What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I very much enjoy The Crew, I find it far more enjoyable than The Mind. I note that it is on the shortlist for the SdJ which I think it has a good chance of winning.

More Silver Tower this weekend.

I had an epic session that I started last weekend, but didn't finish until Friday. My team was Lord of Plagues, Bloodstoker, Lord-Celestant, and Loremaster. I like the look of the Lord of Plagues, a bloated, rotting bloke with an absurd spiked shoulder pad and metal helmet with 3 oddly placed holes. But the Lord of Plagues is not especially good in combat, though he is really tough. Blookstoker does some relatively useless tricks with his whip. The Lord-Celestant is a typical Sigmarite, somewhat overpowered, especially his magic-missle flinging warcloak. The Loremaster is fairly deadly with his eldritch blast, and also decent in melee and dodging missile attacks.

Their mission was a cakewalk featuring mostly grot scuttlings, who are as weak as they sound. The final room was only supposed to feature the skaven assassin with the mirror image trick, but a Unexpected Event delivered a Chaos Sorcerer and a bunch of Chaos Marauders. Soon, the Gaunt Summoner showed up to deliver a couple of Pink Horrors to the scrum. Things got very ugly. First, the Lord of Plagues got killed, and the Bloodstoker was right on his heels. But then the Unexpected Events started breaking my way. The Unforged literally dropped in, and he is allegedly an "Unstoppable Killing Machine," though he died two rounds later.

Then providence (Unexpected Events) delivered a Cogsmith, which is like an dwarven NRA member. He was helpful for some turns, though swept away by another Unexpected Events roll. By the way, those Chaos Maruaders kept getting reinforcements, though by this time we had them down to less than a dozen, and tight control of the room such that no more than 2 of them could attack at a time. Right near the end, a Chaos Sorcerer even showed up to help for a turn. This was a really long, brutal fight, and the periodic nuisances of the familiars didn't help us.

Saturday, more Silver Tower. This time the Exalted Deathbringer, the Knight-Venator, Orruk Weirdnob Shaman, and Grot Shaman came to play. The deathbringer is a hairy barbarian who wears all black and likes to impale things with his spear. The Knight-Venator is another OP Sigmarite, highly deadly in both melee and missile attacks, and even able to make missile attacks despite adjacent enemies. The Orruk Weirdnob is weak in melee but has a deadly puking attack. The Grot Shaman is weak, sneaky, backstabby, and able to stun with an itchy ranged attack.

Again, they had a casual stroll through the tower, killing mostly khairic acolytes, until they got to a rage-inducing room with Tzangors (bird-headed cultists). In this room, if a hero missed an attack, he would automatically hit another hero if one was in range. Worse yet, each time a Tzangor died, it added 2 vigour (hit points) to each of the remaining Tzangors. And to really crown the whole ugly situation, the heroes would be forced to fight each other after the Tzangors were all dead.

The deathbringer died first, while fighting in melee with two Tzangor. The knight stayed just out of the room, which meant that he didn't hit his allies whenever he missed. That left him free to rain down arrows with impunity on the Tzangor. The shamans worked together as a team, occasionally whacking each other in the frenzied battle. At the end, the knight shot them both down easily for the win.

Sunday, still more Silver Tower. This time a Slaughterpriest, a Battlemage, a Knight-Vexillor, and a Lord-Relictor walked into the tower. The slaughterpriest is decent in melee, has lethal but inaccurate area attack, and can do an inefficient healing thing. Battlemage is a crap fighter but has a mean missile attack. The Knight-Vexillor is a non-overpowered sigmarite, but had an odd teleporting ability and a stunning area attack that didn't hit often. The Lord-Relictor is another sigmarite of moderate ability. A good ranged attack that sometimes does a little extra to surrounding targets, plus a powerful healing effect. This group had an easy time against a variety of standard Silver Tower opponents, and was only my second team out of six to both gain a piece of the artifact and get everybody out alive.

Played two player Street Masters with my girlfriend tonight. It had been a while since playing, but it came back pretty quickly. We almost won... had we turned our attention to beating the boss's ass sooner, I think we would have had it.

I have to say, the box that came with Aftershock holds everything in such an organized fashion. It's really great.

Played our copy of base 7th continent. It was fun, definitely an almost pure coop. A lot depends on how well tuned your "life" deck is. We're almost dead and we've just gotten off the intro island.

My wife and I finished our campaign game of Age of Napoleon on Friday or Saturday. It was our first time playing, and while I do love the look and feel of it, I found it a bit dry and, at least at first blush, somewhat simplistic and random, and for all that the rules, though not hard, I found very hard to synthesize, mostly owing to the five states that nations can be in and how that affects diplomacy, insurrection, and recruitment. Might be worth another try.

This weekend we also dug out Fortune and Glory, which I have a soft spot for despite the raggedness of its rule set relative to the complexity it's striving for. We faced off against the Crimson Hand and pulled off a fairly comfortable win (though there's always that suspicion with FANG that one is playing it wrong at some point). It looks like the Hand starts slow and crescendos, so maybe we just got a bit lucky. I actually got lucky by being KO'd back to my home city without losing some of the fortune we needed to win in the victory check phase.

We've had fun with Monsters Menace America before, but we quit by mutual agreement after we'd ended up in Hollywood (health 0) a few times apiece. I think we'll go back to our variant of playing two-player with two monsters each; this time, with just one apiece, we ended up (maybe coincidentally) hammering each other with military more effectively than I remember or would find thematic.

My wife crushed me in Firefly on Monday, and this after she'd had a very slow start with a few failed Misbehaves and a stack of warrants. We were playing Harken's Folly, which requires becoming "solid" with four contacts (not Harken) and then taunting the Alliance in a couple of ways involving flying around and Misbehaving. The most galling/hilarious thing was that I'd traded my wife a sniper rifle/firearm for some contraband--the second time I'd been forced to scramble for some contraband to finish a job, after the Alliance pinched me--and she was able to use those two keywords to bypass two or maybe three Misbehave cards at the end to win.

I should probably have left it there, but I hauled out The Vampire, the Elf, and the Cthulhu, an ostensibly thematic but not very thematic card game I'd gotten my wife for her birthday last year. On top of rules translation issues, the game was virtually inexplicable--or at least I couldn't explain it, even after having watched a video. Maybe we'll try again. It's a weird one, anyway. Would've helped had it had an included player aid for the five card actions, all of which have a different payment cost and none of which is all that intuitive.

Online:

Several games of Rallyman GT on boardgamearena.com who have put together a really swish implementation.

I like this far more than either Formula De or Downforce as it poses some genuinely interesting tactical decisions that reside totally within individual player agency and is also highly competitive along with it. Those other two racing games (though fun to play) now feel a bit lacklustre in comparison.

I’ve enjoyed many thrilling moments and instances of winding up my opponents – like stopping right before a corner in high gear and thus preventing anyone overtaking, swerving into a gap and slamming on the brakes so that cars behind in a higher gear have to forfeit their next turn, gearing high and then dropping into what feels like a handbrake turn around a corner with just enough dice left to gear back up and out onto the straight again, and so on. I am actually surprised at how much scope there is for Machiavellian behaviour on the track, how frequently the positioning and lead changes shape, and not least how much tension it brings out when blended with the core push-your-luck mechanism. Great moments come out of those tough decisions where you desperately want to advance just one more space and are freaking out about a big three or four dice braking manoeuvre that is coming up later. Then there is the option to manage this risk with panache by timing your ‘flat-out’ runs well in order to acquire focus tokens (the luck-mitigation currency of the game), which is absolute gold when you dump a load of tokens to pull off a particularly stylish move.

The GT5 variant cars present an even more interesting challenge as they come with the option of being able to skip a gear when accelerating and this creates the potential for some interesting manoeuvres with multiple accelerations and decelerations in the same turn. Four players has been more interesting than three as it more frequently creates pinch-points that keep the pack together and prevent runaway leaders developing, but that might also have something to do with the implementation as it keeps putting three-lane tracks into play when with three players you really want it to only have two for most of the track.

The only thing that I’m not convinced about are the pit stops; not once has anyone miscalculated and crashed badly enough to pull a chit that would make this action necessary and I cannot fathom why you would ever willingly want to do so, but I’m also aware that we haven’t yet seen more than a fraction of the full content available. Perhaps some of the game modes will necessitate what is otherwise merely a mild threat that prevents the game devolving into one where everyone is constantly taking too much risk in higher gears. Or maybe the digital game is much easier to parse than the physical one. Having to skip a turn and maybe gear down to take a pit-stop are warning enough to think carefully about tactical positioning rather than simply gaining as much ground as possible each turn.

The movement and positioning of the vehicles, the competitive overtaking on corners, the sense of speed and jockeying for advantage, are all evocative of a motorsport event so it passes my litmus test of sports games needing to feel like the actual sport is in progress. I enjoyed playing so much that I ordered a physical copy to play at home – do you see Asmodee? That’s how this digital stuff works.


Despite all the negative scorn from everyone I trust who has played Tapestry I still wanted to see what all the fuss is about with it so tried a couple of solo games on TTS then found a willing opponent and gave it a go. Boy oh boy what a soulless, uninteresting and pointless waste of time. ‘Progress Track – the Board Game’ where you move tokens up progress tracks, except watch out! Other players are also moving tokens up the same progress tracks and if you are too slow then they will get to take a gumball machine toy before you do and fill in their charmless Sudoku puzzle first. The ‘capital city’ sideboard actually gave me flashbacks of the conspiracy puzzle in Android, a perfectly fine minigame that just doesn’t belong with everything else. In fairness there is some kind of arcane efficiency engine ticking away somewhere in the background… ah, no, I just can’t talk about positives, this game was just crap in every way. I don’t think it even looks that pretty either so I can’t make the ‘pretty but dumb’ comparison with Wingspan.


At home:

More 7th Continent (spoiler free)

The Icy Maze – we started fairly confident as although there isn’t much in the way of clues as to what to do we were familiar enough with the continent by this point and had a fair idea of which way to go and what to look out for along the way. However, we still managed to get distracted and ended up going off on a side quest that left us near to death (my character had several status cards that were difficult to shake, being poisoned and injured multiple times). We eventually reached the icy shores of the north and what followed was far more punishing than we had even imagined. We twice dipped into drawing from discards (meaning imminent death is a constant threat hanging on the next card draw) but somehow managed to pull back from the brink through random encounters providing meagre sustenance. Then we found ourselves so badly lost that we ended up back where we started and our luck didn’t hold out for a third time delving into the discards.

We reset and started again and this time made sure that we were much better prepared – it’s not much of a spoiler to say that you probably want to stock up well for cold weather if you are going on an expedition to something called ‘The Icy Maze’ but you’d be surprised at how easily this game enticingly suckers you in to challenging situations. The endgame has some really amusing encounters that can occur but is also very punishing and has perhaps a few too many points where you can be reset back to the beginning that could be frustrating if unable to avoid them. Based on the final end card I think this is another one that would work well when played in parallel with another curse.

Dark Chest of the Damned, we made a mistake of going off on a big exploration and had to backtrack a bit as we had missed something critical along the way, let’s put it down to overconfidence. Even so we managed to stay in good shape and had a rock-solid idea of what we needed to do next, largely predicated on our existing knowledge of the island, and wrapped this one up with very little trouble. The highlight along the way was a combination of events providing a boon of a forest fire right next to a hunting spot where we ate BBQ and watched the trees burn down, and along with some bonus resources on an event card that allowed us to construct hunting gear for free we ended up well set for the last stretch of the adventure. I think that I really want to get the Path of Repentance which fills out the rest action and prevents you from cheezing the game at hunting spots due to the additional risk of drawing something awful in your dreams.

Dark Chest is a bit similar to Voracious Goddess in that it asks you to roam around the continent looking for a MacGuffin. The downside is that it isn’t immediately apparent what to do or where to go if you haven’t already explored and become familiar with the continent, with the upside being that it gets you doing the shoe-leather work that will set you up for future quests. I think it is perhaps even a better fit for a first quest instead of Voracious Goddess for reasons regarding how much and what parts of the map you uncover that would be a bit too spoilery to discuss. Also, playing through Voracious Goddess kind of makes Dark Chest a touch too one-dimensional to solve for even more incredibly spoilery reasons. On a side note, every time we pick up one of the ‘track’ encounters we now send it straight back to the bottom of the deck and draw another one, those spot-the-difference puzzles got real tiresome real quick.

I am continually impressed with how each play reveals something new in the secrets of the continent, and often things that we hadn’t properly noticed before now suddenly come to life in new ways. There is also the residual knowledge from previous plays which adds a dreamlike quality to it that the game often plays up to – there are places that I know I can head to in order to find something that comes from knowledge gained in a previous play and which, thematically, now forms part of the strange dreams my character is plagued with. It’s a neat way of excusing you from gaminess through familiarity.


Osprey Games are having something of a clearout at the moment, and one of the games they are ditching is the second edition of Martin Wallace’s London which I picked up for little more than a tenner. I’d played it once before and had a terrible experience but given that both real life historicity and tableau/engine building card games are very much my jam I figured I’d take a punt and see if external factors were the root of the problem rather than the game itself.

We started with a couple of two-player games between my son and I, everything seemed to go well and I was wondering if my initial ire was indeed misplaced. Then daughter wanted to join in and my son discovered exactly what had made me previously dislike the game so much. The specific issue that I have is that it is a really punishing and unsympathetic design which conceptually does not sit well with a card draw mechanism that is highly capricious; this can be perfectly fine so long as players have options to mitigate those risks that are within their gift to realise, and therefore not have their game destroyed at the whim of random card draws. London solves this conundrum through the ‘Boroughs’ mechanism that gives alternative options for managing cards and clearing out the dreaded poverty tokens as well as providing special rule-breaking powers that can be transformative when taken at the right time. The problem though is the butt-stupid decision to put the Boroughs into a deck of cards with a random draw which means they are at the mercy of the same capriciousness as the regular card market. Therefore players can get caught in a doubly-punishing downward spiral where both the market and the borough decks are screwing them over whilst their opponents are getting the pick of the prime cuts and stealing away the only thing that would enable that player to get out of their hole.

Watching my son get so upset about being mercilessly kicked by the game and left behind without any options to change his position while we other two marched ahead was too tough for me to bear going through this again. It isn’t about skill level in this kind of tableau/engine building game as he can handily dump me on my ass in 51st State, it’s just poorly balanced development work making the game into something where someone can have a miserable experience just because that is what the game is giving them today. I think the problems with this game don’t manifest in a two player head-to-head as the back and forth mean that there is a much higher chance that you can find something in the card draws to help, but the multiplayer game for me is a total failure where one player ends up passively being the punchbag.

I'm absolutely loving Rallyman GT on BGA as well. I was a big fan of the original Rallyman, but this one is just works so much better on so many levels. I feel like I learn a new trick every time I play.

I've been playing Rallyman GT on BGA too; it's really fun! Great implementation, but boy do I have an uncanny ability to roll exclamation points.

Same name there if anyone wants to friend me and play a game. Asynch is better for me.

So I'm trying to run the tutorial for Rallyman GT on BoardgameArena.com and man it is just slow as molasses. Is this out of the ordinary? I'm waiting a measured 60 seconds before clicking the next button and it's telling me an action is already in progress, presumably meaning I have to wait for it to catch up.

Sagrilarus wrote: So I'm trying to run the tutorial for Rallyman GT on BoardgameArena.com and man it is just slow as molasses. Is this out of the ordinary? I'm waiting a measured 60 seconds before clicking the next button and it's telling me an action is already in progress, presumably meaning I have to wait for it to catch up.

You know what, never mind. I can't make this piece of shit start a game so I can actually play, so it just doesn't matter.

If I'm not getting paid I'm not debugging someone else's source code.

I have never encountered that kind of lag. I'm sorry you had a bad experience.

Yeah that's completely outside of my experience. Never had that happen. The closest thing is that I have to wait about one second between placing dice.

So it was up on my screen when I started up this morning and it's pretty clear at this point that the tuturial for the game is broken. It isn't slow, it just doesn't work at all.

Figuring out how to just start a game with two people is way more complicated than it should be, but I managed to finally finagle it. I kept getting errors that I had made a set of selections that don't work together. Pretty clunky.

I figured out that you can't move dice, only click on them, whether they're on the map or on the dashboard. You keep clicking on them until they eventually end up on the position you want them. Lesson learned. As best I can tell if you grab the wrong die you just start over from scratch.

Brake dice are supposedly placed automatically when needed, but I put a 2 in a corner requiring a 1 and the game just dinged me for doing it. Couldn't place a Red die. Don't know. I'll figure it out at some point. I've already invited friends to play so I guess I need to get this done.

Quicker this morning, but still not fast. What browser do you guys run in?

Another run through Silver Tower. This team was the Aspiring Deathbringer, Tzeentch Sorcerer Lord, Great Bray-Shaman, and Bloodsecrator, and they all had the Chaotic trait. The deathbringer is tough and violent in melee, but has no ranged attack. He can move 2 spaces immediately after killing an opponent, so he can efficiently mow down quantities of weaker opponents. The Tzeentch has a nice ranged attack that can spill over to adjacent opponents if he activates the attack with a die showing a 6. More importantly, he can add or subtract one from the strategy roll for one adversary group each turn. Great Bray-Shaman was the weak link of this team, but still had a decent area-effect stunning attack. The real monster of the team was Bloodsecrator, who is an armored killing machine. With a die showing 3+, he can do an area attack that hits on 3+ for 1 damage. He can use a 6+ die to increase that damage to 1d3 for all of his area attacks for the rest of the turn. In practical terms, that means the Bloodsecrator can often dish out several points of damage to every opponent in the room in a single turn, and 50% of attacks against him will be blocked by his armor.

As usual, most of the mission was too easy. They killed some khairic acolytes, and quite a few grot scuttlings, before getting to the final room. But that final room was a fungus cave that could often instantly heal wounds inflicted on enemies. The room contained the Ogroid Thaumaturge (magic-wielding minotaur) and six bird-headed cultists known as Tzangor, the toughest standard opponents in Silver Tower that show up as a group. That fight went very badly for my team, with the Ogroid summoning six extra Tzangor as the battle continued. Finally, the Tzeentch sorcerer finally broke through the enemy line by throwing a warpstone bomb and then blasting apart the two fungus formations responsible for the instant healing of the enemies. After that, the Bloodsecrator and the Deathbringer reaped a bloody harvest.

I have two more missions left, and then I plan on taking this endeavor in a new direction, pitting each of the surviving teams against each other in a shared dungeon, until one team has collected all 8 mystic fragments. Depending on how the last two missions go, there will be somewhere between 18 and 24 heroes fighting it out. Here is how my variant will work, utilizing both of my Silver Tower sets:

1. Take a normal deck of playing cards and assign a card to each hero. For example, the Aspiring Deathbringer mentioned above could be the Jack of Spades. Unassigned cards will be assigned to various adversary groups that show up, like a given group of Grot Scuttlings might use the 2 of Clubs. These cards will be shuffled each turn and used to determine initiative.

2. Take all the dead-end rooms out of the room deck for each of my two sets, and shuffle all of the rest of the room cards together. I believe there are maybe 18 to 20 non-dead end rooms, so the deck will contain 36 to 40 cards.

3. Each of the 8 teams starts in a random room. Each time they go through a doorway, they draw a random room from the deck.

4. At the start of each game turn, each team will roll 5 destiny dice, to determine if any familiars or events occur. Then that team must immediately use or lose non-discarded dice to heal team members.

5. Draw an initiative card to determine who goes next. That character or adversary group takes all their actions, and then a new initiative card is drawn.

6. If a room card is drawn that matches another room card that is already in play, those two rooms merge, and any overlapping inhabitants get randomly re-positioned. If there are too many occupants in the merged room, random adversaries will be discarded until there is room for everybody. If the overlapping rooms connect to other rooms that now won't fit together, those rooms become disconnected and separate, with their occupants. This is how the 8 teams will have the chance to meet up and fight, and also how some teams might get split up.

7. If a given team is down to 1 or 2 team members, they are allowed to join another team if the two teams share two or more traits (Swift, Arcane, Chaotic, etc), as long as the resulting team does not exceed 4 heroes.

8. Larger teams (3+) must fight each other.

9. Each fragment in play must be carried by a specific hero as equipment.

10. Grievously wounded heroes are removed from play, and any fragments they carry are left behind where they died.

11. If a room or event calls for a given type of adversary and all of them are already in play, roll for a random exotic adversary instead.

12. Renown is now tracked with tokens on individual character sheets instead of one the destiny wheel board. When a character gets 10 or more renown tokens, he can cash in 10 tokens to get a new skill.

Sagrilarus wrote: So it was up on my screen when I started up this morning and it's pretty clear at this point that the tuturial for the game is broken. It isn't slow, it just doesn't work at all.

Figuring out how to just start a game with two people is way more complicated than it should be, but I managed to finally finagle it. I kept getting errors that I had made a set of selections that don't work together. Pretty clunky.

I figured out that you can't move dice, only click on them, whether they're on the map or on the dashboard. You keep clicking on them until they eventually end up on the position you want them. Lesson learned. As best I can tell if you grab the wrong die you just start over from scratch.

Brake dice are supposedly placed automatically when needed, but I put a 2 in a corner requiring a 1 and the game just dinged me for doing it. Couldn't place a Red die. Don't know. I'll figure it out at some point. I've already invited friends to play so I guess I need to get this done.

Quicker this morning, but still not fast. What browser do you guys run in?

You'd put a "1" in the corner requiring a one along with a red brake die if you were in 3rd grade the previous space.