What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

PAX VIKING

Got in a two player game today. Compared to the other various PAX games, the rules seem to be the shortest and easiest to digest. The rulebook is about a dozen pages, and half of that is glossary and set up instructions ( and those aren't hard ) . As per other PAX games, the deck ( in this case circular saga tiles in the usual market row, albeit single this time ) is seeded according to the number of players. You can either play with semi seeded decks based on certain numbers of each tile ( Venture tiles that are economic, Events, Gods, Ambassadors ) or free form - I suspect by type will result in more balanced games . Unlike say PAMIR, REN, or PORIFIRIANA, there aren't VP tiles - the victory conditions are determined in advance by drawing 4 random cards from Beginner, Basic, Advanced, and "Eklundian". Other than basic, where victory is checked at the end of each turn, the other are triggered by certain Event tiles being played.

Overall we liked it - but 2P felt a bit too wide open - not much conflict or competition for space. I think it will be better with 4+. Replayability may be the most varied of any of the PAX games - 200 Saga tiles, 20 different victory conditions, and 9 different home spaces to start with, each with a unique ability. Mixed all together, gonna take a long time to see the same set of stuff twice, if ever.

Mads - Sleeping Gods' Tides or Ruin expansion is coming to retail sometime this summer if you're still feeling the game by then.

Msample wrote: Got in a two player game today. Compared to the other various PAX games, the rules seem to be the shortest and easiest to digest. The rulebook is about a dozen pages, and half of that is glossary and set up instructions ( and those aren't hard ) . As per other PAX games, the deck ( in this case circular saga tiles in the usual market row, albeit single this time ) is seeded according to the number of players

Which game is this? I went back a page and couldn't figure it out. Sorry, I'm in grading mode right now.

I believe based on context it's Pax Viking.

CranBerries wrote:

Msample wrote: Got in a two player game today. Compared to the other various PAX games, the rules seem to be the shortest and easiest to digest. The rulebook is about a dozen pages, and half of that is glossary and set up instructions ( and those aren't hard ) . As per other PAX games, the deck ( in this case circular saga tiles in the usual market row, albeit single this time ) is seeded according to the number of players

Which game is this? I went back a page and couldn't figure it out. Sorry, I'm in grading mode right now.

Spaced out, sorry. PAX VIKING.

Turns out I'm terrible at Kingdomino. Played four two-player games now and only one was particularly close.

I'm not particularly sure how I feel about it. It's a fine game. I think the drafting mechanics are solid. Hate drafting seems weak, but that's probably alright for what the game is aiming. I do enjoy the puzzle of arranging the tiles, but the game is so slight. It feels gauche to write that, especially when that is clearly what the designers wanted to make, but it is what it is.

It may just be a filler, and I'm not hyped for a filler right now. However, my boys were the ones to pick Kingdomino out. If they get into it, you can safely ignore everything I right above, except, probably, having terrible scores.

I'd be very interested in a three- or four-player game where you are actually guaranteed to see every single tile.

A couple of Garphill games on the table over the weekend.

Viscounts of the West Kingdom might be my favorite of the lot. It’s a pretty unusual design- kind of a card drafting/programmed action thing where you move a little Viscount/Viscontessa(?) around a track and do actions based on where you go. There’s also a funky 3 level plastic castle in the middle of the board where move pieces around to get bonuses and try to maneuver someone to the top.

There’s some cool stuff going on- a corruption/virtue paradigm on everyone’s board triggers when someone’s markers meet and there are generally good effects for those who have fewer Criminals on their board and more negative effects for those who are more corrupted. There are also debts you can take on as well as deeds- debts are negative points but convert to resources when you pay them, deeds mature from 1-3 points if you get a flip effect.

It’s pretty complex, and the strategy is still a little elusive. But some objective cards help give it shape and getting the hang of sequencing actions and working out how to make the most of benefits is pretty straightforward. There’s some depth here, and I liked it better than Paladins. Both have excellent solo options, Viscounts is a little more difficult to run but it proved to be pretty challenging.

Raiders of Scythia is sort of a retooling of Raiders of the North Sea. I’ve only played the predecessor on the app and it’s pretty good but sort of simplistic. It reminds me a lot of Stone Age. Scythia adds a little more to it and is the more interesting game I think. It’s pretty meat and potatoes- place workers, take stuff, build up a crew, go raid and take stuff. It has the same neat place a worker/take a worker mechanism, which I think is really smart and it increases player friction by forcing you to consider what you are leaving for someone else. The illustrations are really cool, the style is very different from Viscounts- heavy pencils and a less caricature style. I enjoyed it but I think that Arnak is the more fun game in this space.

BUT..this game games in a tiny box. One thing I love about these Garphill games is they come in boxes about 3/4 the size of a standard square box. They contain no inserts and they are PACKED full. I like this a lot. It’s less wasteful and the games take up much less space/

I wound up buying an Anachrony Infinity box...so stoked to check out the solo modes and some of the additions. Also stoked to have storage for all of it.

I’ve been playing the crap out of Wingspan because Scarlett loves it. The only game I think she likes better is Silver. She’s damn good at it too, she picked up on it right away and she noticed on the first play that it was all women credited for design and art on the box and everybody she’s told about the game, she’s pointed out that it’s made by an all-women team. I got the European expansion solely because she wanted the purple eggs...it’s nice to have more objectives but there are already 170 unique cards in the box so I’m not sure there’s value in a giant pile more just yet. We’ve played it almost every night over the past week. I’m going to pick up Mariposas soon I think.

DarthJoJo wrote: Turns out I'm terrible at Kingdomino. Played four two-player games now and only one was particularly close.

I'd be very interested in a three- or four-player game where you are actually guaranteed to see every single tile.

I love Kingdomino, but 2p 7x7 grids are where it’s at. You see all the tiles then and it becomes almost a card counting exercise, if you like that kind of thing.

I find 7x7 two-player Kingdomino to be much more challenging than the regular game. So much so that I can't consider it a light filler. The difficulty is due to the fact that you need to consider how you're going to place four tiles with certain order restrictions.

I do recommend giving it a try, but be prepared for more of a brain-burner.

Got in some more plays of the stupendously overproduced Rococo...Scarlett had really gotten into it and every game is full of brutal trash talk about my garbage, out of style dresses.

I love this game. It’s not really the best game I’ve ever played, it’s not innovative or insightful. But everything about it is just right. Setup, rules weight length, depth, subject matter, etc. are all just in this perfect zone. It’s fun to play, with some good resource management, a little area control, economic choices, and super light deckbuilding. It’s just so solid top to bottom that it feels like the platonic idea of the Bronze Age Eurogame.

We’ve started using the included Jewelry Box expansion and it adds some dimension to it with an additional choice to buy jewelry with each dress made but more significantly a cool way to complete “examinations” to upgrade some of your worker cards- kind of like an achievements list that you check off as you do things.

Of course the setting and concept are a real treasure...and it’s great that O’Toole and the designers made sure that despite the French setting and 18th century historicity, it’s inclusive and diverse with people of color and non-Europeans represented throughout. There are even dresses from Brazil, Japan, and other cultures that can show at the ball.

The production is just ridiculous for a Eurogame.
It’s not more over the top than some of the big Kickstarters, but it has embossed tokens, plastic thread and lace tokens, embroidered velour bags, a miniature porcelain bust, and extremely nice storage trays.. it’s just supreme quality throughout. $130? I dunno. Kinda? It is a $60-$75 tier board game with a major expansion and four smaller ones so the cost is actually kind of close to where it would be without the EGG production. I did spend extra for the metal coins, something I -never- do because YOLO and if there’s any game that ought to have upgraded excessive coins this is it.

i clicked on the first page of this thread and didnt notice for a second, and the first thing i saw was this post from 2014 about Rococo and it gave me some solid chucks.

Then I lost all judgement and agreed to play a horrible game called Rococo. A game allegedly about making garments for a bunch of snooty elites going to some ball at Versailles. I say allegedly because what it really is is another dry as dust worker placement/efficiency game where you turn one resource into another and then turn that into points or money. It suffers all the pitfalls of every game of this genre not the least of which is the last few turns dragging horribly as people calculate and recalculate how to squeeze just one more point out of their possible moves.

Holy Moses, I HATE games like this. Let's put in 50 different ways to earn victory points to camouflage the fact that this is just an exercise in mental math.

Anyway, dispensing with mental exertion, I went for the "Shiny Bauble/Pretty Color" strategy. I lost. I didn't care.

When asked if she liked it, Uba said "It's about making dresses!"

She likes to make dresses.

anyway, ive played Bonfire 5 times now, 3 solo and 2 2p. its the most recent Stefan Feld game, and its quite an odd one.

First off the theme is bonkers. the world is cursed with eternal darkness, and the Guardians have kept magical bonfires lit for ages to keep the world safe. For unknown reasons the Guardians have recently abandoned their posts and retreated to some islands, and the bonfires have all gone out save The Great Bonfire in the middle of the big Guardian city. You play as tribes of forest gnomes who have come to the city/islands to entreat the Guardians to relight the bonfires to once again stave off the darkness. whoever does this the best gets the most victory points and wins! its strange, and I like it.

Mechanically its a super odd duck. It kind of reminds me of Trajan, in that there are a lot of things you can do that all have their own little mechanics, and that are all tied together by a central spatial puzzle. The central spatial puzzle here is tetrissing together little 3 tile pieces on your central player board to get the action tiles pictured on them, and getting bonus action tiles for matching symbols on the tiles. This is a way less crazy puzzle than the mancala that drives Trajan, but the game picks up that slack by all the actions you can take with the action tiles you get being WAY trickier and tightly interwoven. the short version is you need to get tasks, complete the tasks to turn them in bonfires, and for each lit bonfire you want to have built a path to it that matches its color, have built the portal next to it that matches its symbol, and have walked a guardian in there to stand next to it. each of those things scores you points at the end, and you can generally go about those things in whatever order you want, but if theres not a lit bonfire in a given place at the end of the game then all the path/portal/guardian there dont score anything. there are mechanics and puzzles within all of those individual steps, and the whole thing is weird multistep process of getting the right action tiles at the right times and having the right resources in place to have all that stuff come together for you in the end. that probably doesnt make any sense, reading it. but! its a neat game if you like out there puzzly weirdness, and it plays snappily once you get the rules down. the forward planning/crunch required is nontrivial, but its not so intense that one misplay spells doom (like some other feld games) so you can generally do things that seem good and not spend forever micromanaging out your entire game. you do want to plan a route through the available tasks in a given game up front, but theres room for tactical looseness turn to turn.

So anyway, if you like out there puzzly euro games, give it a shot its not my favorite Feld, but its up there (my faves are probably Trajan and Carpe Diem, with an honorable mention for Burgundy and In The Year of the Dragon). the solo bot is super low overhead also, and quite hard to beat. My best score so far in the game has been 70, typically more in the mid 60s, and the solo ai usually scores in the 71-75 range. im so close!

My friend and I are both vaccinated, so we actually had our first in person board game session in.... 10,000 years? Time means nothing.

Last year he received his Rambo Kickstarter and we had played the first 3 missions. Last night we revisited it, playing two more missions.

The game remains fun, but hindered by unfortunate production issues and some odd rules. I still find it a bit out of character for a game called Rambo to not employ dice in combat, but it certainly does increase the strategy. There is also a negative effect card called "Crippling Fear" that can really screw you, and any time it affects Rambo we think "yeah right, Rambo is afraid of nothing".

I think the full campaign has 20 missions. I don't know if we will make it that far, but it's a fun time. I will say I'm glad it was his money and not mine.

Saw some friends with kids this weekend. I packed games for both. Hits among the kids? Rhino Hero, Ghost Blitz Junior, Animal Upon Animal and Sequence Junior. My eldest was so hyped for Rhino and Animal that he was trying to teach his friends. I was too busy cooking breakfast to see how successful he was, but my heart was warmed at his enthusiasm.

Also he has recently declared Dropmix his favorite game. It’s baby’s first mixer, and we’ve only done freeplay layering vocals, synths, percussion, bass, whatever, but it absolutely brings a smile to my face. The library is legit. “I Will Survive,” “Call Me Maybe,” “Down With The Sickness,” and the Doctor Who theme? Nice.

Dropmix is legit. It's such a technical wonder how the different tracks layer together and intetwine.

Unfortunately the game modes are all weak.

Got another 2P game of PAX VIKING in...it works 2P but other than learning the mechanics, I can't see playing with less than four players. Among other things, the limited number of tiles in play with 2 can make some victory conditions nigh impossible. Plus with 2P there is just too much space on the map.

One rule to keep an eye on is that the move ship actions only allow you to move ONE ship, not all ships in a space. This puts more of a premium on tiles that give ship movement bonuses.

Also played a quick game of MARVEL UNITED. Very easy rules, game has a built in timer of sorts in that each hero has 12 cards - if they run out before beating the boss, they lose. Game is OK, I can't see going all in on the half dozen boxes of stuff. I think the LCG from FFG is a better game in a similar space.