What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Two good boardgame days, yesterday and today.

Yesterday I finally wrangled a very long time family friend into some games! Hes a heavy video gamer, and an RPG dabbler, but we've never played boardgames together for whatever reason. Probably because he works a million hours every week and basically never leaves his house beyond going to work, but yknow. Anyway, long story short, I got him out of the house and we played 2 games of Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft and it was a blast. First off we played the adventure wherein you have to find and kill Gravestorm the Dracolich, and got just stomped into the dirt. My dwarven cleric just couldn't kill anything ever even once, we got a bunch of brutal encounter draws and rough dead tile draws etc, and we limped into the boss encounter with like 2hp left between us and no healing surges left. Gravestorm used lightning breath on his first activation and toasted us both, game over. I consider it a moral victory that we even survived to see the boss. Second game we pretty handily found and stomped the Howling Hag, thanks in large part to my finally figuring out how to roll a hit. My friend really enjoyed it, and wants to play more games. I really like the current D&D game series, myself. It's a dead simple system of rolling dice and mashing monsters, which is generally what I want out of that kind of game.

Then today I got two back to back 4p games of Cthulhu Wars in. Two new players, one second timer, and me teaching. I tried out the Sleeper in the first game, the others were Crawling Chaos, Red Goat, and Yellow Sign. Sleeper seems really fun, but I misplayed and didn't have enough power on the final turn to pay for my last spell books. Me and Red Goat were way out in front in points, but Crawling Chaos was the only one who hit all 6 spell books when the game ended on the ritual track. I was ~4 power short of the win, and if I correctly noted my power needs and not ritualed that turn I think I win. Though Crawling Chaos could have easily pulled some shenanigans and made it a race, so I'm still not sure I win based on how many elder signs he potentially could have pulled on the last turn. I really want to play Sleeper again, they seem really fun. Lethargy is brutally good, among other things. Round 2 I tried out Opener of the Way for the first time, while the others switched around some and played Cthulhu, Red Goat, and Yellow Sign (same player). This one was a rout. Red Goat pulled the classic newbie mistake of hamstringing himself spreading too thin too early for his spellbooks (I specifically warn people about this, but it's a tricky thing to do correctly). Cthulhu pulled the classic newbie mistake of building two gates first turn (I specifically said not to do this during the teaching, but some people need to see things themselves I guess), got his guys eaten and gates taken, tried to take vengeance and just kinda death spiraled into irrelevance with no income. Yellow Sign got the desecration zombie train in FULL EFFECT, after seeing how the faction plays the first time through. The last turn he desecrated for like 15 points. Not quite enough though because The Opener pulled some serious nonsense for me (mainly because the two combat factions were basically it if the game). I controlled 4 gates + Yog Sothoth for two rounds , one of which got me 15 points with Dragon Descending (round 3, it was). Also used Dragon Ascending to summon Yog and hit 0 power then immediately jump back up to 9. I possibly have those names reversed but still. It was a brutal turn 4 win. In conclusion, the two expansion factions were really really fun, and I hope I can get rematches out of this group asap to explore the different matches more thoroughly. They're all big DOAM/TI4 etc fans and they seemed to really enjoy CW, so I'm hopeful.

Just took a shot at a prototype due to hit Kickstarter in February, presumably to do a review. Unplayable in its current state (the rules are insufficient) but looks promising. I provided feedback which hopefully will be taken in the right way.

I'll just mention this -- making a game is harder than it looks. Even the non-moving parts require a lot of attention to get right. Don't wander into this space lightly.

Ah_Pook wrote: Then today I got two back to back 4p games of Cthulhu Wars in.

Sounds like an awesome time playing my two favorite factions. A lot of people stumble on the power demands for Sleeper, so don't worry about that. It sounds like you properly exploited Opener's advantages and timed your dragons properly. Nice work.

By a second gate in CW do you mean not build a second in total or a second in that turn for three total?

mads b. wrote: By a second gate in CW do you mean not build a second in total or a second in that turn for three total?

He built two gates on the first turn, for three total. Two moves + two gates = 8 power = no monsters protecting those gates = you just gave your neighbors free gates.

Might be a feasible opening if you can build them both in non adjacent spaces to your neighbors, which would make it expensive for than to come eat your cultists immediately? Not sure there, and if so it's probably faction dependent based on where everyone starts etc. I advise against it when teaching newbies, as it's tempting and will generally end badly for them. Much better to build one gate and monsters to protect your gates from the predations of your jerk neighbors.

Most dudes on a map games have several turns of buildup so I sort of get the impulse.

I always forget how good Robinson Crusoe is at so many types of play, we beat the Swiss Family scenario today (w/dog AND Friday, so easy mode).

Played Fields of Arle and Terraforming Mars today. Both good fun, Fields is especially great because it really respects your time, pacing is great.

Played Age of Empires III for the first time yesterday. Currently in print so Age of Discovery, after losing the AOE license, but we played the original. It's a really interesting hybrid worker placement/area majority game. It's a race to carve up the new world before it's all gone, with way too little manpower to do all the things you want to do and cutthroat competition for all the available things. Thoroughly enjoyed this one. I came in last, though I feel I pulled myself together respectably towards the end of the game once things kinda clicked for me. The winning player for or to an early lead with missionaries scoring him a bunch of points in the early going, before pivoting into trade goods and buying a zillion endgame scoring techs (ie having a big pile of money at the end to buy points). The second place player played a really good game as a straight trader, basically ignoring sending colonists to the new world area majority board. He was way behind going into end game scoring, but his amassed tiles and techs scored him 74 endgame points and put him in second. Really looking forward to playing this more. Its nasty.

Lots of Christmas games this year, as I enjoy.

D&D - One of the guys in my regular group has a son in my son's class, and they both enjoy D&D as well. They are always on us to find a good time to play, so we took advantage of the holiday and I set up a little beginning adventure for them. I actually used some mapping software to create a map for them to explore, and then picked a few ready-made adventures to plug into various locations. I think it'll be a fun way to continue to find cool things to do in this map. Anyway, the adventure the took ended up being the beginning of the Lost Mine of Phandelver, where the characters have to attack a goblin stronghold. It was familiar to my friend (we try to have an adult play to keep the whole thing on track), but we still had a lot of fun.

Suspend - This is a Melissa & Doug game (a toy company from the US) where you need to hang little wire bars from a pole, without knocking them down. It's not a very complex dexterity game, but it looks really fun on the table and we all enjoy it a lot.

Animal Upon Animal - I have a working theory that all Haba games are basically the same thing, but the devil is in the details. The components for this one are really well designed. I like how the animals all feel like they have different irregular shapes, but they fit together in a lot of creative ways. Very cool!

Acquire - Always a classic, and always a loss for me. I think I might be bad at this one.

Clank! - Bought this one with Christmas/birthday money. I have had my eye on it for a while, since it checks the boxes of what is likely to get played by both my family and by the rare crowds I get to play board games with. My intuition was solid here, because this is the first deck-builder game to impress me in years. That's not because it's a particularly deep game, or even a particularly creative one. It's more because it feels more laid-back then deckbuilders often do to me. It really is more about risk-taking and deciding if its worth it to get more treasure and make more noise in the process. Its approach to deck-building is a little more low-key, in that optimization is not its chief concern. You pick from a random lineup of cards, Ascension-style, and there aren't a lot of ways to thin your deck. So it's not a very taxing game that forces you to agonize over the specific build of your deck. It exists a little more in the moment, which is always appealing to me. I bought the Gold & Silk expansion along with it, and the other expansions frequently show up at stores here in Manila. This was a great purchase.

Star Wars Outer Rim - This looked like something I would really enjoy on paper, so I asked for it for Christmas. I have played a couple of partial games and a solitaire game, and so far I haven't been disappointed. I don't know if the smugglers-and-bounty-hunters section of Star Wars is what I find most compelling, but I think it's translated into a game better than any other Star Wars title has for me. I think a big part of that is that I'm not fighting against the system. There's not a lot of smarty-pants design work that can sometimes be in FFG designs, and it's mostly contented to just let you do what you want. This can make it feel a little more like an adventure game and less like a pick-up-and-deliver. A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one, as that's a genre I dig too. I really like how unique the different pilots feel, and I appreciate how the different subsystems of the game feel well-integrated into the whole design. There's no side-system that feels bolted on, like say the combat in Merchants & Marauders. It's just intuitive and sandboxy. If I have any concern at all, it's that the pacing can feel a little pokey. I don't want to harp on that too much, since I have yet to finish a game. Besides that I actually like its pacing. One of my issues with similar games like Arkham Horror and Merchants & Marauders is that they present a huge sandbox, but push forward so much that you can't really explore it. Outer Rim feels much more content to let you do stuff, and plenty of it. But it can sometimes take a while for things to come together. Once everyone has a solid ship and crew it feels like it picks up quite a bit. The solitaire version is decent too, though part of the pleasure comes from reading the card effects out loud, so YMMV.

Star Wars Outer Rim intrigues me. It seems very divisive. Charlie isn't a fan, and usually I like what Charlie likes. If he liked it, I'd probably already have it.

I would like a good pick up and deliver game. I don't care about Star Wars in the least, but something about this game seems interesting. I'd like to try it some day.

From my limited experience I think it would be more accurate to call it an adventure game with pick-up-and-deliver mechanics. Your pilot has a pretty specific set of skills, and while you're flying everywhere it feels more like a game of Talisman or that ilk than Merchants & Marauders. It's not that goofy or random (not in the same way anyway) but it gives off that vibe heavily. Your character has personal goals, as does the ship you buy. I like that last part a lot, because you buy the YT-1300, but if you fulfill its goal it becomes the Millennium Falcon.

In terms of design it's really pretty understated. You fly around, interact with NPCs, take jobs/bounties/cargo, and take that places, and there's some dice-based combat that's always over in a single round. It also has skill checks for specific jobs. None of this is pulled off with any particular creativity, but it all runs really smooth, and I feel like it lets you play in the Star Wars universe as much as any board game I've played.

There's also just a bit of a paragraph game there. The jobs especially give off a feel that reminds me of Arabian Nights, except it revolves around skill checks and flavor text to tell you what's happening. It totally works too.

I don't want to be too positive until I've had a chance to sit with it for a while, but so far I think it's actually pretty great. It's quality is less in creativity and more in how it all comes together pretty effortlessly, especially in its setting. I don't feel like I'm working to find the fun in this game. The pacing is really my only issue, but I think it might be one of those issues where you need to build a certain system together before the fame really starts rolling in. I'll know more with experience.

If you wanted a good pick-up-and-deliver game, and you aren't that into Star Wars, I think you could probably look elsewhere. I mean it's worth trying for sure, but if the logistics side is the main draw this might feel a little thin, especially if the setting doesn't have much appeal.

(Excellent write-up on Outer Rim, Nate. You should incorporate that into a full review.)

Played Tiny Epic Tactics, since it rolled in on the Kickstarter boat from China last week(I didn't get in on the KS, but ordered from Gamelyn in the summer.) It's pretty cool. If you've played Final Fantasy Tactics, this is basically the board game version. The fact that they managed to create 3D terrain that all fits in a Tiny Epic box is a truly impressive design feat (they're a series of nested boxes and a microfiber/satin "board".) There's a ridiculous amount of replay value, since the four characters that are randomly dealt out for each player (warrior, rogue, mage, beast) come from a set of 8 each, which means over 4000 different combinations. Plus, there's an expansion that gives you winterlands and desert motifs with different map layouts (they're folding sleeves that fit tightly over the boxes.) Oh, and there are maps inside the boxes for dungeons when you're playing solo. Just crazy.

Game play is very smooth, but available actions in each turn are in short supply (three, and if a character takes more than one in the same turn, they become weakened.) So, some turns feel like setup, but when people really get to grips with one another, things get bloody quite quickly, even though it's got a version of the Wiz-War limitation (only one attacking action per character per turn.) It's very much an area control game (that's literally how you score the most points), in addition to beating up your opponents' dudes. The tactics cards that are drawn after every turn also provides a lot of variability. I can see this one becoming a favorite quickly.

Then we tried a game of Tigris and Euphrates, because the three people I was playing with had never played. I consider it the most difficult of Knizia's games to teach because there are a lot of little rules, unlike many of his other designs. But while everyone has that glazed-over look at first, you get two or three turns in and they're all playing with a plan in mind. It's that signature depth of his that takes hold. We had a lot of consistent draws, which means that monuments came out early, and we didn't expand too much on others' turfs. Then people got adventurous and the wars started springing up every turn. I thought I had it locked down because my lowest total was four, which I knew a couple others were close to or equaled, but two of my other spheres were five, so I figured I'd win the tiebreak. But my friend, Leah, had a lowest sphere of five thanks to the last treasure she got that ended the game. Dammit. Still a classic.

Played Pandemic. I have absolutely no feelings about Pandemic anymore.

I overall really enjoyed Pandemic Legacy, but my biggest knock against it is that I had to play so much Pandemic.