What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I've been playing a bit of Knizia's Babylonia over vassal, and the thing is tight. Every turn is seat of your pants decision time, and every game has it's own little thing going on, an ever so slightly different feel depending on the spread of tokens and what powers people end up taking. Terrific old school euro feel as you'd expect. Not as confrontational as say T&E or whatever but plenty of blocking of connections and horning in on other people's rackets and you are always a bit stretched. Always a big move or two to build towards. I've now played at all the counts and they are all good. I've only played on vassal asynch but it would go quick in real life. At the first pass it was yeah, okay, good solid Knizia (so, more than okay if that's your thing), but it has kept on getting better and better. Most of the guys I'm playing with have got 10s of games under their belts already (I don't!), and I'm pretty sure it's going to hold my attention for that long easily. If you like your classic Knizia's you probably should check it out and give it a run of plays - it's up there with the best.

Babylonia is very much Samurai+Through The Desert. It's awesome, but I think it's got a pretty limited audience in today's board game scene. It got reviewed and talked up back when it came out in Germany if memory serves, but there was a long time between that and the American release. And like... I just don't know how many people are going to get hype up about a boring looking family weight tile laying game that time warped in from the late 90s even if it's super good (like Babylonia emphatically is).

I don't pay attention to new games anymore, but now Babylonia is on my radar. Thanks!

IMO, the few times I do try new stuff it seems like there's mostly a lot of shit JASE and half-finished-barely-a-game-but-has-minis crud out there. To me, Knizia creates games you play against other people, and not against an algorithm to see who can solve it most quickly. So his non-kid games are always at least a "try a couple times" for me.

bump

I posted a longer thing about it in its own thread, but we have like a little TWBG tabletop simulator casual Oath club going and it is bringing me a lot of joy in this tough time. When you're clocking in at a somewhat leisurely two hours, including dealmaking, the game sings and fits my own weird game preferences perfectly.

What sort of times are you playing Gary?

Hey mc, we generally play in the early afternoon on Saturday US---we have some europe time zone and some US time zone players so that splits the difference. Consistent 4 of us. I put info on my little discord server we coordinate on in the tabletop simulator thread. I'll bump it again with the info for my server if you're interested.

I can also do weekday evenings now that the semester is mostly over. Let me know if you want to play. I can always teach, too, if you haven't worked through the rules. Teaching takes a bit of time and early games are slow so it can be a bit of a dud for the first game or two.

Alhambra is beta on BoardGameArena and the release is solid. It’s one of the few pure euros I still really enjoy. Worth a look, especially on a desktop as desktop browsers show the cheat sheet as well.

Tough game to implement visually in software. I’m impressed with their work.

Gary Sax wrote: Hey mc, we generally play in the early afternoon on Saturday US---we have some europe time zone and some US time zone players so that splits the difference. Consistent 4 of us. I put info on my little discord server we coordinate on in the tabletop simulator thread. I'll bump it again with the info for my server if you're interested.

I can also do weekday evenings now that the semester is mostly over. Let me know if you want to play. I can always teach, too, if you haven't worked through the rules. Teaching takes a bit of time and early games are slow so it can be a bit of a dud for the first game or two.

Thanks Gary - in a few weeks I'll be off on holidays myself so might be able to make it if there is still something going on. Early arvo US is first thing here, and I'm an early bird so that can maybe work. I'll let you know.

Had a couple of Cyclades two player games. Much better than i anticipated. Plenty of Cosmic Frog... review coming this week.

So my buddies and I are playing The Crew online and we’re up to mission 19. The challenges aren’t changing much at the moment, just involving more goals per hand.

Has anyone played beyond this? Is it just more of the same? I’m curious to know if this is a game where it’s expected you finish all 50 scenarios, or if they’re just up there to provide ever more impossible challenges? They’re getting pretty tough and we aren’t half way yet.

You can look at the logbook and see, they generally get harder and harder. There are definitely some curveballs in there too aside from just "more tasks!" My personal favorite as far as wtf value is "the player to the left of the player with the Red 9 in their hand must win all red cards".

Edit: also, once you find a level of difficulty you're comfortable with you can just replay those missions. The deal will be different each time, and beating a mission once doesn't mean it's "solved" and you can't play it again. And as you're doing that, if you collectively find things getting easier as you get better you can go from there.

Just wearing out this copy of Spirit Island. I'm glad I spent the (I thought at the time) indulgent silly money on getting the wooden tokens and expensive organizing box in that last KS.

Sagrilarus wrote: Has anyone played beyond this? Is it just more of the same? I’m curious to know if this is a game where it’s expected you finish all 50 scenarios, or if they’re just up there to provide ever more impossible challenges? They’re getting pretty tough and we aren’t half way yet.

It simply gets harder. There are some interesting missions, but of them are just a increase in difficulty. The missions in the online expansion do seem more interesting, though.

I'm surprised you are finding it difficult. I'm awful, awful at trick-taking games and thought it was pretty easy, at least until whatever point we played.

I'm not sure my couple of thousand trick-taking hands over the last 45 years are doing me any favors. My deep brain wants to control control control and this game is more about getting out of the way most of the time.

Well we aren't 40% done yet, so even though we're cruising through, I can see the complexity rising and it's due to more than double. As it stands we're redoing missions. We just had an awful goals draw that was about impossible to clear. Hopefully the re-deal tonight will be better.