What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

They have been doing something similar at FFG to Twilight Imperium with the Codex releases.

A little window into my home gaming life. So it has been a nuclear five alarm fire of work stress in our house this semester due to upcoming deadlines, but my spouse's reward request... was that we play Arkham Horror when she was done with the two papers she needed to finish revising.

Finished those two this week and she's setting it up this weekend.

charlest wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: This may be a bit too "you kids get off my lawn", but the notion of DLC for a board game makes me cringe.

Oh certainly, I hate the notion of DLC as well. However, this type of content is really similar to a new scenario pack for the Arkham LCG, or how they used to publish the small blister expansions for the first edition of Mansions of Madness.

FFG did similar DLC for MoM 2nd Edition, and those scenarios were very good.

What won me over with this type of electronic expansion content is that it's actually a very lean addition to the game. I don't necessarily want more tokens or boards or cards to worry about storing. If the game already has components you can use in a multitude of ways, actually take advantage of that and offer me new scenarios like this.

Now, it does get a little harder to cough up $10 for something that is only electronic and only a single scenario. It's part of the reason why it wasn't an instant purchase for me. I don't think that price is crazy, however, considering Plaid Hat paid for top-notch voice acting and the DLC also adds 100 scripted events spread across the existing scenarios (when you hit a certain numbered space the app will randomize what event triggers from a small pool, this expands that pool).

I half want to purchase it right now just to give them the indicator this type of content is desired, by me at least.

I think I'd prefer to cough up a lower price for DLC that re-used existing physical content, paying a lot more for an expansion because it has physical content gets annoying especially when the Core game has massive content to start with.
I'm not a marketing person but I'd like to think a company would sell a lot more DLC at x price than a physical expansion for a 3x price, especially with the ecological benefit of more mostly needless resources including shipping not being produced.

Successfully taught Oceans to my brother and a friend last night on TTS. We had it figured out pretty quick and despite feeling like I was in distant 3rd place, I eked out a 1 point win. I hear that Evolution + Climate has more direct conflict, so I hope to try that one sometime to be able to contrast them.

hotseatgames wrote:
Marvel also got a modular Ronan the Accuser set, but I know less about it.

It's pretty much the same deal as what you've described for the Arkham LCG. A small freebie put out during the pandemic. From memory it's about eight or nine cards. I think it was originally going to be a GenCon exclusive so I'm glad they made it a free download or else I'd never have been able to get it.

Ronan wasn't a full villain scenario, instead it was a "modular set", which in Marvel Champions language means you can mix him into any villain you're fighting. When they released him there'd been a drought of villain content for the game and he was the hardest modular at that point. It really gave the tired villains a real difficulty boost and breathed a bit of life back into things.

To be fair, even now he's still not to be sniffed at.

Last night it was Beyond the Sun, which I've heard got a fair amount of hype on the back of enthusiastic reception by the Space-Biff guy, a thoughtful and prolific reviewer.

I don't uniformly need conflict in every game, but I had a suspicion that this was going to not going to be a great fit for me--very low interaction, worker placement, race for achievements that are important in the end-game point salad, the hallowed "many paths to victory", etc.

Allegedly you can opt to concentrate on colonization or go all-in on the tech tree, and there are 4 colors of tech that afford different kinds of benefits--but in practice, I felt that most of the choices weren't that compelling. What spots are available for my workers, and which of them at a given moment lets me spend stuff most efficiently? I ended up doing a little of everything, so it was like making repeated trips up to the buffet and filling up my plate with different foods every time. After a pretty excruciating 3+ hours (new players plus TTS effect?) in which it wasn't ever really clear who had the edge, we all finished between 68 and 71 points, haha.

Some people are going to absolutely LOVE this thing, and others like me are going to bounce off it violently.

Yeah, I was pretty excited about that one since Rio Grande tends to make pretty good euros... but I want to try that one before I buy.

Had an epic nerd date this past weekend with a friend.

Dragon Punch. I am a sucker for games which try to replicate the fighting video game experience, as I am many decades removed from my Street Fighter II prime, when I was a god at my local arcade but not beyond it. This uses the typical framework of predicting what your opponent will do based on incomplete information. The gimmick is that it's a card game that doesn't even need a table; you can hold everything in your hand. So take it to a theme park and play it while you wait in line. You have a hand of seven cards move cards (punch, kick, block, throw, etc.); six of them are generic: white on the top half, red on the bottom half. The seventh is a character card. You select your next move, put at the front of your hand, then reveal simultaneously. There's blocks, and attacks are high or low or both, and a speed factor. After you use a card, you flip it face-down. You can't use it again until you use a "taunt" card, which flips everything face up but also leaves you open. If you take damage, you rotate cards upside down to the red half. The red half is usually more powerful. If all your cards are on the red half, you're KOed. The red half being more powerful does a nice job of creating a "super" or "rage" meter effect, common to the video games, that keeps things interesting to the end -- since the red moves are more powerful, there's always a chance of a comeback. Anyway, I lost. It's a fun, very lightweight game.

Sovereign's Chain. Another card game, this one is kind of trying to do a bluff/counterplay thing. You have two suits; your score is the total of your higher suit, minus the total of your lower suit. You play cards either on your side or your opponent's side. Cards have various minor powers. Some you play facedown, some faceup, then there's tokens that change the suit or value of a card. It's fine but a little lackluster, and the theme is whatever. Bound for the eBay pile. I lost.

Council of Verona (Second Edition). A much better iteration of bluff and counterplay. This is kind of (slightly) advanced Love Letter, with a nice theme of trying to play off the Montagues versus the Capulets. Characters are cards, and each have an agenda, and you can place influence tokens (face down) on the characters. Influence tokens are between zero and five points. Each turn you play a character either onto the council, or into exile. Then place a face-down influence token onto any character's card. At the end of the game, your influence tokens get your their points, if and only if the character they're on fulfills their agenda. So Romeo doesn't care whether he's on the council or in exile, as long as Juliet is with him. Lord Montague wants a majority of the council members to be Montagues. Etc. Good, short, and has a lovely little expansion where you can try to poison people, or give them an antidote. I won.

Tiny Epic Galaxies BLAST OFF!. You know it's good because it has capital letters! I think this is far superior to the original, as it eliminates cruft to focus on the core experience of the race to colonize planets. You don't have secret agendas and the powers of the planets are much simpler. Roll dice, conquer the galaxy. I lost.

Sub Terra. This is such a tight little design that produces very tense and thematic play. It's The Descent: the board game. There's an accident, you are trapped in a cave system, and there are ... things ... hunting you down. A co-op race to find the exit before your flashlight batteries die out. Variable player powers: some are good at healing, some are good at dealing with cave-ins, etc. The expansions are seamless. Played twice; the first time we barely won: only half the party was dragged screaming into the darkness, their screams slowly being replaced by wet gurgles and sounds of chewing. The second time we all died in laughably short order.

The King is Dead: Second Edition. Another extremely tight design, this one a complete brain-fuck. We played with my friend's 14yo, who ended up winning. Everything about the game is an agonizing choice. Plus there's only eight actions you can do the entire game. But you can pass, as an aggressive dick move, kind of reminiscent of passing in Ra. You are trying to manipulate eight territories of the Great Britain so that either the British, Welsh, or Scots control them. You also bring nobles of the three factions to your court to support you, but each time you do this, their ability to control the territories decreases. If a territory isn't clearly controlled by a faction, then can become "politically unstable." Three politically unstable territories means the French invade, and whoever has the most support from all three factions wins -- everyone unites behind you to fend off the invaders. But if the game ends before a French invasion, then whoever has the most support from the faction that controls the most territories wins. So you are trying to tip the endgame condition to the one that benefits you, but also trying to block your opponents, but also trying to ensure your favored faction wins.... It's crazy good, and also plays in about 45 minutes, and has a modestly-sized box (although still oversized).

Tiny Epic Western. It is not especially epic, and the amount of table space makes it not tiny either. It's reasonably fun though, as a light worker placement game. Buy buildings and attempt to become boss of a town. It's almost entirely tactical, as the available buildings are constantly changing. The game also makes an odd decision to have a custom deck of cards with oddball suits: hats, teepees, cows, and horseshoes. You can duel for spots, try to win poker hands, and bluff other people into leaving you alone. There's a bit of information overload at the start -- three different currencies, multiple places to place your workers, multiple industries to manipulate. As a result, I won handily.

Res Arcana, with the expansion. A short and somewhat soulless efficiency race. The great art makes up for it a bit, but the relentless pace of the game makes me feel like a rat frantically hitting the cocaine lever. Convert things into victory points. Sometimes there are intermediate steps of converting things into other things, and then the other things into victory points, but if you are doing that you will probably lose -- too slow. I've played with my friend on BGA but he wanted to try it in person, because the BGA implementation doesn't have the expansion, and because games are usually easier to learn when you have the physical doo-dads to help anchor concepts. I won handily again, which is a nice change of pace from BGA where I typically get shellacked.

Just One. A third friend joined us for this delightful co-op party game. Try to get one person to guess a word, by writing down a one-word clue. Duplicate clues cancel each other out before the guesser gets to see them. A very simple concept that is very entertaining in practice. Everyone I've played this with has gone out and bought their own copy.

Western Legends. Did a 3p game of this sandbox, which is actually a western that is epic (but also not tiny). Sandbox games are at their best when they produce good stories, instead of just people point salad games with a map. Normally I don't care for them, as they always leave me wishing I was playing an actual RPG instead of a pseudo-RPG. But this naturally leads to people calling either other "pardner" in a slow drawl and getting into it. I jumped out to a lead with some crime, then someone maneuvered the sheriff onto my space, forcing a duel which I lost. I got sent to jail, losing all my Wanted Points as I had paid for my sins. That did not stop another playing from galloping past me and ride-by shanking me with a whiskey bottle, sending me into a world of hurt. I tried to rally back with some cattle rustlin', but gaining any amount of Wanted Points puts a big target on your back, so I spent too many turns meandering around the edges of the board, in an attempt to avoid justice. The bottle-shanker eventually managed to eke out a victory through putting down bandits.

Finally, Tiny Epic Zombies. The TE series might be gimmicky, but they pack a lot of game into the box. There's 14 possible characters (each with their own special power, and each with a zombie mode on the reverse); 9 locations (each with a different one on the back; you randomly choose front or back for each), and 9 different objectives (randomly choose three, complete those to win; lose if the zombies overtake the mall first). We did 2p co-op mode, and to win we had to rescue survivors, find the cause of the outbreak, and find the helicopter parts to escape. All while keeping zombies from overwhelming the board, or running out of time. We were down to the last turn when I was able to grab the final helicopter part, but I didn't have enough movement to make it back to the center of the board to drop off the part and win. However I realized I could grab an item card -- a skateboard -- that would let me move to any room for free, so I skated to the center of the mall for the win. Very 80s!

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Other than epic nerd weekend, I've been playing some games with the 6yo spawn:

Legacy of Dragonholt. She is a gnomish bard named Rose, who dabbles in a little alchemy on the side. We are just doing 1p, with me being the narrator. So this is basically an extremely elaborate Choose Your Own Adventure. On one hand it's pretty impressive -- it does a very good job of tracking different game states (some paragraphs will tell you to check off box J6 [etc.] on the tracking sheet, and you can get wildly different results in future paragraphs based on what you did in the past). It also accommodates many different character types very well; there's lots of ways to get different results based on the skills that you might have, so if you're a more social character you can get better results in situations by being persuasive. Or if you're more of a fighter-type character. But ultimately, it's hard to shake the idea that this might be better as a Zork-style interactive fiction game. But it's fun to play with the kid. She is incredibly risk-averse, as in "will actively avoid any whiff of danger even if there are clear hints in the text that people you like will die if you don't act." The funny thing is that losing all your HP is not especially bad, and there's lots of ways to get it back.

Memoarrr!. An inoffensive and cute little memory game with a theme that almost makes sense and instructions that appear machine-translated from Italian.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. A simple co-op deckbuilder. We played through Year 1 as a learning game but will do it again, in an attempt to rope my spouse (a big Potterhead) into playing games with us. Curiously, there's no way to thin your deck. I don't think I've ever seen a deckbuilder without this. Maybe they thought the concept was too arcane for a mass market game.

Awesome stuff.

Council of Verona is one of my favourite small box games although I really believe that it is much improved with the poison/antidote discs added in.

A friend of mine has Dragon Punch. Great micro game. He also had some fantasy bakeoff game where you launch lava cakes and stuff. It was brilliant.

I think I'm the only person that really likes Sovereign's Chain. Several others were disappointed with it, but man, I still really dig it. I like how you can screw with other people's tableaus and do some nasty stuff.

I continue to think that Tiny Epic Western remains the best of the series (perhaps 1A with Tiny Epic Kingdoms.) It's just different enough to stand out for me. I agree that the info overload can be steep for new players, though, which is part of its weirdness.

Think I'm going to try to trade for a copy of The King is Dead.

dysjunct wrote: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. A simple co-op deckbuilder. We played through Year 1 as a learning game but will do it again, in an attempt to rope my spouse (a big Potterhead) into playing games with us. Curiously, there's no way to thin your deck. I don't think I've ever seen a deckbuilder without this. Maybe they thought the concept was too arcane for a mass market game.

There's no way to thin your deck because the game is horribly designed.

I don't mean this in a "gotcha, haha" way. The game has some very serious problems that become more and more apparent as time goes on. If you are using it to bring your spouse into the fold, keep in mind the game becomes unfair very quickly once you are outside of the tutorial. If I remember correctly, the first three years are the tutorial and the fourth was fine as well.

Beyond that, being knocked out on your turn and every other player turn is a likely occurance. Some villains are extremely strong while others will let you stall for a very long time. If you are using the game to introduce someone to the hobby, there's a big chance of crashing hard. Again, it should not be an issue until you dig deeper into the game but it will eventually be.

Just something to keep in mind. I feel bad because there's a lot of newbies buying the game for its aesthethics and getting a brutal, unabalanced game in return.

Received a game that I kickstarted over a year ago: Masters of the Night. Co-op/solitaire game about a family of vampires battling mortal hunters to take control of a city. The production values are excellent. I played once and lost, but will try out some different combinations of characters before posting a review.

Jackwraith wrote: Think I'm going to try to trade for a copy of The King is Dead.

The King is Dead is an incredible game. Just amazing, every time.