What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played two rounds of Sushi Go Party! with different menus. It was alright. The art is cute, the strategies and rules are clear. Really nothing to complain about except the lack of a compelling reason to hate draft but for such a gentle, easy-going game that is probably a feature, not a bug. I’d play it again, but there wasn’t anything to really ramp me for another round. Just the promise of another breezy, pleasant experience, and sometimes that’s what you’re in the mood for.

Four games of Resistance after that. Taught these same friends the game earlier this year, so it went down smooth. There was much consternation among husbands and wives as they realized they couldn’t tell when their spouses were lying. The one newcomer couldn’t stop giggling when someone said he was being too quiet. He was a spy three games in a row. A great time, as you might expect.

Played HORRIFIED with the oldest kids (8 and 11) yesterday and it was great. The game is pretty simple - what you basically do is run around town to pick up color coded items (three colours) with numbers on them. Then you use the items to defeat the monsters you are up against, but that is where the story shows up for real. In order to defeat Dracula, for instance, you have to find red items (weapons) in order to smash his coffins and then defeat him for realzies using yellow (spiritual) items. The invisible man, on the other hand, requires you find evidence of his crimes by delivering items from specific locations to the police station, and then you can capture him.

It also has a very old school horror vibe which is nice, and with six different monsters (you are up against two or three at a time depending on difficulty) it seems to have pretty good legs. Hoping this will be one to replace Castle Panic which I'm pretty much done with.

Picked up SUB TERRA (collector's edition) on JoshLook's recommendation. Verdict: SOLID. A great co-op. Great theme that makes the whole game simple to explain. No issues with the BGG gripes about the tiles too hard to see. Expansions are nice and modular; easy to add it; easy to ignore.

Played a great solo game of Camp Grizzly. Drew four random characters and got all females. I got Karen the artist who starts with four survival cards, and the one who navigates nature trails freely. I also got a couple of expansion characters, including the selfish one and the pacifist Saffron. I set up the challenging lockdown map, which immediately became very challenging because my first cabin card was John the Carpenter. He is a cameo who follows counselors around the map and installs more locks.

It was a weird game. Quite a few cameos showed up early on, including Karen's boyfriend who almost immediately got ahold of the keys and escaped with the Van. Thanks to John (and Karen's boyfriend), the mean girl got trapped in the girl's shower, where a fire broke out. She died from the fire while trying to escape via a nature trail, but played a survival card that brought her back as a ghost.

The other counselors found good weapons and routinely knocked Otis off the board, but two of those weapons were guns with limited ammo. Karen died of a failed first aid attempt by a camper. At the end of the game two counselors made it one square short of an escape, only to die in a fight with Otis. So the only survivors were Otis and Karen's boyfriend.

dysjunct wrote: Picked up SUB TERRA (collector's edition) on JoshLook's recommendation. Verdict: SOLID. A great co-op. Great theme that makes the whole game simple to explain. No issues with the BGG gripes about the tiles too hard to see. Expansions are nice and modular; easy to add it; easy to ignore.

Also a solid endorsement from me. Just played the base game but we had a great time. I usually shy away from co-ops but the theme does so much work in this game. Good times!

hotseatgames wrote: Nemesis works better in co-op than I would have expected. A really great game.

Yep, I prefer co-op with three players, works/feels better than standard. Haven't played the campaign in the Untold Stories book yet.

Well I haven't actually played it yet, but I did get my copy of Cosmic Frog, and managed to make the following adjustments:

1. Paint all the frogs
2. sleeve the action cards
3. sort out the "normal game length" barren tiles into their own bag so it will be faster to set up

At home (where else?):

Several games of Everything Lost from Thomas Jansen, the self-published designer of Club Stories that I have raved about a few times on TWBG. I need to spend a bit more time and thought before writing about this in more detail because it deserves a bit more effort than a couple of off-hand paragraphs. I personally find it excellent, but it certainly won't be for everyone; prima facie it is an apocalyptic zombie survival game that leverages map-drawing as an atmospheric tool, but it does this trope so much better than any other game in the zeitgeist that I have tried. I also think it passes the fabled Josh Look criteria for a good horror game, replete with jump scares, tension building moments, an often desperate struggle for survival, escalating stakes, and the slowly unveiling horror of the wasteland descending on your local town. It even has a mini-campaign mode where you progress through four tiers of sort-of-branching paths (or five via an additional PDF scenario if you take the time to give Thomas some feedback).

There are downsides though, notably and most likely due to the small print run - in an effort to cut costs the cards in the game are made to work hard by filling several functions at once where a bigger and more economical print run would likely have seen them split out into several separate decks. Most egregiously the text is in the tiniest legible font imaginable; my eyesight is still thankfully pretty good but even I have a hard time reading some of the text, and a lot of people are in all seriousness going to want to have a magnifying aid to hand. Regardless of this the gameplay is really fulfilling although you must spend some time drawing the map in detail or all the tension just drops out of the experience. When you are desperately struggling to make it home, wounded and infected and on your last roll of bandages to cover the gaping bite wounds you have taken, it feels so much more important to make it through when all of the time spent making your lovingly detailed map is at stake of dissipating into nothing.

The game is marketed as a solo-gaming experience but my son and I have had a great time playing it together so I think it also works well as a co-operative experience. In any case this is a special yet niche treat from an overlooked designer/publisher that I believe will be right in the wheelhouse of some of the audience here.

Following on from recent discussions I went ahead and found a copy of the latest iteration of Agricola. For this latest edition Uwe has gone through all of the hundreds of cards that were in the previous release and various expansions and revised them into more synergistic sets, much to the dismay of the typical crowd who are despairing at the clearly scandalous rip-off of fewer cards in a game that is still the same price as it was ten years ago despite the significant increase in printing costs since then. Anyway, it has sheep-shaped wooden blocks so there is an upside.

We set up to play and I'll keep it short - daughter was the master of understatement, thanking me for showing her this game but noting that there might be other things that she would normally prefer to play, whilst son was less diplomatic and asked me not to sell it on too quickly as he would consider playing it again... solo... maybe... if there was nothing else more interesting to do... kids eh? So I played a few solo games and had some fun messing around with the card combos. I found some of the 'new to me' cards interesting but, in general, none of it matters much because baking bread + stone houses + family growth is still the dominant way to play. After a few games I got bored with it, what can you do. Will probably chuck it on eBay soon, I got a good enough deal that it will probably end up costing almost nothing to have had the opportunity to give it a few plays.

In another blast from the past I picked up a copy of Ryan Laukat's Above and Below which I had previously avoided because the Euro-crowd at the club circa 2015 were coo-ing over how novel and ground-breaking it was to have flavour text and random encounters in a game and it turned me off given they were thirty years late to the party and not the most reliable of taste-makers. How silly I was, this game is pretty darn fun. Build stuff, attract new villagers, and send them down into the catacombs where you can rob old men of their hard earned fish. It's never going to see hard repeat play but I like it for the simple and fun distraction that it is.

Someone in my five-year-old’s class tested positive, so he’s out of school until next Friday. At least that means we had time for some Rhino Hero. We didn’t play with hands, just drew off the deck on our turn, and most of the card symbols mean nothing in a two-player game, but he was all the way into it. Made some impressively tall towers and loved moving Rhino Hero to his next position with sound effects and everything. It was a joy and a pleasure.

Playing all the Cosmic Frog. And all my thoughts will be in my upcoming review and I guess that's why I never post in this thread lol

DarthJoJo wrote: Someone in my five-year-old’s class tested positive, so he’s out of school until next Friday. At least that means we had time for some Rhino Hero. We didn’t play with hands, just drew off the deck on our turn, and most of the card symbols mean nothing in a two-player game, but he was all the way into it. Made some impressively tall towers and loved moving Rhino Hero to his next position with sound effects and everything. It was a joy and a pleasure.

That right there is why you don’t teach your kid Agricola.

At a very small gaming get together ( don't judge, we're all very careful/responsible ) last weekend:

3 games of ANGOLA. The game never fails to disappoint and this was no exception. My partner and I went 3-0, winning twice with the Commies which we feel we've tweaked the play balance enough to be even. 

2 games of NEMESIS, both semi co-op five player. In the first game, the ship blew up when we ran out of Malfunction tokens. Players were too self focused on personal goals to worry about pesky broken rooms til it was too late. In several cases, they hadn't even reached their own goals. The second game went down to the very last turn as one by one players died from wounds caused by numerous aliens. In the last turn the last two survivors tried entering Hibernation. The firseryt one got in; the second one spawned an Alien, so he and the creature got splatted against the bulkhead as the ship jumped to lightspeed. Turned out the guy who made it into hibernation's condition was the other guy dying. God I love this game. 

We played with the Trait cards, which give each character a unique bonus ability. I've seen some say the Captain sucks, but his Trait allowing him to open/close doors really can be a game changer.
 
UNDERWATER CITIES. Described a TERRAFORMING MARS underwater, I found it dull at first, then gradually more excruciating. Unlike TM, the game has a fixed number of turns til it ends, so it suffers from the engine being just barely built and able to do cool stuff before its over. 

GIZMOS. A different engine builder, where you buy marbles coming out of a chute to buy tiles. Kind of like ROLL FOR THE GALAXY. Faster and more streamlined than UNDERWATER TORTURE. Not great or something I'd buy but I'd play it again I suppose. 

A few games of LAS VEGAS. A few more of SKULL, a quick bluffing game . 

We haven't used the trait cards yet for Nemesis. Mainly because we almost always have had someone that is a first timer.

They add virtually no rules overhead and buff up characters a bit, so I would always use them going forward.

Game of Oath today on tabletop simulator w/3 other TWBG veterans, it was great after such a work grind this fall. Two hours, some dramatic twists, and last ditch campaign by Sornars (now dubbed "The Bully") to win the game, having already stolen my grand scepter early in the game!