What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

It's an interesting point that the component load itself can lend toward the complexity of a game. Independent of any accessibility of the gameplay itself. I think I tend to agree.

ubarose wrote:

mc wrote:
In any case my kids really like Agricola.

I find it interesting how Agricola is now a game we play with kids. When it first came out it was positioned as this complicated, strategic gamers game. Just looking through the old rule book it is clear that they were really concerned that people wouldn't "get it," so they have so much verbiage explaining how to play, plus the boards with all the explanations on them (which I don't know if anyone actually every used).

Kids are better at learning games than most adults.

We should all do the next generation a favor and teach them how to play with their Pokemon cards.

I think we need to be cognisant of the fact that our kids have weirdo boardgaming parents. Every time mine have tried to teach a game to one of their friends (“it’s super easy and fun!”) they’ve hit a wall of glazed eyes. There is still a big gulf between board games and Board Games.

As for Agricola we’re talking about a game from thirteen years ago that had a tiny initial print run and was aimed at the domestic German market that was, and still is, heavily oriented toward family gaming. I remember someone on this site once interviewed Hanno from Lookout and he made a point either here or elsewhere that they thought the game would be super niche with just a few hundred copies sold so were trying to broaden its appeal as wide as possible. I don’t think there was anything dishonourable in their intent, even if a bunch of jerks who made the game popular in hobby circles ended up making it seem that way.

mezike wrote: I think we need to be cognisant of the fact that our kids have weirdo boardgaming parents. Every time mine have tried to teach a game to one of their friends (“it’s super easy and fun!”) they’ve hit a wall of glazed eyes. There is still a big gulf between board games and Board Games.

.

Yeah this, I think. I wouldn't think to try with many of my kid's friends.

Also the attitude up above about just building a farm for the fun of it, that's how we roll, a bit. Everytime we play I think, there has to be a scoring variant someone has made out there which rewards specialisation instead of diversification. If I play properly, sure, I can build a really tight farm with everything it needs, but, yeah, toting up at the end is boring and anti climactic and you can tend to see who's got the better one scoring wise. "Buy a different game" is another solution but one I'd prefer to avoid, I don't need another big heavy(ish) WP style euro (Agricola isn't that bad, systems wise, is it - the flow of turns are not hard for kids to understand, I think), and my kids most likely won't let me part with it.

90% of my kid's friends have grasped/excelled the games we have thrown at them. Probably 50% of the.(non traditional gaming) adults have managed the same.

Still finishing off various home projects before the weather turns cold, so I haven't had much time to play board games lately. But I left Blackstone Fortress set up on my gaming table, and have been playing a turn or two here and there when I am taking a break between tasks.

My early impression of Blackstone Fortress was that it was still a little too easy, which is not an ideal quality in either a solitaire or co-op game, especially for an extended campaign. In truth, Blackstone Fortress is precariously balanced, and the sweet spot for play is when a given combat gets a little ugly and your team has taken some damage. Normal damage is a hinderance but you can take it in stride, spending action dice here and there to do some field dressing. But grievous damage can't be healed during a fight, so a character with a couple of grievous wounds is really in a bad spot. And if a character gets taken completely down during a combat, they could die after the fight, automatically bringing a mission to an abrupt and early end.

So my first mission featured 3 easy combats, except for a string of bad die rolls leading to a dead hero at the end of the third one. I'm only in the first combat of my second mission, and already one character has taken 2 grievous wounds while the enemy has received some reinforcements. I might need to start paying closer attention to certain special abilities and the support ship advantages that can be used once per mission. Maybe even start using some real tactics aside from just charge at the enemy while blazing away.

How embarrassing. I have been commenting that Blackstone Fortress seems too easy, but my first two missions have now ended incomplete due to the death of a character. And I haven't even been to any of the five strongholds yet.

The first encounter in mission two was a non-combat challenge that involved my team rushing to grab loot that was temporarily available, resulting in a mildly painful collision between two team members. They both failed their vitality rolls afterwards, so we went into the first combat with a couple of injuries. That combat was going okay, until the enemies got a couple of good reinforcement rolls, bringing back most of the original opposition. By the end of the fight, most of my team had at least one grievous wound. Third encounter was my reptilian hunter dude getting ambushed alone by 3 ur-ghuls and 3 traitor guardsman. He had a great first round of combat, stunning and/or injuring 2/3 of the enemy, but the event phase deprived him of bonus destiny dice in round two. By round three, he was down and out and the combat ended. There was a 20% chance that he would die of his wounds after the fight, and I rolled badly.

I need to take Blackstone Fortress more seriously now. There are only 8 characters in the base set, and a mission requires exactly 4 heroes, so this campaign will end once 3 more heroes have died. I think my problem is my casual, intermittent playing of a turn or two at a time leaves me lacking in focused tactics. I should commit to playing out a full combat when I sit down to play, which is probably only a 10-15 minute commitment.

I got to watch a bunch of kids (around 14 years old) playing Settlers of Catan dead wrong. They were enjoying themselves so their rule set must have been fine, but I asked if any of them had ever read the rules and the one guy said someone else had showed him how to play and he had taught the others.

So yeah, I think some modern games aren't necessarily as dead-simple as we think, but I think the current generation is doing the exact same thing we did, just passing on bad-habits from one person to the next.

Today I played American Rails on TTS and, even though the people I play it with is great, I'm increasingly skeptic about the game.

The game has a tendence to grind against the rails. It often puts you into do-or-do situations in which one player can lose the game on the spot or where they need to follow a very exact sequence of moves to prevent a runaway leader. The dynamics of the game are often ugly and not in a way the designers intended.

There are companies in the game with 2 and 3 shares. If a player manages to get full control, he's at a massive advantage so you have to throw yourself to block them. But if you do, you both come out way worse because now neither player can gain an advantage over the other. There's a single 3-share company in Chicago Express and it's already tense, 3 of them is just too much.

You have to throw yourself and auction shares to prevent runaway leaders but the minimun bid is 10. You cannot "water down" stock. Spending half of your money just attemping to slow down another player will make you lose. In today's game there were a lot of situations where the wrong person getting the wrong share would cause the game to spiral out of control. And we had one situation in which two players were in a dollar auction: Whoever lost the share would lose the game but if they bid everything, they would also lose the game.

The game is also very development-based and much longer than CE. This means that an early advantage grows for longer and longer. It's very difficult to gain an advantage on tempo or win with a bad company. If you are in a bad spot, the game will drag enough for you to be unable to compensate. There are only three auctions per turn, one less than in CE, but two more companies and far more building actions than in it or any other game in this family.

In fact, today's game could have been over on the first turn. In the initial auction, a player got three shares. He could have blocked one of the three auctions spaces and get a massive bonus before the first turn. He did not realize, but I did. I also noticed several spots in which they could have forced auctions and I did notice a player was out by the beginning of the second round.

I just think the game doesn't work well. My friend loves it and I have fun playing with them but I'm far less hopeful. I think they haven't realized how weak the game's structure is because they aren't very strong players. I'm not, either, but having played so many similar games I'm not hopeful.

Gary Sax wrote: It's an interesting point that the component load itself can lend toward the complexity of a game. Independent of any accessibility of the gameplay itself. I think I tend to agree.

Root wouldn't have been a third as popular without its player aids. In fact, I would say the game would have become yet another dudes on a map forgotten in the depths of the BGG database were it not for the art style and how well-presented the player aids are. They are that important.

Sagrilarus wrote: I got to watch a bunch of kids (around 14 years old) playing Settlers of Catan dead wrong. They were enjoying themselves so their rule set must have been fine, but I asked if any of them had ever read the rules and the one guy said someone else had showed him how to play and he had taught the others.

So yeah, I think some modern games aren't necessarily as dead-simple as we think, but I think the current generation is doing the exact same thing we did, just passing on bad-habits from one person to the next.

Another generation, and you'll get to collect all of the resources the robber has stolen whenever you roll a 7....

I don’t think I’ve ever played Monopoly with the correct rules.

When I was a kid (which seems like both yesterday and a million years ago, simultaneously) it was very common to house rule games. A game played at one house may have been quite different at another.

These days, I don’t see that much. But it could just be the people I play with.

n815e wrote: I don’t think I’ve ever played Monopoly with the correct rules.

When I was a kid (which seems like both yesterday and a million years ago, simultaneously) it was very common to house rule games. A game played at one house may have been quite different at another.

These days, I don’t see that much. But it could just be the people I play with.

If anything I see the opposite. People are scared to make any change, even in places where the rules don't provide clear guidance.

Been playing a ton of That's Pretty Clever, a cool little multicolored dice game. It's great for what it is. Current 2p high score is 338- it's on the refrigerator.