What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I dunno. Comparing High Society and Cyclades seems more ridiculous than comparing Cyclades to Scythe.

Usually people are looking for a specific type of game, i.e. a certain feel. If we're talking area control style games we're looking for conflict and territorial development, probably a battle mechanism.

People are comparing Eclipse to TI because both have similar goals from a narrative and feel perspective. Sure they get there differently and focus on different details, this is what people want to compare and how that services the experience of each.

I'm not saying your outlook is crazy, but I would expect it to be in the minority.

Yeah, I don't see the comparison of Cyclades and Scythe as outrageous. They're both area control games to a certain extent. They both have important economy considerations. They both have mechanics that are largely external to what's happening on the map, but still affect it. They also both look like wargames to the casual observer but really aren't, since the combat is, by far, the least thrilling aspect of both of them. Guess it depends on where/how you contextualize your categorization, which is where we veer into a similar discussion about how to classify different types of music. That never ends well, either.

Perhaps the compliment that can be paid to both of them is that they're not easily identifiable as "X category", which is something that I think has led to Scythe's popularity and the general appreciation for things like the Matagot trinity, Tyrants, etc.

charlest wrote: I dunno. Comparing High Society and Cyclades seems more ridiculous than comparing Cyclades to Scythe.

Usually people are looking for a specific type of game, i.e. a certain feel. If we're talking area control style games we're looking for conflict and territorial development, probably a battle mechanism.

People are comparing Eclipse to TI because both have similar goals from a narrative and feel perspective. Sure they get there differently and focus on different details, this is what people want to compare and how that services the experience of each.

I'm not saying your outlook is crazy, but I would expect it to be in the minority.

Thanked for its incredible display of diplomacy.

For me personally it's not a game I particularly like or dislike very much. It's fine, I haven't played it enough to be particularly good at it, and a couple of guys in my group have and typically play circles around me. So it's kind of like being the fifth wheel when I play. I'm not terribly concerned about closing the skill gap.

It's a dependable 7. But seriously, look at that artwork! Autobuy!

Sagrilarus wrote: It's fine, I haven't played it enough to be particularly good at it, and a couple of guys in my group have and typically play circles around me. So it's kind of like being the fifth wheel when I play. I'm not terribly concerned about closing the skill gap.

This sounds similar to my introduction to Dominion, wherein the people I was learning the game from had played dozens of times. So, they were clearly reading the deck as it was played and performing these elaborate maneuvers and I was totally in over my head. After two games with them, I basically decided I wasn't interested because it was pointless even trying to compete. Then, after learning more about it and its relative lack of theme, I found that my disinterest was well-founded and I discovered other deckbuilders which were much more my taste.

My experience with Scythe hasn't been negative. It's just been kinda meh. It's nice. I'd play it. But there are many other things I would prefer to play instead.

La Granja: No Siesta It's a roll-and-write with a dice-drafting mechanic that beat out the current fad by a year or two. It takes just a bit too long for what it is, and I suspect there aren't enough viable strategies to explore over too many more plays. I didn't hate it and would play it again but would rather rip through three games of Roll Through The Ages: The Bronze Age in the same timeframe.

Pengoloo It's a memory game of checking eggs under penguins. Five-year-olds can play it, but it made the table laugh. There are a lot of worse ways to spend five minutes.

5-Minute Dungeon Kind of leery of a real-time, co-operative matching game, but a lot more fun than I expected. Took a while to get in the groove, but it kind of felt like The Mind where you have no idea how you're going to get past level three but things start to fall into place and you roll level eight. All of our victories came with seconds left on the timer, but we did beat the final boss in our first game. Makes me think the skillcap is pretty low. Feel bad that every card in the dungeon had vibrant, original art, but there was no time to enjoy any of it.

And, finally, Gold help me, Funkoverse Bought both the Harry Potter boxes for my wife's birthday, and we cracked it tonight. I thought it was the dumbest cash grab when I first heard about it, but it works and works well. The scenarios and actions and abilities are all clean and not overburdened with cruft to make it feel like more than it is. There are dice, but there are enough meaningful decisions that if you win, you probably deserved to win. Depending on your tolerance for the Funko look, the production values are pretty great, too. Apparently that Prospero Hall outfit knows what it's doing. If my wife wants to keep playing regularly, I could definitely see picking up the Batman boxes just to pair Robin and Ron and anyone else for the dopey sidekick team.

I played Wingspan and Scythe.

I liked Scythe. I like the logistics of movement and the way you expand around the board. But I suspect, partly because of my play and partly because of what I've heard from others, that I'll cool down on the game as I play it. It does put a lot of heavy limitations in what you can actually achieve, in the way you can interact with your opponents and so on. Still, I can see the appeal.

Plagiarized or not, I think the art is kitsch.

Wingspan is just dull. It's a very well-made game but there's nothing in it that seems interesting to me. I played it, I finished second by one point and I can't say I cared about it. I can respect how clean the design is and how well ingrated the but the fun, the interest isn't there. If she moves to design something else, I might give it a look but this is just dull.

I played the new “Igor” short game variant for Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein, now officially released by Plaid Hat. This is *the* way to play. The game still is not short, but 90 minutes is more reasonable than 2 1/2 hours. The game loses none of what made it intriguing in the first place and, I would argue, is a little more interesting due to two new rule changes that mitigate the dice rolling while offering new decisions to make. I was also happy to see there is no need to print new components (as in the variant I playtested, though that variant has also been made available on BGG from the designer).

If you’re going to play Abomination, I highly recommend going straight to the Igor variant, you won’t be missing anything by doing so.

Funkoverse is better than expected. I got The Batman and Harry Potter sets with the expansions and played it a couple of times with Batman without opening HP just in case. I almost returned it (Target). But my kids really latched on to it and after many games it’s a fun, easy to play skirmish with a really neat cool down mechanism. I also especially like that each character is totally different and their abilities make them feel true to the source in some really fun ways. There are some cool synergies to play around with for sure, and the dice combat is total bullshit in a good way. The figures are neat but pretty awkward. Scenarios are kind of meh but it takes really well to just making them up on the fly.

I picked up Rick and Morty last week, it’s an interesting set. The Portal Gun is stupid powerful on objective maps or paired up with Voldemort.

Looks like Back to the Future is next...totally doing Morty and Marty versus Doc and Rick.

Very few people at the local gathering tonight, so I sat down with a friend who's really fond of co-ops. I'm not, but I had one that I hadn't played yet, which was Tiny Epic Defenders. This was the one TE game that I wasn't especially interested in, but I got it in an easy trade along with the Dark War expansion and the KS exclusives. It's interesting. There's a lot of variation in how to approach the different challenges. The final bosses seem a little on the easy side, but I/we have lost to them. We played with just the 'A' sides of the main box locations and without the Dark War stuff, since my friend was a newbie. We took Lealith, the human paladin and Brutus, the goblin assassin against what turned out to be the Fire Elemental. We were going along pretty well, although frustrated at the lack of anything to use our turns for when we got a cluster of Defenders cards at the start. But then it snowballed badly after the Elemental arrived and the capital city caved in. We were only able to get one artifact, the Gavel that lets you look at the top two cards and rearrange them.

So, my friend switched to Eyru, the lizardman warrior, and we added in the XP system that lets you use extra action points for XP, which can then be used for various functions later in the game and to gain skills. We kept the base locations, though, and ended up fighting the Kraken. We lost a couple locations, but then moved in and crushed him with the Shield of Aughmoore, the potion that gives you an extra action for a sacrifice, and the mech arms that heal you. The skills didn't come into play too much, but they might with more players. WIll have to try it.

Then we switched to Set a Watch, which he had Kickstarted. No, it's not about waiting for the train or working in 19th-century Zurich. It's about an adventuring party. We took the Wizard, Beast Master, Knight, and Cleric. I'd never heard of the game but it's a decent puzzle-solving style co-op, where you have to figure out how to manage your action economy against a string of enemies, most of which you can't see until they get close enough to the fire, and with one player/character always having to be missing from combat in order to tend the camp. I found it a little mechanical, but I'd definitely try it again.

My wife and I have been playing a lot of Tussie Mussie since it came a little while ago. It's a little card game about dueling Victorian flower arrangements. There's a deck of 18 cards that score in various set collection kinda ways (same color cards, different color cards, cards with no points printed on them, etc). Each turn you draw two cards and offer them to your opponent, one face up and one face down. They take one, and you get whichever one they didn't take. Face down cards stay face down, and some cards care about having lots of face up or face down cards etc. Then they offer you two. Repeat until you both have 4 cards, then score the cards. Play three rounds, high score wins.

It's super quick, but the central "are you the type of person that would put the poison in your own cup" tension is a lot of fun. Plus the Beth Sobel art is beautiful, and the theme is fun. It's a solid little card game, if you like that kind of thing.

We finished our latest Dungeon Degenerates campaign last night. I don't want to spoil too much, but we basically destroyed the world and then turned into mounds of spores and vapor. Since we had a Witch Smeller in our group who was even praying to his gods in the final session as we were doing evil, we determined the drugged out, ash lunged Bog Conjurer in our group poisoned his mind and convinced him he was doing good. I was a greedy Alchemist who was amassing alchemical items in prepping for the end. Mistakes were made. Worth it.

Our next run will include Mean Streets. Looking forward to trying out a completely different type of character as well.

Mental Blocks continues to kind of perplex me. On one hand I really like it. On another I think it's too easy unless you include the wonky restrictions which feel a bit tacked on and grueling.

Wayfinders was weak. It's a mellow Splendor-ish thing but the board is very busy and the different tile affects are a bit too complex for the light gamers. It was too mellow and boring and the way the spatial puzzle of the board fades away quickly didn't really grab me.

Also tried the EXIT Haunted Roller Coaster which sucked. This just reinforced my thoughts that Unlock is much better than EXIT.

Cool, seems like dungeon degenerates has had some staying power with you. Which is saying something given your job game churn.

Gary Sax wrote: Cool, seems like dungeon degenerates has had some staying power with you. Which is saying something given your job game churn.

It has. It's not perfect as two issues keep creeping up for me over time:

1. It's difficult to just pull out. I really need to re-read the rulebook before we play if there's months in between sessions.

2. Combat is the main thing you do and it can get a tiny bit repetitive. Loot, excellent encounters, and killer scenarios break this up. But there are a few small moments near the end where I'm hoping we don't get in a fight simply to avoid a tiny bit of monotony.

The atmosphere and richness of setting really elevates it though and makes up for these issues.

As much as I admired the aesthetic and atmosphere of Dungeon Degenerates, it was far too tedious for my liking. It’s not really a complicated game but it felt like one, and as Charlie said, the combat is most of the playtime and, for as outside of the box it was, it wasn’t fun. While I admire it for having so many different outcomes and things that can happen, playing a campaign of it quickly felt like work.

Trust me, I want to champion the weird kid on the playground, but aesthetic doesn’t carry a game. The things that happen in it are fun, playing it isn’t.

The immersive magic of DD's setting combined with the heavily RNG events (that still manage to narratively *work* every time) can come at a cost: inconsistent playtimes. This, for me, directly correlates to how much combat fatigue starts to affect me by the end of a scenario. The combat rate and dynamics feel a lot like a JRPG, where the mechanisms and choices are fairly simple and enjoyable to repeat, creating that weirdly satisfying grind that can eventually become *less* satisfying if the scenario extends for too long and/or loot drops are too spartan. So the large, intricate, diegetic canvas can sometimes backfire when it mixes with extra-diegetic mechanisms that don't seem to be designed for consumption that extends beyond a couple of hours.

I still love it to death. It's my fourth most played game since I started logging board game plays back in 9/2013. Currently sitting at 22 sessions.