What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played a couple games of roll for the galaxy. Remains a perfectly calibrated length and depth for casual play with a decent number of quality decisions.

We play our second session of Middara tomorrow Barnes. One of the guys in my group is madly in love with it. I prefer it to Gloomhaven (it's more Ameritrash and less puzzle-y), but it's certainly excessive. The 60+ hours of story-driven campaign is supposed to be a large part of the appeal, the fact that you're enjoying it despite that is pretty impressive.


My brief synopsis of my 5th Geekway:

Warhammer Underworlds - Awesome, wish I could play this more. Won one game against Raf using the Dwarfs from Shadespire and he fielded the Gitz. Next game he beat me with the newer engineer dwarf dudes from AoS.

Res Arcana - Continues to delight.

John Company - Perhaps the best game of 2018. This was my 6th play and I'm still not sure I have a strong strategic grip on the system. Always pure bliss though.

Betrayal Legacy - We started the campaign and played the first two games. This is Betrayal at its best. Looking forward to more.

UBOOT - This game is weird. It's not 100% the real-time app driven U-boot game I really want, but it was a real joy. In 2.5 hours we attacked only two convoys, somehow missing with a four torpedo salvo against the first. The second convoy we sank a big merchant vessel and let out a huge cheer. We survived depth charges, malfunctioning toilets, and a couple of internal fires. Also had a hull breach that we patched.

The majority of this game is logistics and planning. It's definitely a resource management game and most of the effort is spent on getting your crew in the right place. The action comes in short bursts but is very intense. My favorite part is the navigator charting our path on the Atlantic map and determining target relative positioning on the map. Very neat.

That's Not Lemonade - Still enjoying this Black Jack-ish game from Loter.

The Mind - We lost. Still haven't won since last year at Geekway when I first played it (we won in our 5th play).

Eclipse - Spent my entire Friday morning playing in an annual game of this with some friends. I was Eridani and didn't quite secure enough early on. I was also the only player not to receive an improved hull, ugh. Still, I came in second and only lost by 4 points.

Cockroach Poker - I met up with Ian Allen (who I think some of you know), and played this. It had been awhile as I got rid of my copy - we usually prefer Skull or World Championship Russian Roulette. Fun times though.

Battlestar Galactica - This was on Ian's amazing Lego set. He's rebuilt the board, characters, vipers, pretty much everything but the cards from Lego. It was mighty impressive and a ton of fun to play on. We had over 30 people stop and take pictures while playing.

Treasure Island x2 - Love this game. Taught new players both times and they were impressed.

Tales & Games: The Hare and the Tortoise - Still my favorite racing game.

Spartacus - Another game with Ian using his painted gladiators. People were overpaying for dudes in the market so I held out and just kept winning host. The first two rounds my starting gladiator kicked some ass, defeating a better gladiator as well as a guy with an axe and a shield. It was glorious. I went on to win.

Root - Vagabond ran away with it. I was teaching three others and didn't focus enough playing the Woodland Alliance. I thought I'd kill them going into it.

Pirate Tricks - Still my favorite trick taker.

King of Tokyo x2 - Hadn't played this in a couple of years. I still have my copy as I want to play with my daughter (likely soon). I forgot how fun this could be with the right attitude.

Hellapagos - An 11 player game with mostly new people, including five kids. This was awesome although we didn't have anyone die for about 4 turns (thanks to so many items in play). I survived with six others. Best move was someone using the revolver and it being blocked by the metal sheet. Then we killed the shooter.

Cyclades w/ Titans - Four player game with a newbie. I made a huge run with Pegasus and captured two Metropolises. Didn't have enough to hold them and got beaten down by another player who went on a tear and won.


Playing Middara this week as previously mentioned, hoping to sneak in a game of Wings for the Baron as well. Those two, Res Arcana, and UBOOT are my shortlist of games I'll be playing for the next few weeks. Oh, and a buddy just got in Gods War so we'll be trying that soon.

That’s like 4 months of gaming for me.

hotseatgames wrote: That’s like 4 months of gaming for me.

This weekend was my daughter's graduation but STL folks take their geek way seriously. Last year my friend had 24/7 gaming in his hotel room. It was like board game delivery service, we hung out and drank and a rotation of people showed up with new games every few hours.

That is a good ass lineup, great mix of small and large stuff. It helps that we continue to have weirdly similar tastes.

John Company!!!

The only games I didn't get to play that I really wanted to were Cosmic, Sidereal Confluence, and Inis.

I'll make up for Cosmic at Gen Con (already have a big group ready for it). May bring Sidereal as well.

Played Res Arcana for the first time today, which was pretty cool. I think my wife will really like it. My only issue with it is that I've been falling hard into RFTG for the past month or so and it's eating all my tableau builder bandwidth because of how it is a great game. This one was fun and seemed well designed, and I'm looking forward to exploring it more. I like how much it squeezes out of such a small deck.

Also played Mage Knight for the first time, which was fun. I played a few turns Solo to learn the rules previously, and then my friend and I played through the learning scenario together today that introduces the different places one by one. The puzzle that game presents you each turn is really interesting. We're planning on playing a full game very soon, and I think this one is going to get a lot of solo play too.

charlest wrote: The only games I didn't get to play that I really wanted to were Cosmic, Sidereal Confluence, and Inis.

I'll make up for Cosmic at Gen Con (already have a big group ready for it). May bring Sidereal as well.

We should game some time. I'll bring Inis

Fly all twbg Sidereal fans into the same place for one big game.

Lots of games this past weekend:

Space Hulk: Death Angel - I'm loaning my copy to a friend who is heading stateside this summer, so I took him through a game of it to show him how it's done. Both of my teams died before we had made it out of the second floor. We eventually won on a very dramatic die roll, but we had forgotten that you can only activate a location once per round. Otherwise I suspect we would have died an hour earlier.

Argent: The Consortium - Man, this game. We played two players with the two-player version in the rules. I hadn't played that version in a while, and while it's not as tight as the six-room setup I feel like you're able to try more weird stuff because of the extra locations. I played the Divinity mage who can wound people for an IP, while my opponent was the Mysticism mage who can get 2 Mana for free. It was pretty close until I managed to get the spell (I think called Mega Drain?) that forced my opponents to give me a mana whenever they cast a spell. That was what turned the corner. I ended up winning 7-5.

Warhammer: Diskwars - My son really wanted to play this one, so we set up a match between my Empire/Dwarves setup and his Orcs/Chaos team. We had fun, though a couple of seams in the design have started presenting themselves. It feels like the game has a really solid system without a terrific victory condition. The hidden goals would be good, except even with the two expansions there are only three of them. Either you get points for every enemy casualty, five points for every leader casualty, or five points for overlapping someone's deployment zone. That said, I still really like this game, and I think part of the reason is the deterministic melee combat. The Destruction factions all have more giant units that can wreck the board unless you dogpile them, and the melee combat makes those dogpiles more of a known commodity. If it was as dicey as the ranged combat, I think that'd favor giant units a lot more. My son did end up winning, but he only did so on the tie-breaker, that is, because he had initiative.

Argent is still the best worker placement.

I think I'd be willing to say that Argent is my favorite game of this decade. The only other game that is in the conversation for me is Duel of Ages II, and I play Argent way more often.

Of course, I'm one of those crusty gamers whose favorite games are almost entirely at least ten years old, so that statement probably says more about me than anything.

WadeMonnig wrote:

charlest wrote: The only games I didn't get to play that I really wanted to were Cosmic, Sidereal Confluence, and Inis.

I'll make up for Cosmic at Gen Con (already have a big group ready for it). May bring Sidereal as well.

We should game some time. I'll bring Inis

Ha, I have it and have played it many times. Half my group isn't a fan unfortunately so I try to hammer it at conventions.

I played Wings for the Baron last night (along with Middara). It was good! Solid recommendation Sag/Barnes.

Any comments on whether the campaign game is better than the standard?

Bought Res Arcana based on the hype here, and after two plays...

,,,I just don't get it. It's doing almost nothing for me. Part of it is that it's tired ass high-fantasy bullshit, which is so vanilla and uninteresting to me that it may as well be themeless.

Tom Lehmann isn't a hit factory for me, and this feels a little closer to his To Court the King, a game I actively hated, though I don't hate this. Being themeless resource conversion, this feels on par with Century Spice Road, but that game doesn't have 15 different types of cards to choose from, all of which are slathered in Euroglyphics.

Maybe there's something here I'm not seeing but this is wizarding its way to the trade pile rapidly.