What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I played a 4 player game of Clash of Cultures yesterday. 180 minutes it says on the box. Hah.

I want a medal or something. Something that says, "James never has to play Clash of Cultures again."

Lemme guess... 1 hour per player?

boothwah wrote: I played a 4 player game of Clash of Cultures yesterday. 180 minutes it says on the box. Hah.

I want a medal or something. Something that says, "James never has to play Clash of Cultures again."

You’re not missing out. Like Merchants & Marauders, it’s a very, very overrated game. It’s got more DOAM elements than most Civ games and the Civ elements range from tedious to typical. It’s fine, but there’s nothing noteworthy about it and I don’t find that its various parts equal to anything great.

Last night's game night --

Dungeon Drop -- Kickstarter dreck. Played once, won't get played again, $46 with the fancy bag upgrade. Not my money, an idea for a game with zero development effort.

Five Crowns -- interesting twist on Gin Rummy that plays quickly in spite of going 12 rounds. Very much enjoyed.

Aquire -- excellent as usual, in spite of it being on the old 3M copy with the color issues. I preferred getting trounced at this to winning at Dungeon Plop

The Adventurers Temple of Chac -- whole lotta fun to close the night, but one son of a bitch cleaned out the river treasures after everyone jumped in. My game of the year when it came out, still making happy people a decade later.

Very enjoyable game night.

Frohike wrote: Lemme guess... 1 hour per player?

5.

And it is a bad game. Like a really bad game. I have no idea why they included army figures in the box. Combat is such a rare occurance and is so costly. I have seen or participated in 3 games, and have yet to see the winning strategy be anything other than "sit in the corner of the board and focus on filling out your techs and generating enough resources to build wonders as soon as possible."

The fact that it takes so long to play, while leaving game ending variance as a "feature" (i.e. Famine event was pulled four consecutive times over 2 turns before one player had a chance to do anything) that can effectively put a player in a position to be out of a long game on turn 6 or 7 of 18, is an unforgivable design sin. In each game, I've played and watched, at least one player was effectively hobbled by poor event pulls / drawing only worthless combat actions, and was effectively out of the game by the end of the 2nd status check, obvious to all, and was forced to zombie on for an interminable amount of time.

Have a LAN party and play some Civ - or load it up on the Xbox and play online - This is not the experience you were looking for.

I need to try Temple, it was the Big Thing back in the day but I never got around to it. Sounds like the type of thing I'd like.

Played ARCTIC SCAVENGERS twice at the group on Saturday night. I guess I'm not particularly keen on deckbuilders generally--didn't strike me as one I'd go out of my way to play again.

My daughter and I started a game of SPACE BASE over the weekend but she abandoned it to go read a book after about 10 turns. We hadn't got back to it, so I asked her last night at bedtime if she wanted to keep going. In response I got an exaggerated sigh and "what IS it with you and games, anyway?"

Ouch.

Man, if I knew the answer to that, a lot of things would fall into place I bet.

JoelCFC25 wrote: Played ARCTIC SCAVENGERS twice at the group on Saturday night. I guess I'm not particularly keen on deckbuilders generally--didn't strike me as one I'd go out of my way to play again.

We played it twice this weekend, too. Weird. We had the base set + 2 expansions bundle. I can safely say it was "solved" after the second playthrough. I like deckbuilders, and it was fun to solve it, but it's kind of half baked. And that was with expacs, which tried to get some mileage out if its screwy threshold resource system, that makes having big numbers in any but one of the resources meaningless. We all wanted to like it better than Dominion, because generic Arctic Merc Tribes > generic European middle ages buildings and titles. But we didn't.

It's deck builder season I guess.

I played Aeons End there times back to back yesterday with a friend. Easy win against Hollow Crown where we never felt particularly threatened to start. Crushing loss against Wraithmonger that took like 10 minutes next. The first Nemesis card that came out was a minion with an Unleash affect, and it took us too long to get rid of it. Lack of high damage spells in the market didn't help either. We lost by taking the last terror tile. It was brutal, but I was glad to find a difficulty level that felt more correct. We ran it back with the same mages and one tweak to the market (swapping a 5 cost spell for a different 5 cost spell) and eked out a win that felt great. Gravehold was on 7 life, one of us was exhausted and the other of us had 2 life left. Friend had the mage that upgrades your 1+2 breaches to be +2dmg per cast which helped a lot with the low dmg stuff available. I thinned my deck down to 10 cards and was cycling Scorch and Fiery Torrent for big chunks of damage. Very satisfying to win the salty runback.

So the guy that owns Clash just sent me a pic of his latest arrival : Seafall. FML.

I've read a number of reviews, and it sounds... not great. How hard should I duck this?

I don't think I've heard anyone on this site say a good thing about Seafall. There is an extended thread on someone's play sessions of Seafall around here somewhere and it sounds *dire.*

I haven't played it but I have literally never heard anyone anywhere speak well of Seafall.

I tried Maracaibo tonight, which is the big new Eurogame by the designer is Great Western Trail. It uses a similar rondel as GWT, but replaces the cow deck building with a big deck of multiuse cards. There's an area majority aspect, there's tableau building, there's just a lot of stuff. Lots of forward planning based on how far you're going to go each turn and making sure you have the stuff you need at each step. It was neat, but it was exhausting. 4p game, everyone's first time, took us 4.5 hours with the teach. And that's solid crunching on Eurogame stuff the entire time. I enjoyed it but it's maybe a bit more than I want most of the time. Everyone went different directions and scores were pretty close barring the one guy who's a savant. 213-183-179-171. If you're looking for a beast it's worth a shot. I liked it more than GWT, but I never played GWT all that much. It's also weirdly got a story mode, where the board changes game to game and there are story cards and events and stuff. I'm curious about that, it just seems wildly out of place.

Gary Sax wrote: There is an extended thread on someone's play sessions of Seafall around here somewhere and it sounds *dire.*

That was mine .