What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Jackwraith wrote:

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.

This is my take-away from it as well. It's a game you play in panic mode, because someone can go from 2 to 10 points in a turn. Given my current position at work I'm not looking for panic mode in my spare time.

Terra Mystica, on board game arena.

Hmm not sure about this one. I have gone full euro, but perhaps not this far. Its a tight resource conversion game with an interesting conceit, you are terraforming the world to splodge your buildings on it. I like all that, I like that it has different player factions and even the aesthetics in their own way. But it is an unforgiving game, if you don't grok the resource engine it punishes you by giving you fewer turns. I spent most of the game passing with no workers. I don't mind getting a low score when learning something new and complex, but no turns, no thanks.

Played 2x games of Everdell solo last night. The expansion kickstarter made me want to play it again, it's been a while. The solo game is low overhead and fun, and Everdell remains a nice game. Balancing the engine building aspect vs scoring points is a fun puzzle, as you have limited room in your city and if you fill the entire thing with low scoring engine pieces you're probably not going to score super well. Much like Wingspan, Terraforming Mars et al it's very beholden to luck of the draw, especially since so many cards are looking for specific other cards in Everdell. This is exacerbated solo/2p since there's less turnover in the meadow. I seem to recall playing with a house rule in the past where you discard some cards from the meadow, but I don't remember the details. I largely talked myself out of wanting the expansions, as I don't think this game wants main deck bloat at all. I do still want the Bellaire expansion, since it replaces the events with actually achievable events and gives each faction a special power. I think it's wildly overpriced for what you get in it though.

Also played 3x Chainsaw Warrior, which is still just savagely unfair. All three games ended to radiation poisoning, and the first two took about 10 minutes apiece. The third game we got to within 16 cards of The Darkness, even after having to exit the building and start again.

Had a four-player game of Pan Am last night; me, my wife, my daughter, and her boyfriend. Four-player Pan Am is definitely in, "too many things to do with too few actions" worker placement territory. Boyfriend got the directive that lets you look at the next event card, which told him to load up on routes that he could cash in for a stock apiece. Final scores were 23 (him)- 21-21-21.

Then we played Codenames, my wife and I vs. those two. We were planning on best-of-five, but decided to be nice and friendly and stopped at two wins apiece. I think it needs more players per team, but 2v2 is still fun.

Played DOMINANT SPECIES with my 9yo. It was "ummmm fun?" per his direct quote.

He liked most the theme. Being an animal is generically cool. HIs biggest dislike was being devoured by spiders (me).

Kingdom Builder, it sucks, don't do it. It's like playing tennis with your leg in a bear trap.

jeb wrote: HIs biggest dislike was being devoured by spiders.

Same, jeb jr.

Have fallen in love with solo Shadows of Brimstone. Have spent too much money already

therewillbe.games/forum/10-ameritrash/19...mstone-topic?start=0

re: Shadows, some really top notch stuff in this thread, JEM and SebastianBludd played a ton of this and gave session reports.

After a great month with Flamme Rouge that pushed it into my top ten, my wife and I have moved onto Maxime Rambourg's The Big Book of Madness for March. She was in the mood for something cooperative and has a deep, abiding love for Harry Potter, so it was an easy pick. We're building decks of elements to power our spells and banish the monsters we've released from the titular Book of Madness. It's a really nice presentation with vivid, stylized art from Naiade and the monsters arriving by turning pages of a book. Unfortunately, the rulebook is kind of a mess as important stuff was left out or buried in the translation from French.

I feel like the game definitely could have used another month or two to cook in the oven and smooth out balance. The discrepancy in power levels between wizards and spells is obvious even after two games. We made some rule mistakes in the first game due to the aforementioned rulebook and our character abilities were essentially blank, but we still won easily on the back of a bonkers broken level-one spell that let me constantly recur our best cards.

Not that I think better balance would push it past the B-tier of co-ops. It lacks escalation and the win/loss condition depends entirely on defeating the final monster and thus feels disconnected from everything that comes before it. The biggest problem, however, is that it feels mechanical once you get properly setup. Once you get the right spells and deck composition, it's just a manner of hitting your buttons. It's not bad. It's just not inspiring. I don't think I'd reach for it before Ghost Stories, Pandemic, Pandemic: The Cure or Arkham.

Otherwise some more stuff with the kids, most notably Animal Upon Animal, Spot it!, Candy Land and RoadZters. Apparently it's an official Candy Land variant to draw two cards and allow the kid to pick the best for their position. The rulebook even admits it helps speed up the game.

Played a couple solo games of Lost Ruins of Arnak last night, which seems solid. The combination of deckbuilding and worker placement is tight and tricky, since you don't get to cycle your deck often and you only ever have 2 workers. Resources are tight, and maximizing the available cards and placements each round is a satisfying tactical puzzle. There's a decent amount of luck in it, which is either a positive or negative depending on how you go feel about luck. Personally I thought it felt right for the weight of the game. Id put it right around Everdell in terms of weight, luck, fun, etc.

Terraforming Mars - my wife beat me like I owed her money. By eye I thought I was heading for a close loss, but she beat me by 40 points.

I tried to teach Ghost Stories to a six year old. If nothing else, I figured he’d enjoy rolling a handful of dice. He did enjoy that and waited patiently for his turn which is still pretty great for his age but decided that collecting tokens was how you win the game. Then he just started sneaking Qi and tao out of the box. Still he was pretty hyped and tried to teach his younger brother when he came home from school. I’ll call it a qualified success.

We also played a round of Jenga. He actually picked that one out as he’s really into building things at the moment. He made me put pieces back several times because I took edge blocks instead of those in the center. He wanted it to look like a ladder, not some teetering mess. I can dig it.

Finally got a game of Dune: Imperium in. Unfortunately, it was just a two-player, since our third bailed. so we had to use the AI components which are... OK. I ended up playing Rabban and a good chunk of the AI's cards are Rally Troops, which means "oriented toward combat" Rabban was kind of gimped in terms of keeping dudes in the garrison. I supposed that mirrors what a third player might have tried to do to cut me off, but the AI was more of an annoyance than anything else.

Apart from that, the game was really good. The deckbuilding isn't as huge an element as it is in games like Tyrants of the Underdark, but that's fine, because when you do take advantage of its combos (like playing multiple Bene Gesserit cards together). you can produce some explosive turns and have some really interesting choices to make. I got rolling with the Guild and had a little Spice for troops/water system running for a couple rounds. But my opponent had the BG thing going, which also allowed him to thin his deck more than mine because if you don't draw (and are able to purchase) Guild Administrators or Fedaykin Death Commandos, the only to trash cards is with Selective Breeding with the BG. That made his deck more useful than mine. I had one turn where not only did I not draw an Imperial card to get the Solari I needed for the Swordsmith, I also didn't draw a Landsraad card to even get to the Swordsmith, so I had a late round that was completely neutered by a poor draw and I was then a couple rounds behind my opponent in acquiring my third agent, which is HUGE. I ended up losing, 10-7. We definitely want to try again ASAP, though, and with more people.

Then we played a round of Neuroshima Hex; Sand Runners vs Borgo. He'd only played once before so he wanted to stick to one of the "simpler" factions, while I wanted to get more time in with the Runners, whom I've only played a couple times. I'm becoming less enamored with the Quicksands as I am with a couple of the foundation tiles in the game. The ones that affect placement AND do something to tiles around them like Hole are interesting. Just having "Don't deploy here" signs on the board is less so, even if they can move before a Sandstorm. The Sandstorm/Battle tiles, however, are still great for the tactical choices that they demand when using a faction that has a significant amount of shooting. I got multiple attacks on his HQ with a Chieftain-linked Secateur early in the game and ended up winning, 13-11, despite failing to stem the cyborg tide flowing toward my HQ in the later stages.

I continue to play back-to-back games of Rallyman with a few folks here via Boardgamearena and have started getting back into Puerto Rico. I also continue to be comically bad at Rallyman since I seem to have a poor sense of the timing for going Flat Out (I see some people in the race banking 20+ surge tokens and I rarely get that high). Re-acclimation to Puerto Rico has been rough but I'm starting to get a better sense of the tempo. I screwed myself by misreading the turn order in the latest game & flooded the board with Trade goods at the worst fucking time, but that's more of a UI problem for me.

I've been playing nearly daily sessions of Navajo Wars, now mostly using Vassal to allow me to dip into the game between meetings or right before bed without dealing with the overhead of setup and teardown (I have some rather... regurgitative cats & no place to park the game between sessions). I just love the quasi-narrative/quasi-strategic headspace that it puts me in, and I get special satisfaction out of seeing that enemy morale meter go down after failed raids. And of course it has sent me on a few historical research trips, especially when the scoring phase cards come up.