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

Played another game of Weimar. I took Zentrum this time (I was DNVP last time) because I wanted to see how one of the debate-heavy factions worked. KDP usually starts fast, but this time, he had an amazing draw and got a Council down in Berlin and two more Uprisings in the first round; either of which elevated to Council would have ended the game right there. So, SDP and I leaned heavily on the KDP units and largely eliminated his ability to stage more coups in round 2. But I got WRECKED by the Crisis rolls after round 2. I rolled 4 1s in a row, which means loss of party base, parliament seat, AND a VP and then a 2 for another point loss. I went from 9 points to 4 and never recovered. I was completely absent from the street with no remaining party bases. I also dropped to three seats in parliament, which meant that SPD picked KPD to form a government. KPD accepted because his street presence had been so neutered, but that also kind of limited his ability to challenge the DNVP and the two of them went hog-wild on the Foreign Affairs, such that we were on the 6th of 7 before midway through the 4th round, which means that it was raining party bases and parliament seats from the skies for the DNVP. Eventually, the black mass was just too much to overcome and in the 4th round Politics phase, after the Crisis rolls, DNVP had 11 of the 21 seats for a majority and the win.

Popular opinion on the fora of BGG is that Zentrum is gimped. I can see the argument, but if my Crisis rolls had turned out just a bit better, I would've been in decent position to either keep DNVP under control or wreck the government and win by VPs after the 8 point penalty for the government parties. But the dice were not my friends. I even became the first in our games to make a deal with the Nazis (Flag Dispute) to get the VPs (5) to try to be in it if it came down to counting them. Still a brilliant game.

Started the night with what is hopefully my last play of Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps. This was supposed to be an exciting battle against the Queen. That is what I signed up for as I explicitly asked the owner of the game if we fight the Queen. I was assured we do... well as it turns out, you CAN fight the Queen, but the scenario explicitly urges you to NOT do that. This game follows the movie's script way too closely, in my opinion, sacrificing fun for accuracy.

The goal of this mission is just to get Newt to the exit. That's it. But the way is blocked by eggs, and the Queen is attached to the egg sac. If you damage any eggs or attack the Queen, she dislodges and starts attacking. You can't kill her, just stun her. She doesn't die until the next mission when you have to shove her out the air lock. Again... it's faithful to the movie but this is not the fucking movie.

We tip-toed through the eggs until we almost ran out of time, and there was a veritable HORDE of xenos behind us. Like every one in the game was on the map, I think. Finally Vasquez (I was playing her and she is the best in the game with the possible exception of Ripley, but Ripley is always bogged down with Newt's bullshit) had had enough and started blasting eggs to clear a path for Newt to scramble to the exit. That strategy worked great and Newt made it. Ripley was falling behind and she probably died but I convinced the owner to call it a victory and not play out the rest of it. This game is just "fine" and always devolves into being chased by a pile of xenos that you can't hope to deal with.

Next was Wiz-War, a MUCH better game. I had not brought it out in so long. We had one new player. Three player isn't ideal, I'd rather the full complement of 5, but that's what we had. I explained the rules pretty quickly and also that most of the real rules are on the cards, in VERY tiny fucking text. I had one card I had to strain just to read. I have the FFG edition, fully painted. The two wizards who were not me started fighting each other, and I ganged up on one of them. We had him down to 5 health, but he already had one enemy treasure in his home base, and was standing on another one. I could have killed him if I had just had an attack card, but I didn't have one, and he was able to pick up a treasure and on the next round boost his way back to his base to win. Fuck. Everyone had a good time and the new player said he would definitely like to try it again. I showed them the enormous stack of cards and explained that just about anything could happen in the game. There is a reason it's such a classic.

Had a little extra time because Wiz-War ended way faster than expected. I busted out Volt, taught them the training game, and we got to robot killing. I ended up getting shoved in a pit twice. I lost, and yet again everyone loved it. I showed them the other arenas, explained there is a whole upgrade system, etc. This game punches way above its weight.

hotseat, I have heard a couple times now that Volt is the faster (and once even 'the better' - sacrilege) RoboRally. Can you compare the two?

Got a couple regulars over today. We started with Villainous, as the new decks- Davy Jones and Tamatoa -had been released a couple weeks ago and I wanted to try them. So, one took Tamatoa, I took Davy, and the other took Yzma. Right out the gate: I am less than impressed with the new design team, post-Prospero Hall. Both Davy and Tamatoa have overly-complex win conditions that leave them in a disadvantageous position against the older, sounder, decks. Tamatoa has two decks to manage (his villain deck and the Maui deck) and has to get both of them operating correctly in order to pull off an Ursula-like win condition: Have Maui, with the Hook, in a certain location. Davy has to collect all five Treasure tokens by defeating the Heroes that they're sitting on. However, like many other villains, you're often dependent on someone else Fating you to get Heroes to your board, which they won't do if they know you need them AND you have to play particular cards to put Treasure tokens on them AND you have to play particular cards to get those tokens to flip over (if you vanquish Heroes with unflipped tokens, those tokens go back to the supply, not to you) AND each token does something detrimental when it's flipped. There are a couple cards in the deck that let you search for Heroes to place in your realm, but you need FIVE of them, not just one like Evil Queen or Captain Hook. In the first game, Yzma found Kuzco right away and then found Kronk a few turns later and won. I never had more than one Hero in my realm and didn't collect any tokens, while Tamatoa never saw Maui.

So, we played another game, with Davy and Tamatoa in for a second round, while our third played Shere Khan. Tamatoa made it farther, getting the Hook in play and finally finding Maui which came into play on the turn that Shere Khan devoured Mowgli. Meanwhile, I had every location in my realm occupied by a Hero and was about to start trying to vanquish them... except that I didn't have any of the cards that let me flip the tokens, so it would've been pointless. Yeah. I think this may be the last Villainous set I acquire.

In complete contrast, my opinion of Tiny Epic Cthulhu had been low enough that, after the first couple times we tried to play it (one solo to test it out and the one group of four), it had not come off the shelf again. The pathing of the mechanisms is, uh, "overwrought" is putting it mildly. I can see why they've designed it this way in terms of building tension and risk and opportunity cost for the players, but our first two plays made it seem absurdly clunky. I stated before this most recent attempt that, if it didn't go well, it was going on the trade block. So, we sat down and read every word of the rulebook for the third time and finally something clicked. We set up the Doctor, the Astronomer, and the Officer to take on the Big Man Himself (Cthulhu.) We moved through translating the pages of the Necronomicon pretty quickly and then started trying to close the portals. But, once you have all of those Chaos tentacles in the bag, as useful as they are, it creates a serious risk of madness (accursing your track on your player mat) every time you draw. We also were loaded on blue and green runes (three dice to try to seal a portal) but only two players had single red runes, which isn't enough to seal either portal (a 3 and a 4 on a die that doesn't go higher than 2.) So, we ended up interrupting our flow to try to get a couple more pages translated to give us some more red runes and two players in a row drew 3 or 4 Chaos tentacles in a single draw and one of them ended up going insane. Might be an argument for spending more of them to grab pages of any kind, rather than saving up to get the big ones. HOWEVAH, it was much more fun and flowed much more smoothly than our first couple tries, so not only am I not trading it, but I'm kinda interested in playing a different GOO to see how it works out in terms of threat and so forth (I believe Cthulhu is considered one of the most difficult of the 8 in the box.)

Nodens wrote: hotseat, I have heard a couple times now that Volt is the faster (and once even 'the better' - sacrilege) RoboRally. Can you compare the two?

I can't, because I've never played RoboRally! Hard to believe, perhaps. I think they are both programmed movement and since they feature robots, I'm sure the comparisons come pretty easily. Volt is fast, clean, cheap to buy, and I have played it with so many people, and not a single person ever disliked it. I don't know how much cross-over there is with RoboRally but I can't recommend Volt enough.

Thanks, I obviously have to check it out then.
Maybe have a look at roboracer.net, it's a fun site.

Season 2 of Cthulhu: Death May Die has begun. We took Azathoth for episode 1, Strange Bedfellows, because it has a middling success rate (52.4%) on the results spreadsheet and Azathoth is kind of a middling challenge GOO (52.6%.) We had Agatha with Hyperactivity, Robert with Psychotic Episodes, and Karen with Uncontrollable Fear. We could see right away how it could be challenging, because you need gangsters from the Discovery deck and, if you don't draw them, you're kind of wandering around for safe spaces to investigate as much as possible. But we got handed gangsters right from the outset, so we had a plan in hand. That said, Azathoth was advancing quite quickly and was on the last green space when we entered the vault and disrupted the ritual. But by that time, between Robert's Slaughter track bonuses and a couple nice items he'd picked up, he was a killing machine. As in, rolling eight(!) green dice with every attack kind of machine. Agatha (me) died outside the vault, having drawn the one perfect Mythos card that drew a room full of monsters that I'd otherwise avoided right on top of me. But Karen and Robert both survived and Robert killed Azathoth over three turns, one-shotting his final phase. There are moments when characters kind of get out of control (like picking up the Grinding Axe in Descent 1st Ed.) and this was one of them, making the ending kind of anti-climactic. But maybe it's just time to ramp up into the higher level of difficulty of GOOs (Black Goat, Dagon, Yug and Neb) and/or start using random monsters without relics and see how much more of a challenge it makes it. Many of our previous wins have been really close, so this may just be a case of recency bias.

Jackwraith wrote: Got a couple regulars over today. We started with Villainous, as the new decks- Davy Jones and Tamatoa -

My oldest daughter was playing as Tamatoa for a couple of games with some of her friends and I don't think I have ever seen her so annoyed, bordering on out right pissed, about a game. Her boyfriend owes all of the Villainous games (as far as I can tell), and was shocked how bad this character functioned.

Oh, Hello everyone, I'm back

The local theater's offerings over the past year have been really subpar. I get that they have to make money to stay in business (they're a non-profit) but I signed up for a membership to see small films that I wouldn't be able to find elsewhere (or at least would have to search hard among many streaming services to find.) They've been showing an increasing serving of mainstream stuff that I'm just not interested in. Tuesday night is always free movie night for members and we've been going less and less often because there's just nothing on that's interesting. The upside is that Tuesdays are also when one of the local board game groups meets at a local brewery, so I've been doing that more and more often.

Tonight, rather than bringing something like I usually do, I signed up for my friend John's offering of DerrocAr, which is a political game about the economic/political crisis that gripped Argentina in 2001 (feels like yesterday to me but it is almost a quarter-century in the past...) Each of you plays a politician from that era trying to become president and/or garner the most support among elements of society from the unions to the farmers to the press to the IMF. Whoever gets to 10 support first, wins. Alternatively, if someone gets knocked out from having four threat tokens (protests (paquetas), bad public image, economic lockout, etc.), whoever has the most support among the remaining players wins. There's a board phase and a card phase. In the board phase you take one action on the board and buy cards from the market and in the card phase you play those cards for a variety of effects. It's very much an above-the-table game where making deals is the way to get ahead. However, John had only played once and two of us (me and Jim) were playing for the first time, so no one had a firm grasp of what was valuable and what wasn't for some time. I made it to 9 support, meaning 1 more of any kind and the win was mine, but then got piled on a bit and knocked back to 7. John then got to 9, but couldn't close the deal as none of us had any money to buy cards and a bank run had started, which meant that whomever was president was also losing money every turn and John and I had been trading the role of president (whoever has the most support) back and forth. Jim had been lagging behind, but jumped forward to 6 support, but then I was able to play a conflict action on John, giving him his fourth threat token, knocking him out and taking the game, 7-6. There's a lot to explore there and I'm eager to play again, especially if we can play with the max player count, which is 5 as, like John Company, the larger the group, the more dynamic and varied the game in that style.

Then, since we had ended a little early, John pulled out Politico. It's a relatively simple card game where you're a Middle Ages noble trying to get the support of the people among 4 different classes: peasant, guild, merchants, and clergy. Whoever collects 13 dudes and at least one of each of the 4 classes wins the game. There are two basic actions: drawing/playing cards and getting dudes. Those actions are represented by two cards, one of which is placed face down by each player and then turned over. If everyone plays the same action, we all just get one action. If someone plays a different action, then you get an extra action for each one that differs from the one you played. So, if Jim and I played Dudes and John played Cards, Jim and I would both get two actions because there's one different action (Cards) and John would get three actions because there's two different actions from what he played. Also, there's a suit of the 4 classes each round and that means you can play cards of that suit with the Dudes action, as well. It sounds more complicated than it is, but the essence of it is basically just poker. All I did was keep an eye on the two of them as they examined their hands and assessed what they were going to do based on what they'd done the previous round and played against it. So I ended up with three actions quite frequently, letting me refill my hand with cards that often let me steal their dudes or just straight drawing three dudes. I got to 13 playing Dudes to their two Cards and won. Jim laughed and said: "You're still pretty good at this whole gaming thing." I said: "I'm really just good at two things: politics and poker and both of these games were right in that wheelhouse." Like DerrocAr, I think Politico would be even better at its max player count of 5 because having to read more of the table would be more of a challenge and there would be wilder swings of fortune, but it was still quite fun at 3. I might try to trade for a copy.

Busted out Spartacus, Blood and Sand- and played a 5 player game with the expansion. One player was not very invested, but it was still a fun way to spend a Saturday,

I need to get that one back on the table.

Vantage is an odd duck to be getting this much coverage, I've played it a bit more solo. It's a very very light booklet game that makes some smart decisions about mechanical simplicity. The way it's been talked about so much you'd think it was some Big Thing but besides the breadth of the game it remains a very simple little thing, which is not a complaint.

Gary Sax wrote: Vantage is an odd duck to be getting this much coverage, I've played it a bit more solo. It's a very very light booklet game that makes some smart decisions about mechanical simplicity. The way it's been talked about so much you'd think it was some Big Thing but besides the breadth of the game it remains a very simple little thing, which is not a complaint.

I think the way it breaks down the barriers and work of every other narrative game I've played is a huge factor and what is resonating with people. Modern narrative games tend to not be chill, with Lands of Galzyr being the one exception (and the narrative there is more family appropriate, with surprises being less impressive than Vantage).

Sleeping Gods, 7th Continent, Tainted Grail, Tidal Blades 2, TIME Stories, etc. all require quite a bit of work to get to the story. Some of these are grueling at times. Design in this space tends to be throw hurdles up in front of the story to extend game length and draw out the experience.

Vantage sets up in five minutes and you can experience your first awesome moment almost immediately. It's fail forward, all the way down, as all of your actions yield narrative progress.

It also has seemingly endless content. Effectively endless for the average hobbyist gamer at least.

It rewards repeat play but doesn't demand it.

You can teach it to someone as you go, again, destroying any barriers or work.

It's effortless and it's excellent. Despite it being derivative of its influences, there's nothing quite like it in terms of implementation.

It's currently trending towards BGG top 100 within a few weeks, and this doesn't surprise me at all.

Quo Vadis was never among my favorite Knizias, despite my attachment to most things Rome. I don't think it was anyone's favorite. But I signed on to Bitewing's campaign for Zoo Vadis once I heard that the good doctor had been invited to update his original. I don't know that the thematic change (cute animals, a la Root) was entirely necessary but it certainly made it easier to weave in the two-use special powers that each type of animal has, since if you're going to believe in anthropomorphic animals competing to be lead mascot of the zoo, you can believe they have special abilities, too. There were four of us at the usual Tuesday night alehouse group: Kevin, who is a regular that I've played with before and two people I hadn't met, Paul and Lauren. In the first game, it was Ibis (me) vs Marmosets (Kevin), Hyenas (Lauren), and Armadillos (Paul.) We filled up the top exhibit fairly quickly and Paul was way out ahead of everyone with 17 points, with Lauren closest behind him at 13. Second game was Tigers (me), Marmosets (Kevin), Rhinos (Lauren), and Crocodiles (Paul.) I got shut out of the top exhibit when they moved a couple Peacocks in there and Paul won again with 17 points and Kevin the closest to him at 9. Third game was Tigers (me), Armadillos (Kevin), Marmosets (Lauren), and Hyenas (Paul.) Paul cleaned up yet again with 15 and I was closest behind him with 12. It was the first time he had played, but I think he just had the "quiet guy" knack of working his way through deals and accepting pretty much anything anyone offered him. It's still not my favorite Knizia, but it's definitely a cool, lightweight game that can still take some thinking. Going to have to try to get a max player count session (7) in and see how that flows.

Played a local's copy of Spooktacular, a recently-delivered Kickstarter from Level 99 Games. It's light and short (~45m) but leans into those as strengths I think.

The theme is that it's 1986, all the players are 70s/80s-style movie monsters, and you've trapped a bunch of people inside a movie theater on Halloween night. You get points for "spooking" people (making them run away from you) and points for turning in sets of people you "devour" (kill/eat/remove from the board).

It's quite asymmetric -- 20 different monsters you can be. Each monster gets a deck of cards. Five are common cards for everyone; five are unique to that monster. So everyone has different strategies for getting points. I was a demon guitarist who could move people around the theater with the siren song of my playing and then devour them with a killer solo. There was also a clown (good at scaring, not good at devouring), a bunch of sewer gremlins roaming around under the floor (weak actions but got a lot of them to represent lots of beasties acting), a puppetmaster manipulating animatronics, and so on.

Good art, fun theme, snappy turns. Doesn't look like it's available at retail yet. 6/10, maybe 7/10? I had a good time.