What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

For the original Railroad Tycoon, the real problem isn't that the board is butt-ugly, it's that about a third of the board is wasted. If you go south of a line from St Louis => Memphis => Jacksonville, you'll lose. And I'm not even talking about dead board space. Why are there hexes north of Toronto and Duluth, or south of Jacksonville?

Having said that, I don't get the scoring track hate. RotW's has the payout as well as the score. You could do it on a second board, but that board is already taking up all of the usual game table space as-is.

But I do like it. I might try to rope the family into it again, or play it at Origins.

The score hate is because the spaces are tiny and they are around the edge of a HUGE board. Which means that the score pieces are sitting in front of every player's elbow, just waiting to be knocked off multiple times a game.

I feel like some sort of colored paper clip would be ideal...

Gary Sax wrote: The score hate is because the spaces are tiny and they are around the edge of a HUGE board. Which means that the score pieces are sitting in front of every player's elbow, just waiting to be knocked off multiple times a game.

I feel like some sort of colored paper clip would be ideal...

Like in the DUNE board game! I love it anytime I get to mention my coveted and precious Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley DUNE game.

dragonstout wrote:

- gameplay issues: the cards and the auction for first player. WTF. WAY more cards are made available on the first turn of the game than will ever be added to the display again. This frontloads all the reading instead of trickling it in. But more importantly and more objectively wonky, this means that the first turn's auction for first player is way way way more important than any following turns. In following turns, unless a particularly flashy card is flipped up as one of the two or so new cards for the round, the auction is pretty flaccid. This bizarre flow, or lack thereof, of cards-of-interest feels wrong.

In crowded games, the auction is reasonably exciting. Or better than 'flaccid', at any rate. There's a good bit of 'beat guy x to city y for the cubes', or 'beat girl x to get the city bonus'.

Just to keep the thread going in the right direction, it turns out my family gamers really like Love Letter. Nothing else made it to the table, and it was a fun time.

I don't know..I love ROTW, it's one of my favorites. Something about the game just clicks with me. I get the reasons why there is some hate for the score board, but who cares really. I just put it off to the side on a smaller tv table or something. Overproduced? Hell yeah! The auctions for the cards make the game more exciting to me. With the right people playing if you want that card, you've got to pay for it, so how much is it worth to you? If I'm playing this with timid people who won't block on the board or in an auction I'll eat em for lunch. Luckily I don't, which is probably why I count wins in this game as preciously few. Man..I'm fired up, now I want to play.

I don't like scoring tracks because I'm a klutz. My buddies keep their score in their head when their marker is on my side of the board.

S.

Played Lewis & Clark last night. I was already in a grumpy mood because of one of the other guys there, but man, this was slow and boring. I wrote this about it:

There's stuff I should have liked about this. I like the theme. Artwork isn't bad, though there's an inexplicable use of the infinity symbol on some cards and the usual Euroglyphics are annoying. I like that they used real people (including a dog!) and you can read about them in the rulebook. The red Native Americans are a sadly unfortunate choice, but I do like that the game emphasized just how much help the native population was.

But good god this game is boring. Just the same thing, over and over, the same Agricola-like thirty-steps-to-get-a-horse bullshit repeated ad nauseum. Get one AP player in there and you better bring a book. It's tedious, the promising theme is under-utilized, and you can almost pinpoint the exact space on the board where you stop caring.

I just don't have the stomach for this kind of stuff anymore. I've done all this. Maybe not in this particular fashion, but still. It's well produced, with great little historical notes, but there's no heart in it, you just do what's best for you to do at any given moment. Nothing unworkable or off-putting about it but I just don't care. It's there with Tzolkin, Village, Russian Railroads, Trajan, Keyflower, and all that other stuff being churned out now. A few years ago I probably would have flipped for this game, but it just doesn't do anything for me anymore. I would seriously rather play Settlers of Catan, Tikal, or Planet Steam, games I already have, than this.

Where's the love for Steam? Great game, and no clumsy board mess. And Morgan's expansions are excellent.

@Hatchling: I'd play Steam, Age of Steam, or RotW. I might drag my copy of Steam to Origins, if CABS doesn't have it.

RotW doesn't get the rep that AoS and Steam do, but you can kill yourself on the first turn in RotW just as easily as you can in the other two games. It feels friendlier, though, and you don't realize you screwed up in 'Railways' until a few turns in.

Hatchling wrote: Where's the love for Steam? Great game, and no clumsy board mess. And Morgan's expansions are excellent.

Steam is fantastic. One of my all-time favorites.