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

Traded my way into a complete set of Elder Sign (so including all six expansions) which, Lovecraft fan that I am, I'd never played because it seemed too light and I'm usually more interested in more elaborate HPL presentations. But I had some books that I was trying to get rid of and someone in one of the local groups had this complete copy up for trade, so I took it. My regular 2-player partner and I sat down tonight to try it out and... it's pretty good. We just used the base game (although I presented him with all of the possible investigators, which is a few dozen) and took on Hastur as our opponent. It was actually more challenging than I expected because both Darrell Simmons and Carson Sinclair got devoured, but then Amanda Sharpe and Lily Chen managed to close the deal on the big, yellow guy before he made too much progress on the track. Since a lot of Elder Signs come from the Other Worlds cards and Hastur advances on the track every time you complete an Other World, we had to dance around that a bit, but finally got it sorted.

We played a second round against the Big Man himself (Cthulhu) who starts you out with -1 stamina and sanity, which is problematic for some of the 7-3 investigators. But we tried more even people in Monterey Jack and Mandy Thompson... and both ended up getting devoured again quite quickly. So we switched to Carolyn Fern and Wendy Adams and lasted much longer. After some struggles where Cthulhu got up to 8 (out of 11) on the track, we finally sealed the gates and won again. I like it. There are some real choices to be made as to which Adventure cards to take on at any given moment and surrendering a whole turn to pick up another Unique item or a Spell seems like you're risking a lot, but is absolutely necessary to handle some of the tougher outings. I think next time I'll add in the Unseen Forces stuff (more Adventure cards and the Blessed/Cursed die) and see where it takes us.

Elder Sign is a good game. I sold mine off many years ago but had the first couple of expansions... I remember one of them being really neat as it changed quite a lot about the game.

Yeah, that's probably Gates of Arkham, which ramped up the complexity quite a bit. Not only does it introduce skills that Investigators can take advantage of, but it also adds to the mystery with the Adventure cards coming out face down, but with an indicator color (green, yellow, red) on the back that hints to their difficultly. Other Worlds cards also spawn gates, which make adventures impassable until the gates are closed. Opinion on BGG is that Gates is what made Elder Sign into the game that it should've been. Am looking forward to it.

Another good tranche of gaming in the past three months:

Batman: Gotham City Chronicles - Played a dozen games of this since first cracking it open in May, all three opponents (and me)have really enjoyed it. Yes, the elevations and iconography takes a game or two to get used to but their app helps massively and makes it a great gaming experience.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon - My second playthru with the new group and we finished up after a year or so (around 80 hours). Saw a lot of new story arcs and at the end, because I'm pretty sure there won't be a third play within the next five years, I laid out all the location cards and had a good look - and I reckon there were two locations I still haven't been to in 150 hours of play. An extraordinary narrative game.
Etherfields - back into this after my co-gamers had their summer break. This is another brilliant and fun narrative game from Awaken Realms, story and deckbuilding and card-play and changing game modes all put together really well.
Sleeping Gods - picked this up a few months back (had it three years ago) because I wanted to have another run or two through it as it played well the first time. This play we just didn't seem to arrive at many (hardly any) 'linked' locations, still did a lot of exploring and won all our battles but didn't really find many of the stories - ended up with a shit score, might struggle to convince my opponent to give it another try
And a few more games of Machina Arcana, Maximum Apolcalypse, and Silverton - plus introduced some of the new group to Mansions of Madness 1E, I had this 6 years ago and then sold it to get 2nd Edition but the app driven one didn't really click with me, seemed a bit sterile even though it had the plus of 'fog of war', so managed to track down a 1st Ed copy this year.

Sleeping Gods is a beautiful game, but the mechanics actively detract from the enjoyment of the game. The exploration is fun, the combat is fun, but there is too much downtime and fiddling with resource management.

Shellhead wrote: Sleeping Gods is a beautiful game, but the mechanics actively detract from the enjoyment of the game. The exploration is fun, the combat is fun, but there is too much downtime and fiddling with resource management.

Yeah - trying to remove the Fatigue from all your crew every two turns just slows the game down and, as you say, makes a exploration/adventure game become more of a resource management game.

Oops, forgot to add that I cracked open S.T.A.L.K.E.R this week and I've done five games in the Zone Survival mode (one shot random missions) with a couple of different opponents to learn the game before looking at the short campaigns.
Zone Survival is a bit hit and miss as you randomly select one (of ten) scenarios and one (of ten) maps and then add four (of 55) setup cards to add random (positive and negative) elements to the game, and then you have Event cards that act as the game timer (one per round) that also introduce positive and negative effects.
All up those random elements does make every game completely different, but it can also make a game unbalanced. Of my five game - one was a cakewalk (although we may have missed a rule), two were a great experience, one was a hot mess that just threw too much stuff in, and that we lost as one of the late-arriving random elements teleported me away just as the enemies attacked (& destroyed) their objective, and the last one yesterday that as soon as I had set it up knew it was impossible to survive let alone win (we ended up both being killed after just two turns).
I like the game, and the campaigns will undoubtedly be well designed so no question of selling it - just that the Zone Survival mode, where we can pull it out for a different one-shot mission any time, is going to be a big part of owning it so I'll just have to accept that I will get the odd lemon when playing.

I was SO tempted by STALKER and it was the zone survival mode that most interested me. I'm glad I did not get it, only because I just knew it would not get the plays it deserves.

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Had a 2 player game of Guards of Atlantis II last night. It was the first time in a long time, and my opponent's first game ever. This was also my first try at the new heroes I had gotten in the second Gamefound campaign.

We each ran two heroes. I played Gydion the Wizard, which is the most unique hero in the whole game, as far as I can tell. He actually has a separate deck of spells (his spell book), and you can only cast each one once before you have to then "Prepare Spells" with his Silver card in order to get spells back. But it's a balancing act because some of his spells are buffed by how many used spell cards he has. He is challenging but rewarding, as his spells are diverse and powerful. I was able to move enemy heroes around on the board, which pissed off my opponent quite a bit and was well worth it. His defense capabilities are predictably not great, nor is he the speediest dude out there.

My other character was Mordred (or something), an undead rocker who can raise zombies that assist him. He's neat, but I was just not able to get my head around using him properly.

This game is incredibly mentally taxing, as you try to figure how to best use your heroes, while trying to prepare for whatever your opponent might be doing. Running two heroes is not ideal but it's what we had.

I was focusing on killing minions to push the lane, while my opponent seemed hellbent on killing my heroes. I did push once towards his base, and had set up a plan that would have had my victory... but he fucked it all up by forcing my wizard to discard two cards in the same round, and managed to kill my heroes. This handed him the game. The whole thing took 3 1/2 hours, which is way longer than normal, but it was a teaching game and we deliberated on things quite a bit. We had a blast!

We ended with a quick game of Cave Troll, which was good but it does not shine with 2 players. I lost that one, too. :/

Last night we had 5 players, which does not happen often...

Started with Worms, and almost immediately my team went from 4 worms down to 2. Everybody pretty much gunned for me until I was the first team out, and at that point there were 3 players still with full teams. It looked very much like one person was going to win it since he had the most kills, but then in the final turn another player killed two of his worms so he lost, she won, and it was great.

Next up was the main event, Damnation: The Gothic Game. Everyone had played before. My character was the Terror, whose abilities are about movement. I never used a single one of them. One player used power of adjacency on someone to put them in the Great Spiral Staircase, which wasted a few of their turns. Once they got out they stupidly hung around the area, and another player did the same damn thing to them! On their first turn they rolled properly to get out, but I slapped a card down that forced a reroll and they were stuck there again. Hilarious!

One player became the Vampire, and as they struggled to catch up to anyone, another player who was very close to death ran away from the Vampire and closer to ME. I promptly stabbed them to death, claiming the first death of the night. Once the Death Knell cards started flipping, they flipped pretty damn quickly. The Vampire killed another player, extending his time, and I stepped on a trap that killed me. Down to two players, the Fall started, and things were very much going the way of the Vampire player since the Villain controlling the Vampire doesn't take the chip damage from the Fall every round. Even then, it was going to be close, but the other player could not summon the right cards and died to damage from the Fall. An appropriately climactic ending to a bloody game. This one is always so much fun.

We wrapped a game of Vantage. I think it's incredibly interesting design if you like narrative games, it's worthy of the buzz. Worth checking out if you like narrative games at all, even just to check out someone's copy, though you don't necessarily need to own it.

I find it somewhat shocking that this is a Stonemaier production as it's way riskier than any of their other games and it has a lot of stuff that kind of says no to you and isn't always trying to cater to you. Specifically, a lot of games are chasing open world feelings, and this is one of them. But this game isn't really interested in chasing the open world of feeling of like a skyrim, where the world is catered to you, the threads are all presented and always avaiable to you, and you can just take your time munching through all the open threads at all times. A lot of the clues are hard to follow and it can be difficult to do a linear "do one thing, then do another, then look for a icon on the map to do the next one" approach of a Bethesda or BGIII style RPG map or a GTA icon soup. You can pick up a thread, try to follow it, get thrown for a loop into something else, and just have to roll with that and do that. It's not a game that's super interested in getting you through all the content in the box at the pace you want it. I think it's pretty bold design in that way, but it can generate some frustrating moments if that pushes against your ethos. It ground against my wife a little bit in that way.

The way it gets out of its own way mechanically is pretty top notch and it is able to do a lot of stuff you don't initially think it's going to be able to do with its card system. I built a business, for example, which I had no idea the game could do.

Like I said, try it if you see it, but no YOU HAVE TO BUY this recommendation. I think even just trying out the design space it's playing with is a good use of your time, you'll get the picture after just one or two games.

Gary Sax wrote: I find it somewhat shocking that this is a Stonemaier production as it's way riskier than any of their other games and it has a lot of stuff that kind of says no to you and isn't always trying to cater to you.

This is kind of what caught my eye about it, after hearing mostly positive opinions. This doesn't seem like a Stonemaier production at all, for precisely the reason you point out: It has points that say "no", which creates potential "feelbad" moments, which is not their schtick at all.

hotseatgames wrote: Next up was the main event, Damnation: The Gothic Game. Everyone had played before. My character was the Terror, whose abilities are about movement. I never used a single one of them. One player used power of adjacency on someone to put them in the Great Spiral Staircase, which wasted a few of their turns. Once they got out they stupidly hung around the area, and another player did the same damn thing to them! On their first turn they rolled properly to get out, but I slapped a card down that forced a reroll and they were stuck there again. Hilarious

Is the Great Spiral Staircase easier to escape in this version of The Gothic Game? I have played the original Gothic Game a couple dozen times and have only seen one person escape the Great Spiral Staircase after spending more than one turn on it.

I've not played the original, but I suspect that it is. While you have to roll a 6 each turn in order to ascend, you can use a Fate token to enhance the roll. Further, there are 3 entrances to the staircase, so if you are ascending it is very likely you can make it out.

This particular player has played twice, and both times he ended up in the staircase for a long time. He wasn't thrilled.

Did the original only have one entrance?

I recently picked up Vantage and got in a two-player game last weekend. I played the medic and my friend played the navigator. The spoiler-free version of our mission is that we were supposed to find the [redacted] and then [redacted]. For background music, I put on an excellent AI mix called Vintage Surf and Tiki Exotica, by Vintage Vibe-o-rama.

I landed in a cold region, and despite moving around, took a point of cold damage at every location that I moved to for the rest of the game. I equipped my medkit, but it strangely doesn't do healing. Then I acquired a frying pan which did do healing. After some wandering around, I did a mission action and found that our objective was in some tropical region. So both of us started moving south. As I continued to take cold damage, I spent every other turn cooking with the frying pan to heal myself, but the bigger problem was my plunging time and morale levels. Finally, I did another mission action, which offered us the chance to switch to an easier mission, as we had apparently drawn a difficult one. We decided to not switch since we didn't feel that we had enough resources to survive starting from scratch with a new mission. Later, I ran out of morale on an easy (2-dice) challenge because I didn't have the right dice slots to absorb any more morale hits, and my friend couldn't help.

Overall, the rules were easy enough to learn, but that frying pan raised an issue that we couldn't easily resolve from the rules. It showed a list of three red actions and one orange action, then an arrow pointing at a heart symbol. At first we thought that you just had to spend a turn doing one of those actions and get the heart, but we were puzzled that there was no matching page reference in either the red or orange book. After a while, I noticed the matching skill symbol on each action selection, and we decided that I needed to pay a skill token of the appropriate color to take the action. I guess. We couldn't confirm that from the rules.

During our wandering, we each got a puzzle challenge. My involved memorizing a serious of direction changes in a maze, and I successfully memorized all but the final turn during my 60 seconds of gazing at the card. So that was a failure. My friend got a different puzzle that involved rearranging 3 cards multiple times to recognize 3 patterns. He got the first one easily and was never able to figure out the other two. I liked the puzzles.

Vantage did a decent job of conveying the sense that we were exploring a truly alien world. Our mission seemed pretty hopeless, though my friend did finally get to a tropical-looking region near the end of the game. We will definitely play again. I don't love Vantage, but I do like it. Definitely recommend that you try before you buy if you can, because this might not be a game for everybody.

hotseatgames wrote: I've not played the original, but I suspect that it is. While you have to roll a 6 each turn in order to ascend, you can use a Fate token to enhance the roll. Further, there are 3 entrances to the staircase, so if you are ascending it is very likely you can make it out.

This particular player has played twice, and both times he ended up in the staircase for a long time. He wasn't thrilled.

Did the original only have one entrance?

There are no fate tokens in the original version, but otherwise it sounds the same, including the 3 entrances.