What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Taught my spouse Food Chain Magnate. It was... extremely easy to teach? It's an incredibly thematic game which did a ton of the heavy lifting for me, very sharp satire.

I couldn't resist, and bought a copy of Pan Am last night, and the three of us here at home played it last night. I'm not sure what it feels like - it isn't Prospero Hall's answer to Power Grid, and it isn't Ticket To Ride.

While I consider that some more, here's what I think after one play:

- At least for the first play, 60 minutes on the box is a bald-faced lie. I told everyone 90 minutes for the first play, but it took two hours. I think that might be because neither my wife nor my daughter had never played a worker placement game before.

- The game definitely puts you on the hook for what to spend your money on. Screw that up (raises hand) and you can lose big.

- Bits are nice. Cost $35 at Target, and I didn't feel cheated.

I'll try to talk the family into playing it again today.

Whenever in person gaming is a thing again I'm definitely picking Pan Am up, I think it looks really fun.

Chicago Express with two others; This has a very low margin for error in the auctions. I was clearly out by the third round. Despite this i quite liked it. It does play simple and quick, but i doubt i will keep it long term.

Through the Ages - Have had a run of two player online games (steam version). Lost many but won the last couple having worked out how to play this game. Might be better as a PC game to be honest.

Two more short intro games of Food Chain Magnate. This game is great! And savage! I'm surprised we didn't have any hurt feelings around here.

Still no milestones. I'm honestly super skeptical about how fiddly that part of the design is.

Lots of games played this eve.

Played Oath on TTS with a friend who has a preorder on it.

At first blush a fairly straight forward area control game with a wide rock paper scissors power relationship between faction cards you use to buff attacks. However what makes this game interesting is the layers built on this, different victory conditions, memory from one game to the next, switching sides and the variety in the card deck. Great art too.

I won a two player game via the straight area control victory condition as the usurper with some cheesy die rolls and a fairly blunt attack attack attack strategy. I can't give a comprehensive comment on the game because i ignored half of the mechanics in the game for relics etc, which can open up very different routes to play. Looks good, but personally i'd balk at the price tag.

Pretty solid streak of gaming this past week.

Played Lost Cities for the first time in too long with my wife. It's right up there on my list of perfect games with Carcassonne and Thebes. Just so good in every aspect. She had a twenty point or so advantage after two rounds, but the tensions of holding high-value cards the other player needed versus actually diving to find the cards you needed were so great, as always.

Taught my sister Jaipur and played a round with her while we waited for everyone else to get ready for something more substantial. Wish we could have played longer as the strategy isn't obvious on first play but good to be reminded too how great this game is. Easily won as gold and jewels kept flopping for me.

Also introduced my sister and brother-in-law to Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age when he asked to play Yahtzee. They took first and second by rushing buying developments every single turn through the early purchase of Quarrying and Coinage, and I finished with negative points for the first time in known memory, just completing my seventh city in the time for the game to end. A fine time had by all.

Also played Don't Let It Die, my first Gamecrafter production. You are a team of Neanderthals that have discovered fire when lightning struck a tree, and now you're trying to keep the fire alive while you learn how to create it yourself. Resource collection and crafting and tech trees ensure. It was better than I expected. Most of the game was in finding the synergies between the characters, which we did. A little bit of card counting allowed my psycho killer Gronk and his two stone knives to clean out dinosaurs and boars which then triggered healing on our witch doctor and fire knowledge of someone dressed like a dog. S'aright.

And now I'm going to try solo Carcassonne.

Been playing lots of DOWNFORCE and WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD with my wife and kid. It's pretty fun; maybe they'll want to play something else someday but my wife so rarely wants to play games that I'll take what I can get.

I've realized that I have about zero patience for learning games, especially heavier ones, on Board Game Arena. Or maybe in general. But fuck me, as soon as I try to learn something new and it pops up looking like yet another goddamn spreadsheet (YAGS?) I just mentally check out and start clicking randomly, hoping that the game will end and grant me merciful relief. Which is kind of a shitty thing to do to the other people playing, so ... sorry? I need to get into the habit of looking at a game before I join a table. Recent offenders:
- CITY OF BIG SHOULDERS (what a stupid name for a game)
- TEOHOUTCHILAN (or however you spell)
- LORDS OF XIDIT, some programming game

On the other hand, I've been playing a ton of RALLYMAN GT, CAN'T STOP, ICE COLD ICE HOCKEY, and a few more.

dysjunct wrote: On the other hand, I've been playing a ton of RALLYMAN GT, CAN'T STOP, ICE COLD ICE HOCKEY, and a few more.

I've been on Rallyman and Can't Stop, so thanks for the rec on Ice Cold Ice Hockey.

Game selection is key, in real life and online.

Before COVID struck we had just begun getting into Lord of the Rings: LCG as I had a couple of core sets. Now lockdown has been loosened the two members of my group who can come out at this time bought LotR: LCG stuff while locked in, as did I, so we started getting some decks built and back into it.
We've gone through the core quests again, interesting how they are a bit harder now with larger (proper) decks rather than what you can scrape together from a couple of core sets and saw us drop three games before we got the three quests done, and am following that up with the fan-quests from Ninjadorg on BGG (Tristan Hall from Hallornothing).

Had a couple of games of Legendary: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, forgot it wasn't a Legendary Encounters version so it wasn't as challenging as those ones (Aliens, Firefly, X;Files) but still fun.

And a game of FFG's Civilization (with both expansions), I screwed this up by not reading the FAQ/errata for Greece being used with the expansions - basically the player who took it used a social policy that allowed him to get two Tech advances a turn from turn 2, the game was basically decided by turn 5 (he was untouchable and so far ahead of the other two of us) so we called it. What really pissed me off was that because it is a once a year game I had forgotten that the same thing had happened (with the same player) two years earlier .

Played the first four turns of a new Fields of Fire I Normandy campaign on Tabletop Simulator. While the Tabletop Simulator implementation is not nearly as slick or as good as the VASSAL one, there is something about having a physics engine and virtual table which makes the experience way better when I'm playing a solo game.

Fields is still an all time great deeply flawed masterpiece.

Played a 5 player TTS game of TMNT: Shadows of the Past. One of the people in my game group has the KS edition, and the game has been a hit with our group.

The scripted module sets up the mission and generally makes things easy to handle; there were a few visual bugs, for example I was the only person who could view my health or focus.

I like the dice sharing mechanic a lot; it's probably my favorite feature of the game. One thing I'm not crazy about is how it always seems to devolve into this scrum in the middle of the board until the heroes can eventually push toward the goal. I suppose games would take 10 minutes if that didn't happen, though.

I'd like to see how the Batman Animated series version stacks up.

Have only managed to get in one game of this since I traded for it. I also love the dice sharing system. Our game kind of devolved into a morass in the middle, too, until Raphael had a burst in one round that cleared space and the Turtles won the day. Is the Batman one out yet or is it the massively overproduced KS release from last year that you're referring to? Themewise, I'm kind of interested in it (moreso than the Turtles, really), but there's no way I'd be tossing down that kind of money (even if I had it.)

I don't think the Batman game has materialized yet. It was indeed the massively expensive KS from recent times. Had my friend not already owned the TMNT game, I would have had a harder time rejecting it.