What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I’m pretty much only playing Aeon’s End right now. What an awesome game. Why didn’t anyone tell me.

Unlike most of the straight deck builders where that is the mechanical focus of the game, there is a real sense of dynamism and dimension as you gauge the need for Gems to make Aether to buy cards versus acquiring more spells or relics. And then there is managing your development curve by focusing and opening breaches, which is just about the best game representation of the D&D/Dying Earth magic system there is. I love how you “load” the spells and set up your next turn along with planning discard order to your advantage. The opposition is tough but fair, and every game has been tense and challenging to the end. It is without a doubt the best deck builder I have ever played- it’s more complex than many, but it plays smoother and leaner than you might expect.

I have the first two “blocks”, the first two starters and their expansion packs. So I have a ton of variety to play with. I’m mostly soloing it, and it is one of the better solo options out there I think. It provides a deep, rewarding experience with really not much overhead or fussing around with AI routines or whatever. Coordinating two mages makes for a great solitaire game.

Michael Barnes wrote: I’m pretty much only playing Aeon’s End right now. What an awesome game. Why didn’t anyone tell me.

I bought this when I was hospitalized and wanted something I could play in a fairly small space. I thought it was fairly dry and mechanical. I wanted to like it, but it just did not click with me. Instead I just read (both real books and wargame manuals).

I _love_ Aeon’s End. I think I’ve been the sites only vocal proponent of it until now though.

Tried The Herb Witches expansion for Quacks of Quedlinberg last night. Its the perfect expansion for that game. More options for all the base game ingredients, a fifth player, a new ingredient, all good additions. The titular Herb Witches give each player 3 very powerful single use abilities that really kick the game into overdrive. Double your buying power for a round, or take a second copy of a chip you just bought for free, stuff like that. They are really fun, and they play into the new overflow bowl, which let's you continue to push your luck once you reach the end of your cauldron track (a more common occurrence with witch boosted engines). If you like QoQ this one is a no brainier, especially since I grabbed a copy for $25 shipped.

Yeah, Aeon’s End isn’t really about telling a grand narrative story and it pretty mechanical- typical deck builder traits. There is a bunch of fluff on the backs of the character and nemesis cards but who cares. You are a wizard trying to get powerful enough to beat some kind of weird ass monster and their weird ass minions before they smash a city’s health dial to 0 or everyone gets worn out. The end.

The value is in working out the combos, figuring out what you need to prepare for the next turn (which is determined at random so you might be surprised), deciding what the biggest threat is. Sorting out what to spend your aether on...and then coordinating that with another mage.

It is a really volatile game though if you play like I do, random everything. You wind up in games with lots of expensive high power spells but crap artifacts and a fast-moving Nemesis that doesn’t give you time to crank up production. You might have a Nemesis effect that hits you for 2 damage per spell you have readied, so you’ve got to spend a couple of turns to avoid it. Then there’s dealing with the Nemesis Unleash effects, which can be devastating. All the while, you are planning essentially with a 1 turn look ahead for the players and Nemesis so you have to weigh risks and make smart decisions.

One quality I really like is that it has an intangibly Magic-like feel to it. It feels closer to Magic than other deck builders and I appreciate that.

I honesty don’t think I’ll ever touch Star Realms, Ascension, Legendary, Hogwarts Battle, or any of the others again- this is the best in the genre. And yes, I do like it better than Dominion.

I'm quite fond of Aeon's End, as well. Don't get it to the table that often, but same can be said for most of my games. If you really are digging it, I'd recommend getting a hold of the Legacy version at some point. It's not amazing, but it was compelling.

Been playing this little solo wargame from Hollandspiel called Escape From Hades. It's a new release with exceptional artwork that really frames its golden era Sci-Fi setting wonderfully. This is from designer Fred Manzo who did a cult folio game Space Vermin From Beyond that looks kind of rad.

Anyway, this is solo only and it's a blend of war and adventure game. You command a ship (The Vittles) and a small contingent of a few military squads. There's also some special commanders and a scientist each with their own capabilities.

The squads start deployed on the Hades installation - a space station holding prison controlled by the Nastians, an enemy alien faction. They've captured a key political figure, a princess of course, and you're basically executing a daring raid to free her.

So you land on the surface at the beginning and need to manage troops which are used to take out enemy units sort of mindlessly patrolling around the map as well as defensive installations on the surface which pop up and threaten your ship.

Neat elements include keeping your ship in system and facing fighter and missile battery attacks, or keeping it out of system in which case it can't offer support with its quad cannon or two railguns. Blowing the hell out of surface elements with railguns is pretty awesome.

You have a few different troop types including these SWAT dudes with jet packs that are very effective, but they also risk misfiring their thrusters and exploding or scattering.

Once you destroy some of the defenses you make your way from the first paper map of the surface to the underground map which has a bunch of cells. The contents of each cell is randomized and there are other inhabitants you can rescue, two gorgon monster things that start rampaging and attempt to destroy the entire station, traps, and engine rooms, etc.

It's a pretty neat game that's reminiscent of Nate Hayden's recent magazine stuff. It did have a bit of a pain point in moving around a ton of AI units late in the game. Their movement is very simple - a straight line based on their facing, but when there are more than a dozen units scooting around it gets a bit fiddly.

The combat system is also a bit fiddly as there's a resolution deck for each of the factions, you flip the top card and look at the modifiers for the given unit you're attacking it. It's neat and much better than a CRT, but there can be a ton of flipping on any given turn and it can really impress a mechanical feeling.

Overall though I dug it due to the personality and quirkiness.

Last night we played games and I'm feeling more positive on Claustrophobia 1643. In my previous plays I was lamenting the choice of iconography over text, and I still think that was a mistake, but it was made easier due to our familiarity and using BGG player aids.

I lost as the humans, running into a demon early with one of my convicts and then getting bogged down in a corridor full of fog. This really delayed me as I was pinned, and by the time I killed his hellhound and demon I was in tatters. I made a break for it but exhaustion and a big ambush took me out. Exceptional game as always.

We got Cowboy Bebop: Board Game Boogie to the table. I played the Cowboy Bebop OST which helped elevate the mood. I think this is a pretty solid, heavily abstracted coop with some neat features.

It's not pick up and deliver, yet it still hits on a few vaguely similar feelings as Firefly and Outer Rim, although it's only an hour. It has moments where it's giving me what I wanted Outer Rim to be, and I do appreciate its streamlined nature.

However, I am a bit disappointed in one aspect. The game makes a deal about how the character's personal stories (called "Sessions") are really the focus of play. You're trying to deal with these while also pursuing bounties as kind of these major sidequests to earn resources and not starve.

The problem is that these sessions are key moments on the show about each character, but they feel so dull in play. The main mechanism in the game is spending cards from your hand to meet symbol requirements on bounties, and this is extended to the session cards. So to deal with a Vicious in Spike's Ballad of Fallen Angels Session we just need to all be on Mars and then discard a bunch of cards.

Sure, the symbols for the cards mean different things - a red gun is fight and the purple magnifying glass is investigate for instance - but it never feels thematic. There's no real narrative arc to play and these big session moments aren't really meaningful. They're just kind of there, as check boxes to mark off as a requirement to win.

I really wish the game added some meat and oomph to these. If they were more asymmetrical and just added a touch of complexity it really would have bought an elevated experience. Spike's session should add special event cards or Vicious to the board or something. Maybe accomplishing the first leg of one of your sessions gave you a new special ability or card. Really, anything to break up their mechanical monotony and add some personality would have been appreciated.

Despite this failure, we did enjoy it (the others were actually less critical of this than me). It's a hobby game that approaches mainstream/gateway, and does an OK job of capturing the shows elements. It does feel like you're bouncing around and picking up bounties, which is neat. I'm just a little annoyed as it had an opportunity to be fantastic with just a little more.

I also was introduced to Auztralia, the zany Martin Wallace game about building railroad and fighting Cthulhu. I really dug it. I ended up starting somewhat near a player who decided to go heavy military, so I gained just enough troops to defend myself from a stray monster or two and leaned heavily into farming. I gained the bonus point personalities for two types of farms and built most of my farms near my military neighbor to leech off his protection. I ended up winning by a slim margin over Cthulhu who was in second.

Also got Silver & Gold back out which was a hit again, and then when one guy left we yanked Zoo Ball off the shelf and played 6 straight two player games of it. I won all six, no shit. This guy used to be great at flicking games but he must be rusty. On the sixth game I scored the winning shot off my opening flick. We called it right there.

Played a few learning games of Fast & Fhtagn yesterday. The Boy, when shown the box a couple of weeks ago, showed definite interest (he's into classic cars and whatnot, but also likes HP Lovecraft. When I read the cars' names aloud, my wife lost it. She isn't a racing fan, but will definitely play because of the HP references.

Played a solo game of Era: Medieval Age to get the rules down. On first blush the economy is tighter than I thought it would be, which is a good thing. You need a lot of food to run the economy if you start building up dice.

The skull lock on rerolls is also reasonably restrictive.

Made a trade for Tiny Epic Quest with a guy who's deployed in Kabul. He's with the 16th Airlift Squadron (sent me a unit patch in the box, which is pretty cool.) It's the only TE game I didn't own, so I've played a couple times in the last couple days to get a feel for it. I'm tempted to say it's the most "mathy" TE game, although that doesn't feel quite right, since you're very much dependent on dice and a push-your-luck mechanic to make progress, which isn't "mathy". But it's quite the abstraction from the theme: adventuring around the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue it from the invading goblins.

You have three ways to score points: killing goblins, advancing your magic knowledge, and completing quests. Killing goblins is pretty straightforward and you can score a lot of points with them, especially if you pick up the magic sword that every player has access to and/or the magic bow which only one player can get. Killing goblins also increases your max health. Completing quests is also obvious and not only scores points, but gives you direct rewards; stat recovery for travel quests and magic items for temple quests, like the aforementioned bow. You also make progress on the universal swords, shields, and staves by doing temples. The magic knowledge part is the most abstracted and the most obvious case where the push-your-luck aspect comes into play. You're trying to learn higher level "spells" in order to score points at the end AND increase your max power. You use power directly in dealing with temples and resisting the damage of goblins (and sometimes killing them with the sword.) So, despite the spell knowledge being largely about an end game condition ("spells" don't do anything; it's just a record of how far you've pushed), it is kind of important for the rest of the game, which is a nice design weave.

Played a three-player game yesterday where I came in second. I'd actually gone hard on the knowledge and questing parts, but an opponent went farther with goblins and squeaked by me. Then I tried a solo game tonight and couldn't even get to the lowest level of achievement ("Peasant".) This is what I mean by "mathy". You have to suss out a cost-benefit ratio as to what's going to score you the most without neglecting the other two or one; just like Tiny Epic Kingdoms. I'm still surprised at how much depth these "tiny" games have and how all of them have been genuinely entertaining, despite being so varied in approach.

It can be a fair statement to say that a dice heavy game is mathy. It's just probabilities and expected outcomes and not deterministic calculations.

Sure. It's just that when I think "mathy" games, I tend to think of figuring point salads, rather than odds, so it doesn't feel like the right word here. And that's also because the ability to actually move to the right spot and complete quests is often dependent on what your opponents do (everyone moves the same way as the person picking the travel method) and the quest card draw. So, there's a lot of randomness built into this game which, like other push-your-luck games, can be minimized in a number of ways so that it doesn't spiral out of control. But it's still such an overriding presence that the kind of calculation that "mathy" games usually present doesn't seem present. I don't know. Maybe I'm overthinking it. The important thing is that it's still a solid game. It's not my favorite TE game by any stretch, but I'd be interested in playing it in more of a "I wonder if this strategy would work" experimental approach.

Rliyen wrote: Played a few learning games of Fast & Fhtagn yesterday. The Boy, when shown the box a couple of weeks ago, showed definite interest (he's into classic cars and whatnot, but also likes HP Lovecraft. When I read the cars' names aloud, my wife lost it. She isn't a racing fan, but will definitely play because of the HP references.

Is this fairly easy to pick up? My wife gave it to me at one point, but it drifted down into the backlog of games, including a backlog of unplayed mythos games.

I played Tapestry last night.

I've known this for a while, so it wasn't a great revelation, but this one just proved to me again that the modern style of games just isn't for me.

It's a worker-placementish, point-salady, engine-buildery, optimization puzzlish game. Any one of those descriptors should be enough to send me running to the hills, but I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.

Players control civilizations as they develop & expand through history. You can expand on the map, but there really isn't any conflict. You collect resources, but what you collect has no bearing on what anyone else collects. You develop technologies, but the benefits are relatively minor and not exclusive. There's randomization in the luck of the draw and the roll of dice, but it's not the kind you can plan for. You just have to hope you get as lucky as everybody else. Damn, the more I describe it the more I hate it.

The player-interaction was minimal. And of course, there are dozens of ways to get points, all of which seem equally valid (when balance becomes blandness). What was that Vonnegut story? Harrison Bergeron? That's what all games feel like to me these days.

I'm an unapologetic Knizia fanboy, but it astounds me that people used to call his games cold and mathy and themeless. Choosing which camel to place and where, as the pool of each color and the spaces on the board rapidly disappear creates more tension, more emotion, more FUN than anything I could possibly do in Tapestry, and I even built a space shuttle and explored new planets. But hey, it's got great bits.

^so very wrong about games was *damning* on this one, similar thoughts. Their discussion about the super uneven tech powers and comparing it to Innovation (which does overpowered cards successfully) was illuminating.