What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

My daughter and I went to the local game club, where we met my brother. My daughter was wanting yet another attempt to beat me at Wingspan, but it didn't work out for her. First turn Chihuahuan Raven (1 egg for 2 of any food) is a game breaker. Get a bird that lets it double its usage, and it's really GG. Her boyfriend won with that combo the last time she played, so she is now convinced that it should be removed from the game. Maybe we'll house rule it, but I really don't like messing with games like that.

Then we played Clank. None of us had played it before, and as we were going through the rules a 4th player joined us who taught us. I ended up with some mini combo of fighters, the crown, and money which let me buy yet more stuff. I can see why it's popular - I might even spring for a copy.

AGE OF DIRT. A fun little game of idiot cavemen building stuff. You send your cavemen out to areas to collect resources (go to the forest to get wood or berries, etc.). But when you call people back from the areas, they go into a Shogun/Wallenstein type of tower. Whoever comes out of the tower brings back resources from the area that was just activated. So you might have sent a dude to the plains three turns ago but he just now stumbled out of the mountains ("uh hey boss, I brought you a rock"). You use the resources to buy inventions. Some inventions give you little bonuses; some just get you points. Ten points wins.

Very nice table presence, fun cartoony art, a love tent, plays 2-5 in slightly under an hour.

WESTERN LEGENDS. I need to stop reading Wade's reviews.

Haha, after like 8-10 great games of Arkham Horror in the last few years it just served us up a depressing 35 minute long turd of a game.

dysjunct wrote: AGE OF DIRT.

WESTERN LEGENDS. I need to stop reading Wade's reviews.

This makes it sound like you regret playing it! Say it ain't so!

Picked up El Grande Big Box with credit from a FLGS. It was a complete joy watching it click with my daughter Tegan who loved it and kicked my ass.

Today I taught my girlfriend Root, which she had been wanting to play for a while now. I just got the latest expansion so I took the Underground Duchy (the moles) and to keep learning as simple as possible, I had her take the cats and we played on the standard board.

The moles have a lot of interesting decisions to make on their turn. They can use tunnels to appear anywhere, and they also have several ways to utilize cards. However, their key path to victory is "swaying ministers" to their cause. They have 9 of them, and each one gives you at least one free extra action on your turn. The problem is that you need cards to sway them, and if you are using cards to sway them, you probably didn't use those cards to do some other things. I got too frivolous with my card usage, and missed two opportunities to sway ministers; key ministers whose absence pretty much lost me the game because the cats got a domination victory. It was pretty much decided anyway, since even without domination she probably would have gotten to 30 points before I could have; I ended the game with perhaps 11 points.

There is a lot to learn in this game, as always. I suck at it.

I think the moles are super cool, a great addition without being too out there and weird. You need those lvl 3 ministers to really score points.

I played a couple games of Theseus this evening. Spouse won both games, first one was pretty close (Bots-Marines) and second one was not very close (Greys-aliens). The aliens elude me a bit, the greys managed to nuke several of my damage causing traps (Hive).

Played Kemet and Xia tonight.

Kemet was a backdoor win, as one does. One player got to 7 points (of the 8 required to win) and had a bonkers economy going, so everyone saw the need to focus fire him down. The player determining turn order that round put me last (at my suggestion), as I had the best combat units and could be the hammer to stop 7 point guy from winning on my last action if needed. I had 3 points to start the turn, and was deemed not threatening enough to safely give the hammer to at that moment. The two other players attacked 7 point guy. I upgraded a pyramid to level 4, bought a point, and took two temples without fighting (having bought the power that kills two units before battle happens) to put me at 8 to win. Turns out I had the hammer after all

Xia I specced hard into pvp and basically just destroyed everyone. The socialist merchant event came out early making cash points harder, so trading heavily didn't seem like the way. Game ended 15-7-6-5, somewhere in that range. I had the power that let me spawn at a spawnpoint of my choice each round, and the level 3 railgun power, a level 3 blaster and a level 2 blaster + 3 shield piercers. That all equals every turn spawn next to whoever is damaged or nearest a spawn point, get next to them, roll 2d12+1d8 attack and their shield roll is -12. Then if needed finish them with a railgun shot. Rinse repeat. Also had the title that gives extra dmg versus npcs, in case no likely targets presented themselves. I would have had a harder time of it if any of the other players had bought big shields, but even then I kill the enforcer for 2vp every round minimum.

Had my friends over yesterday to play board games and eat vegetable lasagna.

Our first game was Chrononauts, a game I knew nothing of back in the day. I had Angela, and my mission was to get three of four future artifacts and return them. The game was going great for me, and I was fixing the timeline as quickly as paradoxes opened up. I had seven cards, two of the three items and only needed a Got There First to win.

Then my wife played Discontinuity, and I lost my hand. AUGKGGGHFHG! Then, Trish swapped my mission with hers, and borked me further. In the end, my wife won; indirectly through my help "Wilson Kept Us Out of WWI". Really liked the game.

My wife then suggested Nova Cry, since Nathan had an obsession with the game after playing all of once. He tried getting it on Ebay earlier, but someone naturally snaked him. The Gaming Gods smiled on him yesterday, as he got one for $24, with shipping. I had Pat Keohane, whom I immediately dubbed Captain Cocaine. Nathan had "Captain Kirk", my wife had "Commissar Holt", and Trish had "Captain Janeway"

My ship was the Jackal, fastest warp, but every time you landed on a planet you had to draw 2 Alert tokens. No big deal, as Captain Cocaine, while high on the Devil's Dandruff, could ignore three of the four different alert tokens, and later on, I upgraded the ship to ignore the last one.

Nathan successfully won the Chancellorship, twice in a row, in order to do double the effect of his strategy actions. He thwarted me far too long, and I went after his ass. His ship had NO WEAPONRY, my two separate attacks on him fucked up his ship but I failed to take him out. "This is the Chancellor's ship! It's on a diplomatic mission!" "*snorts more cocaine* ASK ME IF I CARE!"

However, Nathan dueled me and Captain Coke got deep sixed. I performed an emergency revival, which Nathan said was a cybernetic device mainlining cocaine directly to my heart, and came back. Otherwise, my FIAT made ship would fall apart. Unfortunately, this essentially cost me the game, as spending all that intel made it next to impossible to try to attack or duel other captains. Trish eventually won, by being nominated Chancellor and docking at a planet for the win.

The next game, Trish asked for Beneath Nexus, as she loved the game when we played it at Friendmas. I, again, was the Blight Lord and the others were the Heroes. The first round saw me taking out my wife, the magician, as I knew how dangerous she was when Trish played her. My wife kept referring to her as the Catnip Lady, as her brain for whatever reason kept misinterpreting Cantrip as Catnip. In round 2, I messed up both Nathan and my wife, but still they persevered. For the reward round, I jokingly said "Get all cursed Relics!" and sure enough, four cursed Relics came up. Heroes were not happy.

The last round was against me, and I fought much harder this time around than as Apep. I almost took out Nathan on two separate occasions, but Trish kept denying me by countering my spell cards. The Heroes prevailed, very bloodied, but unbowed.

The last game was Darkness Comes Rattling... Whoo boy, I wonder what Kevin Wilson was thinking when he designed this game. Probably something along the lines of. "Hmmmmm, How can I make Elder Sign even harder???" Well, he did it in spades. Trish was Nyala, Nathan was Lupe, JoAnn was Kitsune, and I was Artos. We had an abortive first play, so we restarted the game because it went from 0 to WE'RE ALL DOOMED! in the span of a heartbeat.

The second game was extremely stressful, as unlike in Elder Sign, there's not much to mitigate dice rolls. You earn bones, which work like rerolls or gives you an additional action point, depending on type. You also use the bones as currency to buy regular equipment and to please the Wind spirits. You HAVE to really work together and there's very little room for error in the game.

We were trucking along, and then an Event came up that saw the ending of the West Wind. That was bad, as if all four Winds leave, the game's over. Then, Trish's character pissed off the South Wind and she was not allowed in the Southern Region for the rest of the game, which made it harder to deal with Corruption and Challenges. Then, after three Shadows inhabited her region, the South Wind took off.

My guy, if wounded, actually performs better. So when the chance came for someone to get swallowed by the Snake, they chose me as I said I had more life than anyone, I had a spirit weapon, and I'm hurt, which will make the challenges in the Snake easier. All they had to do was defeat challenges, and I would advance a space per each one beaten.

In the end, the sun was in the final stretch, and I just caught up to it. I took my turn first, discovered that the target number to beat was truly small, and beat it resoundingly.

And cheers erupted! Both Nathan and Trish remarked that they liked the game, but it had a STEEEEEP difficulty curve. I agreed with that assessment, as even with two players, the game's hella difficult.

Jesus, lvl 2 blaster and lvl 3 with 3 shield piercers??? Hide in those asteroids but that doesn't save that hapless enforcer.

WadeMonnig wrote:

dysjunct wrote: AGE OF DIRT.

WESTERN LEGENDS. I need to stop reading Wade's reviews.

This makes it sound like you regret playing it! Say it ain't so!

Naw, it's a good game! I definitely see the rough edges discussed in your review of Ante Up -- would it really break the game to make everything cost an action, and balance the rewards appropriately? Or to make moving between the base map and the expansion map cost one movement point like everything else? But it's fun, looking forward to playing it again. I don't think I've addressed people as "pilgrim" so often in one night.

The newest Western Legends kickstarter scares me for that reason. "You can buy deeds and legendary equipment from a travel salesman..." God, I hope it's not more quirky complexity.

Played a 4-player Root. I had 1 person who'd played once and two newbs, so I took the Aerie, which I've found is usually the most frustrating role. The experienced player took the Marquise. The Vagabond and the Alliance were a father and son and they immediately started cooperating. Meanwhile, despite this, the Cats came charging after me when I got a small lead, after starting with the Builder, putting nothing in Battle until late, and doing some decent crafting with as many as 5 roosts on the board. But the first turmoil led to another, as my side of the board became quite crowded by revolting peasants ("Yes. They are.") and I couldn't keep things afloat.

I tried to warn the others to take an action or two to beat up on the Thief (who had smartly left 3 ruins in place to stall the Cats) when he had a solid collection of quests, but they didn't listen and the Vagabond won with the rest of us in the 20s. I'm going to bring it to a larger group this weekend and try to get some Cult action.

New Root stuff is very fun trying to learn and puzzle out how the new factions work. The mountain map is cool as it rewards a bit more territory control. I still feel like this is in direct competition with Cthulhu Wars but has far more complexity. Our games are 90 mins with 4 on average, similar to CW, and really comes down to a sprint at the end and bash the leader as most games of this type do.

Oceans is awesome. Its the game that Evolution should have been with a deck of 100 unique cards that can be combined to amazing effects and enough random events that the feel of each game is different. Highly recommend this.

Barrage seems like a heavy euro I would hate but I really like it. Stealing water from other players and timing your actions right is super rewarding and the game can be very mean. Its long for sure but all the actions make sense and aren't just bullshit Lacerda complexity just to be obtuse. Its easy to explain within the game setting. As opposed to a medium euro I recently tried, Rajas of the Ganges, that was absolute trash. Themeless mechanisms and actions to score more points and be more efficient and slowly waiting for your turn as other people puzzle out their actions. I don't think I could like a game less.

Mezo is borderline keep for me. The gods are all unique and can do fun things, but for a 2 to 2.5 hour game the eventual winner feels too luck dependent based on regions resolving randomly. If it was a 90 minute game I'd be a lot more forgiving of it, but even with 4 plays in a month with the same people we couldn't finish under 2 hours.

Scott_F wrote:
Oceans is awesome. Its the game that Evolution should have been with a deck of 100 unique cards that can be combined to amazing effects and enough random events that the feel of each game is different. Highly recommend this.

Got to try this out yesterday and I 100% agree, this is a winner. The deep deck is such a great change to the formula, letting them to keep a balanced set of always available traits cards in the regular deck, while still having tons of specialized/weird/fun cards without diluting the regular deck so you never see the core cards you need. Also making it very hard to actually kill off others species is big. You can apply pressure to each other in many ways, but all your shit will not generally get destroyed with no recourse like it had a tendency to do in regular Evolution. Huge change for the better, first blush. Really looking forward to playing this more.