What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

After literally years, I broke out Tomb, from AEG. I have both sets. It was the 2nd or 3rd board game I ever bought. The rules have a ton of jank in them, but the potential for a great dungeon crawl was always there; I'll take the jank of Tomb over the "you fall in a hole and die" of Dungeon Quest any day.

I am just running a solo party, so I'm playing fast and loose with the rules since there are no other parties involved. This most definitely takes a lot of the pressure out of things, but I'm just out to stomp some monsters and get loot, so that's fine.

I assembled a party comprised of a wizard, a rogue, and a fighter. We were moderately equipped (I'm using some updated community rules from BGG that seeks to prevent power creep). After clearing the first crypt, the party was pretty battered already, so it was back to the Inn to obtain a Cleric and some more gear.

Now four strong, we were ready to do some damage. An innocent 2 card crypt... what could go wrong? Inside was a monster and a treasure; the monster got to select who to attack, instead of me choosing what party member will absorb the blow. I rolled a D4, and my wizard came up. He was one-shotted, dead. After that, my fighter made short work of the monster, and obtained a sweet, near-broken treasure, that instantly kills a monster if I hit on any green dice (30% chance). My fighter rolls 5 green dice, so I think I'll be wrecking some monsters in short order.

hotseatgames wrote: I'll take the jank of Tomb over the "you fall in a hole and die" of Dungeon Quest any day.

Point taken, but you could replace Tomb with almost any game and this sentence would still be right. With Tomb, it's just irrefutably right, since they're the same type of game.

Last night I sat in on a six player game of Scythe. Expansions included, Wind Gambit, Invaders from Afar, and a new set of encounter cards that were super swingy and odd.

It was at least my 15th sitdown with this game and the needle never moves. It's okay. The expansions add unnecessary cruft to an already baroque game. For a game full of minis and mechs you sure do spend a lot of time fiddling with your board and staring at your neighbor to be sure you grab every single little bonus. The game went reasonably quickly and I ended up solidly in the middle of the pack, so I can't complain.

Every few months I look at the lovely box art and long for a game. 10 minutes in I remember why it takes a few months to rekindle my interest in it.

It made me open and punch out a recent acquisition of Antike II, a game that I assume Scythe has ripped off wholesale and dulled it down. That's just a guess.

Played a little Andromeda last night. Maaaaan they don’t make ‘em like this anymore. It’s basically a simple set collection card game with a kind of Civvy trade step (no disasters or anything though), two tech paths, and what amounts to a lottery to build space stations- the more cubes you have on a planet, or the more cards in a set you play, the better your odds are in the ashtray. Or, you can luck out by paying a minimum three card set and get the draw on one pull.

It’s so old fashioned, but I really enjoyed it. It’s straightforward and fun and the lot trading makes for some hard choices. It’s maybe a little too long- 45 minutes is just right, 60+ a bit long in that tooth. We had 4, three new players, so that could have added some time there.

The game looks great too- it’s Doris Matthaus, still one of the great game illustrators.

20 years old. Wow.

Had a 4p game of Cthulhu Wars and Tigers and Euphrates lined up last night, but then a fifth showed up so we played El Grande instead. El Grande is pretty great is all.

Tried out Trapwords too which is a solid party game which will definitely get a bunch more plays. Basically it's Taboo but the other team gets to make your list of forbidden words and you don't know what they are. Theres a bit more stuff around the edges but that's the gist of it. Enjoyable, and nailing someone with an off the wall trapword as they try to avoid the obvious words is real good, but at the end no one called for another round yknow.

Also, Dungeonquest is the best it's a fact.

At home:

We spent some time with friends over the weekend and after a pleasant meal and a stroll around the park went back to theirs for a convivial drink and a couple of games. All lightweight stuff but the interesting one for me was a chance to play the superbly beautiful Saturn which is a game from about twenty or so years ago. According to legend these were initially made as part of a range of curios to feature in show homes so were designed to look incredible on the table whilst still being playable. This one features a set of concentric rings that balance around a central dome and you place different sized and weighted wooden balls onto the rings. The larger the ball or the further out it is then the more points it scores at the end, however if the mechanism tips and touches the table after placing a piece on one of the rings then you have to remove the offending piece and discard it back to the box.

I really enjoyed playing this, you have a good idea of how each placement will rebalance the structure but need to be careful that you don’t then set your next opponent up to make a big score by tipping the rings too far in one direction with an open spot that will counterbalance. I wouldn’t count this as a dexterity game as there is no care or finesse required in placing your pieces, it is purely strategic in understanding the weight of the balls and how they will affect the balance of the rings. Kind of sad that it is now incredibly rare and prohibitively expensive to get a copy.

Played some Xia with my son, I thought that I was onto a good thing by taking the Swamp Rat and very quickly cashing up into the Void Wasp – for the unenlightened this meant that I had a spaceship with an awesomely powerful cannon that I could now fire twice, theoretically making it easy work to finish off the NPCs for quick VP scores. With a title available that would make me immune from the law I could turn into a right bandit with no repercussions, except I then proceeded to get hosed by crummy dice rolling and the spawn kept stealing my kills from me after I categorically failed to finish off any of my targets. He got very far ahead and all I could do was try to keep up. I had a late game surge after I switched gears into digging for relics and buying a mission computer in order to cycle mission cards into a series of quick completions, but it just wasn’t enough and a couple of fairly simple titles gave him an easy tip over into victory. We finished in less than two hours for a full twenty FP game which makes our first couple of stuttering attempts to play risible by comparison.


At the club:

I rocked up a little late to discover everyone playing Hellapagos which a couple of people have bought after playing my copy. The only problem was that the owner had picked up a German copy of the game by accident and as it is text heavy they didn’t have a clue what many of the cards actually did. As soon as I walked through the door I was bombarded with questions but because many of the items are sensitive in terms of player interactions I found myself employing some interestingly obscure explanations like “Do you remember that time when Phil kept giving me bullets and you were mocking us that we were going to starve to death anyway, and then Tom played this card?”

I like that we now have this shared experience to fall back on and the games are so memorable. It’s also almost as much fun to watch as it is to play. There were a few newbs in a group of eight and predictably they were far too nice in trying to keep everyone alive. By the time that they had dug down into the second set of cards and with the hurricane looming there were seven left alive and no food or water. As there was plenty of space on the raft this suddenly cued in a rush for the wreckage by the people that had played before and some bemused and desperate resource gathering from those that hadn’t. Bloodshed followed but incredibly five of them managed to escape together which is the most I’ve yet seen manage to survive.

We came within a whisker of playing Cosmic Encounter which to my chagrin I have not played since before my kids were born and therefore ostensibly a lifetime ago. But someone was mesmerising us by waving a newly acquired copy of Sidereal Confluence around which ended up gazumping CE. I had the Fancy Dragon faction that need to build fleets of ships to operate their production lines and I made the exact mistake that the player board explicitly tells you not to do, which is to build too many ships too quickly and then not have enough resources left to actually put into your production lines. Fortunately for me though we were all equally inept. One of the players had convinced himself that the relative value of the cubes was different from that suggested by the player aids and was making really crazy deals during the first couple of rounds, another player completely forgot his factions main power and so on. So it was a bit of a mess but we got ourselves sorted out after a couple of rounds in.

The game involves building a resource churning engine, punctuated with some bouts of real-time trading where anything can be offered up for anything else. The thing that we found though was that there are so many options available to each player that keeping track of your opponents progress and capabilities was a lost cause; you might think that the black cubes are vitally important to them and therefore try to leverage that in order to put pressure on them in the trade negotiations but, really, they could just do something else equally impressive with other resources and blow you off for a completely different deal elsewhere. We were just blowing raspberries at poorly weighted deals and it led to some horse-swapping where we were asking for exactly what we wanted to run our optimum strategy and offering up a fair pick of our remaining superfluous garbage, sometimes leading to three way trades in the process, but mostly met with a shoulder shrug if a deal couldn’t be made.

The thing is, as soon as you have what you need then there is no point in helping out an opponent, even if you are getting something extra on top, unless you are thinking about your position in the following turn. This is what I was doing by mortgaging heavily with promises of future riches partially because it was what my faction board was telling me to do but also because it made unequivocally good sense to feed as much as possible to the machine to grow capabilities more quickly. The other players kept giving me stuff for no reason other than an extra couple of cubes in the following turn which was only a fraction of the additional ones that I was manufacturing from what they had loaned me.

Anyway, we played for the two and a bit hours it takes and at the end there was quite a range on the scores. My focus on making a big economy, refusing trades after I had what I wanted, and investing heavily in new technologies for a smaller number of bigger scores put me some way out on top. I have to say that although I enjoyed the playing of the game I didn’t particularly love it. It’s pretty much the most banal Euro cube-swapping game imaginable made lively with the trading phase, but I could have done without the chore of swapping one type of cube for another in order to eventually have enough of one type or another to then swap them for VP. On the face of it we would have had far more fun playing CE twice in the same time and still had the same experience with negotiations and deal-making.

Just enough time at the end for a quick journey to the bottom of the deep blue sea-sea-sea with Deep Sea Assholes Adventure wherein I failed by taking too much risk and always being just shy of making it back onto the boat with an armful of treasure, but at least I managed to bring some of ‘em down with me by hogging the air supply when all was clearly lost. The problem with that was that it helped to create some big stacks at the bottom of a fairly short run and in the final round the eventual winner managed to make it back to the boat with one of them for a game winning score in that single haul. I was dismayed to reveal my single treasure and discover that it was worth absolutely no points whatsoever, but not as much as the runner-up who had carefully escaped alive in each round with a tasty trinket only to be gazumped by one big haul at the end.

I enjoyed my one play of SC well enough, but it was essentially Information Overload: The Game to the point that trying to parse the game state was basically the entire game. 8p it was just a bewildering array of stuff everywhere you looked, and everyone basically ended up dealing with their neighbors. Maybe it would get better with more plays, but no one seemed likely to ever want to play it again. I'm happy to have played it once anyway, as it was definitely an experience.

Rummy.

2's wild-scoop up whatever you want from the discard pile as long as you play the bottom card immediately in a meld-double points for holding your melds until you go out variant.

Eh. At least there was rye whiskey.

Picked up ding and dent Cthulhu wars at MM. Brought it home and played Sangrada and Century Eastern Wonders all night. If I have to explain why, you obviously are not married.

Played merchant of venus. Besides the overhead of the market, which pays itself off in gameplay, it was as pleasant as always. Made some mistakes early and my spouse won by about 400.

Played my first game of A Feast for Odin. I liked it fine. Mostly I’m happy to scratch the game off my To Buy list.

Maybe the problem was that there were no surprises. We’d seen it all in Rosenberg’s iterative design ethos, so while it was interesting to track the bits of the game we’d seen out of context, the game itself held no delight.

It was pretty good, and surprisingly graspable considering all the pieces, and I’d say it’s weight on BGG is way overestimated. But it’s a bit dull and overstuffed.

That said, I’d play it any time. I’m curious to see how it fits together

Cool, it's on my list, Roland, glad to hear your thoughts. As I've talked about endlessly around here, though, these Uwe games are more a shared pastime of something to do in the evening that isn't too intense in my house. It's a way different way to evaluate games.

I thinks Fields of Arle is the best one I've played because it doesn't have those infernal worker buys. Curious to try Feast.

I sat down and played another game of Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization this weekend. My first game went well enough, but I was a bit jetlagged and the opacity of the system was such that I felt a vague whiff of disappointment when I was finished with it. I'm pleased to say that the second game was much better. The systems became more transparent and I felt more able to make effective plans now that the flow of the game was more obvious.

A couple things that I really like about this game:

- I love how varied the military aspect feels. The civic actions all appear in every game (in ages I-III anyway) so the order dictates that. But the military cards can be much streakier. It's far more dependent on getting good tactics cards and relevant aggressions. Those things, combined with the events, make a huge difference in the tempo of the game. It's not a difference that I think is insurmountable, but it's quite pronounced. Finding leaders who play well with military is also really valuable. In my game I played a largely peaceful organization except for Age II, when Napoleon led my civilization to a huge military buildup and pushed around my opponent. There's definitely an opportunity cost associated with the military, but it feels like it's balanced right.

- The game is very well-paced. Our first game was really slow, and turns always have a potential to bog down, but the conveyor belt of cards is a great way to keep things moving forward. You can't advance every kind of tech in every age, there's simply not enough time. So that's another really good decision point.

- Unlike a lot of Vlaada Chvatil's games, it's not a very punishing design. It's easy enough to avoid to really bad consequences of corruption and unhappiness, although it requires some management. There's enough consequence for failing that the stakes are there, but it's not this brutal journey to get above water.

Overall, I found myself more taken with the game than ever. It's like playing a game of Sid Meier's Civ where the only victory is the Culture one, and I think that's a pretty cool idea. The layers to production, building, and research are really satisfying to me. It's definitely a Euro design, where efficiency and action points rule the day, but it totally works as that kind of game.

mezike wrote: At home:

All lightweight stuff but the interesting one for me was a chance to play the superbly beautiful Saturn which is a game from about twenty or so years ago. According to legend these were initially made as part of a range of curios to feature in show homes so were designed to look incredible on the table whilst still being playable.

Very cool! My eBayed copy of Fire, by the same publisher, arrived all the way from Germany a few days ago. (Pretty lucky - I committed to buying it without checking to see that the seller wasn't offering international shipping, but when I contacted him, he was all over finding the cheapest way to ship it to the States. Stand-up guy!)

We haven't figured out how to play yet since none of the rulebooks are in English and my girlfriend thought it would be fun to attempt translating the French copy first. So far, we think we're supposed to drink wine and throw the boardgame in an actual fire. I'll look for English rules this week.

It's gorgeous in person, more vibrant and with more contrast between the pieces than photos would lead you to believe. I had read that Fire was supposed to be both ornamental and playable but I didn't know that was their intention for the whole line. I'm kind of surprised to hear that about Saturn, actually, which looks like it has a considerable tabletop footprint. Fire's base is a slim 2"x7", and I look forward to perching it somewhere in our home that it will start conversations I can end by suggesting we take turns tossing dowel rods in the fireplace. Again, have to look at those English rules.

Speaking of games with a considerable tabletop footprint, I paid $80 to a guy from Craigslist over the weekend for a 2nd edition copy of Arkham Horror with the Dunwich Horror, Kingsport Horror, and Lurker at the Threshold expansions all stuffed into the base game box. My old copy is lost in a basement somewhere on the East coast (along with a lot of my old collection); I've tried to avoid re-buying games I own somewhere 3,000 miles away, however A) I'm not sure when I'll see them again and I'm not interested in the third edition.

Of course it's still the awesome adventure game I remember. The rules came back to me right away despite not having played in almost a decade and I kind of laugh to think that folks derided it as a prohibitively complicated design. (It doesn’t near the level of something like Die Macher, which I think is some kind of weird German Ouija board, or even Robinson Crusoe, which I own but have trouble finding the effort to play solo.) In my experience, the narrative in AH emerges so readily from the gameplay that the easiest way to teach new players is to tell them to “do what you think your character would do.”

My mostly-non-gamer girlfriend picked things up immediately and we snatched a hard-fought two-investigator win out from Cthulhu's tentacled beard. In the final moments of the game, with twelve out of thirteen tokens on the Doom track, a gate opened on her Librarian and she was sucked into Another Dimension with only four clues, but then found two more clues during her Other World encounters and was able to seal the sixth gate for the win right before we would have awakened the Old One. Nail-biting stuff! Already wondering if it’s worth shelling out $100 for the Miskatonic University expansion, which I haven’t used but seems like it could shake things up substantially from game to game.