What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Michael Barnes wrote: That all works really well, but the core of the game is one of those “dice but the rolls don’t matter” things. So you roll but there’s umpty jillion ways to post-fudge the rolls. I don’t like that. Sort of 50/50 on it right now.

One of the worst things that BGG did to this hobby was make people afraid of rolling dice. Role-players have been enjoying dice for decades, then suddenly BGG made risk management seem evil. Control freaks.

I'm still waiting for my Dark Venture to arrive. The wait would be easier if I wasn't buying it from a re-seller by the name of No Regret Games.

Shellhead wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: That all works really well, but the core of the game is one of those “dice but the rolls don’t matter” things. So you roll but there’s umpty jillion ways to post-fudge the rolls. I don’t like that. Sort of 50/50 on it right now.

One of the worst things that BGG did to this hobby was make people afraid of rolling dice. Role-players have been enjoying dice for decades, then suddenly BGG made risk management seem evil. Control freaks.

I’m also playing Sanctum, but I’m more into it. At least 75/25. The dice do not matter for most of the game, only the resources that manipulate them and how efficient you are at killing monsters. That matter way more at the end as you’re stripped of the ability to change them. I know the end game has been met with mixed response, but its actually one of my favorite parts about it. The gameplay loop is extremely satisfying leading up to it, spot on for a game inspired by Diablo, and I love desperately clinging of life as the batshit insane difficulty of the final boss comes out of nowhere. It’s pretty much exactly what I was hoping it would be, but it is not for everyone. I’m admittedly dead center of the target audience since I’m a Diablo fanatic and I lean Euro.

New Year's Eve was 'gaming' for my family that came over. I showed my brothers The Mind, which didn't get much traction with them. Co-ops aren't a thing with them.

Then when the full eight players were ready we could only settle on What Do You Meme and Cards Against Humanity. Like I said, 'gaming'. My brothers' family hasn't gotten burned out on the cards yet, and I laugh when they laugh.

Side note: I put the Broken Token Gloomhaven organizer together last Sunday, and it was literally all day. Now all I have to do is find some players.

I hate CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY. How these guys get to make a million dollars for cum-themed APPLES TO APPLES is insanity. Alas.

We played SIDEREAL CONFLUENCE yesterday, just 3p, despite out efforts to bring in a 4th. Again, the rules are just such a bag of steaming garbage. No offense if someone on here wrote them! Except they are garbage! If that's what you were going for, you really nailed it! The game is fun though, and there is a ton of deal-making, which I really like. My kids are savvy enough now to not get plain ripped off, so it's fun all around. We scored wrong, it turns out (see rules, above), so the winner is a mystery, but it was a good time.

Friday I had some friends over. We had agreed to play Cthulhu Wars for the second time, but instead opted for Nemesis. I liked CW, but Nemesis is so much more of a story generator, and I think that was why we went for it. We got objectives that sort of aligned and quickly agreed to ditch the ship and just get the hell out of Dodge. Lots of intruder activity, and our CEO (one of the expansion characters) was extremely close to dying at some point. But somehow we miraculaously all made it into escape pods even if one of them accidentially got shot into space by an event card. The CEO failed to make his objective, but the rest of us (we were four total) managed to do it and were even infection free. I think the game really shines if the objectives don't align as well, but it's the difference between a good and a great game, I think.

Yesterday I soloed Arkham Horror 2nd ed. Just the Arkham board, but with The King in Yellow expansion as a visiting show. I lost pretty fast as the play reached its third act. I haven't played with TKiY for years and I remember it being more exciting. Maybe it was a mistake to also have Hastur as the GOO since it eliminated my chance of a seal victory by requiring 8 clues.

Today I soloed my own prototype. It's a coop adventure game based on a series of popular books that are sort of half comic and half novel. It's a familiy game and it seems to be working out quite well. Right now it's only for the Danish market (since the books have mostly sold in Denmark, Norway and a few other countries), but I think there is a real lack of short adventure games you can play with your kids.

Regional championship for the Game of Thrones card game. As is my wont, I didn't decide on a deck until the night before and didn't finish physically building and sleeving the cards until thirty minutes before the tournament. I was really leaning Baratheon or Martell as their prize sets were tops, but I ultimately went with a Tyrell mill deck because I just find it oodles of fun to play with a win condition that no one else has.

Fortunately, as is also my wont, my performances are best with a deck I've never played and only built the night before. I went 3 and 1 but missed the cut to top four on strength of schedule. Feel bad about the third win. It had been a tight game, but my win was guaranteed if we went one more round because he couldn't make 15 power before the game forced him to draw his last two cards. Unfortunately time was called at the beginning of round seven. I was prepared to concede because the conclusion was obvious outside of historical misplay, but another player pointed out his plot would force him to draw out his deck two phases before the end of the current round. There was salt. He shouldn't have pointed it out at a tournament and immediately realized it. He also made top four and basically offered any and all of his prizes to my found four opponent to make up for it.

Also played two team games of Unmatched while waiting for the cut to finish and to go out to dinner with my friends. This may be the absolute poundings my team received in both games, but I've soured on Unmatched. Both times either I or my teammate lost their main within two rounds, and the end was writ. It would take a little persuading, but I might be willing to try the game head-to-head. The team game, though, is dead to me. If a bad draw leaves one teammate without enough defense, it's blood in the water. They're getting clobbered for two straight turns before they can try to make something happen, and as you might expect, one against two is not a fair fight.

Yeeesh, I can see the hard feelings in that environment.

So, a friend pinged me and said he'd been reading my Neuroshima Hex articles (Woo hoo! We have readers!) and wanted to try a game of the hex people, since it'd been a while for him. He said that the faction I'd written about most fondly in part 2 was Uranopolis, so he wanted to face them with his favorite from the main box, Hegemony.

As often with Uranopolis, I placed my HQ a row in so that I could be sure to provide power to as many units as possible. Being Hegemony, he also placed a row in so he could surround his HQ and still try to dish out melee hits to mine. I got an early start with a Guard powered by both the Wastes and a Combat Generator, going two fights dealing out 3 hits to his HQ each time. But then his generally higher initiative and Officers started to tear me down, at one point, having both a Universal Soldier and the Gladiator hitting at 4 initiative, which wrecked anything I tried to set up in front of them. I cleared out one high initiative formation with a Ray, losing my own Inferno in the process, but then he built another one. And then, the Ravager arrived. Two battles meant my HQ took unavoidable damage, but the Ravager wiped out big chunks of his setup. We both drew Battle tiles in our final draws, which are unusable, but I could see this coming down to a tie, which means another round of battle and a Universal Soldier I couldn't get rid of.

But the Final Battle saw one ranged hit from a Soldier at my HQ and there we were: Uranopolis 13, Hegemony 12. That's... not a draw! I won! Somehow I'd miscounted and hadn't realized that the Ravager would clear more space than I thought so only one shot would be dealt out in the Final Battle, rather than two.

We had a pretty full board for much of the game and, like usual, a good chunk of it was my stuff that couldn't be activated for lack of a Power Supply. But I managed to deal out enough big hits early on to take a lead that he couldn't completely whittle down. It helped that two of his last three tiles were Battles, too, or otherwise he would've had me. Power of the Ravager, yo.

We played Escape Room in a Box: Flashback. We had planned to play this one with my in-laws over the holidays, but I was quite sick for several days of it so my wife prioritized getting other games played when I was feeling better.

Anyways, ERiaB: Flashback is probably easier than its predecessor, The Werewolf Experiment. Also, like the earlier game, it prioritizes cool components over solid puzzle design. The game is very easy and despite being considered "destructible" we solved it without damaging a single component. It has three independent puzzle paths that all need to be solved to complete the overall game so it is a good choice for larger, inexperienced groups.

I picked it up for $20, but it is definitely not worth its full $30 price. I would recommend it if you have group that is unfamiliar with escape rooms or you want to try one out with younger children (probably 8+) or "determined to never be a gamer" nongamers, such as my inlaws.

Two more games of Draftosaurus while we waited for any stragglers to make their way in to open play. Still a puff of a game, but it’s too short to seriously dislike.

Then we finally got to play Galaxy Trucker as I packed all the right pieces in the box this time. Five players, and I was the only veteran. I think it went over pretty well. No one threw a fit over losing their ship, and the winner was the first to lose his ship in the first round. Still a great game. Need to bring it more, so I can finally introduce the expansion ships and tiles.

So I just finished painting my Black Plague set. The spawn (5 yo) asked to play Lego Harry Potter, but instead I pull out the Zombicide set and we played a 3 heroes game with the tutorial mission (mom joined in for the fun). It was a cakewalk. But then this happened when we went sleeping, all of us lying together on the bed (because the my in laws were visiting and occupying my spawn's bedroom):

Spawn: I did great, didn't I?
Wife: Yeah, you killed how many?
Spawn: Four!
Me: Five zombies.
Wife: You shoot them all!
Me: No, she used the 5 dice greatsword hitting on 5+

Man... that was so surreal.

combination holiday/birthday gaming:

I finally forced Vast: The Mysterious Manor onto people, twice. We played the same setup both times, myself the manor, my wife was the Paladin, other couple were the Skeletons and Spider.

I really liked it, each time. The manor is alittle puzzle, that's kind of disconnected from the rest of the game. But, if the Manor doesn't pay attention and help one side or the other out, the other players can run away with things.

1st game the Skeletons got a large jump on the paladin and then it was a scramble to slow them down. paladin eventually winning
2nd game, the paladin got a great tile draw and some good treasures and was a powerhouse. so the manor and skeletons were working together to slow her down. Skeletons with a close win.

Both games I as the manor was 1 turn away from winning.

We had difficulty getting the spider going. Next time we'll switch roles. but the spider just felt at a loss at times on what to do. a lot of neat abilities, but felt like she lacked blood to keep her terror going. I think she was trying to do both the hatch eggs route and the 'spend blood to raise terror' route, and by doing both was hurting herself.

Still...I loved it from turn 1.

A lot of Roll for the Galaxy. at the end of the day, I think I like Race better, but I cannot emphasize enough how much easier Roll is to explain to new players. My kids (5,7,8) will play Roll and enjoy it, even if they forget some of the special powers in their tableau. I enjoy Roll well enough, that I'm ok with it mostly replacing Race. the Ambition expansion is really nice.

We played Harvest several times. I just love this little game. I've mentioned before introducing Agricola to my friends and family. and locally, i'm a freaking shark with Agricola, but I kind of dislike playing it now. I love the card combinations and building your little farm. but hate feeding your family and the negative points at the end.

Harvest takes a lot of what I like about Agricola and condenses it down. Some starting special powers, unique buildings, building alittle farm. And it has a variable turn order, that I just love. You deal out initiative cards, then you end up drafting the next turn order from a set of cards that give you resources, with less resources the earlier in turn order you go. and then there's a set of worker spots that rotates each turn with new cards. Our gamer friends have been looking for a copy, but aren't quite ready to spend the $35-$40 I've been seeing it go for.

I picked up Slide Quest, Treasure Island, Zoo Ball and the Heroes & Hexes Expansion for El Dorado in various sales, and gifted them to my kids.

Treasure Island was to my daughter, and she absolutely loves being Long John Silver. the compass/sextant thingy is just ass. We've been using a piece of string to draw circles. Even with that caveat, it's a perfect "start to a game day" game. I just have to convince her to let someone else take a turn as LJS.

The local game store does a thing for Christmas/black Friday every year, which is neat. She wraps up a bunch of games in wrapping paper and marks them down ~%50 from their list price. but you don't know what you are going to get. It's a fun idea, but I stay away..as I know what I like, and I know that most games in that stack of randoms I won't be very happy with.

Well, my wife decided to get two, which is fine. So we ended up with Village and Shark Island. We haven't tried Shark Island yet.

Village we've played twice....it's...ok. I like the fact that there's multiple resources, both the 'cubes' you pick up like a normal WP and the 'time' that's attached to your family. and the fact that there's a definite flow to the game, where time is more or less important depending on what you are trying to do. But it's kind of boring. It makes up for the fact that you can't actually do a ton with most resources by allowing you to select spots by turning in cubes 3 -> 1. which takes a lot of the tension out of the game.

We played Wiz-War over new years, which ended really quickly, when 1 mage dropped a 'quadrant' spell that damaged everyone, which was countered by a spell that re-casted it against him. I was the third wizard in that quadrant and got smacked twice by that spell. and died the next round to a fireball.

Lords of Waterdeep +Skullport - it has been a long time since we played this. Just a solid game,

For my birthday the last couple years we've done a 'guys' game day. don't care if it's guys or not, just that we tend to like more conflict driven games that our wives aren't quite as thrilled with. this time we decided against it, but still let me pick more of the games. We started with more Harvest and Treasure Island

by that time everyone showed up and we had 6.....that means Dune I actually got rid of my PnP copy of dune, but a friend had just purchased the new reprint. which is very nice. We ended up with a Fremen/Space guild win on turn 8. Bene Gessert predicated a turn 9 Fremen win. We were alittle slow starting out, as the game itself is relatively simple, but just wrapping everyone around all the different aspects of the various factions is quite a lot. we had 4 never played Dune players...so a slow start was expected.

Mare Nostrum + mythology. I've contemplated MN:Empires a couple times, but it's rare I get this played as it is. I was adamant that we had to watch out for Egypt and the pyramids. We even raised the cost of the pyramids to 13. Cleopatra goes, oh, I'll probably play wrong anyways so don't worry about it. Cleopatra won.

Still, I loved it. as always. I ended up invading Carthage with a force of Centaurs and legions from Greece, when I thought he was getting ahead. I too was distracted and let Egypt jump ahead.

Slowing down, we finished with Ultimate Warriorz. To me, this fits squarely in the King of Tokyo level of games. But I'd take Ultimate Warriorz over King of Tokyo 9 times out of 10. We had 8 warriors and somehow I didn't die until turn 5 (of 7) but only ended up with 1 point. The Dragon and Minotaur ended up surviving with the Dragon winning on points. Usually he dies first thing, with him being a big target and having no defense.

^good gaming! Harvest sounds like it could be interesting in my house.

lj1983 wrote: I finally forced Vast: The Mysterious Manor onto people, twice. We played the same setup both times, myself the manor, my wife was the Paladin, other couple were the Skeletons and Spider.

Awesome report. lj, have you played Crystal Caverns? I'm interested in a comparison between that and MM, since the roles sound very similar (Manor is maintenance like the Cave, etc.) But my experience with CC is that the Goblins (Skeletons) are more difficult to really get going than the Dragon (Spider) role because the greenskins are more subject to random draws than the Dragon and have to try to restart every time they take a significant actions because of scattering.

I'm also a fan of Ultimate Warriorz over King of Tokyo/New York. Unfortunately, Warriorz is way down the list of things people want to pull off the shelf. Been wondering if I should trade mine.

Unfortunately, I have not played crystal caverns. I wouldn't mind trying it sometime.

So I don't really know how the cavern sets up, but the skeletons have a lot of movement options and can move pretty quickly around the outside of the manor, that they are only a turn or two out from being back in conflict, even after a successful attack.

as for the Spider, we'll play again and switch things around, it may just need a fresh set of eyes. or the Shadow Paladin.