What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I decided to try out the Untold Stories coop campaign book for Nemesis. I'm running it solo with two characters, the Soldier and the Medic.

There are four missions. Each one has special setup instructions and at various points you look up entries in the comic book that progress the story. Items and effects carry over from mission to mission.

I did mission 1, and it was a pretty cool introduction to the process. I expect things to pop off pretty soon.

I introduced my son to Wiz-War, and I think I've created a monster. We've played in consecutive days, and I think I will have no problem getting other rounds in the immediate future.

Wiz-War had suffered a lot for me after Bestial Forces came out. I liked the new cards fine, and I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working anymore. It turns out the answer was that I was still insisting on using the Big Book Of Spells variant. I love the idea of just mixing all the cards together, but with the second expansion added it was now just too many cards. The whole thing didn't just feel chaotic; it felt unfocused and flabby.

So for my son's first game I broke down and went with the FFG method of picking cards: use the cantrips and three schools of magic. It's a bit more subdued in its scope, but the result is that the personality of each game is much more distinct, giving it much more variety between sessions. It also helps new players to understand the sort of things each game will do, even if they don't know the specific cards.

It has been great to play with my son, who totally understands the improvisational nature of the game, and grokked the use-it-now approach the game favors. I sometimes find myself playing things with him a little grudgingly because while I try to be patient with how he plays stuff, it edges the game experience closer to work. (Good work but work nonetheless.) But that wasn't the case here. It really showed the intuitive nature of Tom Jolly's original design.

Have been playing my Silver Tower variant with the 8 teams running around trying to eliminate each other and gather fragments of the amulet. I was originally thinking that this would be a neat format for a convention event, but I think that it would need at least four or five judges to keep things running at a reasonable pace. I have played five turns in about four hours, but the pace is accelerating. I started with 23 characters on 8 teams, and now it's down to 18 characters on 6 teams, due to elimination and consolidation. Some teams have had a relatively easy time, fighting successive waves of Khairic Acolytes or Grot Scutlings. One poor team ran up against 4 Blood Warriors and 5 Wrathmongers, but they had a pretty defensible position on one of those narrow, winding tiles, forcing the followers of Khorne to attack with only one or two at a time. (Apparently Khorne's followers are unfamiliar with ranged weapons.) But now that group might be doomed because the Ogroid Thaumaturge just popped up behind them. There are currently two areas where two team are fighting each other right now, so I expect that the game will collapse down to maybe four teams and a dozen heroes within the next two turns.

Oh, how is Silver Tower? I recently acquired a complete copy of the original WQ and have a copy of SoH en-route once the reprints start shipping again. I feel I might have bitten off more than I can chew but I had to see what all the fuss was about.

The only versions of Warhammer Quest that I have played are the first edition and Silver Tower, and I think that Silver Tower surpasses the original in every aspect except maybe the tiny furniture of first. One very crucial difference is that Silver Tower doesn't need a dungeon master. Another big difference is that all of the Silver Tower components are lovely, especially the minis and the cardboard map sections.

Silver Tower has some really neat, addictive mechanisms at the core of the game. Rolling dice and then spending them for actions is very satisfying, except when you get a bad streak of luck and miss some combat rolls. Racking up Reknown (xp) is also enjoyable because all of the heroes move tokens around on a shared display, so you can easily see who is the closest to gaining another skill card. Every character feels somewhat distinctive, and you get the dungeon crawl tactical experience because some characters excel in melee while others want to hang back and sling ranged attacks. Every adversary type rolls a die each turn to determine their tactics for that turn. Even if you replay quests, there is a lot of potential variation in opponents and random events, so there is great replay value to the game.

The worst thing that I can say about Silver Tower is that each quest is usually a little too easy, except that the final boss room can be fairly challenging. The base set has fairly limited variety in terms of both heroes (6) and adversary types (8), but you can double that variety if you also get Hammerhal. Better yet, get the decks of additional heroes and additional adversaries and then you have lots of variety.

If you've got Hammerhal on the way, you will get something pretty close to Silver Tower. Hammerhal does need a dungeon master, and the dungeon tiles are more utilitarian and less pretty than Silver Tower.

If you really enjoy Hammerhal, the other game you might want to look into is Blackstone Fortress. It's similar to Silver Tower but even better, and takes place in the 40K setting. The initiative system is better, and the adversaries have better tactics, plus reinforcements.

The first has tiny furniture? My copy doesn't. Are you thinking of Hero Quest?

Thanks for the in depth rundown though! If SoH is a hit I'll look into it for sure.

Not as keen on the 40k universe but if I see an affordable Blackstone it might be worth a shot

Andi Lennon wrote: affordable Blackstone

Oh, Andi

Hahaha yeah I know. You don't wanna know what I paid for WQ 95 :/

Andi Lennon wrote: The first has tiny furniture? My copy doesn't. Are you thinking of Hero Quest?

Whoops, yeah, I'm thinking of Hero Quest. I know that I have played first edition of Warhammer Quest at some point, but I don't remember details now.

Several years ago, I realized that I was never going to be better than an adequate painter of miniatures, and that painting minis would be a joyless and tedious exercise for me. I also realized that games with minis tended to be overpriced for my purposes, because I wouldn't get the same value out of those minis as a normal player. So when I bought Silver Tower, Hammerhal, and Blackstone Fortress, I bought stripped copies on eBay. That means everything except the miniatures. I swiped relevant art from online and cropped it to print and glue to wooden nickels. That's how you get affordable copies of these games. But I sort of regret it in the case of Blackstone Fortress, because those miniatures have amazing sculpts.

Finished out Aeons End Legacy tonight. The boss before the last absolutely crushed us, as our party wasn't set up to really deal with the and he did. Looking forward to trying this particular boss again with randomized setups. We annihilated the last boss though! On the whole it was quite fun, though I do prefer randomized setups more than playing the same mages over and over I guess. You can plainly see that the designers took the coolest stuff from Legacy and refined it into the replayable Expedition mode in New Age (with the Nemesis cards that get stronger, and the treasures that give your mages upgrades as you go), but the legacy version has a lot of fun/unique stuff too. Less of the market cards are directly compatible with the other AE sets than I was anticipating, but you do get a ton of really good Nemesises and Nemesis cards at least. Plus all the gameplay material from the first 4 waves fits in the Legacy box which is nice. Going to have to figure out something else when wave 5 hits, but whaddya gonna do.

My copy of WQ95 was mostly destroyed by a delusional (clinical dx) ex-wife and a couple hyper religious family members. I Have since done a full print and play version of the game using paper figures and foam core. The papercraft bats are mounted on curved acetate attached to pennies and have a happy little bounce to them. I have made gratuitous use of the online community for extra tiles and such to expand the game.

Maybe my imagination is running wild, but I feel you might be burying the lede here.

Played some Merchants of Venus and it's just pure pleasure. What a game.

Ah_Pook wrote: Finished out Aeons End Legacy tonight. The boss before the last absolutely crushed us, as our party wasn't set up to really deal with the and he did. Looking forward to trying this particular boss again with randomized setups.

Continuing to ramble to myself about AE, turns out we played the boss before the last wrong and made it WAY harder than it should have been. In more detail, he has a special turn order card that makes one of his Nemesis turns do some extra bad stuff. I failed to notice that it was supposed to replace one of the regular turn order cards, not be an additional turn. So each round the Nemesis was getting three turns instead of the regular 2. That combined with his schtick being to flood you with weak minions that you have to keep under control, and that you lose if too many come out, made for a quick and very brutal loss. We just couldn't keep up with an extra turns worth of trash mob spam.

I ran it back today 2 handed with corrected rules and random market/mages and won... Not comfortably but not too badly either. He's still a real fucker. I probably should have suspected something was off when the final Legacy boss was so much easier than the miniboss has been.