What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

dysjunct wrote: 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.

There are some Mario Kart variant rules out there that add a touch of whimsical fun and are worth checking out.

Just started playing Babylonia, Knizia's cross between like Samurai and Through the Desert, over vassal. Liking what I'm seeing so far. Anyone else played it? I believe you pretty much can't get it outside of Europe?

mc wrote: Just started playing Babylonia, Knizia's cross between like Samurai and Through the Desert, over vassal. Liking what I'm seeing so far. Anyone else played it? I believe you pretty much can't get it outside of Europe?

I bought it when it came out in Germany, and think it's really good. It does basically require a first playthrough to see how the scoring plays out and how the endgame comes up etc, but after that first playthrough it's great. Here's my first impressions from this thread, which pretty much mirrors where I'm at with it still. Easy to teach, fun and nasty to play.

Also I ordered a German copy of Babylonia , and have played it 5 times so far. It feels a lot like Knizia's follow up to Blue Lagoon and it is GREAT. Take the super streamlined tile laying/route building of Blue Lagoon and mash in various concepts from Samurai, T&E, Through The Desert, and also unlockable variable player powers and voila. You can score by surrounding cities for majority a la Samurai, or by building huge networks of connected tiles that score when other people score cities. Both have hugely explosive score potential, which is really fun. Play things correctly and your late game turns are like I play these tiles and score 40 points and your opponent go... Wait what. Plus if you get majority of a ziggurat when it scores you get to claim a game breaking special power, which is just great fun. Place extra tiles, larger hand size, back to back turns, etc. Plus it's super quick (15-20 minutes 2p, 45-60 4p tops) and brutal to play. If you like nasty tile laying games like Knizia is famous for you should order this right now.

Played a few things recently:

Got in a two-player game of Tiny Epic Western. As noted in the article I wrote, TEW is in my top two of the TE series, mostly because it has weird depth. I'd never played with two people, though. There's a lot more separate action. Over the course of the six rounds, I think we ended up dueling only three times, which was unfortunate for me, since I was the Outlaw (+2 strength if you don't have the Wanted poster) but was fine, long-term, since we weren't aiming for the same poker hands and buildings most of the time. The Rival was more backbreaking than normal, though. Both of us were denied the ability to buy a building in a round by the Rival having the only card in the deck that could beat us. I ended up winning by 8 points, based almost solely on aiming for the higher VP buildings, while my opponent went for lower ones that suited his share strategy. The shares are worth less with only two players, so that was probably a mistake.

Speaking of two-player, I played two games of Through the Desert with another single opponent. I had also never played TtD as a 2-player. It's not enormously different, but it's much more like Go, as you might expect, since you spend a lot of time matching your opponent's moves or starting new areas and expecting them to match yours; unlike in the multi-player game where you often have to just stake out your own corner and try to squeeze as much as you can out of it, since if you try to operate in too many spots, you'll often get nothing. In the first game, I mostly just swept up point tokens and didn't close off any significantly-sized territories. I won narrowly. In the second game, my opponent got distracted by tokens and allowed me to section off large parts of the board, which not only gave me significant points bursts at the end, but three of the "longest caravan" tokens. I won that game with a significant margin.

Then we switched to Chimera Station. 2-player is funny because there's just as much competition over the good spots, but fewer overall workers and so fewer turns that force a default to the Lounge or the permanent modules. We played with the basic sides, since my opponent was new to it. I went with a Leaf strategy early to lift me out of food needs and then stuck with Claws to take the spots I needed. In a pretty low-scoring game, I won by around 30 points. The next day, I talked two of the people I actually live with into another game. 3-player is, of course, much more dynamic. I went heavy on Tentacles and Claws early, so I could just gather piles of what I needed, even while I was bumping people to the Lounge. I scored the Giant Statue in the 5th round and the Monolith had been scored in the 4th. But I ended up with probably half of the entire component supply in my pool or on my dudes, which netted me huge points, in addition to the final round shenanigans with the Command modules. I won by about 40 points, with a score over 200.

Most of my regular group is still leery about moving around and Michigan is seeing another surge since the bars reopened (the governor just closed them again), so it may be a while to get any larger games in. I still want to try Gandhi. I should just play solo.

Cosmic Encounter Duel is one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

Saw you talking about this on twitter. Sounds like it's the answer to a question no one asked: "let's make a game focused on only one thing, multiplayer dynamics, and take it out."

So we just got done with our first game of Tainted Grail and i'm pretty sure the hype was legit and it was worth waiting for. It's too early to call but this looks to have almost everything i dig and i'm super keen to carry on with it tomorrow. From what I've seen so far- this is big box kickstarter done right.

It was a toss up whether to start with this or The King's Dilemna but at a player count of three this seemed like the safer bet so the king will have to tent his fingers on my shelf for awhile longer.

Crikey - first gaming since early March last week now we are allowed to visit each other's homes over the pond in the UK. Two sessions so far where we finished off our Descent Shadows of Nerekhall campaign (the less said about our pitiful effort in the finale the better ... the OL winning in three turns was an insult to the hours we put in to get there ), and filled the rest of the time with Legendary Encounters: X-Files.

My regular group is four but one guy has a bad immune system health issue and he has put himself into fulltime isolation, we may not see him for at least the rest of the year so our gaming schedule will have to change - a bloody nuisance as we are two thirds the way through our Sword & Sorcery campaign. I suppose the only silver lining is that the four Kickstarters I have arriving in 2020 have all been delayed by an average of 6 months (and none really due to COVID by the sound of it) so that gives me time to get other games out of the way that should have been played in the last four months.

Got in a game of Terraforming Mars and it turned into a duel of super-powerful space/titanium engines, one with hefty discounts (Space Station/Warp Drive/Mass Converter/Quantum Extractor/Shuttles) and one with a neat biological sideline (Small Animals/Pets/Decomposers/Martian Zoo/Ecological Zone) plus some hefty additional science in the form of Physics Complex and AI Central. I'd never played Utopia Invest before, and found their versatility (sacrificing production for resources) invaluable near the end. Prelude and the base game map, we both topped 100 points, and the game took a little over two hours. Very high-power game. Still love TFM.

Tried my first game of Leaving Earth , which was interesting. It's a strange game. I enjoyed it, but I don't know if literally anyone I know will also enjoy it. Played an easy difficulty game to learn the mechanics, finished with 12/14 points in 1965. Missions in this game: Probe in space, Probe in orbit, Man in space, Man in orbit (heat shield failed during reentry, killing Buzz Aldrin and losing me 2p), Unmanned survey of Mars. Will crank up the difficulty and replay soon. I think this would make for a really interesting multiplayer game, as negotiation and deal making comes into the mix, but I think the odds of myself finding a group that wants to play this are infinitesimal.

Been playing some card games with my new house mates;

Bloody Inn, twice. This game comes to life if you take stupid risks an miscalculate as it forces you to try and delay the conseuqences of those decisions with more bad decisions. Far more entertaining this way. But if everyone is cautious can easily be a rather ok tableu builder card game. Our second game was the former.

London - I've gotten better at this. Im not a pro or anything but the game is starting to play out a bit for me although it is still enjoyable. Because you cannot really decide on a long term strategy there are optimal play principals that you just sort of refine. Works well two player.

Another game of Carcassonne with my wife in which she easily handled me by thirty points or so. Might have been competitive if I had realized that the farm I was trying to steal didn’t actually connect to my farmers and rectified my mistake.

My four-year-old gave good efforts on Rhino Hero, Ghost Blitz Junior and Animal Upon Animal. Unfortunately he has my wife’s fondness for randomness and would turn the die in Animal to whatever he wanted.

Yesterday I played two games of Cosmic Encounter, Dominion, Can't Stop, Dune and Battlestar Galactica. I'm beat.

Today two more games of Legendary Encounters: X-Files, then the Belly of the Beast mission in Gears of War (and somehow we won,- OK, it was by two of us being bleeding speed bumps and our mate sprinting for his life as the AI deck ran out), and finally a truncated game of Runebound 2E as after nine hours we ran out of time.
Great fun but I'm knackered as well.

Played another round of Unmatched last night. The SOHO board, I was Alice, my opponent was Medusa. First time for both of us with those characters.

I eeked out a narrow victory, mainly due to my approach of almost immediately killing all 3 Harpies. Still, with Medusa's 3 speed vs. my 2, AND Medusa having a ranged attack, AND being able to zap me for one HP every time I was in her zone at the start of her turn, I was constantly on the brink.

Alice has very few cards that specifically deal with the Jabberwocky, but the ones that are in there are powerful. Jabberwocky dealt out far more damage than Alice, but since it is expendable, that's really how you should play.

My thoughts after this session are that Alice is decent, Medusa seems not so great, and I disliked the SOHO map layout. I enjoyed playing as Sherlock more. I do love this game though, and would like to get the physical edition.