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

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15 Jan 2025 22:01 #343311 by Jackwraith
If you ordered both, you can at least be relieved that the rules for Tiny Epic Game of Thrones aren't nearly as complicated and there don't appear to be any issues with them. The base action mechanism is a slightly more complex fusion of Tiny Epic Kingdoms and Tiny Epic Galaxies. You roll dice with action faces on them and then select one to take and everyone else can follow that action. No one else can do that action until the round is over. The rest of it is just standard card-driven wargame play, where you use the cards for strength in battle or as the events written on them. Seems pretty nifty. The expansion, Ice and Fire, is not only two more factions (Targaryen and Night's Watch) but also an alternate version of the game, which is a co-op where everyone tries to fight off the Night King and his horde of ice zombies. So, altogether far easier to learn (one read through the rulebook and I'm ready to go) and definitely more up my alley, game-wise.

Howevah, the problem with GoT at the moment isn't with the rules, but with the cards, as people have found at least one major error on a few of them (missing a gold cost.) There's apparently also a difference between the game mat (didn't get it because I generally don't like them and have an ethical objection to neoprene that never dies, rather than cardboard, which does) and the cardboard card for the NPC faction (House Arryn.) Remembering that all Secret-type cards (which the three misprints are) always cost 1 gold isn't a huge thing but, again, it's an example of how useful an outside editor could be. It reminds me of FFG, back in the day, when they'd get the produced games in their warehouse and have to repack them with rules corrections before sending them to retailers. That finally resulted in the Mansions of Madness screw-up, where one scenario couldn't be played because two adjacent rooms were printed on opposite sides of the same piece of cardboard.

All of that said, the litany of problems with the two games may be a result of them trying to complete two campaigns almost simultaneously, which they've never attempted before (was always one game at a time.)
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19 Jan 2025 15:43 - 19 Jan 2025 16:11 #343315 by Jackwraith
Played a four-player round of Tiny Epic Cthulhu. We took on Nyarlathotep, since it was a teaching game; technically for three of us, but really for all of us, since the rules are so problematic. One thing I discovered that's in the Shambler rules is that you have to draw another token per Shambler in that part of town if you end your move there. That would have significantly changed my solo game and it's a REALLY IMPORTANT RULE that somehow isn't emphasized in the text, as it's stated casually alongside all of the 300 other perfectly casual rules. If any game ever begged, pleaded, prostrated itself for a hint/reminder card, it's this one. The problem is that it needs like three of those to cover everything that's going on.

It was the Officer (me), the Astronomer, the Cultist, and and the Doctor running around town trying to deal with the endless pile of tentacles. We ended up taking a longer time than was effective to translate all of the Necronomicon pages and, thus, get to Phase 2 of the game where we could try to win. Another problem with this game is that your characters don't advance. As you get worn down (more Eldritch tentacles in the bag, plus drawing more at the start of each turn), unlike Death May Die or Arkham Horror or Unfathomable or basically any other co-op Lovecraft game that I've played, you don't get stronger as the game goes on. Indeed, when you spend your Madness tentacles to perform any action in the game (defeating Shamblers, translating pages, etc.), you often reset your characters to base level. That means the game gets harder but you don't get more powerful alongside it. Your power fluctuates depending on what you're trying to/need to accomplish (you spend tentacles to seal portals, too, which is how you win.) So, in the end, we got to Phase 2 and sealed two of the six portals we needed, but the GOO was already one step from victory and so we instantly lost when drawing six tentacles from the bag and three of them were Eldritch.

I'm REALLY not sure about this one. Playing a couple more times will not only smooth out its overly elaborate systems and will doubtlessly introduce some insight into strategy as to how to handle the game. But this is the first TE I've ever played that strikes me as largely a design failure right out of the box. It's way more bookkeeping (and rules checking!) than it is actual fun and it's SO mechanical that the HPL theme is almost completely absent.
Last edit: 19 Jan 2025 16:11 by Jackwraith.
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19 Jan 2025 15:58 #343316 by Jackwraith
Then we tried a 4-player game of Tiny Epic Game of Thrones. Again, this is a fusion of Tiny Epic Galaxies (roll dice to determine what actions can be taken) and Tiny Epic Kingdoms (active player takes an action that everyone else can follow.) It was Lannister (me) vs Night's Watch vs Martell vs Tyrell. I was playing Tyrion, rather than Jaime, as my hero. The action system is interesting in that each player gets a choice of two dice by which to take one action. But when you place your die, you also can do another available action. So, there is some opportunity cost, but both the action card, the dice, and the Plot cards in your hand give you so many options that you're never really constrained or just don't know what to do with your turn (as is often the case with TE Cthulhu, when you're sitting in a space that has no good options for your third action...)

There's only six rounds, so you have to start out quickly and we all did to one degree or another. Alliances with the NPC houses (Arryn, Tully, Baratheon, Stark; Arryn is always present, the others are random) ramped up fairly quickly, with at least one house secured in the first round. Those alliances give you access to more armies and another hero card per house and most of the hero cards seem quite good, although I have to say that I didn't use Tyrion's event at all.) Each Plot card (including hero cards) can be used to Plot to gain alliances, as the Event listed on it, or as a battle function (more strength points, retreating right away, gaining strength from adjacent regions, etc.) so the system is quite versatile. You gain VPs for winning fights, but even losing them only costs you one dude and forces you to retreat, and also gets you compensation (either 1 gold or 1 card) for that dude being knocked out. So it's not a situation where you feel like you've been beaten into a corner and are only playing out the string as can happen in DoaMs. And, in fact, there's a makeup mechanic, where the person with the fewest VPs after the two scoring rounds (after rounds 3 and 5 and then a final scoring at the end of the game) can gain a token that gives them a VP for even starting a fight, to say nothing of winning it; similar to Heroes of Land, Air and Sea.

It's a solid DoaM and there are so many options that there could be a fair amount of AP, for those prone to it. It does retain a lot of the flavor of the story, though, in that you're never really out of the fight and the potential for surprise and sweeping actions is quite prevalent. There's also a co-op version, where the players unite to fight the Night King. I think this one will reward hardened wargamers more than casual ones, though.
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19 Jan 2025 17:21 #343317 by hotseatgames
Dug out Lords of Hellas after about 2 1/2 years, and had a 3 person game. It's still great, and was a ton of fun. The new player won, thanks to me and the other player not noticing that they were about to conquer two lands for an immediate victory. Oh well.

Then the winner left, and we had a 2 player game of Terminator Genisys. My friend is really into Terminator and had been wanting to try this one for a while. It's a great game and my friend loved it. It was a good game night.
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21 Jan 2025 00:02 #343318 by cdennett

Jackwraith wrote: Played a four-player round of Tiny Epic Cthulhu.
........
We ended up taking a longer time than was effective to translate all of the Necronomicon pages and, thus, get to Phase 2 of the game where we could try to win. Another problem with this game is that your characters don't advance. As you get worn down (more Eldritch tentacles in the bag, plus drawing more at the start of each turn), unlike Death May Die or Arkham Horror or Unfathomable or basically any other co-op Lovecraft game that I've played, you don't get stronger as the game goes on. Indeed, when you spend your Madness tentacles to perform any action in the game (defeating Shamblers, translating pages, etc.), you often reset your characters to base level. That means the game gets harder but you don't get more powerful alongside it. Your power fluctuates depending on what you're trying to/need to accomplish (you spend tentacles to seal portals, too, which is how you win.) So, in the end, we got to Phase 2 and sealed two of the six portals we needed, but the GOO was already one step from victory and so we instantly lost when drawing six tentacles from the bag and three of them were Eldritch.

Did you know that you reset the GOO strength marker when starting Phase 2? Just making sure, if you had a lot of eldritch tokens in the bag I can see it not mattering as much, but just in case...
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21 Jan 2025 11:14 #343320 by Virabhadra
Had the opportunity to break out [/b]War of the Ring: Anniversary Edition[/i] to teach my partner's brother. We'll be playing again when a second brother is visiting from the East coast.

Was it expensive? Sure. Do I regret owning it over having played and traded 20 other games from the Hotness in the past decade? Absolutely not.

I can hear the spirit of Michael Barnes waving around a $10 copy of Can't Stop and shouting about value, but that game doesn't have wizards.
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21 Jan 2025 11:37 #343321 by Jackwraith
Ha! I did not. Thanks! That makes more sense than just moving it to where it was on the opposite side of the card. I just assumed that was the case because of all the damn "Solo" aspects to so many games (like, for example, TE GoT) made me think that we had been using the solo side, incorrectly.
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26 Jan 2025 16:43 - 26 Jan 2025 16:58 #343323 by Gary Sax
I've been playing stuff, gaming is definitely a comfort, but most of it is pretty much the same shit. Arkham LCG, Arkham 2nd edition, some of the old stuff with my partner.

I played a solo 3 handed Arcs campaign since it was a slow night last night. I still have a lot of huge issues with the game I've discussed before but there is still just something there with the campaign structure specifically. I like the bespoke way that a given game of campaign Arcs plays out given the array of Fates on the table and their incentives, despite my middling feelings toward the system at work itself.

Ah Pook played a co-op game I hadn't heard too much about from a 3-4 years ago, Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor. It has acrylic standees rather than miniatures, and I'm a HUGE sucker for that. They look so good! So read the 60 page rules (lol, sickos.gif) and got to it on tabletop simulator. It's obvious they put a ton of work into the tabletop simulator mod and probably did a lot of testing on it, it's very full featured and scripted. Overall, I was really really taken by it. It's like someone made Defenders of the Realm but it's good and it's of a heavier weight more in line with my interests. It's hard to recommend buying it given how expensive it is and between print runs, but I was super impressed by a whole bunch of different dimensions of it. A good medium amount of cooperation for a co-op, cool asymmetric factions, combat resolution that is not overcomplex and involve lots of custom dice rolling, and despite being sprawling and long it is still pretty constrained with respect to your action economy and the decisionmaking isn't asking you to make a ton of obvious decisions. I was kind of blown away by how I liked it. It's hard to want to bring in yet another big kickstarter box but I'll be pretty tempted by it when they make the next campaign. Pretty unclear whether it's too heavy for my partner, but if she liked it it'd still be a straightforward decision at a high expense.
Last edit: 26 Jan 2025 16:58 by Gary Sax.
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29 Jan 2025 05:20 #343328 by Cranberries
I had a Barnes and Noble gift card from work so I bought a copy of Cartographers, which was the same price as Amazon. I'd checked it out of our library but never played it. My college daughter stopped by so I played a game with her and my wife. It is a nice, quiet, roll and write where you sort of play slow motion Tetris but with differently shaped terrain types. When we were done my daughter said she would play it again, which is high praise. It was fun to see her thinking like a strategic gamer and looking at scoring opportunities down the road.

I then took it to a church gaming group and even though they are all gaming animals, they seemed to like it, but they played SO FAST even after I had included color pencils to make it a little more fun. It was our warmup game. One of the guys had played it extensively as an LDS missionary. During the pandemic a lot of mission rules were loosened up and I guess there were a lot of DnD campaigns in the mission field. My daughter is currently serving in Oregon and her group plays Secret Hitler with playing cards and sticky notes. I have mailed her a copy of Skull King and Taco/Burrito, both of which were thrift scores.

From ToS:

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29 Jan 2025 08:56 #343330 by SuperflyPete
A few months worth of games:

Duelosaur Island: Fantastic 2 player game that is not hard to learn but has multiple ways to win. Good art.

Outer Rim: I hated this the first 2 plays, until I ended up with Lando and Chewie in a the HWK-290 (Hawk Tuah- 90) with 7 of 10 victory points ONE FUCKING TURN from delivering illegal cargo to Kessel for 1VP, which would have triggered my special for 2VP. This would have completely destroyed Han's bullshit Kessel Run in 11 parsecs narrative and replace it with the true greatest hustler's achievement.

Kero: Still one of my all time favorite 2P games. I love absolutely everything about it. It's as if someone drew blood from a Micheal Barnes erection circa 2002 and injected it into a board game box. It has every possible thing that would have aroused him back then. Just an exceptionally well done game.

Starfarers of Catan (new): Absolutely exactly what I wanted it to be. I only wish they'd have paired Star Trek Catan with it and made it a Starfleet game. 3P game for my first game, and it was very well balanced.

Cyclades: Just got it for Christmas again, missing a part sheet, somehow. I absolutely love it, and it's still one of the best civ-as-a-DOAM games ever. I used meeples I have in a game development box, so my buddy won with 2 cheerleaders.

Downfall of Pompeii: I've played this 3x recently and it's just such a fun, fun game. I love pouring lava on people.

Alien Frontiers: This game has aged like a fine wine. If I ever wanted an area control game that mashed up Stone Age, Drakon, and Agricola, this is the one. Not a lot of fat on this game, it's pure fun.

Splendor: I still hate it, despite it being a game I often win at. I ended up giving my copy away.
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29 Jan 2025 15:50 #343334 by Jackwraith

SuperflyPete wrote: Outer Rim: I hated this the first 2 plays, until I ended up with Lando and Chewie in a the HWK-290 (Hawk Tuah- 90) with 7 of 10 victory points ONE FUCKING TURN from delivering illegal cargo to Kessel for 1VP, which would have triggered my special for 2VP. This would have completely destroyed Han's bullshit Kessel Run in 11 parsecs narrative and replace it with the true greatest hustler's achievement.


Hated it on my first play, too. So much so that I ended up trading it after that first play for a copy of Ethnos. I think I may have taken the most challenging character in Boba Fett for that first play because I spent the whole time desperately trying to reach a world- any world -getting impeded by the patrols and then finally landing on a world without enough resources or stats to fulfill my bounties, which meant that I'd end up picking up scrap cargo or something and head out into the void to get slowed down by patrols again. I've rarely encountered a game that repelled me that much on a single play.

Full agreement on Downfall. Some games, like Cyclades, Ankh, and so forth, look great on the table and attract attention. Nothing ever attracts so much attention as both the volcano and what we're doing with it (i.e. tossing people in) in the second phase. It's a great game.
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02 Feb 2025 10:58 #343341 by hotseatgames
Played a 3 player game of Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps. This was my second time playing. My friend bought all of it, which was surely unnecessary but he has completionist tendencies.

After a rules explanation, we started with a huge first turn that saw a grenade take out something like 8 xenos. Most of the game was smooth sailing after that, with little opposition until about the 75% mark... when I drew a motion tracker card that put a whopping 15 blips on the board! This card is fucking asinine... most cards add 1 or 2 blips. We almost didn't have enough blips for this card. I was playing Vasquez, and frequently kept drawing "hazard" cards that stuck to her, causing grief every time she activated. I found this more annoying than interesting, but that's just me, I guess.

The game ended with all characters basically running down the corridor to the APC, being chased by approximately 20 xenos in a massive crowd.

I found the first mission more fun than the second. Components are fine, but the tails on the xenos are very annoying, constantly getting caught on anything and everything. This is a decent game, and certainly captures the film... but it's not a great game.
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02 Feb 2025 14:14 #343342 by charlest
I remember when that game came out, this place was hopping, hoping it would be great. The writing was somewhat on the wall, as GF9s stellar design group already departed (now Monster Fight Club).

I recall Michael Tweeting or posting in the Actual Play thread here that he had a blast with his first play. Was absolutely loving it. Then he turned on it quickly and ended up giving it a somewhat critical review. I played several missions and then reviewed it for Ars Technica, ending up disappointed as well.

Assembling the minis was one of the worst minis projects I've ever encountered. This is coming from someone who has played dozens and dozens of minis games and has the tools and experience. I cannot imagine a board gamer buying it and seeing those sprues. The tails are horrific to assemble and play with.
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02 Feb 2025 16:13 #343343 by hotseatgames
Yeah, there is no good reason that these models couldn't be single pieces. My friend struggled to build it all.
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02 Feb 2025 16:35 #343344 by Msample

Jackwraith wrote:

SuperflyPete wrote: Outer Rim: I hated this the first 2 plays, until I ended up with Lando and Chewie in a the HWK-290 (Hawk Tuah- 90) with 7 of 10 victory points ONE FUCKING TURN from delivering illegal cargo to Kessel for 1VP, which would have triggered my special for 2VP. This would have completely destroyed Han's bullshit Kessel Run in 11 parsecs narrative and replace it with the true greatest hustler's achievement.


Hated it on my first play, too. So much so that I ended up trading it after that first play for a copy of Ethnos. I think I may have taken the most challenging character in Boba Fett for that first play because I spent the whole time desperately trying to reach a world- any world -getting impeded by the patrols and then finally landing on a world without enough resources or stats to fulfill my bounties, which meant that I'd end up picking up scrap cargo or something and head out into the void to get slowed down by patrols again. I've rarely encountered a game that repelled me that much on a single play.


OUTER RIM doesn't have a steep learning curve, but there is a curve. You can't just wander around without a plan - each character has a sort of meta that drives how you should play them. For instance, Boba Fett is a bounty hunter - he's gonna get into fights to collect bounties. So get some cash and tool up ground combat weapons and maybe your ship. You aren't a jobber or cargo smuggler . As far as running into Patrols - early in the game they're only 3 strength - assuming you pick the starting fighter type ship you have a slightly better than even chance of defeating them, getting $5K in cash for your troubles.

Bounty Hunters got buffed more than other characters in the expansion, since contact tokens get revealed much more quickly than in the base game.

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