What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Amazon had SUSHI GO for $8 so I picked that up. The spawn (5yo) has declared that it is HER GAME and if it is found on my game shelves will quickly reappear on her bookshelf. She is really liking it despite never having eaten most of the foods.

Still playing SUB TERRA; a really fun game and so well done. Introduced my in-laws to it; my FIL was the only one to survive as the rest of us died alone in the dark.

My daughter is back from college; her roommates caught Covid, and she hightailed out of there. She is now out of quarantine, and we (wife, daughter, and I) played Pan Am. Destination cards were kind of shitty, but I hung on to the ones I got until well into the game. At that point they became useful for level 4 (or whatever the terminology is) destinations. It didn't help with the win, though. My wife got four stocks from Directives, which put her over, 19-17-17.

My daughter is now big on traitor/hidden role games online. She asked me, "Have you ever heard of 'Citadels'?" That was kind of out of left field. I'll have to play that sometime, it's only been about 15 years or so since I played it last. She also likes Secret Hitler, although she grumbles about the whole 'Hitler' thing.

In the "I can't believe you haven't played this" department, I had never played Race For the Galaxy before last night. My ex-coworkers organized a Tuesday night game on Boardgamearena, and that was the game they picked. So I sprung for the Steam version a half hour beforehand and played a couple of games to get familiar with it, then played a couple of games against real live humans. I can see why it has its rep; I can see there are multiple ways to get points and win. It feels like a revved-up San Juan, which isn't a bad intro to tableau builders.

There is an excellent free solo implementatiom of RACE :

keldon.net/rftg/

Coincidentally, we played Roll for the Galaxy today. I love Roll. If you're an experienced player, the orb is such a great addition in the new but very expensive expansion. It also further improves the two player game in a couple of important ways.

Some Spirit Island tonight after dinner. We're up to difficulty 5 but starting to struggle if we get the wrong matchups. We matched with France, me with the dahan spirit and my spouse with the ghost spirit. The ghost spirit just has a ton of trouble with all the town's France produces, it really wants to knock off explorers instead.

RobertB wrote: My daughter is back from college; her roommates caught Covid, and she hightailed out of there. She is now out of quarantine, and we (wife, daughter, and I) played Pan Am. Destination cards were kind of shitty, but I hung on to the ones I got until well into the game. At that point they became useful for level 4 (or whatever the terminology is) destinations. It didn't help with the win, though. My wife got four stocks from Directives, which put her over, 19-17-17.

My daughter is now big on traitor/hidden role games online. She asked me, "Have you ever heard of 'Citadels'?" That was kind of out of left field. I'll have to play that sometime, it's only been about 15 years or so since I played it lHitler. ast. She also likes Secret Hitler, although she grumbles about the whole 'Hitler' thing.

I've been wanting to try Inhuman Condition, the blade runner type Turing test that is available via the creative commons act made by the creator of secret Hitler. Have you tried that?

Thanks to a timely assist from Brewmeister, I obtained the Endless Peril and Advanced Arsenal expansions to Blackstone Fortress and resumed play yesterday. I was especially eager to get Endless Peril, because every standard mission involves a combination of 4 combats and 4 challenges, but the base game only has 15 of each. That can make for a lot of repetition. Instead of shuffling the new cards in with the base set, I put them on top of the respective decks to ensure that I was just playing with new content. I also burned three music mixes for the game, arbitrarily focusing on modern white funk with a good beat and upbeat pace, especially GRiZ, Grammatik, and Big Gigantic. I feel that Blackstone Fortress should be played at a brisk pace, and not like some deliberative puzzle.

I had enough clue cards to go after another stronghold, but instead elected to go on another standard mission to get back up to speed with my tactics. My first combat card was an ambush, which generally means starting in the center of the combat map instead of entering at the edge. That tends to mean getting into combat with all of enemy groups (typically 3 or 4) at once instead of initially fighting 1 or 2 of them until the others cross the map. The fight quickly got ugly enough that I used up several single-use items to turn the tide.

The next couple of fights went more smoothly, then I got a nasty new challenge card that left each of my explorers with a fresh grievous wound, and most of them already had a grievous wound, so this reduced my team to roughly half their normal actions per turn. The final combat of the mission featured only 2 enemy groups, but they consisted of both Chaos Space Marines and all 14 Traitor Guardsmen. To make matters worse, these two groups were well-positioned to leave my explorers initially pinned down between them, plus all the objective tokens were booby-trapped. Reinforcements arrived as the fight was winding down, leaving my badly-battered explorers to escape from a few remaining marines and guardsmen.

I now have enough clue tokens to go after the two remaining strongholds and then the secret stronghold that unlocks once I have cleared the first four strongholds. The Endless Perils cards add an ideal and welcome amount of variation to the combats and challenges. The Advanced Arsenal cards will probably work the same, but I didn't quite have time yesterday to do the post-mission shopping for gear yet. Blackstone Fortress has been really fun so far, and I am looking forward to delving into the Escalation expansion maybe by Christmas time.

WadeMonnig wrote: I've been wanting to try Inhuman Condition, the blade runner type Turing test that is available via the creative commons act made by the creator of secret Hitler. Have you tried that?

I hadn't heard of it before you mentioned it. My daughter thinks it might be interesting, but she wants more people.

I ordered Faiyum from France, because sometimes im an impatient fool (plus it was like $7 more than it would have cost to wait another month or two for it to show up in America), and tried out my first game of it solo last night. Man, this game seems super cool. Basically its the cardplay of Concordia (a shifting market, when you buy cards they go straight into your hand, on your turn you can basically pass and get cards back out of your discard pile instead of doing other stuff), combined with kinda Splottery communal infrastructure building. You get points as you go for building towns, connecting towns with roads, draining swampland etc, but nothing on the board is yours even if you built it. So building stuff is also opening opportunities for other players, who might have bought better cards to better capitalize on the things youre building. Then the endgame cards are big point cards that capitalize on different aspects of what players have been doing throughout the game. If there are tons of towns built up and you get an end game card that wants lots of towns then you can score big, even if youre not the one who built any of the towns. The other twist is that when you take cards back from your discard pile you only get the first 3 back for free then they cost $1 each, so the order you play things is very important and the timing of taking them back etc. Theres more but thats the main thrust.

So the big thing is solo is pretty different from the multiplayer game, since theres no bot or anything. You just play and do everything yourself. Solo scores are WAY higher than multi scores, and the entire timing aspect of the game is missing since no one can do things and take opportunities from you while you faff around doing other stuff. That being said it was a really fun sandboxy puzzle, and each turn was a real brainburner figuring out how to play things and what to do. It REALLY made me want to play the multiplayer game ASAP. I scanned all the cards and stuff today, and my friend is making a TTS mod for it, so hopefully that will happen tomorrow.

If you like euro games this one seems like a real winner. Easy rules, interesting player interaction, and lots of sandboxy stuff to explore.

Plus its got crocodiles!

Caesar Rome vs Gaul

Switched sides this time with me as the Romans. My opening hand kind of sucked, with 5 1 OP cards. I did get Caesars Pass for a VP and a semi decent foothold in Celtica. However 2 of the first 3 tribes were in Belgica and this became a recurrent theme as that area became a hotbed of activity. I could never get enough control up there to go after Engkand or Germany.

Mid game he got three adacent tribes in Celtica to and then linked them up with Vercegentorix to whack my secondary army good. By the end of the game I had one dead legion and all but two others were flipped. There were 14 dead Gallic tribes but I came up 2 VP short.

At work:

Yes, that's right, gaming at the (virtual) workplace. I ran a team-building event for my staff yesterday and wanted to find some fun things we could do in a virtual environment that wasn't yet-another-online-escape-room. The last one of these events that I organised was a few months back and I used an escape room experience but since then the concept has caught on and every single company event has centered around them so we're all starting to get a little sick and tired of them. So I decided to try a couple of 'our' games mixed in amongst the other activities.

Micro-Macro crime city - the online demo - worked very well as the concept is so simple and can be explained in just a couple of sentences. As soon as I gave an overview somebody asked "so it's 'Where's Wally?' with a murder?" The clue cards really help to guide what to look for on each step so it is very user-friendly as you don't need to store any game rules in your head while playing, only your current objective. It also worked as a collaborative exercise with one person driving the map view and the others giving instructions on where to scroll and zoom in. Lots of fun distractions are printed on the map which delighted the audience.

Fake Artist - I created a canvas in MS Paint and used the 'take/give control' feature in MS Teams to allow the players to draw on the hosted canvas. I think it could be done better by jointly working on a file hosted on the platform itself but I couldn't find an easy and intuitive way to do that with a blank canvas and a free-draw option (at least not on our implementation of Teams) so went with the desktop solution instead. The rules are also very simple to explain, and the Fake Artist twist got a really good reaction - "everybody gets the same clue word and you all take two turns to draw... but there is a twist!" In practice we had a connection problem with one person dialing in externally so they could not be given control but the game itself worked just fine. The Fake Artist escaped detection and also managed to guess the clueword, because the learning curve on this game struck again and everybody was too obvious with their art. If we didn't have connection issues then we would have played it again and I'm sure it would have had a different flow.

Online:
Oath, Oath, and more Oath. I keep thinking that I should slow down and wait for the physical copy to arrive but I just enjoy the game too much, especially now that we have a good crew well settled in and the rhythm of play is very smooth. I believe the last time we played wrapped up in not much more than an hour with three players.

Otherwise I have had very little time for gaming recently. My kids are dead set on acquiring some extravagantly expensive tech which I refuse to purchase as a gift so they are looking for entrepreneurial ways to raise funds. They've settled on selling off some of their Lego sets as they have a huge pile of the stuff, it being the only thing they've ever requested as gifts for several years of birthday and Christmas presents. Because we kept the instructions and in some cases even the boxes there are sets that are now worth quite a bit of money, sometimes two or three times what they initially cost to purchase in the first place. If you think board gamers are nuts about packaging material wait until you see Lego collectors paying twenty bucks just for a box or a manual.

Anyway, my downtime for the last three or four weeks has been one of sifting through a million billion Lego bricks so that we can find the one special brick needed to complete a particular set. It has been an equally maddening and meditative experience. I am super proud though that my spawn are finding ways to get the things they want without waiting for a handout, and at the same time detaching themselves from hoarding or creating emotional attachments to objects that no longer have an active use for them. They've watched me cull board games so many times that I've finally taught them something useful!

3p Oath with sornars and Not Sure really hit the spot today. SO MUCH DRAMA packed into 2 hours flat.

Picked up Ora et Labora in a trade recently, tried it out solo tonight for the first time. Scored 489, and the solo goal is 500. It's like 2 games of Le Havre piled on top of each other, with the limiters taken off. You get huge stacks of stuff, you convert it into other huge stacks of stuff, there's points at the end of the conversion chains somewhere. Seems fun if you like that kind of thing. I'm very curious to see how the non solo game is, since in solo you just do everything you want basically.

I like that one but my spouse likes Feast for Odin and Fields of Arle better so we usually play those. It's actually pretty savage multiplayer in the way you can fuck other people by tying up their shit.