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

At the Alehouse, where it was me, Tricia, Joe, and Anders playing the all-time classic, El Grande. We just played the base game because a) I only have the 2023 reprint which only has a couple small card expansions and b) it doesn't really need expansions to be one of the best area control games ever made. We drew a lot of later game action cards in the first round that involved removing guys from the board or scoring territories where no one was present, so that meant that most of us started kind of slowly, while Joe went shooting out in front by scoring the castillo early. But then I established what was basically a permanent position in Toledo with my grande which I exploited for the rest of the game (9 points every time it was scored) and I scored the castillo a couple times, too. At one point, I had shot out ahead of everyone by a considerable margin, not least from having one dude in multiple territories where I could score second place behind the obvious leader, before Tricia made up a lot of ground, as did Anders. By the time we hit final scoring, Anders and I were tied at 110 and Tricia was right behind at 106 and Joe at 103. Still a classic.

Jackwraith wrote: At the Alehouse, where it was me, Tricia, Joe, and Anders playing the all-time classic, El Grande. We just played the base game because a) I only have the 2023 reprint which only has a couple small card expansions and b) it doesn't really need expansions to be one of the best area control games ever made.

I have the Big Box but other than a few times I played with the expansions after first getting the game, I always just play the base game. As you said, it doesn't need anything else and it never gets stale at the rate I play it (3 or 4 times a year).

Shellhead wrote:

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.

$200 for a 3D printer ? That must be a typo, I think you meant $2000.

I've briefly pondered getting one as well. But a friend of mine has one and it always seem to be in some state of repair. I think I'll skip the aggravation and just buy stuff off Etsy .

Been playing a bunch of Hansa Teutonica. My god, this game flows so, so well. Played at 3 and 4. Both are utterly fantastic. I picked up the big box, so I'm planning to try one of the other maps soon.

Best Buy sells a Bambu Lab A1 mini 3D printer for $219.99, and it seems to have a lot of favorable reviews, but I will resist the temptation. I am actually looking forward to my baking soda/super glue experiment this weekend. If that doesn't work, I might try a toothpaste/super glue mix.

Had my regular Unmatched partner over today, but first we started with a game of Dreadball. He played the Wu-ling Wanderers, who are octopod Koris that can summon portals on the field. I played the Glambek Ghosts that are semi-phantasmal Ada-Lorana who can phase when they move to go through opposing players, rather than around them (or Slamming them.) Neither of us had played either team before and the Ghosts were Striker-focused (my team of 6 had three of them, 2 Jacks, and one Guard) so I leaned into it. I spent the whole game largely ignoring my Jacks and Guard other than as a way to be speed bumps for the opponent and scored in the majority of rushes (turns), ending the game two turns early with a 7-0 score, which is considered a landslide victory. It's the only win I've ever secured in the game of more than one point and easily doubled or tripled my total points ever (the game is zero-sum, so that if I have 2 and my opponent scores 1, my score is reduced to 1 while he still has zero.) The Wanderers had miserable luck with the dice, missing more than one Get Up action (downed players trying to get back in the game) and stalling their rushes more than once by going for the ball early and failing (if you fumble/scatter/miss the ball, that's the end of your turn, no matter how many of your 5 actions you may have remaining.)

But then it was on to Unmatched, as there were multiple new heroes that neither of us had tried. I took Ghost Rider against his Moon Knight, with me wanting to play the former mostly for its outrageous miniature and him wanting to play the latter because he enjoyed the TV series. I went heavy offense, trying to maximize what seems to be the essential nature of the fighter, but didn't make much progress (for an offensive fighter, GR's attacks are pretty mild) and MK danced around me until he could winnow me down into a killshot range. Then I took Elektra (a tier S fighter to the Unmatched community) against Daredevil (a Tier A.) Again, I tried to go on offense, not least because Daredevil is one of the best fatigue (deck exhaustion) fighters, since he can continually recycle his smaller deck (20 cards to the typical 30) but, once again, DD danced away and even after Elektra had died and been resurrected, I still couldn't land the kill shot with her more powerful cards. DD was down to 4 health and only a few cards, though. But I figured both games were just making up for my dominant Dreadball win.

We continued the Unmatched when my wife got home and we decided to try the new co-op version, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo vs Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady, Rat King, and Baxter Stockman. Our first couple rounds were rough, as we took serious damage and Metalhead and Casey (Donatello's and Raphael's sidekicks, respectively) were almost dead. But we endured and managed to keep any of the Foot Clan from becoming Entrenched until quite late in the game. We lost Queens and The Bronx and were on the verge of losing Manhattan, but we had wiped out all of the minions and finally put Shredder down before losing our third of four boroughs (if the fourth falls, you lose the game.) It's a smoother operation than the original co-op (Tales to Amaze) as you might expect with it being the second go-round and a few more years of design wisdom. It's even more fun than the original, too, and I'm not a childhood TMNT fan (I'm a bit too old for the cartoon, but I did know Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird from the small-press comic shows, at least.)

Went up to a friend’s place for the weekend, played some games.

SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 4p. This was a mistake. I’ve played a few times and liked it, my friend has played once and liked it, the other two have never played before. One guy was really into analyzing his moves and took absolutely forever. I think we started at like 8pm and finished at 1am. (My bedtime is usually 9:30pm so this was torture.) The guy won, so good job I guess. Don’t recommend playing with 4 unless everyone is experienced and fast.

Next morning was just me and my friend.

One Last Fight, 2p. A GMless storygame in a box, hardbitten adventurers on one last quest to save the land. Six different player classes, six different big bads. You make a deck of cards (three sections: approaching the lair, infiltrating the lair, going to the final showdown) but only use about half the cards in each play, so there’s a lot of replayability. Mechanically it’s kind of resource management with push your luck. But there’s lots of evocative story prompts on every card that really elevate the game — building backstory, character moments, fleshing out the setting, etc. It’s not a pure storytelling exercise like things in the For the Queen family (not that there’s anything wrong with it) but this is not the type of game to play with a head-down fun-murdering optimizer. (But what is?) In our game we had an evil cult attempting to summon an elder thing from the stars; the cult leader was the mother of a witch PC. I was an illusionist, a broken and twisted soul who used glamour to project false beauty. The witch was cut down by her mother’s minions right before the final showdown; I continued on alone and managed to pull off some long odds to put a dagger in mom’s heart and disrupt the ritual. The soul of the witch ascended to the pantheon, my glamour was permanently broken, and I started a temple venerating my ascended former companion. A good time.

Company of Heroes: 2nd Edition, 2p. Moro River, I was the US; he was the Wehrmacht. He advanced on some abandoned buildings on the flanks with some machine gun squads, set up devastating firing arcs, and was able to successfully pin my squads down. They dug in with some sandbags and managed to survive, but it was only a matter of time. I was able to use some Willys to get a mortar team within range and then the jeeps continued forward to act as spotters for the mortar. They pounded the machine gun nest on the eastern side of the map until the building it was holed up in collapsed and it was forced to retreat. From there I managed to get an M7 Priest deployed and continue using spotters to pound his flank until it collapsed and I was able to press forward. I secured the flank and started tightening the noose, and he conceded shortly thereafter.

This is a board game based on a WWII-themed RTS video game. It’s not a historical consim and doesn’t try. The strategy feels largely correct: using terrain, bringing out the right damage type for the right target, etc. But then it has the RTS trappings of rushing out to secure resource-generating hexes, unlocking more advanced buildings (which allows for spawning more advanced units), and upgrading existing units in the field. Plus you can set up blatantly ahistorical scenarios, like the Brits advancing on US-held Stalingrad. Those are almost certainly deal-breakers for the consim crowd. I liked it pretty well though. I find Memoir 44 too light (plus the inconsistent scale and weird strategies around hiding your weakest units so they can’t be picked off for points), but most consims are too heavy and historically pedantic for me. I thought Tide of Iron might be my Goldilocks game but I purged that years ago due to lack of play and now it’s super OOP, sigh.

COH looks promising so far. Looks fantastic on the table (but this drastically increases setup/teardown time as you handle all the amazing terrain). It has a really fun arc as you start with infantry, then get anti-infantry vehicles (e.g. M8 Greyhounds), then get things with armor piercing to counter the vehicles, and so on. There’s five factions available (US, Wehrmacht, OKW, Brits, Soviets) each of which plays differently and some are harder than others to use well. I predict Kuhrusty will hate it but I did play Rommel in the Desert with him and barely made any jokes about the disturbing overlap between “consim fans” and “people who know a little too much about historical SS collectible regalia” so maybe he owes me. North African crowdfunding campaign launches Tuesday. Maybe Rommel will arrive sooner rather than later! No word on if the Italians will need extra water rations for their pasta.

Edit: But the rulebook is absurdly bad, which is just preposterous for a second edition. It ticked me off so bad that I started rewriting it in traditional wargame numbered-paragraph style just so I could have a functional reference for my own benefit.

If a rulebook is so bad you feel it needs to be rewritten to be understood….the game ain’t worth playing. I’d get rid of it. Life is too short for crappy rulebooks .

Monday night gaming started with another round of Wroth. It was me on Alden, my wife on Paldeyn, and Alistair on Runen. The Paldeyn came charging after me which basically let the Runen build up on one end of the map unmolested. That would turn out to be a problem because it also let him build up Miners and begin swimming in Corra. The Paldeyn took the persistent Feat that meant she was deploying a new Elite every time she gained Corra, while I took Rain of Arrows and the Runen had taken the Ram Feat. The constant struggle between the Alden and Paldeyn over regions 1, 4 and 6 continued to allow the Runen to dominate a couple regions, gaining a scoring edge. But my Rain of Arrows took out all three of his Miners, giving the Paldeyn an opportunity to shift her forces in his direction which she either didn't take or didn't have enough Maneuvers to take advantage of so, in the end, the dwarves took it, 36-24-20.

We moved on to a couple more of Perplext's minigames, the first one being the most fascinating to me of the first set in TAJ. It's a voting game where you're rug sellers trying to get your rugs to be displayed in the Taj Mahal. There's a selection of 10 rugs of 3 colors each, only 3 of which will be displayed in the Taj (scored.) Each player has a scoring card where 1 color will score three colors for x2, x1 and -1. Each rug scores 1 for the outer ring, 2 for the inner ring, and 3 for the center. Each round, one player proposes a swap of two rugs in the display and we take a secret vote. A majority of Yeas on the regular voting cards means the swap happens. A majority of Nays means it doesn't happen and the proposer has to get rid of the rug farthest from the Taj. If it's a unanimous Yea or Nay, the same result takes place, but the proposer also gets to move or flip the Taj card, which delineates which rug in the final selection gets a +1 or is even included at all. But each player also has an All/Nix card that's usable once per game. All means a unanimous Yea vote. Nix means a unanimous Nay vote. Each time a vote is taken, the rugs are turned so their 'eye' symbol is near the Taj (symbolizing the curator of the Taj having seen them.) The game ends when either all the rugs have their 'eye' symbol turned toward the Taj or there are only 5 rugs left in the display. My wife won both games, 12-8-4 and 21-10-6.

Next we tried SHH, which is almost literally co-op Scrabble. There are the 5 vowel cards and 1 Pass card per player in a row on the table. The consonant cards are all dealt out to the players, so with 3 players, we each had 7. You take 1 of three actions on your turn: 1. Play a consonant from your hand or a vowel from the table to the right of any cards that are already present to continue a word. 2. Start a new word by voting the current one up or down. 3. Use a Pass card (once each.) Words have to be at least three letters and can't be proper nouns or abbreviations. A scored word puts all consonant cards to the side and returns all vowel cards to the vowel row. If the word was 5 or more letters, the vowels are flipped to their +1 side. The game ends when a word is declared invalid or all the consonant cards have been played. You score 1 for each consonant card played and +1 for any vowels turned to that side. We made it to 16 points ("proficient";, "excellent" is 20 or more (26, of course, is "perfect."))

Msample wrote: If a rulebook is so bad you feel it needs to be rewritten to be understood….the game ain’t worth playing. I’d get rid of it. Life is too short for crappy rulebooks .

That seems like a solid piece of advice, but I am struggling with this issue with a couple of games.

Two months ago, I bought the modern version of the Escape From New York board game. I had read a positive review that mentioned a couple of interesting mechanics, plus the designer is Kevin Wilson and the movie is a classic. But I just can't seem to get through the rulebook. It's probably not a terribly complex game, but the busy, cluttered rulebook design just makes reading the rules a chore. A friend spotted it on my shelf and he is in the same situation: bought it but can't get through the rulebook.

Although I am trying to stop buying board games for now, I am struggling to resist the siren call of Dragons Down. It is a streamlined modern version of Magic Realm, a game that I taught myself with great difficulty during the first year of the pandemic. Magic Realm actually has an okay rulebook that is designed to teach gradually teach the rules, it's just that the rules are excessively detailed and contain an abnormal quantity of exceptions. I keep wanting to replay Magic Realm at some point, but long, complicated setup is off-putting, and leaving a partially-played game sitting is not ideal when I have a young cat rampaging around the house. Dragons Down offers a comparable experience with easier setup and less complex rules. But I would need to be certain that Dragons Down has a good rulebook, because it would be too easy for me to assume Magic Realm mechanics in any place where Dragon Downs lacked a clear explanation.

Shellhead wrote: Two months ago, I bought the modern version of the Escape From New York board game. I had read a positive review that mentioned a couple of interesting mechanics, plus the designer is Kevin Wilson and the movie is a classic. But I just can't seem to get through the rulebook. It's probably not a terribly complex game, but the busy, cluttered rulebook design just makes reading the rules a chore. A friend spotted it on my shelf and he is in the same situation: bought it but can't get through the rulebook.

I was put off by it at first, too, but I think the issue there is more one of bad graphic design. The rulebook is so busy looking that you think it's complicated but it really isn't. I had a similar issue with John Company, 2nd Edition, in that Cole decided that the best way to teach it was to walk people through a game, rather than just present the rules in a fashion that most have become accustomed to. When I first read through them, I wondered if I should even bother, but once you do follow the lead that's given, the rules become quite intuitive. Escape is the same way. If you just push through and read them, the game becomes pretty obvious. I played it with one of my local groups a few months ago and posted about it in this thread. It's a good time. Wasn't good enough to survive the purge, though.

Writing the rule book is the hardest part of the whole thing, and it's not even close.

Was at the Alehouse tonight, playing two games of one of my all-time favorites: Theseus: The Dark Orbit. One of the group had played once, but the other two were first-timers. But they're all pretty experienced gamers, so they picked up the rhythm of it really quickly, which is saying something in the case of Theseus. We were Marines vs Bots vs Greys vs Aliens (me) in the first game and the Marines jumped out to a ridiculous lead, in part because they had Fire as their initial card setup and it only got shut off by Malfunction a couple times before the Greys finally pushed it off their sector (I had to point this out a couple times...) But I got all three of my dudes upgraded and had 2 upgraded Hiddens out on the board (I'd do two damage (gain two points) to any enemies during any of my Onslaughts), as well as a Parasite, so I did the usual Alien snowball near the end and rocketed up the chart only to fall one short of the Marines, 19-18, when the clock ran out.

We'd finished kind of early so we set up for another one. They all kept their same factions but I decided to shift to Scientists. I managed to hit my home sector three times in my first couple moves (assisted by the Tech Bay extra move) and got all three of my guys upgraded early. I also managed to put out no less than 4 Camcorders (we were joking that this was the Epstein space station...), two of them upgraded, so I was raking in data points at the end. But I was once again beaten to the punch when the Bots managed to hit 20 life points, winning the game. One more turn would've gotten me the data win. Dammit. Still one of the greatest games ever.

Scientists are my favorite! I've never played 4 players.... how batshit insane was that? I would think it would be frustrating since it's impossible to predict the board state by the time your turn comes back around.

Completely impossible to predict, yes. But not as crazy as you might think. You don't have to do a Magnus Carlsen and predict everything your opponents might do, but there are obvious trends, especially based on how the cards are laid out. One trick I've tried over the years is in moving into sectors where it's obvious that people won't be moving that particular guy, so you can be relatively certain of moving where you want on the following turn, even if the move to get you there wasn't always the optimal choice. That's how I made sure to keep landing on my sector last night with the Scientists. There is a bit of graphic presentation involved, too, in that the Scientists are generally considered low threat because they don't look like giant, bright green insects coming out of the vents the way the Aliens do, which I've noticed generally causes the Aliens to be picked on even if they're not leading. People just don't like thinking about things like Tentacles, Hidden, and Parasite(!), whereas the Scientists are just setting up cameras. Of course, by the end of the second game, I had so many cameras that people realized that those were about to become a Very Bad Thing and they started taking them out on their sector boards.