What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Michael Barnes wrote: Warcry is really, really great. It is easily the best set of miniatures rules GW has ever produced. It’s so smart, so smooth, so exciting.

Collecting GW will kill you. I did for about 4 years and I just quit cold turkey last summer. Warcry is actually what did me in. I started getting everything released for it and then the cost of it all finally hit me. Shelves and shelves of stuff. Tons of unpainted models. $150 kits not even built. So I let most of it go and it was like the sun coming out. I love Warhammer but I don’t have to own it I loved collecting it, building it, painting it, playing with it...but I felt like I wanted to get out from under it.

So beware!

Yeah the dice matching system is really cool, the one roll combat is smooth and the variety of scenarios on offer is great. the core box has proven to be really good value. I'm well aware of the perils of falling afoul of GW's cult of covetousness. A former acquaintance worked in one of their stores once and told me that by their estimates the average outlay of everyone who bought a starter stet of some kind wound up being in the $2,500 mark.

Forewarned is forearmed and I'm sufficiently wary...but that Corvus Cabal crew looks rad. Oh and Nurgle! ....fuck.

I have NOT been playing Terraforming Mars. It's a resource management game, and I get enough that sort of thing from my career in accounting and finance. One of my peers at work likes to play boardgames, so we talk about games from time to time. He is the heir apparent to the family business, so it would be strategic for me to play up the boardgame angle. Unfortunately, all he can talk about lately is Terraforming Mars. Fortunately, the pandemic gives me an easy excuse to avoid playing boardgames with him for now, and hopefully he will move on from Terraforming Mars before we get a vaccine. I did talk him into getting Dune for his brother's birthday present, so maybe they will get into that soon.

Michael Barnes wrote: You need to analyze your tapping strategy and work the angles, man. You can't just expect to hammer the button and win, that is a highly sophisticated game that demands a lot out of you if you want to reach peak skill levels.

I know I risk ridicule by pretending that wasn't sarcastic but...
I like Loopin' Louie (at least, the versions I've played) precisely because it allows you to play skilfully if you want. If you prefer to play it as a button-masher -- more power to you!

You are in good company in your appreciation for such a fine game.

Behold! the tournament rules !

Good weekend of gaming in these parts although somewhat bittersweet as our eight month campaign of Kingdom Death Colon Monster came to an ignominious end at the unrelenting hands of The Watcher. After 27 sessions averaging around three hours apiece i must admit to being a bit burned out on it by the time our woefully under-prepared settlement reached the climax, but i know we'll be back to try it all again once the Gambler's Chest arrives.

Inspired by Matt's write-up of Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter and in need of some lighter fare as a palate cleanser i grabbed a copy and we had a great two game session that was supremely easy to learn and ran super smoothly. My partner wasn't hugely enamoured of it as she usually prefers co-ops, but whilst dominating the board as Slaine or eking out a last minute sneak victory as Johnny Alpha i had an absolute blast and i'll be absolutely looking to get some more lighter competitive fare of this variety to balance out all the heavy narrative stuff we normally gravitate towards.

Finally we finally played our first session of 'The Quiet Year' and it's easy to see why it has been so influential and sustained such lasting appeal. I'll be doing a full write-up here shortly on the tribulations of our settlement but I know the tale we wove together will linger for a long time in our memories.

Still yet to brave 'Court of the Dead' but it stares down at me with longing so we'll see what next week brings.

Mezike, Not Sure and I played another game of John Company and it had its fits and starts but once we mastered the firm rules it was one of the more exciting games I've played.

I think in my heart I just like more complex games. I know a lot of people around here have swung back to lighter, shorter designs but coming back to this was like playing a qualitatively different experience of game than our excellent Root game this week. The ability to go in on a new company with Not Sure via a deal giving the new company a ship, most of my money, and in return getting 30% of the new company *and* swapping 10% of Mezike's company that Not Sure owned to me to bring me to 50%... that's the sort of subtle, ambiguous interaction that is hard to get out of a one and a half hour game. Especially in the context of so many other important moving parts and risk around it, contextualizing the decisions.

The dice rolls in this game are *agony.* They are consistently amongst the most dramatic dice rolls in a game I've ever played.

Andi, I look forward to your write-up of The Quiet Year. I bought it a few years ago, but I can't seem to get it on the table. Board gamers are spooked because it isn't a board game, and roleplayers don't think it's their kind of game either.

Played a few learning sessions of Giga-Robo. This is a love letter to anime robot fighting, with over the top moves, building smashing and various homages to shows and movies.

The game has a lot of variety, I don’t see myself getting bored with it.

Shellhead wrote: Andi, I look forward to your write-up of The Quiet Year. I bought it a few years ago, but I can't seem to get it on the table. Board gamers are spooked because it isn't a board game, and roleplayers don't think it's their kind of game either.

It's been submitted and should be up this week as I have a couple in the pipeline. Yeah it occupies a weird space but that's definitely one of it's strengths. The more I play board games and RPGs the more I'm starting to see the appeal of mechanics and narrative as possibly working best in entirely separate camps. But that's a whole other topic. The Quiet Year excels at putting the onus of creativity back on the player, which is awesome but yeah it definitely requires the right group to get the most of.

Re: John C

I think the biggest mistake I made in a game of general bumbling incompetence was to undervalue the risk of shipping when it came to my own firm. In our previous plays I’ve been chucking handfuls if dice to ship as President but for some reason with private firm I thought “nah, two or three will be fine” I cannot explain the attack of the stupids happening there other than I just didn’t appreciate the at-all-costs importance of cash flow going through the family firm. Which sounds even more dumb now that I’m writing it.

Gary Sax wrote:

The dice rolls in this game are *agony.* They are consistently amongst the most dramatic dice rolls in a game I've ever played.

Retirement rolls, amirite?

Msample wrote:

Gary Sax wrote:
The dice rolls in this game are *agony.* They are consistently amongst the most dramatic dice rolls in a game I've ever played.

Retirement rolls, amirite?

Some of them, but we had some wildly cursed dice that game. Lots of 4-die (and I think even a 5-die) Sail actions coming up with nothing. Even when we were playing conservatively things were just going wrong.

The comedy of watching the Company take 5 Emergency Loans one turn and the Chairman and all Senior Executives stay in their offices was like watching Brazil. (and in the background, nearly everything in India was becoming prosperous, perhaps because the Company was so inept.)

And I agree with Sax, there's just something that happens in a longer game that's clicking well. It's more appealing to me than playing lighter/shorter stuff, and much more appealing than playing four different games for 45 minutes each.

As long as the rules keep things flowing and otherwise stay out of the way (which Werhle rules are good at), it's a joy to see something unfold over time.

Played some TTS this weekend. Two matches of Unmatched, which is an awesome game. I won the first one, and the second actually got cut short by a power outage.

Then a 3 player game of Wiz-War. The mod had both expansions but wasn't geared up for the way I really like to play it, and of course all the damn cancels were in the deck. But it was still a blast.

Finished trying out my big variant scenario for Silver Tower. It was fun, but was probably too epic in scale to work in a normal game convention time slot. Having two copies of the room cards in a shared deck worked well enough, except that once there were only four teams left, the odds decreased that two teams would cross paths. Maybe throw in a rule about removing two pairs of matching room cards from the deck every time a team is eliminated. Also, the familiars became tedious after a while, so I pulled them out about halfway through.

The surviving team that ended up with all the shards was a 50/50 merger of survivors from two starting teams that suffered losses:

1. Saurus Oldblood, a dinosaur man who is also one of the toughest characters in the game, with a Save of 3+. That means that he only takes damage from a hit 1/3 of the time. He is totally a melee guy, except that he can use a 5+ die to Command another hero to take an action, which is handy when a constrained map prevents him from getting to melee range.

2. Tenebrael Shard, an elven assassin who can teleport and do double damage if he immediately hits an opponent after teleporting. He also gets a bonus attack if his attack roll is a six. Though just a melee fighter, his teleport can help when the map becomes unfavorable. He is one of the six starting characters that comes with Silver Tower.

3. Mistweaver Said is another elven character from the six starting characters in Silver Tower. She is an illusionist with a decent ranged attack and a stunning area attack.

4. The Warden King is just as tough as the Saurus Oldblood, plus his basic (1+) melee attacks hits 5/6 of the time for a reliable 2 points of damage. He can also do a charging shield bash to stun an opponent.

This team was so unstoppable that they finished the game by simultaneously beating the Skaven Deathrunner and the Loremaster, with zero wounds at the end. The Deathrunner is a ratman assassin with 13 hit points and an illusory duplicate. The Loremaster was the only remaining opposing hero, and he is almost as good in melee as the Warden King, has a ranged attack as good as the Mistweaver's, and is -1 to be hit by ranged attacks.

If I were to run something similar at a convention, I would probably want to cap this at four teams and have a second judge on hand to keep things moving briskly. And use a smaller deck of rooms.

Been playing DOWNFORCE on BGA; liked it enough that I picked up the physical version. It's not really a racing game, more like a game of billionaire playboys screwing each other over.