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Kevin Klemme
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Kevin Klemme
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December 19, 2023
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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December 12, 2023
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December 07, 2023
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River Wild Board Game Review

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November 30, 2023
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Outback Crossing Review

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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

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14 Feb 2021 20:25 #319213 by Sevej
So, I recently played bought some new board games, and got chance to play, including some older ones.
Zombicide Black Plague - Not a new one, but I always enjoy it despite the stupid deck digging, search mechanics. The way the map creates a medieval ghetto & how the game makes you move all around seal the deal for me. One of my complaints about dungeon crawls is how slow and static they are. Not this one. Dumb, fast & furious.
Castles of Burgundy - Also an old one. Played with my brother who visited for a wedding. As usual, this is a simple, pleasant game. Despite being somewhat tactical due to the dice roll, you do need some semblance of strategy since there are long term benefits with some planning.
Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion - Disappointing. I'm not sure where to stand on this, but that's my first impression. Too many choices that stops you for doing anything fun, stupid element tracking system, characters I can't identify with, and--despite using art on book as dungeon--boring black, brown and bleak environment. Also, I absolutely despise small incremental improvements over a long term. You get slightly powerful skill, slightly stronger card in your combat deck, etc, etc. Sure there are some great ones, but most of them? Not really. And despite all the "choices" it's still annoyingly random. Refering to three cards to determine an enemy's attack is not fun. Good luck with blessing coming up before the game ends!
Maracaibo - Played twice, once solo and once with my brother. Good fun, love the cards. I like the many choices, upgrades... Overall I really like it. I'm still confused why people consider this (and Agricola) to be heavy games.
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17 Feb 2021 23:10 #319304 by Jackwraith
Played a couple games of Funkoverse tonight (and a review copy of a game which is kind of underwhelming, but I'll get to that later.) I had a new player, so we stuck to Harry Potter for simplicity's sake. He took Harry, Hagrid, and Draco, while I lined up Voldemort, Snape, and Dumbledore. So, it was students vs masters, appropriately enough. He took the Deluminator, probably aware, even as a new player of my offensive firepower, while I took the Veritaserum to try to mess with Hagrid's action boosts. We played Control on the Ministry of Magic board and then Territory on the Headmaster's Office board.

I won both games going away, 10-5 and then 10-3. He just couldn't keep up with the torrent of damage that my guys could put out, assisted by the fact that I had 3 characters all with yellow and gray tokens, so I could dish out ferocious blast after ferocious blast. I knocked out Harry twice and Draco three times. The latter point may be the most important one, as Draco has struck me as a significant liability in most of the games I've played with with or against him. The single defense die is simply too much of a hindrance. Of course, he also took what are two support characters and one attacker against three attackers, so he was going to be in a bit of an uphill fight to begin with, especially in two scenarios that don't demand as much movement as something like Flags, but instead require you to slug it out. He's pretty eager to try some of the other sets, like Rick and Morty, though.
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18 Feb 2021 18:38 - 18 Feb 2021 19:20 #319328 by Jexik
My losing streak has continued in X-Wing. I probably need to stop trying to make Soontir Fel happen. He lost his Stealth device the first time he got attacked. This has kinda replaced the time we used to spend with Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. One ‘heavier’ game per day. We’ll probably come back.

Kingdomino and Encore have been the other go-to’s. The latter is kind of a multiplayer solitaire puzzle where dice determine your possible moves. It’s a race to fill space.
Last edit: 18 Feb 2021 19:20 by Jexik.
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18 Feb 2021 20:47 #319331 by Gary Sax
Been playing some more solo Root with bots. It's alright.
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18 Feb 2021 22:24 #319332 by Jexik
I’ve been reluctant to try the bots for it. How different do they feel from the ‘real’ factions?

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19 Feb 2021 01:21 #319333 by Gary Sax
Pretty different. They don't follow normal game rules in terms of recruiting and such. It's more of a design for effect.

I've only used the official published bots. My understanding is that the better bot project bots are more complicated but play better. So your mileage may vary...

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20 Feb 2021 09:48 #319374 by jason10mm
Conquest of Nerath is an odd duck, a definite retro-throwback that I wish WOTC had stuck with because I think there was more there than folks gave it credit for. The 4 quadrant map set-up is a limiter, I'd rather have had 2, 3 and 4 player alternate maps like small world or something.

But for me these DnD board games are firmly rooted in the beer n' pretzels category (versus the pseudo euro direction some of them are trending) and no one did that better than MB in the 80's! Legions of low resolution minis made with soft plastic, chucking fistfuls of multi-colored dice, hearing the lamentation of the losers as you drive them before you, this is best in life!

On an unrelated note, playing a lot of Uno by firelight with the kids. Aside from some difficult blue/green color differentiation by flickering orange flames, it works well and kept the munchkins from crying for power depleted ipads for several hours. Lots of house ruling the specific details about when/where to yell "UNO" and the variable penalties of a failure to do so or a premature Uno declaration :P
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22 Feb 2021 17:18 #319479 by DarthJoJo
My mom bought a book of rules to mancala variations, so I played my first rounds of it since the third grade. It was a lot better than I remembered, as a low a bar to clear as that is. Feels like it would be pretty easy to solve as there are only six possible moves ever, but then we have the rulebook to find a better version.

Got my dad and boys in on a round of Roadzters. It’s like an engineer played PitchCar once and thought, “I could make a better version of this.” It’s cool that the bearings in the ball give you some pretty incredible control and that the base box includes a jump, gate and risers for more track variety immediately, but it misses what makes PitchCar special. It’s a game you play with a beer in hand. Mistakes are funny. You don’t want to be too good at it. I also never got my car off the starting line, but that has nothing to do with it.

I expected my dad’s sprinteur to take first in Flamme Rouge. Even though he lost four movement playing a nine into an ascent, he had sheltered him well and gained far more than that in slipstream. I did not expect his rouleur to also take second by a single square over the finish line. Still great.

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22 Feb 2021 23:17 #319493 by Michael Barnes

jason10mm wrote: Conquest of Nerath is an odd duck, a definite retro-throwback that I wish WOTC had stuck with because I think there was more there than folks gave it credit for. The 4 quadrant map set-up is a limiter, I'd rather have had 2, 3 and 4 player alternate maps like small world or something.


Did you try Assault of the Giants? It’s a somewhat more modern B&P WOTC war game...I think it’s better than Nerath. But yeah, that was actually a pretty fun game...just had the usual too long/too clunky kinds of things going on.

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23 Feb 2021 04:51 #319495 by Erik Twice
I played New Angeles with a bunch of content creators and it was interesting. It's pretty much a competitive version of Battlestar Galactica, if that makes sense. I wonder how the game works beneath the layers of FFG design, it has an interesting mechanism by which you are given a card noting another player. You must beat that player in score or, if you drew yourself, end in front of at least 3 other ones.

It seems very wonky from a game design perspective but I find it interesting.
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23 Feb 2021 11:20 #319501 by Joebot
We've now played three sessions of Red Raven's latest game, Sleeping Gods. It's a long (15-20 hour) campaign-style game where your merchant ship has somehow travelled from 1920s Earth to a weird and mysterious world. The game has 9 player-controlled characters, so you divvy those up evenly amongst the players, and then work cooperatively to find a way home.

First impressions -- the game is cool as hell. Really beautiful artwork, as expected from Ryan Laukat. He's been making these story-driven games for a while now (Above and Below, Near and Far), but this one takes the concept further by creating a persistent world filled with hundreds of locations to explore. The game uses keywords to create a surprisingly coherent story. If that weird guy at the tavern told you a rumor about a location, you might get a special keyword. Then when you travel to that location, if you have the keyword, it unlocks a different story than if you'd gone there cold, without the background.

Combat is my favorite part. Each monster has a 3x3 grid that represent the monster's body. Some or all of the spaces are filled with hearts (basically hit points), counter-attacks, or other features (such as "flight"). As you attack, you cover these spaces, which eliminates that ability. It's surprisingly thematic too. A monster might have two spaces marked as "claws" that do 2 damage each. If you successfully attack and damage its right claw, it can no longer hit you with it, so it loses that ability. Now it's only going to hit you for 2 damage (with its uninjured left claw) instead of 4. Combat doesn't pop up very often, but when it does, it's always full of crunchy tactical decisions that involve a lot of discussion and planning. Stuff like: "You knock its wings off so it can't fly, then I'll go for the tail so it can't poison us."

I've read a lot of complaints on BGG that the game is too hard, but those people are ridiculous. The game is hard, but it's certainly not impossible or unfair. Like most Laukat games, there are numerous ways to mitigate bad luck or bad draws. Resources are tight, especially "command tokens," which are used for lots of different things. And you can't hoard them either, because there's only like 15 total in the game, so you have to constantly use them so they get recycled back into the available supply.

After 3 sessions (maybe 90 minutes or so each), we're a 1/3 of the way through the game. We're all pretty sucked into the story now that we're more familiar with the game mechanics. The trickiest bit to learn is what you can do on your turn vs. what you can do to help another player on their turn. Once you internalize that, the game really opens up.

Very cool stuff so far, and every time we pack it away, I'm always eager to get it back out again.
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23 Feb 2021 11:26 #319503 by Jackwraith

Erik Twice wrote: I played New Angeles with a bunch of content creators and it was interesting. It's pretty much a competitive version of Battlestar Galactica, if that makes sense. I wonder how the game works beneath the layers of FFG design, it has an interesting mechanism by which you are given a card noting another player. You must beat that player in score or, if you drew yourself, end in front of at least 3 other ones.

It seems very wonky from a game design perspective but I find it interesting.


I like it, too. I picked it up in one of FFG's holiday sales for dirt cheap and have only managed to get it to the table once, but it was a really interesting game. It's a very social exercise in a similar fashion to Dune, so I think you might enjoy more plays.

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23 Feb 2021 11:49 #319504 by jpat
My wife and I played Food Chain Magnate with the Ketchup expansion milestones and the coffee module. (We've played the base game a few times and then once before with the new milestones.) This is one of those games where I feel like you need to be paying attention and planning all the time, and I was clearly not doing that during this game. My wife ended up winning by about $20, managing to hang on to a big early lead that I couldn't overcome. I ended up lowering the base item price to $5 after the bank broke the first time, which was probably to my advantage, but it really slowed down the game.

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23 Feb 2021 12:40 #319509 by charlest

Joebot wrote: We've now played three sessions of Red Raven's latest game, Sleeping Gods. It's a long (15-20 hour) campaign-style game where your merchant ship has somehow travelled from 1920s Earth to a weird and mysterious world. The game has 9 player-controlled characters, so you divvy those up evenly amongst the players, and then work cooperatively to find a way home.

First impressions -- the game is cool as hell. Really beautiful artwork, as expected from Ryan Laukat. He's been making these story-driven games for a while now (Above and Below, Near and Far), but this one takes the concept further by creating a persistent world filled with hundreds of locations to explore. The game uses keywords to create a surprisingly coherent story. If that weird guy at the tavern told you a rumor about a location, you might get a special keyword. Then when you travel to that location, if you have the keyword, it unlocks a different story than if you'd gone there cold, without the background.

Combat is my favorite part. Each monster has a 3x3 grid that represent the monster's body. Some or all of the spaces are filled with hearts (basically hit points), counter-attacks, or other features (such as "flight"). As you attack, you cover these spaces, which eliminates that ability. It's surprisingly thematic too. A monster might have two spaces marked as "claws" that do 2 damage each. If you successfully attack and damage its right claw, it can no longer hit you with it, so it loses that ability. Now it's only going to hit you for 2 damage (with its uninjured left claw) instead of 4. Combat doesn't pop up very often, but when it does, it's always full of crunchy tactical decisions that involve a lot of discussion and planning. Stuff like: "You knock its wings off so it can't fly, then I'll go for the tail so it can't poison us."

I've read a lot of complaints on BGG that the game is too hard, but those people are ridiculous. The game is hard, but it's certainly not impossible or unfair. Like most Laukat games, there are numerous ways to mitigate bad luck or bad draws. Resources are tight, especially "command tokens," which are used for lots of different things. And you can't hoard them either, because there's only like 15 total in the game, so you have to constantly use them so they get recycled back into the available supply.

After 3 sessions (maybe 90 minutes or so each), we're a 1/3 of the way through the game. We're all pretty sucked into the story now that we're more familiar with the game mechanics. The trickiest bit to learn is what you can do on your turn vs. what you can do to help another player on their turn. Once you internalize that, the game really opens up.

Very cool stuff so far, and every time we pack it away, I'm always eager to get it back out again.


That sounds pretty neat. That keyword system is identical to Tainted Grail and I really dig the implementation there. I need to check this one out.
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23 Feb 2021 13:07 #319513 by Gary Sax
Yes, great write-up, sounds fascinating.

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