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Kevin Klemme
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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River Wild Board Game Review

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Outback Crossing Review

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10 Apr 2020 15:13 #309143 by dysjunct
WIZARD with my in-laws. They'd played other games in the family before (Spades etc.) but the screw-the-dealer rule, plus losing points for busting your bid, really makes this shine.
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12 Apr 2020 13:53 #309184 by DukeofChutney
Picked up The Bloody Inn of ebay and played with my house mate. Decent game, quite simple, sort of tableu building and allows for silly high risk strategies. My bag.
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12 Apr 2020 16:36 #309189 by Shellhead
Arkham Horror 2nd edition solitaire again, with four characters. This time I decided to tailor the challenges to the great old one. Like if I drew Cthulhu, I would make Innsmouth the extra board with a threat (deep one uprising) and use the relevant heralds of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. I drew Hastur and decided to use the King in Yellow herald but none of the extra board threats, though those boards were all in play. My investigators were Joe the private eye, Norman the astronomer, Tony the bounty hunter, and Rita the athlete.

Hastur is nasty because it takes 8 clue tokens to seal gates, and The King in Yellow gradually corrupts key characters in town as the terror level arises. For example, the minister at the South Church got corrupted early on, so Blessing get discarded in the upkeep phase if you roll anything except a 6. By coincidence, I got a variety of Hastur, King in Yellow, and Carcosa-related references showing up in the game, starting with the initial mythos card, though no actual gates to Lost Carcosa. A mythos card triggered the Overture of the Act deck, and we were on Act II when Hastur woke up.

Joe hilariously started out with three handguns, including his default .45. I was using personal stories this game, so he was fated to be a monster whacker. But the monsters that came out this game often overwhelmed Joe's limited will and sanity, so he ended up claustrophobic and delusional. Joe did accomplish his personal story and got a payoff of $15, which kept his expensive .357 magnum loaded the whole game. He was Lost in Time and Space when Hastur awoke, and went out fighting hard.

Norman was my key player. He was my only character with a high sanity, and he starts the game with the spell Find Gate. So he is a great gate closer/sealer, and he found a press pass early on that let him pick up clue tokens faster. He had a very rough time of it, though, and ended up with both consumption and schizophrenia, which reduced his maximum stamina and sanity by 1 each. Norman managed to seal 3 gates, which allowed him a chance to remove up to 4 doom tokens if Hastur awoke. (He only got 1.) He managed to cling to survival until the very end.

Rita also accomplished her mission, which gave her +1 Will. Until she found a magic sword late in the game, she was mostly just a support player, using her high speed and a lucky mirror to dart around wherever she was needed, especially when a nasty rumor popped up. She wasn't much help in final battle and died before the end.

Tony almost pulled out a win for me. He got his arm injured early, but was still going around John Woo-style the whole game after Joe gave him a second gun. His handcuffs were great against the several cultists who showed up. He was working on closing a gate when Hastur showed up, so he had 10 clue tokens for final battle. Hastur's attack requires an investigator to make a Luck roll or lose 2 sanity, and the roll gets harder each turn. Tony dialed his luck up to his max of 6, so he didn't even need to spend any clue tokens during the easier green final battle cards.

As I prepared to draw the first red final battle card, Tony still had 10 clues token and was rolling six dice to attack each turn, while Haster only had 3 doom tokens left. But it isn't often that a final battle lasts long enough to get to the red cards, so I had forgotten how nasty they can be. I drew the one where the game instantly ends because the Great Old One just devours all the surviving investigators at once. Norman only had 1 sanity point left, so he was ready to die, but Tony was blindsided, and sorely regretted not spending his clue tokens sooner.
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12 Apr 2020 17:19 #309191 by Jackwraith

DukeofChutney wrote: Picked up The Bloody Inn of ebay and played with my house mate. Decent game, quite simple, sort of tableu building and allows for silly high risk strategies. My bag.


Yeah. It's a strange game, not just thematically, but also mechanically. (It's even more fun when you tell people that it's based on an actual event...) I've played a couple times and I can see the appeal, but it's not quite singing to me yet. If we're looking for a short card game, I'm much more prone to pull out Guildhall because it seems like strategies are easier to follow and the changes to the game state less jarring. The funny thing is that those mechanical changes can be abrupt, but I really haven't found anything memorable about the games themselves. I've been told that the Carnies adds some chrome that makes for a bit more of a story around the game.

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12 Apr 2020 18:38 #309194 by hotseatgames
Bloody Inn is great, and gets pretty cut-throat (haha) with more than 2 players. The artwork is also great!
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12 Apr 2020 19:38 #309196 by dysjunct
I really like Bloody Inn and haven't even felt the need to break out the expansion yet. Great ghoulish theme, great artwork, and great feeling of never enough actions to do what you want.
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13 Apr 2020 09:23 #309204 by jpat
On Saturday, my wife and I played Horrified for the first time. She has a strong affinity for monsters in general and Universal's monsters in particular, so I figured she'd like it, and she did. We played just the novice game with the recommended monsters of Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was good, light fun and evokes its theme well.

On Sunday, we played Eldritch Horror for the first time in what turned out to be (when I looked back at the data) about two and a half years. That's a little hard to believe because the last time we played before this, it was one of the more memorable games we've had. We still talk about how (and we may be getting the details wrong by this point) I got her to take a Dark Pact and then slew her. Oops. Anyway, Sunday's game was with two characters--the redeemed cultist and the actress--against Yig. Somehow the actress (my character) seemed to keep lucking in to new weapons, and though I couldn't, of course, use them all, I managed to turn her into a murder machine. She ended up taking out the third mystery's epic monster with the Sword of St. Jerome (though I apparently goofed by letting her attack the epic monster before the regular monster), her best move was probably wiping out three cultists in one go. But the redeemed cultist was the one who got us two-thirds of the way there by solving two mysteries, including one we kind of lucked into because it was right next to the first one she solved. We ended up with 1 left on the Doom track, so Yig never awoke. In fairness, we did another goof--my fault--which is that I should've put out more gates at a couple of points, but we mostly backtracked and made up for that. I'm going to accept this as a win.
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13 Apr 2020 12:11 #309208 by Scott_F
Online gaming from TTS to report. Hyperspace has been discussed here a bit, I played a first game of it recently with 4 people. I fully backed the KS and also own all of Gods War and Cthulhu Wars (which I kinda regret - we've only used base game items really). I'm not sold on Hyperspace right now. The ability to throw a colony anywhere on the board makes the board kinda irrelevant. The Secrets are random things that stop the game immediately and demand resolution and disrupted the flow. The combat was predictable for a dice chucker, but later in the game you get points merely by moving enemy ships offboard, not even destroying them. The end game also felt stale in that the only way to get VPs is to fight each other and remove ships. On the positive side I really liked the deck of tech cards and the factions did feel very different with only a few unique things about them, as opposed to GW/CW where there are literally 10 unique things. In HS there are...6 unique things? I guess thats still a lot. It played pretty quick for a first game, aside from setup and teardown this is a 2 hour game for 4 players I'd guess. I'll give it another shot but I may try and dump my pledge.

3 games of Chaos in the Old World online with 2 others and a rotating 4th/5th player. Nobody is new to the game. The person with something like 50 plays of the game won all 3. I really think Chaos is superior to most/all other dudes on a map with some euro aspects games. The games have been close and we've switched factions every time. Some cards that I considered trash are being used in really clever ways and I've played the game a bunch too. After getting players over the "Khorne will always win" mentality every faction can win when run capably, base game and expansion. The TTS module is excellent too.

First play of Cosmic Frog with 4 people. Everyone loved the game and was excited to play it again/try it in real life with actual giant Cosmic Frogs. We fought a significant portion of the game, at least I did, and had multiple players in the Outer Dimensions missing their turns. Swapping the traits is great and its agonizing to decide whether to push your luck and count on your turn again soon or play it safe. The end game scoring felt a little odd, kinda a minigame about making the right patterns of land, in a game about giant cosmic frogs with dice and destruction of the realm, but after a couple examples of how things score it wasn't too tough to figure out who to target.

Caylus 1303 with mostly euro players was next. I've never played the base game. Compared to many euros that I've been forced to play the straightforwardness of resources and scoring was great and highlights the problem with many modern euros that use convoluted rules and resource conversions as "strategy" in place of player interaction. With 5 and on TTS the game took pretty long, I'd say its really only worth 90-120 minutes. The unique player powers were fun. We didn't follow the rules on turn order though and instead made turn order based on when you pass. The hardcore Caylus player hated 1303, said it was dumbed down and friendlier. I don't give his opinion much credit though as I hate almost everything he likes and he has a strange obsession with having 100% open information in games, which I also hate. The game did feel long to me and the last couple of rounds didn't add much, I'd prefer a variable game ending as in the original. There is no incentive to not push the Provost back as far as possible last round too if you have workers left and no negotiation because it is the last round, which ends the game on kinda a sour note as one of the strengths of it is the negotiation. It isn't a game that I love but I had fun and would play this with almost anyone and it is easy to teach.

Last is a game of Root. Enough has been said here, Root is excellent. Eyrie, Moles, Otters, and Corvids all fought on the Winter map with the Moles winning. Moles player is in the process of making semi official modules for the game too and played Root 5 times in the last week alone, so he definitely knows what he is doing. The Winter map felt limited in movement a bit, but with the Otters the central river was useable. Moles hunkered down in 3 spots and just cranked out points, ending score was 30-25-20-16 I think. I was Eyrie and was in second but went into turmoil too early as I forgot about my player board and build requirement. TTS has a good picture in picture option I learned that helped in my later turns as its tough to take in the map and your Decree in the same window. Although the Moles player won, his game seemed boring as he played defense for the last half and just scored points. I've never played the Otters and have only seen them in a single game. Now I want them in every game, the flexibility they provide was amazing and they sold cards almost every turn and riverboats/mercenaries were used a few times too. I'm excited to try the Otters out myself and really like playing as the Eyrie.
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13 Apr 2020 23:41 #309234 by jeb
We've played MAGE KNIGHT acouple of times here, (3p, no PvP) and it's still a really good game. It's complicated, and the walktrhough-based rules aren't helping (there's a rulebook too once you are allowed to know the arcane wisdom), but we got through it with just a couple of screw-ups noted aftergame. I also have the reskinned STAR TREK version and we tried that out. It is... not good. Just a teensy bit simpler in the rules (no Artifacts, no Day/Night cycle), but the art direction is a total clusterfuck. They should have used comic book art instead of still from the movies/TV shows. Everything is dark and shiny. You can't tell what's what on the map or on your cards. Big mistake. We put that away. Secret Satan is prepping his next "gift."
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19 Apr 2020 16:56 #309384 by hotseatgames
Had a great game of Cosmic Frog on Tabletop Simulator, 5 players, led by Jim Felli himself.

First, the TTS implementation of the game is great, and really speeds things along, including an automated setup.

I ended up coming in 3rd place. Stacking your lands in your vault in the right way is crucial to victory, and a late-game raid can be devastating.

On my best and most memorable turn, I (the yellow frog) was in the Aether (a cosmic outer space of sorts) with the purple and red frogs. I wanted to attack purple, but his ability was camouflage, so I would have had to pay 2 oomph (your energy, basically) just to attack. I instead attacked red. I successfully knocked him into the outer dimensions (a limbo-like state) which unlocked his vault for raiding. I then took a single land from his vault, which doesn't sound bad, but the one I chose broke up a scoring streak which ended up costing him 5 points, I believe.

For the final act of my turn, I then, using my ability (the name escapes me) allowed me to swap powers with the purple player, so I now had camouflage. Screwing two players in one move was great.
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19 Apr 2020 17:10 #309386 by Gary Sax
Played a game of Arkham Horror. It had been sitting there for ages, my partner set it up I think on Monday. I was kind of dreading sitting down at it because of the overhead and I'm starting to stress about being furloughed so like half of my brain is doing other things... but it ended up being fun, we got about half way through a game before we were defeated to gate openings by Azathoth. Bad draws, three rumors (one on first mythos, so discarded) and no monster surges is hard to overcome.
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20 Apr 2020 06:44 #309402 by ninorota
I was resisting not to play Jackal for a long time but last night we played it with some of my friends and it was awesome!

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20 Apr 2020 08:31 #309404 by Legomancer
Merchant of Venus via Vassal and El Grande via Yucata.
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21 Apr 2020 15:52 #309483 by jpat
All this talk about Tiny Epic compelled me to unwrap Tiny Epic Mechs, which was my first foray into this series. It's pretty enjoyable, if a little light on the promised combat. My wife really liked it, which is hugely important to me for selfish and unselfish reasons.

When we played Horrified again, I managed to "overlearn" Eldritch Horror and gave us only one monster turn per two players (like one Mythos phase per round). Whoops. Once I figured that out, we restarted with the same three monsters--Invisible Man, Frankenstein/Bride, and Mummy--and managed to lose, but not by a ton. With a game with relatively few levers to pull, it does a nice job at managing the theme (and the various "sub-themes" of the particular monsters).
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21 Apr 2020 17:00 #309485 by Jackwraith

jpat wrote: All this talk about Tiny Epic compelled me to unwrap Tiny Epic Mechs, which was my first foray into this series. It's pretty enjoyable, if a little light on the promised combat.


Heh. Two weeks from yesterday, I spend a fair amount of time talking about this very thing. The instant assumption that most make about a game of mechs fighting is that it's going to be combat-heavy, big explosions, etc. However, if you look at it as a gladiatorial game, where the fights aren't to the death but are instead based on technique/impressing the crowd and/or points like a boxing match, I think it makes a lot more sense. That, of course, is a lot more difficult to use as a marketing approach. Glad you two still liked it, though.
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