What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

What difficulty do you guys play at? I play at 6 when we want to win and 7 if we want to get pushed... not sure how much higher we'll go than that, though it could happen.

Snow all weekend, and my friend's birthday, so gameday.

He requested Archipelago and declared it his favorite game.

So 4 players, medium length. We had a couple things happen that we hadn't seen before. We were using the non-War & Peace deck (mostly because I forgot where the W&P deck was) which doesn't have a ton of uses for iron. So of course, I started on an island that was heavy iron. Luckily the Merchant came out and my wife bought it. I bid high for first in turn order and used her merchant to harvest iron then flood the market with iron ore and ended up with 30+ florin. somehow I did this multiple times during the game.

And birthday boy decided to move into "my" area and build a city where I was trying to start a pineapple plantation. well, this was the same turn that I was going first for iron, and amazingly the Barbarian had popped up as the last card on the previous turn. So I scooped that up, moved in and burned his new pineapple farm to the ground. Very satisfying. I never used the barbarian again, as the threat of revolution would occupy us for the rest of the game, but I wielded the threat of it several times more.

We also played Galaxy Trucker, which was new to two of us. Galaxy Truck likes to just crap on a person. and that person was one of the new people. I don't mind the bad luck, but it can leave a sour taste if you aren't expecting it.

We finished with Clank. I ran in and scooped up a 20 pt treasure fairly quickly, turned around and sped out. I thought I was doing really well, but got slowed down in a series of crystal caverns on my way out. I ended up third in this one, while my wife didn't make it out and somehow won overall by 1 point.

On Friday/Sunday we started Arcadia Quest with the kids. The twins need alittle help, so they are teamed up with Mom/Dad, but overall it's at a good level of rules difficulty for them. The first time someone shot their slingshot and 'stole' a kill from another team was an eye-opening experience. They spent most of the 2nd scenario gunning for each other, instead of fighting monsters.

Had a light game night yesterday, but some interesting stuff.

Got to introduce a friend to Hocus. It's the best boxed riff on poker out there and last night's game just solidified that in my head. First we did a learning hand with no powers, then offered the 8 power options and went nuts. We didn't handle their chaos wizard powers correctly and they won the entire game off of a single ginormous pot. What a great game.

Then we tried the new Marvel LCG. Champions I think? I dunno. It sure isn't Sentinels of the Multiverse. Nope. Not that. Very different. For one it actually has the license.

I dunno, it was fine I guess? Very numbers-heavy. Use that card to reduce that cost to play that thing for that number which lets you reduce the other number which lets you use your hero's number. Very much feels like a game that would be best solo, or maybe with 2p. 4p was clearly not ideal. Not my kind of thing but I recognize there were good design choices here.

And then, friends, we played Mr. Face. Mr. Face is a riot. Add the variant where you give players who successfully fool guessers a point and it's one of the best takes on the Dixit/Fibbage/Drawful framework I've played. The faces are always funny and the phrase cards are so open to interpretation that they don't get "spent" like other games with silly words on cards do. It's a top notch party game that fits in an Oink box, which means you can actually take it to social settings and have it function! What else could you want?

Game number 10 in our Netrunner Terminal Directive campaign. Corp jumped out to a heavy lead (three Agendas worth 5 points total) but I stormed back, snagging multiple agendas from HQ after setting up my programs. I was at 6 points and drawing 2 cards from each run on HQ. It was money intensive to bypass his big piece of ice, but with some tricks like Spear Phishing I was putting heavy pressure on him. He had 3 cards left in R&D and it was getting nuts.

I ran his hand and paid the 6 I needed to bypass the ice. First card draw from his hand - Snare. Ok I had four cards, no worries. I trash it for 0. Second draw...Snare again. Fuck. Dude had 2 agendas in his hand and I had a 50% chance in that second draw.

Then we played a four player game of a new Wizkids heavy-ish Euro called Flotilla. This has a lot of tracks, some rondels, and actually a bunch of dice. It's such a weird hodgepodge like the assembled junker fleet at the heart of the board in the Water World style setting.

It's like a closet Ameritrasher trying to design a game influenced by Mac Gerdts and Feld. You delve for salvage, rescue people, and acquire cards to add to your hand. Play is relatively snappy for a three hour Euro as you play one card and trigger its effects. Some of the advanced cards want you to form certain synergies so there's some nice payout there.

Those who really like a nice complex economic game will most likely hate this. There's randomness in dice from delving, randomness in artifacts you earn, and randomness in certain track payouts depending on where the track is when you push it along.

I really dig it.

It reminds me most of Archipelago I think. No specific mechanisms are identical, but it has this obtuse feeling and it a kind of irreverence for the heavy Euro crowd while still being a heavy Euro.

The big twist is that you may switch from a "sinksider" excavating for goods to sell to the market, to a "skysider" who is now focused on building the flotilla city. It's two distinct asymmetrical approaches to the game that interact across boundaries while using the same components. That's pretty wild.

So we had a player turn skyside relatively early just to try it out. He was now buying from the economy that three of us were selling to. We each affected the price of goods and influenced different mechanisms in the game that fed off each other. It was very rad.

I think this is another bizarre yet semi-brilliant Wizkids release that won't get marketed and will fade, but it will have a very strong cult following. I think it's totally a keeper for me although I imagine most here would hate it.

We closed on Camp Grizzly which was dominated by makeout sessions and banging in the cabin. We made a run to the Radio Tower and discovered a time machine (expansion finale) which set us back in time and on a loop. We broke the loop but I died along the way, another player died in the finale, and then the final player needed to roll a 4 on his D4 while wielding a shard of glass. Otis was stuck and this guy made it back to present day and out of the loop. It was enjoyed by the new guy who hates randomness in anything lengthy but enjoys it in short games such as this one.

I actually want to hear more about Flotilla, if possible. On paper it should be something I'm automatically repulsed by, but your summary sounds really engaging. Are you planning to review it?

I am.

I think this is a really great read on it: boardgamegeek.com/thread/2172458/flotilla-design-diary

My favorite parts of the game were rolling gobs of dice to delve as I stayed Sinkside the entire game and invested in cards that allowed me to roll more dice. While dice are random, many of the faces have goods so we didn't really see extreme payouts or whiffs. I also very much dug the interactive economy, which is relatively light (each good you buy increases the cost of that type by 1 and the opposite if you sell) but it created an interesting tempo as I was hanging on to goods to sell later when the Skysider bought that color.

The implementation of theme is interesting because there are several mechanisms which feel tacked on when viewing the mechanisms in black and white, but they enhance the setting for sure. Stuff like gaining toxicity from diving and discovering, finding artifacts such as old record players or the mona lisa, etc.

The service to theme gave the game more of a sandbox feel with all of its different scoring vectors. If it was more mundane and stripped of any essence of setting, it would have felt a little more point salady, but I got a stronger sense of exploration which again, fed back into the themes at play.

One thing which may perturb some is that there is very little interaction except for the economy. You're competing for goals and such, but the real way players influence each other is in affecting the overall economy and value of all the different tracks throughout the ark of play. I found this fascinating though and made up for the otherwise multiplayer solitaire aspects.

Zev rules and has made wizkids an amazing hodgepodge of cool games.

Thanks for the heads up, charles.

I played Roam from Red Raven Games. It's a super quick game with a bit of a Tetris feel. You create a map by laying out six cards, each of which has a 2x3 grid on it. The idea is that you're searching the map for a bunch of people and creatures who have wandered off and gotten lost. On your turn, you activate one of your characters (you start with three). Each character has a specific "search pattern" like three blocks in an L shape, or two blocks diagonal from each other. You lay markers down on the map in the prescribed pattern.

Eventually the cards start to fill up with markers. When one is full, whoever placed the most markers on that card gets to keep the card and flip it over, revealing a new character with a new search pattern. Game continues until somebody claims 10 cards.

The Tetris-y part with the search patterns is a lot of fun, but there are also artifacts that you can buy, and these artifacts make the game for me. They let you do interesting things, like replace an opponent marker with your own, or slide any marker over one space. You can do some clever, nasty moves with these. But you can't use the artifacts very often, so they're not game-breaking by any means.

The artwork is fantastic, as expected by Red Raven. The game uses a bunch of characters and art from their other games like Near & Far. You get a fun little "Hey, it's that guy!" bit of recognition. And yes, I splurged for the clunky metal coins in the Kickstarter campaign because I'm a goddamn fool. But they are super nice coins, with frogs on them! COME ON. Metal frog coins??!? I'm in.

At home:

Game night at a friends and he was keen to get me to try Battle for Rokugan. I enjoyed it although a bit of rules waffling and my inability to tell the difference between the sigils for the Scorpions and the Crabs meant that my endgame strategy was borked, conceding about a dozen points in the process which was frustratingly the eventual gap to the winner. It really wouldn’t have been difficult for FFG to put the faction symbols on the cards as well as or instead of referencing them just by name.

I’m probably just showing my inexperience but I wasn’t overly keen on the tiles that I draw largely dictating what I do – for instance I had a lot of high value armies in the beginning which made defending a waste of potential and instead felt that I had to lean in to aggressive expansionism. This then left me vulnerable and ineffective later on when I was drawing my low value troops but I can’t see how I would have benefitted from being purely defensive all the way through or attempting to expand with weak armies in the late game. I also get the impression that this is a game where you don’t ever want to be seen as being in the lead until making a big play at the end, further fuelled by the secret objective cards which encourage additional shiftiness, but this is counter to the chit-pulling mechanism that largely guides your options and can leave you exposed to being the punchbag regardless of actual potential effectiveness.

The bonus cards that I drew along the way (I gained four of them as well as being first player three out of five rounds) made very little difference to the greater balance of things and I’m not convinced that they add anything to the game. Definitely still want to play more despite some first-play misgivings, on the fence as to whether the niggles will be something I learn to cherish as manageable chaos or resent as artificial levelling feeding a bash-the-leader mentality.

A welcome return for Pax Po which I haven’t played for several months since our Yucata group collapsed in indifference. There was a new player at the table so I played with an open hand for their benefit and explained the motives behind my moves as well as the relative dangers of certain market cards, much to the smirking amusement of the other player who was confident of hijacking all of this for a long-awaited victory. It was an unusual game where everybody was getting rich and racing down individual VP routes in relative peace. I threw down a couple of freebie straw-men to get my Outrage up, whereas the other experienced player started loading Loyalty into his tableau, with neither of us able to do much to counter the situation.

The first Topple came up and nobody wanted to clear it or even advance it as we all thought that we had a shot at stealing an early win and wanted to pass the buck round the table, preferring that somebody else spend a large amount of coin to buy it out purely for the purpose of salvation. I had more than enough Outrage to win but not quite enough coin to invoke Teddy as well as take the topple, then the next player along managed to get enough loyalty in play but was one action short of closing out the game. This meant that I assuredly had the victory on my next turn unless something was urgently done to prevent me taking the two cards that I needed. The turn passes around to Newbie who asks with genuine innocence what would happen if he plays these two Command troops that he has in hand, switches the regime to Martial Law, flips his Hacendado to declare as Command, and then buys the topple which player two has conveniently advanced into the 8-cost slot in his attempted march to secure deposition through peaceful retirement.

A clean win in the early game but not so much beginners luck as it was general incompetence at work; player two was hoping to leverage the inexperience of the new player by encouraging them to buy the topple during Pax and accidentally giving away the game as a result. A little more thought in clearing the topple as a safety would have been a better step for either of us but we kept passing the buck while butting heads and ignoring the threat from the cards collected by the inexperienced player. At least now we have a new Yucata group so can play more regularly again.


At the Club:

Played Fast Sloths, it was not good. Cute idea where you collect cards to move different colour carrier tokens that pick up and deliver your pawn. Hit eight out of nine destinations to win. In reality it is an hour of staring blankly into space while waiting for other people to take their turns in a low stakes game where the promise of interaction (inconveniently moving the carriers out of optimum reach of your opponents) is actually almost irrelevant, and features a broken endgame move where you simply hoard Eagle cards in order to pounce for a quick win.

It’s an homogenous experience to play where nothing that happened really mattered, at the point that the game ended every one of us would have been able to win on our next turn and it was just a matter of who had the quickest final move. It could honestly have been half the size and half the hassle and delivered the same experience. I suppose that it could be played more aggressively where you deliberately try to strand your opponents in awkward spots but then all you would be doing is failing to progress yourself in order to stop one other player while the rest of the table race on ahead, and the plethora of carriers mean that there is always another movement option available anyway. There is simply no incentive in get involved in deliberate interaction; just take the best cards that will keep you moving, hoard Eagles, keep thinking a turn or two ahead, and have a nice nap inbetween your plays.

Mezike, if ever you are short for a yucata group, let me know. I've got a pretty solid group going at the moment but you know how these things go.

I've often see the criticism of the game that it essentially comes down to a mistake. While that's often true I don't know that I have a problem with it.

Thanks MC. I’ve reinstated my Yucata account because it went dormant, same username as on here. I’d love to join you for a game sometime.

Played a solo round of Street Masters yesterday to re-familiarize myself and to try out Turbo Mode, which is new in Aftershock. With Turbo Mode, you gain 1 power at the start of your turn, and when you attack, you can spend up to 3 power to roll extra turbo dice for a chance to hit harder. To compensate, the enemies roll a special turbo die when they attack, and it has an exploding hit on it.

I found this mode pretty awesome, since it really makes the game cruise along and is really helpful when some enemy is sitting there with 8 defense tokens piled on them. Of course, I never felt the pain of the enemies getting critical hits.

I tried one of the new fighters, Murphy. He is an ordinary janitor who doesn't even have a basic attack, but if he takes damage he can transform into a beast that looks I'm-sure-accidentally-like Blanka from Street Fighter. Murphy was an interesting change of pace since they go against the normal trend of trying to gain power to charge your special, and I often would let one damage through that I could have blocked, just so I could transform. It is clear, however, that Murphy is not meant for single fighter games; most of his abilities in human form are support-based.

I won handily, mainly because I completely forgot that Bosses can move through fighters, so you can't shut them down by standing on objective spaces. Oops.

Is there a new expansion to that? I saw frohike and a bunch of other people playing it on Instagram and was wondering if new content hit or something.

Missed a couple weeks of my regular game night for various reasons, but made it back out last night. Played a couple of real good games.

First up, Galaxy Trucker with all the expansions. I love Galaxy Trucker, and finally have been getting some games in with the expansion stuff. We used the regular ships, but all the tiles and most of the cards. We played the super brutal 4th flight. We didnt use the special guys that can level up, and only one guy used the rough roads cards because he is a Galaxy Trucker phenom. Like... he's on a whole other level. Final scores: him 150 (even with him having rough road cards and using the negative side of the balancing cards that i dont know the name of while everyone else used the positive sides), me 70, other two guys 0. Neither of them survived a single flight. Everyone had a blast though. The plan is to try to play it regularly for a while so people can get good enough to make the phenom's ships worse and kinda level the playing field. Basically once everyone is decent at the game then everyone's ships are bad because everyone takes the good tiles fast enough that no one gets very many of the good tiles. Then, carnage ensues! Anyway, the Galaxy Trucker expansions are Real Good.

Also played Black Friday for the first time in a while, which is probably my favorite stock game. Not that I have huge experience with a whole lot of stock games, but i do really like BF. The market had an early downturn, which led to a late resurgence in stock prices before the final catastrophic crash. Riding the late wave with the right stock (and having one really lucky surge in its price right when i needed it), and buying some early silver when it was still quite cheap let me win it by 300. The rest of the pack were all within like 40 points of each other. I usually do quite poorly at BF despite how much I like it, so this one felt good. It was a nail biter to the final turn.

edit
Galaxy Trucker moment of the evening: One guy had just the worst luck on one flight, but it was hilarious. Due to various asteroids and invaders he was down to 5 tiles left in his ship. A crew cabin and a VIP cabin, both connected to an armory, a shield (no batteries), and a single engine sticking off the back. Each card then sniped something off his tiny ship with ludicrous precision. First the engine, so they were just floating along. Then the crew cabin, then the armory, then the shield. He was down to a single VIP cabin floating through space, with his rich jerk looking out the window and contemplating his life choices. The final card knocked him out of the sky with a 360 no scope laser blast.