What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

ubarose wrote:

bendgar wrote: We just finished year 5 in Hogwarts Battle. Years 1 and 2 didn't even feel like a game. Year 3 kicked our butts. Years 4 and 5 have started tense but ended with us still on the first location with only 0 and 1 threat token.

This game has made me interested in playing the Arkham Horror LCG with this group. If anyone is burning out on their copy and looking to sell, please let me know. The Dunwitch cycle is between printings and hard to find.

Hogwarts battle is a family game, which means it can be played with kids, and kids can play it by themselves. The lower the years, the younger the kid. It doesn’t even start to become challenging for adults until year 5. And really doesn’t become interesting until Year 6. But then Year 7 is kind of a slog.

It really bums me out because Hogwarts Battle was so close to being a very good game. With another month or two of development on rules to lower the number of villains in later years and a card or mechanic to thin your deck, it could have been a Ticket to Ride or Carcassonne. But it’s not.

Gary Sax wrote: I watched a heavy cardboard play of donning the purple but even I was struck by how undesireable the emporer is if everyone else is trying to suitably wobble the empire.

It's worse. It's not that other players try to bring the emperor down, it's that the game itself does.

The main problem is grain. You have to pay one grain for each province and buy it out of pocket if there's not enough. The problem is that the natural production of the empire is significantly lower than its needs. And that's under ideal circumstances, because there's always going to be at least one famine on the board (you roll a die and put it at the beginning of every turn) or an invasion. In our game, events raised the cost of grain to 4 and we had to pay between 70 and 80 just to keep the spot. None of the Emperors we had in the game except one managed to pay for grain. I kept asking if we had gotten the rules wrong but nope, they are intended to work like that.

The game also hates the Emperor. Tons of Event cards screw him over or benefit you for not being the Emperor. There are also 4 cards, two of which are shuffled back in when reveleaded, that kill the heir or put the position for sale. Given the deck is 37 cards deep and you draw 5 at a time, I'm extremely suspicious of the mechanic.

Even if you manage to do well, players can and will attempt to drain your stamina just to give you a negative victory point.

BTW, it seems the senator mechanic is not functional. As in, I'm not sure it works from a basic game theory perspective. The idea is that whoever puts the last senator in place gets a benefit. However, the "put a senator" mechanic is a Puerto Rico-style follow action so the moment you place a Senator, the other players do the same after you do. So you can never use the "put a senator" action to get to the front of the queue. Looking back, everytime a player used it, it was a mistake.

Yesterday I hosted a themed game day at my place. I'd started this monthly a while back but events arose to almost immediately put it on hiatus. This was the return.

The theme was URBAN DEVELOPMENT, games about city building. Here's what got played:

Machi Koro (KYLE, Eric, Clayton)
Card City XL (Dave, Ron, MIKE)
Welcome To (Kyle, Eric, CLAYTON, Katie, Tim)
The City (DAVE, Ron, Mike)
City Tycoon (Dave, Kyle, TIM, Clayton)
Imperial Settlers (ERIC, Katie, Mike, Ron)
Honshu (Dave, Tim, CLAYTON)
Medina (Dave, Ron, Clayton, MIKE)
San Juan (ERIC, Katie, Tim)
Quadropolis (RON, Tim, Clayton)
OddVille (Dave, KATIE, Eric)

It was a great time, and I'm hoping to make this fairly regular again.

Took Battletech over to a friend's house today. He played it a TON many years ago, and amazingly still had a practically encyclopedic knowledge of the rules. We set up a desert map that had some scrub, a small water area, and a few larger hills. We each had a light, medium, and heavy mech.

The game started out with him rolling constant hits, and me rolling constant misses. He also got his light mech behind my heavy (I had the "Awesome", and it lived up to its name) and put some damage into it, but then he miscalculated that my Awesome had not moved, and I turned around to face his light mech that was standing directly behind me. My mech proceeded to kick the shit out of the light mech, knocking it down after literally kicking one of its legs off.

His heavy charged my medium mech and messed it up pretty badly. I started losing heat sinks and one of my lasers got damaged in a critical hit. It was not looking good...

Fortunes changed though. My heavy finally stomped the enemy light mech into the dust, claiming the first casualty of the day. A couple of turns later, a VERY fortuitous shot from a PPC (an energy weapon) literally took the head right off of the enemy medium mech, destroying it. That's two, leaving me with a full complement (although admittedly fucked up) mechs and just the enemy heavy.

We went a couple more rounds, trading blows, but at that point we had been playing for 3 1/2 hours and he conceded.

So.... I will say I had fun. Do I think I had 3 1/2 hours worth of fun? No, I don't. These rules allow for just about any situation, but in exchange you have a lot of tedious calculations and tons of rolling on this table or that table. Now, even with his familiarity he was still a bit rusty, so theoretically it could go a bit faster next time, but I don't think it would be that much faster. Perhaps we could come up with some other game timer, or even start with some of the mech damage bubbles pre-filled.

Yeah, sounds like battletech.

I played Twilight Imperium 4. I'd never played any TI before. It took 10 hours.

Fuck.

The rumors of this game's complexity are exaggerated to the point where I was surprised. It's actually pretty smooth to play. Select roles, take turns, clean up, vote on things, get mad about the voting, repeat. That said it's long as fuck, but I think I know why. Read this list of variables and you tell me:

- 6 players.
- I was Hacan. Someone else was Mentak. They were one of my neighbors.
- We did a player-determined galaxy. I ended up with an A and B wormhole next to my homeworld. The Ghosts were my other neighbor. We eventually approved a law that let everyone travel freely between any wormhole.
- None of us, not a single one of us, were able to score the 2 point objectives. Ever. At any point. Every single one of them was rendered functionally impossible due to map layout, us being at 6p, or just the board state in general.

And you know what? Despite all of that I still enjoyed it! I went into it with the intent being to just try the thing, but I actually really liked it. The combat rules largely suck and it was seriously too damn long, but everything else was really compelling. Next time, if there is a next time, I'd be interested in trying the Embers of Muaat and seeing how much I can sell war suns for while I bully people.

You should try out 2nd edition. All the fun and takes about half as long.

Wait, seriously? Is that true? BGG says so as well.

Is it just less mechanically bloated? How did they manage to make it take longer over multiple editions?

Vysetron wrote: - None of us, not a single one of us, were able to score the 2 point objectives. Ever. At any point. Every single one of them was rendered functionally impossible due to map layout, us being at 6p, or just the board state in general.

You should listen to our IT CAME FROM THE TABLETOP episode on TI4. Josh Look will teach you (as he did for me) how to make these difficult objectives.

therewillbe.games/podcasts/6574-it-came-...m-board-game-podcast

We ended up looking at the other half of the 2 pointers after the game, and every single one of them was well within the realm of possibility. It was a really unfortunate flop. I'll give the show a listen when I free up!

ARKHAM HORROR. 4 characters (three players), using Innsmouth and the GOO is Zhar (the Twins). Innmouth creatures really thicken the monster cup with nasty guys and we'd low-rolled on Uniques (two Holy Waters, Necronomicon, ugh). Weapons were in short supply, and we just couldn't tangle with these baddies. We managed to seal three gates, but back-to-back-to-back gate failures made the Innsmouth track rocket up and bring Zhar before we could do anything (Zhar only at 2 Doom Tokens). They crushed us in Final Battle.

Played a couple 4-player games of Res Arcana. That first game for people is going to slow things down a lot and I was the only one who had played before among this group. But when we got to the second game, things moved along briskly, so I don't think it suffers from AP.

However, at 4 players, with so much of the Artifact deck in play, it's basically a mirror image of 2-player. In the latter, the person who has a dragon has a huge edge. In the former, there will be so many cards that nullify (Dragon Bridle, Guard Dog) or make dragon damage essentially irrelevant that the dragons become very expensive 1-point victory tokens. In a game with 10 VP as the victory condition, that's still significant, but it feels like a lot of the steam is taken out of them at that player level. I had both Fire and Earth dragons down at one point and didn't bother to use either of them because so many cards were in play that just made it a better use of my time to do something else.

Your draw is hugely important. Like Race for the Galaxy, there will be times when you know early on that you simply aren't going to be able to build an engine that will be competitive. Unlike Race, since you'll only ever have 8 cards, you occasionally can't build into anything like you could with the other game. That makes Res faster, but also means there will be games where you're essentially just watching someone else win. I'm not sure how future expansion might address this. It's not a regular phenomenon, but it's present.

So… many… games…

At home

Among the highlights of the last couple of weeks was a beer’n’pretzels evening with friends although, seeing as we are so cultured and civilised, it was a gin’n’crudites evening that slowly slipped into beer’n’burgers then brandy’n’whateversleftinthefridge. Introduced some people to their first time experience of Intrigue which is always a good way to test just how strong those friendships really are. Given how highly competitive they all are I gave them plenty of advance warning that it would end up getting agonisingly mean and dirty and they were still keen to jump right in. It was brutal. A husband and wife team predictably shut out everyone else and then started backstabbing each other in the scramble for the win which the rest of us, bruised form being slighted and dumped in one way or another, were more than happy to facilitate. At the end they had that look on their faces like they were coming to terms with finding themselves standing in a pile of pottery shards having just smashed all the crockery in a fit of pique. It’s the most fun playing a totally unfun game that I can think of. We followed that up with Hellapagos so I’ve now got the reputation of being that guy who brings those games.

Have also been playing a lot of Star Wars Rebellion which is something that I can’t stop thinking about between games. My son insists on playing the Empire every time and fell into the trap of being overawed with the sheer scale of their potential might; so the first couple of games involved a lean on production and Imperial missions to construct Super-Star Destroyers and the second Death Star. This meant that he was pinning his troops and not exploring much, making it too easy for the Rebels to take their time setting up objectives which would run down the clock without the base being threatened.

We actively discussed different approaches he could try and then he came back with a far more brutal shut-down through rapid mobilisation. Sneaky dad still managed to get the upper hand by hiding behind enemy lines, sitting undetected right next to the enemy heartland. Game four however saw the tide turn as he figured out how to accrue his forces in strike zones and to balance expansion with carefully considered deployment on or against missions. There was a shift from throwing available leaders against everything I was doing to allowing the Rebels small victories and instead holding to his core strategy. By cutting off my supply lines he forced me into pure guerrilla tactics which was a system shock for me having become complacent in our earlier contests. I had to take a gamble in neutralising an aggressive Imperial fleet near Naboo in the hope that it would keep my heartland safe and distract attention to the wrong side of the board but all it lead to was a grinding war of attrition that I was ultimately going to lose.

A successful capture and interrogation set him on his way to my base, however he did this really annoying thing where he held his forces nearby and refused to get within attack range while using his leaders to instead land troops on as many remote locations as possible. It was a problem because I had to prepare to evacuate every turn but was facing the prospect of making a bigger challenge for myself by jumping out to a vulnerable location with his main fleet still able to easily react and redirect. I tried to draw out one of his reserve fleets so that I could slip behind him onto Yavin, however he just wouldn’t take the bait and I remained stuck where I was. For some reason I just couldn’t get a single objective into play either so the game went long which ultimately favours the Empire. He was able to gain greater and greater advantage until eventually he closed all available doors and moved in for the surgical kill. I was really pleased to see how he had learned from his earlier hubris and had translated that into strategic thinking – no matter how much I tried to goad him into rash action he resisted and crunched his way to a methodical victory (wipes away a tear of pride). Next time I get to finally try out the Empire!

51st State Had a couple of great games and admired once again how Ignacy is a master at leveraging small inflections in his designs into big strategic motivations. I turned the Merchants guild into a monster deal-maker, snowballing them into a final round where they shot off into the stratosphere with a 50+ point haymaker of cycling Action buildings through upgrades to eat up the huge pile of resources they were producing. Then switched to Hegemony and set fire to everything with intense razing, followed with leveraging the large population of Texas into fistfuls of card draws. I love how those little nuances can totally reshape the game into a different experience.

Having been bitten by the Trewicek bug I later switched to Imperial Settlers for the first solo gaming I’ve done in quite some time. I find it impossible to play this competitively due to being preternaturally good at exploiting the lack of restrictions in the card-chaining, however I love it as a solo game where I can just go crazy with trying to build out the biggest set of combos possible. I picked the Aztecs who use a ‘praying’ action to take a gamble on card draws but ignored that for the more controlled version of acquiring ‘blessing’ tokens that let you do the same thing but with a definitive result instead of random chance. I find it to be far more powerful this way and it makes the Aztecs the most effective faction in this now hilariously and increasingly imbalanced game; I strolled my way past three hundred points which has become a pretty standard score with this faction. Had so much fun with both of these titles that I decided to get onto Portal’s site and pick up the couple of expansions that I don’t yet have – Scavengers and Allies for 51st State plus some promos that looked interesting and the Amazons for IS, looking forward to trying all of these out when they arrive.

At the club

Best recent game was five player Root where I disproved complaints that the Riverfolk were underpowered by taking them to a storming victory. It was my first time ever successfully using one of the ‘Favour of’ cards and I used it to great effect to nuke both the cats and the birds completely out of the game. My filthy Otters then closed up shop by jacking their prices up and proceeded to pick off vulnerable cardboard tokens left exposed by the Alliance and the now struggling Marquise, as well as stopping to occasionally duff up the Vagabond who was my closest rival. It all ended fairly quickly after that with a pretty big spread on the scores. Everything largely stemmed from my early smooth-talking my way into acquiring a collection of captive workers that allowed me to move quickly and effectively on getting three Rabbit trading posts into play. I was fortunate that nobody recognised the danger of the card I was holding, nobody wanted to buy it because they didn’t want to give me any more workers even though it ended up costing them far more dearly in the end.

Something new with Tybor the Builder, which I would describe succinctly as ‘Glory to Rome’-lite. You draft cards that you either play as workers which you can later discard to construct buildings from a central market or as citizens who unlock scoring opportunities and provide a discount on some building types. You array these various elements around your personal board and they all begin to combo together to build an endgame score out of nothing. A slight mishap with the rules on scoring not being made entirely clear until partway through the game, but it didn’t make a huge difference as it’s one of those games where you would have to deliberately aim to screw up and not pick up points in one of their many various forms. For a pocket-money game it’s okay and another neat way of showing some innovative ways to squeeze more game than you would expect out of a single deck of cards. It’s not going to rock anyone’s world though.

And something madcap with Magical Athlete where we struck a perfect seam of amusing combos 3/5 races and dully rolled dice in the other two. I still don’t really know if I like this game or not, at least it is so quick and superfluous that it’s worth enduring the poor races for the soaring highlights.

I've played a few things recently, but I want to highlight Senators in particular. It's the new La Mame game (from Indie Boards & Cards in the states) and despite some production issues with that edition (small box game with shields) it's crazy good.

Senators might be the meanest auction game I've played in ages. It doesn't just not hold your hand, it kicks you in the teeth throughout. The event deck is almost always hugely important, every auction is tense, and there's so many types! Public auctions, dutch auctions, simultaneous closed fist auctions, and my personal favorite, the one from Ponzi Scheme that I don't know the name of where you offer a price on an item and the other player can either accept or pay YOU that amount as a counter.

Despite all of that, most of the turns are either turning up cards for auction, extorting people in turns, or cashing in your resources to buy off senators (VPs). That last one is important because it's the only reliable way to get them and the event deck ends the game as soon as the 4th war is drawn, so there's an element of pushing your luck to see if you can hold out a bit longer or maybe piggyback off of someone else's cash in action by paying them. I've had a ton of fun with it thus far. If you like auctions and you don't mind a game where nothing stops you from spending yourself into a death spiral, check it out.

Intrigue is fantastic and in my top 5 evilest games of all time. Glad to see people enjoy it!

So I played Twilight Struggle twice today and...I didn't like it. Don't have a reason why, I just didn't have much fun and it frustrated me. Nothing against the game, it's just not somehing I enjoy.