What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

A procyon gotta have a code...

Went to my fourth World Championships for the Game of Thrones LCG this past weekend. Fantasy Flight announced a few months ago it was ending, so almost 200 people came out to celebrate a game that has been in existence in some form or another for near twenty years. Over four days there were five different tournaments for four different formats for the game and extensive, bordering on excessive, prize support.

The weekend opened on Thursday evening with the local Minnesota community's Knight of the Laughing Tree tournament, the unofficial start to Worlds for the past four years. It's traditionally a lighter tournament where people try out their pet decks and let off a little steam before spending the next few days grinding the decks they've spent the last two months tuning. I went 2 and 3 with a Tyrell deck that never really succeeded at doing what it was supposed to do. That's a good thing. I was in my traditional pre-Worlds panic, and if that deck had done at all well, I probably would have switched to it for the main tournament.

Friday comes, and I show up fifteen minutes before the tournament is supposed to start and a minute before the hither-to unannounced mandatory players' meeting. I narrowly avoid being dropped without playing a single game and count that as my first win.

Regarding the meta, the last pack had dropped three or four months ago, so it was in a pretty stable, if not solved, place. Targaryen, Sea of Blood was a clear powerhouse that could suddenly and easily wipe your board, but there were clear answers to it. In a bit of four-dimensional chess, I chose to run a Night's Watch, Greyjoy Banner deck that preyed on the decks that countered Targaryen. It sought to limit my opponents' gold and knock out the few characters that managed to make it onto the board. I'm still nervous though as the deck does have counters, and those counters aren't uncommon.

Anyway the joust tournament starts, and I win the first match. And then I win again and again. And I am floating. Those first two matches were not in my favor. Before the flop, I would say both were 60-40 or 70-30 for my opponent, but I got lucky. I held the first off for long enough that I won 11-10 on time even though he would easily have won if there had been another round, and the second had an atrocious start that he never recovered from. I finally lose the fourth even after playing the first three rounds about as perfectly as possible as his superior draw and efficiency wore me down. It helps, too, that I was against one of the five or so players that have a claim to being the best in the world. I get my fourth win and guaranteed spot in the second day of the tournament before losing my second game in the sixth round. That's perfectly fine. Making day two was my goal. Everything else is gravy.

I play the multiplayer melee format on Saturday. I'm on another Night's Watch deck but one that uses Catapults to encourage deal making and otherwise steal their best characters. I win my second table (my first melee win ever) and somehow make the day two cut in melee as well. This is my best performance in Thrones ever, and it's coming at the exact right time.

Sunday comes, and I'm in the top 64 of the joust tournament. My deck does its thing, and all of a sudden I'm in the top 8 and playing on stream with off-site commentators and an audience. Of course I finally meet that powerhouse Targaryen, Blood deck there and lose. I misplayed the first round, but it was always going to be an uphill climb. I wildly overachieved to reach the top 8 and have no complaints except that nothing interesting happened during my streamed game except for a judging kerfuffle that had no last impact on the results.

And so my time playing competitive Thrones ends with my best ever finishes in joust and melee. Sweet.

Played Freedom: The Underground Railroad with the family this weekend, which Robert Bledsaw II and Robert Bledsaw III would probably take umbrage to. In any case, we had a difficult time with it, mostly because we probably didn't manage the economy side of it correctly (and the game itself is just hard). We fell way too far behind in raising support. In the final few rounds we had freed over half of the 22 for the win, but cleared less than half of the support. I think I'll need to try this out solo a few times to get a feel for the strategies that will produce a win. It seems like the "fundraising" tokens encourage some turtling to raise money, followed by strong pushes to Canada before too many slave catchers can react. In any case, if I do practice, I'll need to restrain myself from alpha-gaming when we try this again as a family. It was a perfect day for a board game, though. The wind outside was fierce and we kept losing power since Santa Cruz infrastructure is so fragile with any fluke in the elements (wind: power outages. Rain: floods & mudslides) and roads were actually dangerous, so we had a captive audience for a few hours. Here's to hoping for more bad weather.

^Dr. Mabuse had a great anecdote about playing that game with someone. Thanks for another report on it.

Frohike wrote: The wind outside was fierce and we kept losing power since Santa Cruz infrastructure is so fragile with any fluke in the elements (wind: power outages. Rain: floods & mudslides) and roads were actually dangerous, so we had a captive audience for a few hours. Here's to hoping for more bad weather.

Oh, this was my weekend also. More rain in a few days than we had for the whole of last year, trees down blocking my lane out of the property, a landslide that has destroyed a railway line (and my commute to work,....), power out all Sunday and most of Saturday.

But we got some gaming in! Hope your weather remains that perfect level of bad.

Good game of LOTR in which Sam needed a 2 or less as the last surviving hobbit was good. A bunch of family party games - Just One, homespun Wavelength. Some Witch Trial, a cheapass Pnp that we also made. But the highlight was Guerilla Checkers as I mentioned; I came home today to find my youngest wrapping up a 3rd game in a row with his mother who he had taught this afternoon.

So my 23-year-old son invited over some of his friends from the 7th grade to play Heroscape. We have a pile of expansions and tiles, and haven't used them for at least six years. Because everything was set up, he asked if 20 year old son and I wanted to play a game. We have a lot of Heroscape memories--buying new minis, picking up master sets on sale at the now defunct Toys R Us up the street, etc.

It has been a couple of days and I don't have the cards in front of me, but let me say that it was really fun. Ezra, my oldest, built an army of Grimnak (Mr. Chompers, the tyrannosaurus rex) and grut orcs, which a few zombie popcorn units and this little red demon dude who we said was the brother of the vampires, a byproduct of an experiment gone terribly wrong. His personality was Eternal Hatred. He also had the awesome Krug, who gets more powerful with every wound

Joey (20) had one of the robots, Aleister McDirk and his Scottish pals, and a sneaky little ninja dude worth 10 points that he just held onto behind a wall for most of the game. I had Jutan the giant, the Krav Maga with that Morpheus guy, a ninja woman worth 10 pts. and a random Samurai.

Let me just say that Heroscape did what it did best--generated fun stories and dice rolls that elicited loud exclamations.



Jutan waded right into the fray. He took hits from the giant robot, but they cut his head clean off while holding the robot's machine gun arm out of the way. He then used his mighty sword to kill three Scots at once, then picked up Aleister McDirk and threw him into the middle of my army.

Joey dropped his paratroopers on the bridge and started lobbing grenades into Ezra's zombies and orcs, decimating them.

Krug charged us while Mr. Chompers, after eating a paratrooper, snuck around the back way to prepare for havoc. The Krav maga were excellent sharp shooters, wounding Krug and whipping him into a deadly rage but we were all sad that he expired before his eight dice of damage could be unleashed.



At this point Joey and I teamed up against Ezra.

Ezra started using his little demon dude, who could fly seven spaced and had a unique drawback: you had to roll the dice each turn to see if he stayed loyal, because he was so angry at having been experimented on by his immortal vampire siblings that he could never take sides. He was a loaded weapon, kind of like a one-demon jihad army who would turn on you. Also whenever he killed someone, he'd liqueify them, suck out their guts, and lose a wound marker.

So Ezra lost control of demon dude about 50 percent of the time, which was hilarious.

Anyway, at one point I was on the path to victory, and started pre-consoling my sons, analyzing what had gone wrong. Then Joey brought out his sneaky little popcorn ninja. His special ability was, if you rolled well, being able to move four spaces after being attacked and avoiding damage. That little dude killed my krav maga (who had just won a shootout with the remaining paratrooper and avenged his lover) and then took out Morpheus, who was unable to employ his Sword of Reckoning.

Also, it wouldn't be Heroscape without my wife complaining that we have left the game out because "we're going to play it again soon"

My relationship with my older sons has changed over the years, as it must, so it was really nice to get a game in. My daughter, 15 is playing DnD with her honors roll posse, and I want to get her hooked on the game.

It would be nice to get all of them playing Duel of Ages II, as the setup is more compact, but I ended up selling my copy and I'm not sure it would be as fun.

One thing I noticed after returning to the game was being slightly bothered at first by all the death. I'm not especially sensitive, so that was interesting. We were joking about Krug: "I wonder what he was like as a child. Did he like watercolors? What made him so angry?"

I know there's some lame backstory to Heroscape, like there is for Duel of Ages, but I know in my heart that both are really versions of Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks , which I read in high school, and includes the Marquis de Sade on the back of a tyrannosaurus rex, going into battle against troops from other eras. I also had a copy of Time Tripper in 1980 or so. I wish I still had it. Where did it go? Who threw it out? Where does anything go? Sweet entropy, my only faithful lover.

Frohike wrote: Played Freedom: The Underground Railroad with the family this weekend . . . we had a difficult time with it, mostly because we probably didn't manage the economy side of it correctly (and the game itself is just hard).

I played this at WBC when it first came out, in Academy's sales booth with a bunch of strangers. It was pretty clear early on that we were going to get nuked, but they wanted to play it to the end and, I gotta be honest, this isn't a game setting that you want to play to the end. Though I appreciate that it's historic and tells a story that needs to be told, I came away from it thinking that this was not the vehicle for this message. I've looked at the game (which frankly is pretty gamey) with a jaundiced eye since.

I'm not a fan of cooperative games in general and this one just seemed to be really depressing.

^there is a big, big element of this in both Navajo Wars and Comancheria. They're incredibly hard and the difficulty ramps up in each era until you reach late 1800s USA which is rough game over---the reservation space comes into play and you move in and out of the res to try to keep independent as happened historically. It still works for me, despite being depressing. It helps in Comancheria that you get a period of ascendance if you play really well early, so there's an arc to the game.

So while you can get through the whole thing there's a strong "how far can you get element?" which I actually think works since it's consistent with a number of other modes of play in games (e.g. video games).

Another 4-player Root, which I was hoping would be a semi-experienced group, but turned out to be only one other experienced player (like last time) and two newbs. I had wanted to play the Cult or the Riverfolk, but those (ESPECIALLY the Riverfolk) don't work well with new players. We put one on the Marquise and one on the Eyrie, as the experienced player took the Vagabond, but I decided to go large and use the Duchy for the first time. Since we had the Eyrie in play, too, and they start opposite the keep, I decided to take a different corner that was vertically opposite. This kind of gimps the Duchy, since they really need to expand like the Eyrie do, but since I was the most experienced at the tables, I just took it.

There were a lot of pieces on the board. The Marquise went Sawmill-heavy and so had difficulty replacing warriors, but basically decided to ignore Workshops until late and gladly tossed cards for Field Hospitals. He came in last. The Eyrie player had massive difficulty with the Decree and we had to explain it repeatedly and guide him as to how to execute it. He managed to only drop into Turmoil twice, but he would have failed it on basically every turn if we weren't watching closely. The Vagabond went with the Arbiter, which was highly annoying, since three of the four biggest armies in the game were on the board and the Arbiter adding to the casualties didn't help the ability of any us to spread as we needed to.

But I secured my corner and beyond, got all six markets and citadels out, as well as the tunnels, and brought out all three Squires, one noble (the Mayor), and two Lords, plus some late crafting to surge from 15 points to 27 in the second-to-last round. The birds and cats couldn't really dislodge me to get rid of either of my lords and I just waved a hand at my ability to score using the ministers next turn and won. I had both bird Ambush cards in my hand, too. It was a weird game and my position was obviously aided by the unwillingness of either of my main rivals to come at me with any serious force, while I could just keep moving hordes with my ministers.

Hot takes

Barenpark is pretty alright. Fine. You Tetris pieces on your player board. Id rather play Fits or Spring Meadow or Patchwork but yknow. It was fine.

Taverns of Tiefenthal is the new game by the guy that did Quacks of Quedlinberg. It was an overwrought dice drafting/deck building thing. It was okay? Id play it again, mainly to try out all the optional modules, but I'd also be fine never playing it again.

Oceans is super fun. I wish we had just played Oceans 3 times tbh.

That's amazing Jackwraith, so you were playing with like the three biggest board presence factions in the game? My first instinct is that would all out vicious war at all times.

Gary Sax wrote: That's amazing Jackwraith, so you were playing with like the three biggest board presence factions in the game? My first instinct is that would all out vicious war at all times.

That's what I thought! I think, like most first-timers, they were just overwhelmed with all of the little details that makes Root what it is. I told the Marquise player that his main objective was to build as much as possible and not to worry about maintaining his sprawling position, but instead to try to consolidate and protect his industry so that he could do that late-game burst that the Cats can sometimes get when they're on the last couple buildings of a row. He had that in mind, as he went hard on Sawmills and used Overwork a number of times to produce piles of lumber. But he also didn't fight very much at all. I forced him out of the Fox clearing on our side and just assumed command of the NW corner.

But the Eyrie was even worse. This guy was just lost. Seriously, we explained/guided him through the Decree through all but about two turns of the game. He actually went into turmoil once because he couldn't recruit because all 20 birds were on the board and he wouldn't attack anyone(!) I eventually barreled into the center-top rabbit clearing and gave him some guys to recruit by wiping out five of them and a Roost over two turns and three battles (the Mayor is SO good!) I was encouraging both of them to beat on the Vagabond, who had shot out to a lead because, between exploring and the other two crafting (I didn't craft anything until my next-to-last turn), he had a good stock of items.

All of that said, my opinion on the Moles is still kinda mixed. Anyone who pays attention to what they're doing for a turn or two can cripple them in a bad way in the early game. Once they get to the midgame and can at least choose the least worst option for minister to lose, things get better. It's still a remarkably balanced system. You start VERY slowly if you don't want to craft (i.e. have a Vagabond lurking around.) I don't think I made it past 5 points for several turns, generating them almost solely through swaying ministers and putting my crowns out. The stress between citadels and markets is also pretty good. It feels like there's no sense in putting out markets early, because you won't control enough clearings to make use of the cards. But if you can draw enough of a single suit, you can start dropping the bigger ministers and then you do have uses for them. Similarly, the citadels can crowd the Burrow right quick and you can't make enough moves to get them on the board efficiently. (I know you're thinking: "But you can move all of them with one move...?" Yes, but TWO actions. TWO!) But if you have the right ministers, you can make multiple moves quite efficiently. There's a lot to be learned here.

Wow. Having all your buildings on the board as the Duchy seems super risky. Can't believe the bird and cat players were so timid. Seems they could have wrecked you as defending your 3-4 clearings with buildings would be terribly difficult.

I think they were playing like a typical wargame: "If I attack him, he's gonna come back twice as hard at me!" Given that their recruiting is less bursty than mine (Eyrie: Charismatic already gone, needing cards in other parts of the decree; Marquise: only once per turn, with Recruiters spread to different parts of the map), they probably thought they'd be wasting their time. Plus, they were new players trying to absorb their own factions and probably weren't thinking about how they could knock out my ministers by getting rid of any of my structures; almost all of which were pretty heavily guarded (I had all but 1 mole on the board at the end of the game.)

The incredible advantage of the defender takes low roll mechanic I don't think is super obvious when you first sit down at the table.