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

charlest wrote: Race for the Galaxy has it beat.

Original game, shorter game (Jump Drive), dice game, and full blown board game (New Frontiers).

I really don't like Roll for the Galaxy but I'll have a review of Jump Drive next week.

At the Alehouse and played Red Carpet for the first time. It's a pretty light game about being a member of the 1940s paparazzi on Oscar night (the awards are Sunday, which is why this game was brought in) and trying to get the best pictures of the stars. The celebrities in question aren't named, but they're obvious representations of people like Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth, Groucho Marx and so on. There are five rounds and two of them emerge from their limos with their entourages each round and proceed to shuffle their way into the theater. You're dealt five cards each round and can use three of them for actions, like moving the line along, attracting the celebrities' attention to get them to turn around or move closer to you, and moving yourself to another spot outside each side of the cordon. When everyone has taken three actions, you use your phone to take a picture. You get points for them facing you, having an unobstructed view and none of the nobodies (their entourage) being in the picture. You mark your points on their card and then use one of your remaining cards to vote for whom should win one of the three categories that they and two other actors are placed in. The winner at the end of the game doubles the point you score for them and a 10th actor is getting the lifetime achievement award and always doubles their points. Your last card is discarded. After five rounds, you tally the vote to see who doubles and then add up the points to see who wins. It's not bad and should probably play in about an hour or less. I still like Roll, Camera! or Nightmare Productions better when it comes to games about movies.

Quentin came over to visit Piper on Thursday and he my wife cut a deal that if he played Pictionary last weekend, she would play Wonderland'sWar. Quentin collected on the deal, so we had a four player game of WW. Jessica took Alice, Piper was mad hatter, Q was Red Quuen, and I took Cheshire Cat. I pulled a complete a quest in 4 different areas quest and played to that, while Piper went out to a early lead. Jessica pulled tokens like a beast and got all of her fortresses out and forged to the end of three tracks. I ended up with like 12 points on the main track but completed 33 points quest wise. Jessica ended in first, Piper in second with me 2 points behind her and Q was in last. After the teach to Jessica, the game took about 1 hour and 45 mins which was a pleasant surprise. Good stuff!

Nice! I see that you're determined to play with the Cat, who may be the weakest of the characters, so that's cool. But also cool to see Alice with the dominant victory, plus forging to the end of three(!) tracks. Sounds like a great game and one that I haven't played in a while. Thought I had plans for a friend to show up for a few hours of Unmatched and N. Hex (between us replacing the kitchen ceiling...) but he got the days mixed up (thought we'd agreed on Sunday, instead of Saturday) so I've just been sitting around here producing more words for the site. Lame.

Jackwraith wrote: Nice! I see that you're determined to play with the Cat, who may be the weakest of the characters, so that's cool. But also cool to see Alice with the dominant victory, plus forging to the end of three(!) tracks. Sounds like a great game and one that I haven't played in a while. Thought I had plans for a friend to show up for a few hours of Unmatched and N. Hex (between us replacing the kitchen ceiling...) but he got the days mixed up (thought we'd agreed on Sunday, instead of Saturday) so I've just been sitting around here producing more words for the site. Lame.

Actually, I this was my first as Cheshire in WW, but I tried ALOT with him in Madcala.
Just wanted to play as everyone in the game. Not a fan of himin either games Ironically.
And more words is good

I played Firefly the Game again on Saturday. There were people who were interested in playing at my big damn game of Firefly on New Year's Day but already had other plans, so I invited them to play on Saturday. This one couple was especially interested in playing because I got them hooked on Firefly. Before showing up for last year's event, they watched one episode of Firefly on streaming and liked it. Then they played the game and really enjoyed it, then watched the rest of the series. In a testament to the game designers at Gale Force 9, they said that the show reminded them of the game. I also invited another friend who loves Firefly (game and show) but doesn't want to play in a game with more than four players. Unfortunately, he couldn't make it because the big blizzard messed up his travel plans, causing him to leave town that morning instead of on a redeye that night. I actually would have invited the notorious Lamp Guy, except that he was already hosting his own board game event on Saturday.

Because it was just the three of us, and because I agreed with Lamp Guy's critique of my variant (play until a pre-set time, then count the money), we played an official scenario involving a rum runner's race.

Goal One: Get solid with Ammon Duul and Lord Harrow, plus complete a smuggling job that begins or ends in Alliance space.
Goal Two: Pass a Social-12 check at Hera, Murphy, with a +3 if you have Fake ID. Then load some contraband.
Goal Three: Deliver contraband to New Kasmir, Kalidasa, after doing a 3-card crime job and passing a Fight-10 check.

The game went well. Because of the focusing effect of the three goals, we ignored certain elements, like capers, piracy, and bounties, even though one player had a bounty target worth $2500 in his crew. Because money wasn't the goal, I ran with a smaller crew and did more legal jobs. Both our winner and our last-place player maxed out their crew sizes and had an easier time with the crime jobs. (At one point, I failed a one-card crime job three times in a row.)

Late in the game, a travel card triggered a random Cortex Alert which turned out to be a disaster for everybody: all botched crime jobs would disgruntle the entire crew. Even I didn't want to lose my carefully-curated crew of 3, so we all alternated between crime job botches and buying rounds of drinks to un-disgruntle (gruntle?) our crews. One particular Misbehave card wiped out our front-runner's crew because it caused additional disgruntlement in addition to the botch. Then she won on the next turn with an exploding 6 on the Fight check. Although money wasn't relevant to the victory conditions, I ended the game with just $200.00, and the guy in third place had the most money.

The original reason why I was using my variant in the past was because I wanted long games of Firefly and all the official scenarios max out at 3 hours of estimated play time. In reality, unless you play Firefly a lot, you can double those estimated play times on the scenarios. Our scenario was identified as 2 to 3 hours of play, but we played for over 5 hours.

Yeah, I always found that those suggested play times were as inaccurate as 90% of what's on the market these days. We almost never finished a Firefly game in less than three hours unless someone got a really good streak of luck with jobs.

Jackwraith wrote: Yeah, I always found that those suggested play times were as inaccurate as 90% of what's on the market these days. We almost never finished a Firefly game in less than three hours unless someone got a really good streak of luck with jobs.

Good point, it's most games that underestimate play times. I liked Rock Hard 1977 enough that I hung out in the BGG forum for it for a while. But when I called out the wildly optimistic play time of 45-90 minutes, a bunch of lying cultists jumped me. Apparently the only correct way to play a board game is really quickly and with laser focus and zero chit chat at the table. Fuck that, I play games with my friends to have fun, not to rush through every game so we can squeeze in one more game.

My regular Monday night happened with my friend, Alistair, and my wife. We started with a game of Wroth, since it's a quick player for a DoaM. I took the Guild while they took the Ooglan and the Venna, respectively,. I took Daggers for Hire as my feat, which lets me add a third guy to any Maneuver actions. The Ooglan took Parasitic Influence, which lets them use their Parasite ability in the target region or an adjacent one. And the Venna took the feat the name of which I can't remember but which lets them dump all their Cauldrons out on the board at once, wherever they're already present. Our die rolls were kind of wonky, heavy on one or two action types and few or none of the other. Our first round, for example, was all Battles and Extends, both of which are only useful if you're actually somewhere other than the deployment zone, so all three of us ended up using the Exodus action (which you should probably do on round 1, regardless, which is a bit of a drawback to the game as a whole.) But they both focused on the central plateau and I spread to all 4 of the small ones and racked up major points, even though the Venna used their feat in round 1. By the end of round 2, I had 16 points to the Venna's 5 and the Ooglan's 2. So, it was no surprise when I won it going away, 30-15-9. The Guild did more than a few of their nasty tricks, like attacking in a region with a Stellen and stealing a Corra from the Venna, which wrecked her plans, and paying twice for Doppelganger (do a Battle or gain 1 VP) to just take the win. Not sure I got the best use out of Daggers for Hire, though.

Then we switched to a couple of Perplext's mini games. First we tried Bus, which is a route builder where you're trying to pick up passengers at the bus stops and deliver them to their destinations, but they slow you down so you can only move so many spaces for the passenger cards that score the most. In the end, both Alistair and I had 5 cards completed (which triggers the endgame) and my wife was one move away from having her 5th. I won 17-13-9. Then we tried Gem, which is an auction game where you do a bidding round on each card of each pile of gems (6 with 2 or 3 players, 5 with 4) and then do a reinvestment phase where the "spent" gems that you just won can be made available to buy other gems in future auctions. When you're done, you score points for each gem on your cards and get bonuses for sharing a gem majority with other players or more for simply having the most. Alistair won that one, 22-19-9. Going to start writing a series on this series of games (there's 24 of them) when I've had some more time with them.

Jackwraith wrote: My regular Monday night happened with my friend, Alistair, and my wife. We started with a game of Wroth, since it's a quick player for a DoaM. I took the Guild while they took the Ooglan and the Venna, respectively,. I took Daggers for Hire as my feat, which lets me add a third guy to any Maneuver actions. The Ooglan took Parasitic Influence, which lets them use their Parasite ability in the target region or an adjacent one. And the Venna took the feat the name of which I can't remember but which lets them dump all their Cauldrons out on the board at once, .

Raise the Dead is the Venna Action. It also lets you place two from your Discard to any area with a Cauldron. Generally, I usually hold off on using that until I have a batch of dead troops to take advantage of second part but it sounds like the dice pulls didn't really allow much of that. It can be a huge point swinger when it works.
How long do you think the game took? We were doing three player games in about 45 mins once we learned the system.

Shellhead wrote: I played Firefly the Game again on Saturday.

Not sure if you are a fan of Blake's 7 (or if I have mentioned this before) but I had the ships from this thread https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1507308/blakes-7-in-the-versehttps://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1507308/blakes-7-in-the-verse printed up along with the cards. In the current 3D printer culture, it would be even easier. We enjoyed it because it gave us a chance for more players to get that "Main Character" Energy.

WadeMonnig wrote: Raise the Dead is the Venna Action. It also lets you place two from your Discard to any area with a Cauldron. Generally, I usually hold off on using that until I have a batch of dead troops to take advantage of second part but it sounds like the dice pulls didn't really allow much of that. It can be a huge point swinger when it works.
How long do you think the game took? We were doing three player games in about 45 mins once we learned the system.

Yeah, she said that she'd have preferred to do it with some basic dudes to also distribute, but it also seemed like a good way to have all of the Cauldrons out early with her first Exodus so that when fights did start happening, she could just regenerate at the beginning of every round, which isn't a bad thought. I think the one mistake she made was that she didn't Exodus far enough. She only went to 3 regions, probably not recognizing that in the early stages of the game even one basic dude can either control AND dominate (I did just this for the first three rounds in region 4) or stop someone else from doing either or both. It probably took about an hour-and-a-half, all told.

WadeMonnig wrote:

Shellhead wrote: I played Firefly the Game again on Saturday.

Not sure if you are a fan of Blake's 7 (or if I have mentioned this before) but I had the ships from this thread https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1507308/blakes-7-in-the-versehttps://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1507308/blakes-7-in-the-verse printed up along with the cards. In the current 3D printer culture, it would be even easier. We enjoyed it because it gave us a chance for more players to get that "Main Character" Energy.

I've only heard of Blake's 7, but it's funny that you should mention 3D printing and Firefly, because that was an actual topic during Saturday's game. The angry Obnoxious Guy (not the angry Lamp Guy) from New Year's Day broke his ship, and I have failed multiple attempts to repair it since then. It broke right at point of connection for one of the drive pods. I have tried various types of superglues and epoxies, and they are all fantastic adhesives but won't get the two firefly pieces to stick to each other. Yes, I have sanded the point of contact, and I have washed both pieces. And now there are little bits of vinyl gloves stuck to both pieces, because the superglues successfully glued my gloves to the ship.

So I am pondering three options:

1. Spend at least $200.00 to get a 3D printer. It would be an incredibly expensive solution to replace just this one ship, but maybe I could use it for other things. Then again, I have survived several decades on this planet without a 3D printer, so it feels like an expensive solution in search of some problems.

2. Buy a Firefly ship from one of the several obsolete ship expansions for the original edition of the game. The best deal that I saw on BGG was $25.00 for the Artful Dodger single-ship expansion.

3. There are apparently some two-part epoxies that might work to glue this ship back together. And apparently superglue mixed with baking soda is also a powerful and fast-acting adhesive. I will probably try this first and then maybe go for the Artful Dodger if the gluing doesn't work out.

Which ship is it? I'd be tempted to just buy a first edition copy of the game itself. Seems there are quite a few copies selling for 30 on BGG.

I had a first edition copy of Firefly and Blue Sun and sold them to Lamp Guy to free up some shelf space.