What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I had Graters. I was like wow, chocolate ice cream. There were chocolate chips. It was ice cream, sure enough.

All the fancy flavors that are usually awful, the silly notion that eating “craft” ice cream is somehow healthier or more soulful, the $5 scoops, the long lines made longer by the jackass that wants to taste everything...versus a Banana Split or a Reese’s Blizzard? Or even just a humble pineapple sundae? Pssh.

The only competition is a tiny little cafe in Provins, France. They do a rose soft serve that is like eating heaven. Whatever that place is in Savannah that has Savannah Socialite (a chocolate butter pecan) is the other runner up.

Also, soft serve is the ultimate ice cream style. Hard pack can go to hell.

hotseatgames wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: Dairy Queen > all “craft” ice cream

Pure trolling!

Any Ohioans rolling through my tiny city of Findlay owe it to themselves to seek out Dietsch's Bros. It is the best ice cream in all the land. Puts Jeni's and Graeter's to shame.

My daughter and I were by there the other day I wouldn't have minded a quick ice cream break.

People from NE Ohio swear by Handel's. There's one close to my house, and it's okay, not great. Their big selling point is that they have a bajillion flavors. 31 flavors are for pikers.

Michael Barnes wrote: I had Graters. I was like wow, chocolate ice cream. There were chocolate chips. It was ice cream, sure enough.

All the fancy flavors that are usually awful, the silly notion that eating “craft” ice cream is somehow healthier or more soulful, the $5 scoops, the long lines made longer by the jackass that wants to taste everything...versus a Banana Split or a Reese’s Blizzard? Or even just a humble pineapple sundae? Pssh.

The only competition is a tiny little cafe in Provins, France. They do a rose soft serve that is like eating heaven. Whatever that place is in Savannah that has Savannah Socialite (a chocolate butter pecan) is the other runner up.

Also, soft serve is the ultimate ice cream style. Hard pack can go to hell.

I wouldn't argue with you that there are such things as oddball flavors. Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip still works for me, so I don't need Pinot Noir and Goat Cheese ice cream for my ice cream fix just yet. And DQ is perfectly fine. Reese's Blizzard is good stuff. But Graeter's (using them as the example) just does a better job on the ice cream itself.

Michael Barnes wrote: Also, soft serve is the ultimate ice cream style. Hard pack can go to hell.

I've been reading stupid Michael Barnes takes for thirteen years now, and somehow this is only in the top five or so.

Many years ago, I was in Madison, Wisconsin for a Jyhad tournament. It was held in the student union building on the UWM campus in early January, so I decided to take a walk around after an early oust from the first round. I came across about 20 people standing in line, and asked the last person in line what they were waiting for. "Ice cream," he said, "the best ice cream in Wisconsin and made at a local creamery." Wow, people waiting in line for ice cream in Wisconsin in January? I got in line and eventually got a scoop of eggnog ice cream with both amazing flavor and texture.

I have never forgotten that eggnog ice cream, and sometimes tried to replicate the experience by pouring eggnog onto a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Last Christmas, the local grocery store had a limited supply of eggnog ice cream, and I bought 3 containers of 1.5 quarts each. I would have bought 4, but I knew that I didn't have enough room left in my freezer. Anyway, 3 containers should last me until next Christmas.

I move we turn the site into There Will Be Ice Cream.

san il defanso wrote: I move we turn the site into There Will Be Ice Cream.

Maybe go all old school. If you like anything besides chocolate and vanilla soft-serve*, you're some kind of pansy that probably likes Stefan Feld games or something.

*Mint chocolate chip gets a pass, but it has to be that creme de menthe green color.

It feels like this should be part of a revived Friday Freakout.

Soft serve is pretty fantastic, but hard pack vanilla topped with caramel and salted pecans trumps all.

My wife won't touch the mint chip that is green.

the_jake_1973 wrote: It feels like this should be part of a revived Friday Freakout.

Soft serve is pretty fantastic, but hard pack vanilla topped with caramel and salted pecans trumps all.

My wife won't touch the mint chip that is green.

Last week the local soft serve place had a Cinco de Mayo special - lime soft serve with coconut sprinkles. Pure heaven .

Back to board games....

Yesterday my opponent brought over UNMATCHED, which came out a few years ago. Its a 2P melee combat game. There is a small two sided board. Each player gets a famous hero. We started with King Arthur ( slow, melee tank ) and his sidekick Merlin ( ranged fuck up the other characters ) vs Medusa ( ranged ) and her three Harpies ( mostly meat shields. )

Plays fast - you get a hand of five cards that allow attack, defense, special actions. We got in four matches in about two hours. We split 2 matches with Medusa/Arthur, then we switched to Bruce Lee vs Sinbad. Lee is hilarious, both characters are melee but he can really rack up damage IF he gets the right cards in sequence.

There are some expansions. If you've got a half hour to kill there are worse things out there.

Unmatched is a great game that I never got around to picking up. At this point there is so much of it that it seems overwhelming.

Yeah, I picked up Funkoverse because Uba was so geeked about it and it's essentially the same thing as Unmatched so, despite the latter sounding cool, I don't think I either want or am able ($) to get invested in two games like that (e.g. both brawlers; both endlessly expandable.) Plus, one of the upsides of Funkoverse is that you can play up to four, rather than just two (either teams or free-for-all.)

Before we leave the subject of ice cream:

- Neapolitan is the king of ice cream flavors
- Jimmies are terrible
- Mint Chocolate Chip is down there with Superman for worst flavor
- it should be a criminal offense to serve a child taiyaki
- SherBET not SherBERT but don’t order it anyway because it’s fucking awful.

Anyway, Unmatched is great, I think it’s one of the best games of recent years. It really puts Epic Duels out to pasture in a big way. I have everything but Buffy, I just don’t have any interest/knowledge of Buffy or Inwould get it too. I even preordered Deadpool. My son is just KILLER with Muldoon. Muldoon has bagged Dracula, Bruce Lee, Big Foot, Sherlock Holmes, all of ‘em under his command.

Back to TMB, I played it like five times over the weekend, with one and two flesh gnomes. I am really digging it- for the amount of setup/overhead this game really delivers quite a lot of heft. I get why people go gaga over it...every decision is a big deal from the tactical combat choices to the encounter cards to how you upgrade to which dice you choose to roll or not roll. There are lots of micro decisions that really add up, like whether to lock a die down to build a grenade or let a bones result go onto your backup plan it’s pretty concrete how these decisions have impact and there definitely combos and synergies to explore. There are some neat little narrative things, like how we got busted trying to cross this river which would normally cause the Tyrant’s encounter card to top deck...on turn 2, which would likely be a KO. But we had a Tattered Map that let us draw two Encounters and flush one to the bottom of the deck. So we knew a way around. One of the encounters I saw had a flicking mini game where your flesh gnomes are trying to shoot arrows into trees to pull themselves out of quicksand.

The upgrades and skills are some of the best I’ve seen in this kind of game- it’s a really cool system and each flesh gnome has a different grid and different concepts to work with. There is a very strong sense of getting better as you go as well as having options to get more specialized along a couple of vectors

The fights are pretty tough, lots of “if do this then this happens, but If Imiss then we’re screwed” moments. The enemies are lethal, and they have combos and synergies of their own. The battles feel like a combination of a D&D encounter and a JRPG battle.

But above all...it’s addictive in ways that most games aren’t. It’s just so easy to get into and you play a full campaign in one sitting. The difficulty is a little capricious, but you find yourself wanting to try different builds and combinations to see what you can do or how far you can go with them.

So yeah, it’s good. The horrifying graphic design is a major issue as is the $130 price tag but it is a really well done design.

The establishment I mentioned, Dietsch Bros., makes it in-house. I know this because I used to work there in high school. If that is really unique, that surprises me. I never thought they were doing anything special, just that they were doing it really well.