What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I got a couple of games for my birthday, that we've played over the past few days.

Lovecraft Letter - Love Letter meets the Cthulhu mythos. There are Cthulhu-flavored cards, that have their regular effect or a revved-up Insane effect. The Insane effect is more powerful, but playing an Insane card makes a win 2/3 as valuable as a normal win. It also subjects you to the possibility of an instant round loss. It was fun, and is still Love Letter.

Concordia - it's point salad on steroids, with a 'deckbuilder meets Power Grid meets Century: Spice Road' sort of feel. Every card in your deck is worth a ton of points, so buying cards is a must. Every card is also how you do anything, from producing goods to trading goods to building more houses to buying cards. A game took us about 90 minutes to 2 hours, but that would speed up a little bit once you figure out what a strategy looks like. I'd play it again.

Games played that I did not get on my birthday:
Wingspan - played twice. My daughter beat us the first time, 85-72-70. Then my wife curbstomped us with a first-round Raven. Finals were 105-75-72. Some people on BGG say the Ravens aren't broken but they're full of crap.

Terraforming Mars - I had pretty crappy choices for corporations, and the cards didn't make my corporation choice all that much better. My wife beat me 1x10^6 to 3.

Today I learned B-17 Flying Fortress Leader by DVG Games. It's a solitaire game about commanding the Eighth Airforce's strategic bombing campaigns throughout WW2 in Europe, based on the Air Leader series. Each campaign plays out over a series of months, broken down into x number of weeks each. You can fly 2 missions per week against targets you select from the available Target pool. You have specific goals given by the campaign (destroy x VP worth of Luftwaffe plane factories, etc), and secondary missions that pop up (destroy x VP worth of a specific Target type over the next two months) that give you benefits or penalties depending on how much you focus on them or don't. Your actions will also directly affect Luftwaffe reinforcements that get sent against you and such (for example, if you destroy a bunch of plane factories less planes will get sent against you in the immediate future). You get X dollars to start and X dollars per week, and you have to buy and arm all your bomber and figure squadrons, and maintain them as they get damaged etc. Groups that survive will level up and get better stats etc.

So, there a lot of moving pieces. The rulebook is 51 pages and is kinda lacking as far as organization etc, though there is a 2e rulebook I downloaded that seems better in that regard. It took me 3 hours to go through the rules, get set up, and play through 2 weeks (of the 15 weeks in the intro campaign). It was really fun though, and seems extremely playable once you get over the rule dump up front. You're mainly setting the missions and then you roll a bunch of dice/pull chits to see how your plans go.

I'm looking forward to adding in all the optional rules for weather and Intel/recon and stuff, and getting to the later years of the war where you have more plane types and you can buy tech upgrades and stuff. I guess it's down to how long a campaign takes to play out once you're comfortable with the rules, as to how far I get into all that.

This game definitely makes me that much more hyped for my pre-ordered copy of the Thunderbolt/Apache Leader and expansions in a few months, which has the pre-planning and leveling up and stuff but also has tactical mission resolution where you fly around on a map and shoot stuff.

Man, I really miss playing board games...

RobertB wrote: Wingspan - played twice. My daughter beat us the first time, 85-72-70. Then my wife curbstomped us with a first-round Raven. Finals were 105-75-72. Some people on BGG say the Ravens aren't broken but they're full of crap.

Wingspan is not very well balanced. Since the game is so short and so exponential in growth, having a resource-producing bird soon is a massive advantage.

We have been playing a lot of Catan with our son. It's been great, he really enjoys it.

Also I'm starting to get in Twitter arguments with randos about Catan. I think quarantine has gone on too long or something.

The last few nights I've been introducing 2 friends to Pax Pamir on TTS, slowly working them through a learning game. It helps that we're all experienced with Pax Porfiriana, so everyone seems to be settling into the rhythm and starting to see the strategy. Not surprisingly, it's vastly more interesting this way than doing the Wakhan AI, and I'm internalizing the procedures a lot faster.

san il defanso wrote: We have been playing a lot of Catan with our son. It's been great, he really enjoys it.

Also I'm starting to get in Twitter arguments with randos about Catan. I think quarantine has gone on too long or something.

Catan has been my go-to game for playing with my parents during quarantine. I used to get into arguments with people at game night about it all the time. People try to say that something like Castles of Burgundy is somehow similar, but better, and I'd lay into them.

I am not WAY active on Twitter, but this morning I woke up with over 20 notifications on my account for the first time. A lot of people felt the need to set me straight.

"Actually..."

Is Catan second only to Monopoly in terms of being dumped on? Monopoly is like the poster child, all the other MB/Hasbro type affairs seem to get skipped, too obvious I guess, and then it's Catan.

"trading makes it unfair"
"dice rolls make it unfair"

I was going to say I wished I understood the obsession with fairness in games but I really probably don't!

I guess for many people it was that game that got them started, so all of their adventures in gaming since (if you can call a gravitation towards no-luck medium -> heavy euros an adventure) feel like some kind of excursion into everything that is "better".

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Got hold of Treasure Island and have been playing it with the kids, it's quite fun.

If you ask me (people have not) some of it boils down to defining a lot of gamer identity in terms of what games are you DON'T play.

The other component that I think is a part of this is that a lot of gaming subcultures look down on people who focus on a single game. There's some condescending rhetoric that flies around, like "why don't they explore how many great games there are??"

The same narrative happens with D&D fans in the TTRPG community.

mc wrote: Is Catan second only to Monopoly in terms of being dumped on? Monopoly is like the poster child, all the other MB/Hasbro type affairs seem to get skipped, too obvious I guess, and then it's Catan.

Munchkin is probably equally despised.

san il defanso wrote: The other component that I think is a part of this is that a lot of gaming subcultures look down on people who focus on a single game.

Unless that game is Terraforming Mars.

My daughter and her boyfriend were curious about Pandemic Legacy: S1, and sadly enough we had an unplayed copy (A present for my wife from two Christmases ago). So we broke it out and played three games the other night. The first one was plain vanilla Pandemic, to get them used to the differences between that and Pandemic: Cthulhu. The next two we went 1-1, with the first game being the L. I've played it four times already, and this is number five. I'm trying to let those two run the show, but it's hard.

Played a 1 month scenario of B-17 Flying Fortress Leader today, wherein I was tasked with destroying U-Boat pens off the coast of France. The Luftwaffe spawned totally out of position to defend these targets, so it was just down to me outfitting and rolling correctly pretty much. U-Boat pens are Hardened, which cancels a hit for each bomb that isn't a bunker buster. Final mission of the campaign, 4 bombers attack a pen. If they destroy it I get the highest rating available. I only had enough money to arm 3 of them with bunker busters, so the fourth had ineffective M43s. The first three planes drop their busters and we're 3 hits short of destroying the target. The green 303rd needs their maximum 6 hits to destroy the target. Each M43 does 2 damage on a 7+, but one damage is cancelled by the Hardened target. It was a pretty dramatic clutch die roll, as the U-Boat pen was destroyed and they all flew home triumphant.