What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Project: Kaiju. I got to be the big lizard.

played Bloodborne on stream tonight and FINALLY won the Long Hunt intro campaign. I boned up the rules at the end of chapter 2 by accident, but we rolled it back workably. basically you find the big boss and fight his first form, but then have to kite him across the map instead of actually killing him right then. i failed to notice that that was a thing, but eh what are you gonna do.

anyway, im not sure if the hunter i used tonight was way better than the ones i was trying before, or if my brain clicked with the game this time around, but after getting UTTERLY STOMPED the last couple times i played i kind of wrecked shop this play through. my saw cleaver guy got extra damage when he played Stagger attack cards, and i leaned into that hard by buying tons of Stagger upgrades and speed boosting cards to just stagger everything and do tons of damage.

anyway, Bloodborne is a really fun game i think. ive got 3 more campaigns in the base game to run through (3 chapters each), and I'm really looking forward to playing it more. then theres a whole randomly generated Chalice Dungeon box with tons more bosses and stuff that I havent even looked at.

I almost find it frustrating when CMON makes a good game, because I prefer to blanket ignore them. They should be kind and just announce in the KS if the game will be any good.

yea just a little disclaimer, "by the way, this one is actually worth paying attention to"

Finally played our first game of Cosmic Frog. We only had three, though, and I think it will really turn into something with more than that. With only three, we had Aether Fluxes going off constantly, which let me cycle through quite a few powers. But I think we didn't try out combat as often as we should have and everyone had pretty substantial vaults. I came in third, 27-34-37. Both of my opponents were really intrigued by it, though, so I know it's going to get played again. Also, Whiptongue is probably the best power for a player in a group that isn't aware that combat should be used regularly.

Then one player left and two of us sat down to a couple games of Infiltration. I love the Android setting, which is why I traded for it. Plus, Vaccarino is famous for some other card game I can't think of right now... But I'd actually never been able to get it to the table since the trade, so it was cool to finally get it out. We lost to security both times, once because we dawdled around trying to explore every angle for too long and the next game because we discovered Donald Harris, who raises the proximity alarm by 5 every turn and we didn't have a weapon to kill him, unlike the first game, when I started with both Gauss Pistol and Flechette Pistol and merrily murdered three or four lab techs. I don't think it scales very well to two players, so I'll have to give it another try when we can finally have larger groups. (Vaccine appointment on Wednesday...)

Cosmic Frog is absolutely in my "the more, the merrier" category.

Exciting gaming, mostly with the 6yo spawn.

Agricola Family Edition. I thought the original was okay but not great. It was way too fiddly with all the cards, and everyone's farm ended up samey which was boring. The theme was cute, but then undercut by the anti-thematic elements -- the village apparently only has one plow, and the earth's year is speeding up as harvests come faster and faster, etc. The 2-player version ("All Creatures Great and Small") was better but still ho-hum. Family version I am going to pronounce as ..... good. Still has the anti-thematic elements but when the game plays in 30-40 minutes I can forgive it. It got rid of all cards, and vegetables and stone as resources. The only thing I would have kept from the original is the semi-random order of the action spaces. Here they are set, which constrains the strategy a bit.

Tiny Epic Western. This is the most fiddly of the TE games I've played. It's worker placement with a bluffing and gambling element -- you don't get the best rewards from a space unless you can win a poker hand, combining the single card from your hand with the two face-up cards on the space. So you can choose a undesirable space but one you're likely to win with your card, or a good space and make everyone think you have a great card to give you the straight flush etc. Granted, that nuance is lost on the 6yo who just wanted to buy a barber shop and a doctor's office. I like TE Tactics the best of the line, but this is solid second. The rulebook is atrocious and this is one of the rare games where I was tempted to watch a "watch it played" video.

Sub Terra. Continues to be fun and tense. Co-op means the 6yo can fully participate with light coaching. She likes being the engineer because (a) the character is also female and (b) she can blow things up.

Dice Forge. It has a vagina on the box.

It also has a quarry where a forge should be. These are some very confused people.

This has all the trappings of a good game but the options just aren’t terribly interesting. And it’s over too soon. Maybe I’ll come around to it, but I think it would do better to be a little longer with a bit more build-up.

Playing it on Boardgamearena where I don’t need to worry about disassembling and putting it all away.

Sub Terra is SO GOOD.

Any fewer with 4 and I play Cosmic Frog with 2 frogs per player and the team rules.

At home:

We finally got around to finishing up 7th Continent, although we kind of muddled the end because as much as I admire the innovation on display and the meta narrative that is threaded throughout, it starts to get really freaking tiresome to play after a while. Some of the curses simply require you to go to different parts of the map and do a thing that pulls a variant card from the deck, which I suppose are fine when playing multiple curses at the same time but a dull chore on their own. Halfway through the tenth curse we found ourselves at the entry point to the eleventh one and just switched over to play that instead (which also turned out to be one of the best ones in the series).

Here are the curses we've worked through since I left off this thread back in May:

The forbidden sanctuary - a very challenging dungeon-dive that first asks you to do a bit of general exploration in order to get the items you need to unlock the door. This also helps you to montage-up your action deck and get some items at the ready, which is very much needed as the final stage is very tough. Out of the four (or three depending on your perspective) hidden temples that can be explored this was our least favourite, a little too long and too prone to 'whoops you died' moments, plus some of the puzzles aren't particularly rational. There are some really confusing things in the temple that make a lot more sense with revelations in a later curse.

The Bloody Hunt - really interesting to play and a very good shoe-in for working multiple curses. You travel the land hunting a variety of dangerous beasts, and it's a great example of the design surprising with opening up hidden parts of the game that you've walked past several times in the past. There are all kinds of creatures lurking all over the map so it definitely suits wide travel and taking plenty of hunt actions. We enjoyed this one although there isn't much of an ending to it.

Swamp of madness - probably one of the weakest, go to a place to do a thing and then come back again, but it's a super awkward passage to follow and then the final scene hits you with a series of challenges that pretty much drain the deck regardless of how well prepared you are. So it was kind of disappointing as the final note was one where we would either win or lose based on a series of random card draws. Definitely a non-essential extra. This one and Voracious Goddess are problematic in that it's not intuitive at all as to what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going so I could see people wandering around the continent stuck for what to do next, but because we had seen a couple of things on our previous travels we fortunately knew exactly what had to be done.

A Prison of Clouds - we managed to largely spoil this one by discovering the damaged balloon at it's secret location in an earlier game and so we had a very good idea of what to do. Even so it's largely played on rails - you need to land the balloon in a place that is largely impossible without first getting some help and the specific mechanism for this curse tells you exactly where to go to get the things that you need and you follow on from there. Flying up above the clouds was kind of fun and there is a story that gradually unfolds. Perfectly fine, I just wish that we hadn't found the balloon in that earlier run.

A Beacon in the Night - this one was the most egregious of the 'travel everywhere to do a thing in select locations', it would work fine as a secondary curse in a similar way to Bloody Hunt but on it's own was a frustrating slog that wasn't particularly rewarding. This is the one we bailed on because we already knew exactly where we had to go after collecting all the 'things' and it just felt like work rather than play.

The Veins of the Earth - this was our favourite out of the whole series. An underground temple behind a hidden passage with a Willy-Wonka-esque terrifying barge ride, except the chocolate river is made out of slime and the Oompah-Loompahs are creatures made out of slime. You have to take a couple of runs at it in order to finally break through to the final rooms where there are some Lovecraftian-style revelations about why the island is full of so much weirdness. This makes for a great ending to the rest of the adventure as it adds context to a lot of the things you encounter during your exploits and therefore makes sense to play through after the other curses.

We only have the final Armageddon curse left but it looks like another 'go everywhere to do a thing' and neither of us are really interested, plus it has a reputation for lots of janky insta-death moments. Glad that we were able to have this experience, slightly relieved to be sticking it up on the block now that we're done.

Played about ten games of Res Arcana on BGA and just got fucking shellacked. Every single time I think I have an engine locked in, the other guy comes from behind and obliterates me. Ugh.

dysjunct wrote: Played about ten games of Res Arcana on BGA and just got fucking shellacked. Every single time I think I have an engine locked in, the other guy comes from behind and obliterates me. Ugh.

Yeah, while I initially enjoyed it and thought it was a solid design for its price and size, it wore out its welcome pretty quickly. I think my impression of tableau builders is that they should both be slower to grow and have some counterplay options. Res Arcana is so explosive and so random that the games often leave a sour taste, so it's on the trading block.

I’ve predictably been playing a lot of the Summoner Wars demo. It’s great. I can beat the AI reliably, but my 4 or so games against a tester (WaterD if any of you know summoner wars people), were all losses. Biggest adjustment for me so far is how relevant the commons are. Holding onto champions as the breakers in this matchup can be a recipe for failure.

Jackwraith wrote: Res Arcana is so explosive and so random that the games often leave a sour taste, so it's on the trading block.

My taste would not be as sour if the explosive randomness occasionally swung my way.

Jackwraith wrote: Then one player left and two of us sat down to a couple games of Infiltration. I love the Android setting, which is why I traded for it. Plus, Vaccarino is famous for some other card game I can't think of right now... But

I really like Infiltration, a very underappreciated push your luck game IMHO. I really though it would benefit from an expansion just to add more stuff to surprise players.