.) I usually don't have an issue with TE rulebooks, even the intense ones like Dungeons, but I think it's becoming more clear with each release that they need an external editor of some kind to look them over before publishing, so that whoever is the final check hasn't already internalized the rules so much that what seems fine to them isn't utterly obtuse to the outside world.

As for the solo stuff, I agree that it's bending over backwards for a niche section of a niche interest in the first place, but they're a very loud minority in places like BGG. I guess it's a way to even further guarantee sales if you can be the "solo-friendly" producer, which might give you an edge over others that aren't that interested in taking that additional step in both design and publishing. But, yes, the inclusion of a "turn step" card or something similar, whether in lieu of or in addition to the flowchart, seems like an absolute requirement for anything this complicated.