What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played two games of Flamme Rouge yesterday, with Kuhrusty and two friends. We're doing the "Grand Tour" using the companion app to track time, standings, etc. This adds another fun wrinkle to the game, as half of the exhaustion cards left in a deck will carry over to the next race. (Tired legs!) So sometimes you want to shoot for 2nd or 3rd place if it lets you ditch exhaustion.

We're also playing with all the expansions. Can't wait for cobblestones + rain to come up and cause chain reaction crashes.

One of my friends mentioned, at the end, that his metric of a fun game was how much yelling there was at the table. This passed.

Sagrilarus wrote: This game has been the topic of debate in our group for years because my buddy Paul let someone win one time.

We’ve always played this way. The only issue is, that over time, people have become comfortable throwing the game at the slightest provocation, so you have to be super careful about how you deal with that last person. Actually, maybe it’s not an issue...

Played the "Insert Coin" scenario of Unlock! Heroic Adventures last night. This was an easy one so it did not provide much trouble and we breezed through it in 30 minutes. It's retro video game themed, which it sticks to pretty closely and really does a pretty great job of representing it. The gimmick is also one of the cooler ones from any game in the series. I'm hoping the other two keep throwing out some new gimmicks and clever ideas and it is not like "The Night of the Boogeymen" from Exotic Adventures that started it off with some clever new things and was followed by two relatively lackluster adventures.

My wife and I just played our first Unlock! game the other night. The Formula. We enjoyed it and promptly ordered two more singles from Amazon for $8 each, The Nautilus Traps and Squeek & Sausage, to play with another couple this weekend.

Question: Is there a trading market for these or is the cost of shipping not even worth it over just buying new ones? Now that they are packaging 3 together I’m sure it’s better for trading, but what about singles?

I've tended to sell them in sets of 3, based on the group they released in. So I got the first three right when they came out, played them, then sold those 3 together.

I do see them sell individually pretty well in convention virtual flea markets. If you can remove the cost of shipping people will pay $8-ish for the newer ones.

I've never seen them traded but I'm sure it happens.

Good to know. I figured there would be more of a trade market since since they are basically the same item and you’d just pay to ship them to each other.

Anyway, how do the Exit games compare? I believe they contain actual puzzle items?

I prefer Exit to Unlock!. The difference is in the focus. Exit generally has better puzzle design, but Unlock! has better atmosphere.

Unlock! definitely shows improvement in the later designs and evolves much quicker. They do place a lot of emphasis on their theme and a game can stand just off a high quality implementation (like Insert Coin I mentioned a couple of posts ago, super easy, but very fun).

Exit was pretty stagnant in design for the first 10 and each generally succeeds or doesn't based on the quality of the puzzles. I believe the first 8 were all designed around the same time so that might be why there was little growth. The most recent Exit double box (The Catacombs of Horror) was a big step forward in design and did a much better job of implementing its theme compared to other entries in the series. Hopefully they continue in that vein. The Exit games are destructible one-use designs. You can theoretically reset them, but would need to print off a lot of components in some cases.

charlest wrote: I've tended to sell them in sets of 3, based on the group they released in. So I got the first three right when they came out, played them, then sold those 3 together.

I do see them sell individually pretty well in convention virtual flea markets. If you can remove the cost of shipping people will pay $8-ish for the newer ones.

I've never seen them traded but I'm sure it happens.

I do exactly this. I try to sell them locally if possible, but in general they are easy to move.

We played the "Sherlock Holmes: The Scarlet Thread of Murder" scenario from Unlock! Heroic Adventures last night. Definitely a step up from "Insert Coin" in challenge and probably one of the tougher medium difficulty ones in the lineup. The gimmick in this one was that it borrowed elements from Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and Chronicles of Crime to create a whodunit. It was a definite improvement over the previous mystery scenario ("Tombstone Express"). So far this wave is 2 for 2 on providing good thematic integration and fun puzzles. Hopefully the third one, "In Pursuit of the White Rabbit", lives up to the same standards as the others. If so, this would be the first Unlock! wave that managed to be good across all three scenarios.

I'm diving into that set soon Barrow, glad to hear it's another high quality release.

We finished off Unlock! Heroic Adventures with "In Pursuit of the White Rabbit." This was definitely our least favorite in the set, but that could easily because the last puzzle is a disaster. The scenario continues to blend in the theme really well and has several cool gimmicks. If it was not for the last puzzle, I would have a higher opinion of it. We knew "how" to solve it and what we were looking for, but the components make it an exercise in tedium.

Minor spoiler:


Overall, this is definitely the best set with only the final scenario slipping up a bit.

played Pipeline last night. Another overdesigned euro from the "more is more" school. I'll be glad when this latest design trend pendulums back to "elegant" instead of "deep".

Legomancer wrote: I'll be glad when this latest design trend pendulums back to "elegant" instead of "deep".

As my man Devin would say, from elegant to elephant

Played Wingspan for the first time last night. I'd been looking for it for a while. I already have a couple engine builders in the house, so I wasn't going to pay anything over retail for it and wasn't even particularly interested in the price that Amazon sellers had it listed for ($78, plus shipping.) It was kind of a "if I see it and it seems right, I'll snag it." So I was in one of our local stores (Vault of Midnight) last week, wandering around before seeing a movie down the street, and was on the verge of walking out when I saw two copies of Wingspan sitting in the window for $54. That worked for me. I took it to one of the weekly gatherings at a different store last night (Fun4All) and everyone was "oohing" and "aahing" over the fact that I'd managed to find it somewhere, so I guess they're still pretty rare.

I think I agree with Gary on its merits. It's a good engine builder, but nothing spectacular. I do really like the random goals for each round, on top of the overall bonus goal, so you're really angling in different directions with each game and have something to work toward that isn't entirely dependent on what you draw like Race for the Galaxy. OTOH, since it's a card game, it is VERY draw dependent and even if you want to go in a certain direction or your hand indicates that that's the way you should go, the goals will occasionally countermand that. It's also more difficult to switch gears than other builders, since you have so few actions that diminish with every round. You can't spend a ton of time just drawing cards because you'll fall way behind in other crucial actions like eggs, food, and playing birds. I do like the dwindling actions approach and I love all the info on the cards (even if they do present a challenge to the new player in terms of info overload), but I'm left wondering if, in the attempt to enhance replayability, they made the game more difficult to play in any single setting? Dunno. I came in third of four when my longer-term plans didn't pan out. The only other newb at the table got an egg engine into gear early and dominated.

Then we played Bargain Quest; an intensely meta game for nerds. I... liked it? I think there are some cool ideas in it, but there are some distinct failings in the rulebook. If people are tied for hearts in display items AND cost, who picks first from the customers? For that matter, does the game stay with the same first player for the whole session? Because that seems massively advantageous when dealing with enemies like the Ogre, who does more damage every time he gets wounded, forcing later players into a defense-first strategy and basically shutting them out of the round for VPs if they can't. Considering the tiny margins of the game (we only made it through two of the three rounds before the store kicked us out and I won with 6 points), that's significant. I'd definitely try it again, though, since it moves pretty quickly for a drafting game. I will say that the high amount of tiny text on the cards makes it difficult for larger groups, since everything has to be passed around so people can see their options.

Bargain Quest looks kind of interesting. Shut Up and Sit Down have raved about it, and it's a Jonathan Ying design (DOOM 2nd edition, Power Rangers).

I have a copy I need to open still but I'm certainly interested.