What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Space Ghost wrote: I would love to hear a comparison between Nemesis and Lifeform

This will be happening very soon on ICFTT if I have anything to do with it. I can say that the unfortunate answer for everyone’s wallets is BUY BOTH.

hotseatgames wrote: Last night we had 4 players for Sea Evil, armed with proper knowledge of how to play. I was on the side of the whalers. I now see that this game is the board game equivalent of living through the events of the video game Return of the Obra Dinn.

Sea Evil is so damn good. I find it helpful to think of it as a Dungeon Crawl Classics 0-Level funnel adventure—it's not balanced, it's not a fair fight, but damn if it doesn't tell a great story every single time.

A brown bottle remedy for the ague of the mid-weight Euro.

See if I can get through these.

BGG.Con Friday:

Started off the day catching up on old "campaigns" we wanted to finish, starting with Stuffed Fables, which had been lingering unfinished for about a year. After about 10 minutes of hunting around pictures on my phone, we finally found the photos of where we left off and started trying to remember rules. Really we just had one more "page" to go in the storybook before it ended, so it was relatively brief once we got going again. The wife was more interested in it on the second go round, but perhaps because it was brief. In any case, we packed it up after succeeding in the first adventure arc, as we had another campaign to tackle.

Next up with the same group we wanted to continue A Tale of Pirates from last year's BGG.Con. This is a app-assisted, real-time game with sand-timer sailors and a 3D-cardboard pirate ship (go Google some pictures, mine contain spoilers) where you progress through a series of missions with unlocks. This game really is a lot of fun, especially if you just play on Easy to have a good time even when you screw up. We had stalled out on mission 5 the previous year, so we started back at that one and, even on Easy, lost twice. Fuck that mission, I had implemented a two-loss only rule (and we had now lost it 5 times total), so we moved on. We then proceeded through the next 5 missions with far less trouble, though we fudged things here and there to keep it moving and completed the campaign. It had a lot of fun twists and turns, and really this game is a steal for what they charge (assuming it's still in print).

I believe now is when I pulled out what would become the undisputed champion of the con: Quirky Circuits. I had demoed it at GenCon and it was my surprise of that show, and it did not disappoint with my group. This game is played in scenarios in a story book (like Stuffed Fables), where you are cooperatively programming a robot to perform a task by laying down the program with cards from your hand, like Roborally, however the cards are placed face down and you are not allowed to communicate with your fellow teammates, like The Mind. There is some basic information on the back of the cards that tell you the class of the card (such as a movement card or a turn), but you have to make some educated guesses. You must play at least 5 cards total, and everyone must contribute at least one. We played Gizmo, the Roomba with the cat on top for this session, and while we probably cheated a bit on the communication part, it was a ton of fun. The art and minis are absolutely adorable. And there was much yelling at people during the programming reveal. We went out for dinner, and this game came back out afterwards, only this time we switched over to the robot bee, which involved picking up and dropping off things, as well as some momentum rules (which some people really struggled with). More people kept wanting to play (it only takes up to 4), so I volunteered to sit out, thinking they would just play a few rounds as it was getting late.

Well, they kept playing, so I pulled out Death Angel and setup for a 4-team game (my preferred solo play). Randomly selecting form the base marines (plus first expansion) I started off strong, with Brother Claudio doing what he does best. About half way through my wife decides to go to bed, so I get to jump back into the game of Quirky Circuits, this time them having moved on to the Sushi Robot that is trying to feed hungry cat customers. This one is different because there is very little movement and it's much more constrained. In theory it should be much easier, but we still had our goofs in a 3 player game. After putting it up, one of my friend's joined my in-progress marine expedition to finish off Death Angel. Other then an unlucky roll by Brother Claudio (Nooooooo!!), all the marines survived to the end, in probably the second most dominate game I've had of that. I really should play the harder genestealer cards...

A Tale of Pirates is awesome and not enough people have played it.

charlest wrote: A Tale of Pirates is awesome and not enough people have played it.

I will say it's been one of the more successful Charlie Theel recommendations I've bitten on.

Funny enough, looking back at my Friday, not a lot of different stuff got played, but that's a testament to how much A Tale of Pirates and Quirky Circuits we played...

Played my first proper game of Space Empires 4X tonight, 3p quick conquest scenario (you get a dump of money up front to kickstart your tech research and you don't play with mines/minesweepers basically) Took about 5.5 hours from opening the box, but a good 1.5 of that was setting up and rules. Plus one total newbie and two people that had played half of one game. The rules dump is pretty intense, and I'm terrible at teaching GMT/wargames in general. I'm good at teaching most games but this style I just don't know a good way to do it. Presumably I'll get better with experience? Be that as it may, we had a blast. The game flows extremely smoothly once you have played a turn or two. We ended on turn 9, with my dual Titans (aka Death Stars) blowing up the yellow players home planet. None of us tried out the weirder special ships (boarding ships, cloaked raiders, carriers/fighters), which all seem fun and worthwhile. We also all played pretty conservatively, which I feel like it's not the way to play the game well. But man... This game is super fun. It really nails what it's going for with extremely low overhead, and this far has not descended into grindy attrition scenarios (though I could see it going that way maybe? Need to play more).

Also I think you would have to be crazy to play out every battle as a scenario in Talon, but I love that there are rules for it.

TWBG was finally blocked at my work and my home IP was banned awhile ago, likely due to too many tabs open before Uba upped the amount a few months ago, so my participation here will be more limited as I hate typing on my phone.

So short updates:

Lifeform is still rocking after several plays

First play of Nemesis was slow but good. It wasn't great. More coming though.

Tainted Grail is the main game occupying my mind and table right now. Over 10 hours into it solo the past week. Much better than 7th Continent and a solidly written story. Really love it.

After three plays Cowboy Bebop Boardgame Boogie is firmly Ok in my book. Slightly above average and it fails to really elevate. I think Terminator is the much better Lynnvander game.

Western Legends is definitely improved by Ante Up. I wish it was less fiddly and I hate the production issues and shoddy QA, but it's a good expansion.

Unmatched is great. Very surprising to me. It doesn't feel like a normal skirmish game because it doesn't try and emulate a larger miniatures battle with a stripped down subset/squad. It's firmly a tight Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom sort of thing. I expected to sell it but not going to happen.

Finished Android Netrunner Terminal Directive. We were very tired of the lack of real story by the end of it. Not at all tired of Netrunner but this half-assed as a legacy game.

Tank Duel is still rocking.

Cloudspire is a bit of a slog and not worth playing at more than 2 players. It may be best solo, which is pretty good admittedly.

Got a game of Conan in recently after a few months. Am I this game's biggest fan? It deserves it. Buddy and I are still talking about the session through texts.

Necromunda Dark Uprising is great, but I'd rather play Core Space.

Finally tried Las Vegas (the new Royale version from Alea) and it was a hit with my family on Thanksgiving. Looking forward to more.

Tak is alright. Would rather play Santorini or Hypergrid.

Have a birthday game day coming up and I'm looking forward to more Nemesis and trying Cthulhu Death May Die.

charlest wrote: Tainted Grail is the main game occupying my mind and table right now. Over 10 hours into it solo the past week. Much better than 7th Continent and a solidly written story. Really love it.

How do you think Tainted Grail would play with more than one player? I thought 7th Continent would work really well for my wife and I because she loves PC adventure games but we got rid of it pretty quickly. It seems like Tainted Grail could be better choice for us but I am hesitant to buy it after how much we disliked 7th Continent.

charlest wrote: Have a birthday game day coming up and I'm looking forward to more Nemesis and trying Cthulhu Death May Die.

My wife and I played Cthulhu: Death May Day three times in the last week and we're having a lot of fun with it. I did not back the Kickstarter but after watching Joel Eddy's review I bought the base game. It's pretty much the only game I have played in the last week or so.

It's not the most original game but I would prefer to play this over any of the FFG mythos board games. It's very clean and you can set it up and teach it in about 10 minutes. I love the modular scenario system. I think it makes the scenarios more replayable than something like Mansions of Madness. You're also only dealing with a small amount of components each time you play it too.

So far all the different characters seem like a lot of fun to play. There are only six actions you can take (two are unique to the scenario) and each character has three skill tracks they can move up. The skills you unlock feel meaningful and you won't get to unlock everything each game.

There's a lot of tension and the arc of the game is fun. Anytime you roll dice there's a chance you can go up your character's madness track which is both good and bad. You level up one of your skills at certain points but there's no way to move back down track and when you reach the end you die. Also when the elder one for the scenario hits the board you have to be prepared to deal with them right away. The first level of the elder one is manageable but once they get to the second and third levels you probably only have a few turns to defeat them or you'll lose.

It's not as difficult as a co-op like Ghost Stories but all of our games have felt pretty close. We won two times and lost once. Each time I would say we were a turn or two away from the winning or losing. Both times we won a character had to sacrifice themselves to make sure we won too.

2nd any more info (or link to the column you're writing in the other thread when it goes up) on tainted grail. I've been close to buying 7th continent many times.

(Death May Die) I'm in the same boat. Didn't back it but bought a copy after all the good word on it. The arc of play and high tempo combined with the Rob Daviau unique scenario boxes really appeals to me.

Concerning Tainted Grail, it's kind of difficult to say. I really enjoyed 7th Continent at first but found it got stale after a few hours. Way too repetitive and a grind.

Tainted Grail has had a couple of grindy moments, but not overly aggregious. Most of the chapters have had relatively clear objectives and it feels like a more directed effort than 7C.

Each card you move across in TG is like an isolated choose your own adventure chapter. The location can be explored as you go to the story book and it has different options and people to talk to. It does a spectacular job of tying larger story elements together and continuing threads based off your decisions.

For instance, you could come across someone who needs help. If you aid them it has you check off this box titled "A Helping Hand Part 1" on the campaign sheet (there are hundreds of boxes).

Way later you may come to a spot which asks if you have Helping Hand Part 1 and if so, read X passage.

It feels as though there are dozens and dozens of major and minor branches.

I love the dark kind of post apocalyptic Arthurian setting as well. I think they really utilize the setting strongly and I'm totally bought into the characters and world.

There's also more meat here. Combat and diplomacy are similar-ish, utilizing character specific card decks and a mini Euro-style symbol management game. It's not a very dramatic system, but its satisfying and you can add new cards with experience.

This is the primary issue multiplayer however as you would need to stop and watch someone's encounter for 5 minutes or so.

I would never play this at 3 or 4 players. 2 would probably work pretty well.

I'm definitely going to write a full article at some point. Trying to decide whether to wait until I finish the campaign (I'm about 35-50% done I'd guess), or just go ahead and write it now. Unfortunately I totaled my car yesterday in a bad collision so I'm probably going to pitch this to an outlet as opposed to putting it on my site.

Last one...

BGG.Con Saturday:

Started the day off with a new game: Mechanica. In this game you're building a "tidybot" factory out of factory improvement puzzle pieces, attempting to make the most money by selling bots or banking profits of fulfilling blueprints. The presentation is excellent, with spinning factory market that drops recycled pieces into the box if they're not bought in time. For a relatively simple game, I think everyone made a bunch of dumb mistakes in laying out their factory improvements. The game felt too short, as we all ended the game with only like a third of their board filled out, but I think this may have been a perception or expectation problem on our end. I'm really looking forward to a second play myself, but I think the rest at the table gave it a resounding "meh." There are some mini expansions which may help in this regard (starting with a super-improvement and with a robot overlord ability), and that at least will hopefully bait people into trying it again.

The order of what we played gets fuzzy here, but I think we had a 5th join us with his brand-new copy of Letter Jam. This game is basically Hanabi with words, although you only expose one letter at a time to your teammates. Now, I'm not a big fan of word games, so I was already inclined to not like this. Well, I didn't like, nor did really anyone else at the table (except for maybe the "invested" one at the table). We barely got through it, and most of us had no friggin clue. Plus, at one time, three 'E's where out, making words really hard to come by. Meh.

Probably around this time we broke out the underappreciated Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig. As the title implies, this is a combination of Castles of Mad King Ludwig (which I dislike) and Between Two Cities (which I quite like). You're building two castles by drafting tiles, the twist being you're doing this cooperatively with your two neighbors. Your score is the lowest scoring castle, with the other being the tie breaker. While the iconography on the tiles is so small it requires eyesight better than my 43 year-old eyes, it's very clever and filled with interesting decisions. You really need to work on synergies within the castle, and if you try to do a little of everything, you will lose. I had one amazing castle, and one terrible one, but had a great time. It's a shame this game has faded into obscurity, I've not had a bad game of this. I know this game has been called out by Jamie Stegmaier as the one he over-produced. If you like Between Two Cities, but want more, this is the better title, IMO, though not one to bring out with Grandma.

Next was probably another game of Barenpark, this time with the expansion (Bad News Bears) I had bought for the wife. We went all in with both the Monorails and the exit tiles+grizzly enclosures. It was OK, the new Monorails really stress where you can lay things out, and it's REALLY easy to lock you out of monorails early in the game (which I did knowingly part way through). The wife felt she was doing terrible, yet ended up winning. I think her biggest complaint was at the end we basically ran out of tiles, and we're not exactly sure why. I didn't even finish the last tile. The future of the expansion is in doubt, but we may do some modifications in the future to tailor the game to our interests.

I think we brought back out Quirky Circuits at this point, going back to playing the Roomba and finish off its missions. This time around the social dynamic changed, and one of the players ended up HATING it. Basically she was struggling to keep up, and the rest of us were playing too fast. Part of the problem is that you want to play multiple of your own cards in a row, if possible, as you have more information in that case. So two of us in particular were aggressive in playing our cards out there. Really, this was our fault for not changing our behavior, but one of us is very much on the spectrum, and I'm borderline, so not our strong suits. Didn't sour the game for the rest of us, but something to be mindful of. Oh, and we sucked ass in general, probably more on the point that people were playing on different wavelengths.

I then broke out the game I had purchased and brought secretly: Hundreds of Horses. I wish I could link the text on the front of the manual, but it's amazing. This is a Ravensburger game aimed at pre-teen girls that contains literal hundreds of horse pictures (specifically 100 cards, double-sided) and a deck of cards, each containing three things: a prize, an attribute, or a story. After someone reads the appropriate item on the card, as a group everyone secretly selects the horse picture that most clearly represents it. The stories are clearly the best. Everyone reveals, and then we see who agrees with you, or to argue with others that are clearly wrong. Nominally you're supposed to get a scoring token should you match someone else's vote, but we quickly abandoned that. There's a single die (or dice, for our international brethren) that indicates what you're supposed to do on your turn, but we abandoned that, as well, towards then end and just let people choose. The one action I didn't cover is that the active player can choose to take one of the horses home. They secretly select their horse, and everyone else has to guess. Regardless of the result, you get to take the card and put it in front of you. I did really well at figuring out my wife's choices here. Anyhow, this was a hoot for a couple of hours, and everyone admitted they were surprised at how much fun they had. Credit goes to Board Game Barrage for bringing this game to my attention.

It was getting late for the wife, so we got out Ladies and Gentleman for a second year in a row. You split up into teams, with one person being the Gentleman stock trader, and the other being the Lady putting together the best ball gown and accessories. I got to try my hand at being a gentleman this time around, and my partner was playing it for the first time. The fun in this game is really the role playing you get into, as you're not supposed to give exact information: "Honey, I had a bad day at the office, so don't expect anything extravagant." Regardless, the ladies go shopping, the men earn money, and then the ladies hand over the item for the men to pay for, if they can (or choose to). There are a fair number of rules to get through, but once you get going, the game goes by quickly. The power couple (my wife and a coworker of mine) won for a second year in a row.

The wife went to bed and I convinced the remaining guys to play our first game of Lifeform. As the game owner, I of course got the Lifeform role, with 3 crew people. Man, even after having gone over the rules multiple times, there's a lot to teach, and it took a while. Once the game got going, it was much snappier. Early game I felt pretty ineffective, but worked on getting the cocoon and malfunction track going, as well as getting terror out when I could. The sent Burt Reynolds (aka Norm MacDonald, aka "The Pedophile") to the front of the ship to collect tokens. The rest spread out and generally made their way to the shuttle. Android got out, but two shots of the flame thrower knocked it out. I ended up nabbing 3 of them, but two (plus the cat, as we let one person take it over instead of one of the extra crew when he lost his second guy) made it to the shuttle. Time was now at 11, and they can't launch until it hits 9. My only hope was to go get the pedophile to board the ship, but they instead drew three cards (removing two time) and just left him behind. I had not guessed correctly on the departure and the game was over. Mistakes were made on my side and I'd do things differently, but wish there was more incentive to not just leave someone behind. Because if the Lifeform kills the last crew member on the map, they automatically get to board the shuttle, so the game actually incentivises them to always leave that last guy behind (unless they have too much time remaining). Definitely want to give it another try knowing what I know now.

Leaving someone behind means the alien auto boards as well.

The rulebook isn't great.

charlest wrote: Leaving someone behind means the alien auto boards as well.

The rulebook isn't great.

Whaaaa??!? OK, going to go track that down...

But, this is good news, because I felt like the game was a bit broken there.

Edit: Found it, buried in the 3 ending conditions. Oh well, it was really late, anyhoo...

Played Nemesis with four in the proper semi-Coop mode and it was (obviously) a different beast. Not as many things being done 'for the team' on the ship as players sort out their own objective and we found a couple of things that need to be thought about -
1. objectives like get back to Earth and Player x has to die had one guy just jumping into the escape pod and gambling that either that player would get killed or the ship explodes , yes that is how the game goes but I'm not sure I would jump out early-ish and watch for a long time but maybe that's just me, and
2. I made the mistake of when someone was killed with still about 7 turns left to let him play the Intruder role (I didn't want him to just watch) but I had not read the actual rules for it. The Intruder player gets to play 3 cards against the remaining players every turn with a possible super round of 4 cards if he thinks he can really tank the game in that round. This replaces the Event phase but since the normal event phase is Intruders may get to attack/move and just one event card replacing it with having the Intruder get three actions (with some cards allowing them to pick multiple event cards and choose the worst) it's basic an auto lose for players still on the ship. He can just sit intruders on the evacuation room or hibernating room, where in a normal game they would randomly move around, to prevent crew surviving and quickly cycle the event deck until he destroys the ship with fire or malfunctions (what he did tonight).
So I won't be using the Intruder role again, it just wasted two hours of play for two of us and gifted the third guy the win as he had jumped out in an escape pod earlier.

Today turned into a day where the boy just wanted to game.

First, Diamonds, which we haven't played in a while. A simple, family oriented trick-taker this one but it's been a firm favourite with the kids in the past. It's pretty lucky, if you get a lot of diamonds, you're going to win, but it's a good starter for a kid in the genre, I think. I much prefer Voodoo Prince, but the kids don't find it as fun, I guess it's the thematic hook (the, er, Voodoo stuff doesn't really come through very strongly).

Then Leviathan, a PnP assymetrical naval wargame with... eighteen? cards, where one player is Captain Ahab and the other has a pod of whales (including Moby Dick). You just clear the table and each player has a template for movement and each ship/whale is its own card. Ahab is trying to nab Moby Dick and Moby Dick is trying to sink the Pequod. Moby Dick's cards are face down, including 2 decoys, so Ahab doesn't know what's what until he attacks/is attacked. Lots of cat and mouse, a little bluffing from Moby Dick, really simple. We've been playing lots of Gaslands recently so this is a good little scratch of that itch if we don't have time/the inclination to get out tokens and dice and everything (not that this a chore, but, yeah). I think it will be getting a fair bit of play. He sank the Pequod.

Wildlife Safari, good mini-filler stock holding type of fun. He actually wanted to play No Thanks but there was just the two of us and I reminded him of this one.

Then he wanted to play Alhambra, which is fairly boring at 2 players, with the dummy player Dirk (all dummies are known as Dirk in our house). Eh, he had a good time, but the mathing it out is a little bit beyond his inclination.


Then, mum came home and she was pestered by he and his sister until she gave in to play Magical Athlete. He smashed us one race with Cupid, who got lucky with the other characters that kept resulting in pairs, and I probably would have won with my Amazon but it was neutered by the one that restricts special powers to a single move instead so just had to roll.
I made my own copy of this using images on BGG and my daughter has been quick to point out that every card refers to other players as "he", and isn't that happy about it.... interesting and I will have to see what I can do about it because otherwise this game continues to rule the house.

Still the weekly family games night to go!