What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Currently smitten with Imperium: Classics & Legends, on a deep-dive with this one with several plays over the last couple of days. It's right in my wheelhouse of card-tableau combos and funky asymmetrical play. Some great stuff with how you work your deck of cards; it's not quite a deck-builder, more of a deck-manager as you want to pin some cards to your tableau, drop them out of the game entirely, or bounce them around between your hand, tableau and discard. Some factions go wild with acquiring cards from the central market, others need to go super lean, all of them are occupying very different design spaces.

Every time you hit a reshuffle you get to grab one of your faction cards and (in most cases) you reach a point where you switch from barbarism to civilisation and start buying far more powerful empire cards. This is something you have to plan well for because some of your tactics will stop working once you start wearing togas and going to the theatre and you need to find ways to store those cards away at just the right time so that they don't kludge up your deck, as well as sometimes buying fancy grown-up cards well in advance of your ability to play them in order to deploy them rapidly in the future.

For some factions however there is a totally different angle to how they work and some of them are really wild in how they leverage the mechanisms of the design - the Arthurians for example have quests instead of empire cards and can either work with Merlin to work steadily towards resolving them or rush through them by turning to Morgana for help at an increased risk of reaching the final battle and losing knights to attrition (who are the primary driving force in their deck). Then there are the Vikings who never become civilised, or the Atlanteans who start with an empire but struggle to stop it sinking, and every stripe inbetween. I've not yet played with every faction but so far they are all very unique in how they work. Enjoying this one a lot, it's top ten material for me without hesitation.

As expected, Iron Helm was improved by just piling everything together. I played two runs last night, one ended in tragedy about halfway through because of exhaustion- I was overspending on attacks to try to avoid damage but I should have been taking more risks on the weaker monsters. I also made a couple of bad choices in the dungeon and wound up in a few ambushes I could have avoided. It was sad, I wound up trying to punch a wraith because I just couldn’t swing the axe any more.

The second run went much better, but it was up and down throughout. Some of the stronger monsters showed up and put the screws in early on, but some lucky rolls and lucky draws kept me relatively healthy. There was a moment where poison was getting close to terminal but I found the alter at just the right moment to pray it back down. I had good weapons and the Madman’s Helm (-1 enemy initial damage, +1 to your damage but you can never take it off), and was using the Treasure Hunter skill to siphon some energy off of enemies that have gold as a reward. I made more liberal use of potion grenades (super useful because they don’t cost an energy but give 2D6+a bonus versus specific weaknesses). I did make some iffy choices in the Plot cards, which tanked my Morality well into “chaotic evil” territory and paid for it when an angry angel showed up and took some loot away. But I made it to the boss, and it was a Fire Elemental. I managed to parry his initial damage (with a skill) and did a hit 3d6 attack which knocked his HP down by half. He had me down to 4 HP and I had a do or die moment...and no energy, which meant I could only punch for 1. But I had one last grenade so I rolled the 2D6 and blew him up. Scored pretty low (like 32) but I made it. Fun!

re: Mezike I will look out for it sometime, reviewing well too. Sounds awesome.

Osprey are apparently working on a TTS mod so there will be an option to try online first, but this is one of those rare occasions where I’m happy to stick my neck out and recommend something without applying a mile of caveats, plus it’s relatively inexpensive to grab just one of the boxes. If you want to check out a playthrough there is a good (if a little slow) one from gaming rules! with the designers; Nigel explains bits and pieces of the background and the thematic intent behind the design while they play.

Thoughts re Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition after 3 solo plays: it feels a lot like Terraforming Mars mashed up with Race For The Galaxy! By which I mean it's a way slower RFTG, but a way faster TM. it's still basically a game of hoping you draw into an engine, but I'm way more okay with that in a faster game. I'm not sure I would reach for this over RFTG, which is both significantly faster and more interesting, but this still seems fun enough. The solo game seems brutally hard, assuming I'm playing the rules correctly. Haven't gone bank through the rules after playing to see if I missed anything, but it didn't feel like I was playing anything wrong anyway. The closest I got was 7 steps up a track away from completing the terraforming goals within the time frame, and that includes 10 free steps up the tracks from playing on Novice difficulty.

Speeding up Terraforming Mars is exactly what it needs!

Gary Sax wrote: Speeding up Terraforming Mars is exactly what it needs!

I agree wholeheartedly. I just don't know that I also agree that what RFTG needs is making it way longer and slower

Last week my wife was in West Virginia and found a copy of Reiner Knizia's The Hobbit at a thrift store for $2. Being a fan of other Knizia designs like Lord of the Rings and Beowulf, I assumed it was the sort of thing that would be right up my alley. I was right.

It's got the same progressive "auction" mechanic as Beowulf, but much simpler. There's really only one kind of way to get stuff, and the valuation of it is way fuzzier than it is in that other game. But it's all in service of a bunch of little dice rolling challenges to get treasure, all based off of events in the book. That part almost feels like Elder Sign or the Doctor Who game, where you manipulate the dice to get what you need, but there's still a high probability of failure. It softens some of those sharp edges a little by allowing you to pass on a challenge if you don't think you are up for it, but otherwise that's about it. You do very simple auctions to take on more challenging dice rolls, and then the person with the most treasure wins at the end.

It doesn't have quite the nuance of something like Beowulf, which is a surprisingly deep game for what it is. It's also not quite as committed to its source material as Lord of the Rings. But it's also the most streamlined of those three games, and the most intuitive one. I know that many people here would roll their eyes at yet another Knizia interpretation of a novel that revolves around auctions, but I frankly really like that style. Partly that's because while these games are pretty abstracted, they are not easily optimized. Instead they are about taking risks and playing with the other players, rather than against the game. It's also because they are a very specific design space that isn't at all the zeitgeist these days, and I guess I am nostalgic for my early days in the hobby.

I'm really fascinated by these games, and other is similar games based on novels that still somehow work as 45-minute German designs. Knizia is the best at this, but there have been some other solid games like The Swarm, or even Pillars of the Earth, which felt a lot fresher before all of us got worker-placement'ed out. They work as interpretations of source material, rather than 1:1 recreations, and I think that takes a lot of design finesse. This is probably why I've been drawn to the Prospero Hall games, except those ones function like a more direct translation of their source material.

Anyway, it was really fun, and I think it might be the best board game I'll ever find for $2.

I was playing Crokinole with my kids on Father's Day when my father-in-law walked in, and the first words out of his mouth were, "why aren't you out digging a hole somewhere?" He meant it, though not in a mean sort of way.

My wife's entire family values labor above all else. Not work, labor. Time spent not creating something or fixing something or rebuilding something is time wasted, so to see me playing and having fun with three of my kids was just anathema to him. He's a great guy, but it's just in his nature.

So that was a bit of buzzkill on Sunday. I've learned that any game that takes longer than half an hour is likely to draw frustration from my wife. She won't come out and say it and she won't stop me from doing it and I think in her head she appreciates that this is one of my escapes. But in her heart she gets frustrated. and the opportunity to get out and game somewhere else has been missed over this last year.

Board Game Arena has been a useful outlet simply because I can spend two minutes to take a turn and then move on to other things.

My dad was like that when I was growing up. He was always bitching about "those goddamn video games"....

It was a great source of satisfaction when people started making tons of money playing video games. I wasn't one of them, but that is beside the point! Still, I have made "some" money by producing games myself, so every now and then I remind him of his shitty attitude when I was young.

My family has broadly never cared about games the way I have. No one ever pushed back against it, of course. For my wife it has always been something to do with other friends, but games aren't an inherently relaxing thing for her like they are for me. My older son is now 11, and he's getting to the point where he's becoming my primary opponent in most games. This summer he's played several bigger games with me, including War of the Ring (winning both times) and Civilization: A New Dawn. I actually have a copy of the new print run of Command & Colors: Ancients coming, and I think he'll really dig that one.

But I really miss getting together with people my own age to play board games, or roleplaying games, or really playing any game at all with a group. That was really the oasis of my week, and I haven't had it properly since February of 2020. Roll20 and TTS do in a pinch, but I'm pretty tired of the pinch by now.

Last night we finished up a 2nd game of Dune: Imperium that had lingered on for a couple of TTS sessions. I continue to marvel at its appeal, because it goes to such lengths to avoid interactivity--something totally at odds with the material. Once the upcoming game with the super long title that promises to be 85% of "real" Dune for 2-4 players and in under 2 hours gets released, what's the remaining constituency for Dune: Imperium?

JoelCFC25 wrote: Last night we finished up a 2nd game of Dune: Imperium that had lingered on for a couple of TTS sessions. I continue to marvel at its appeal, because it goes to such lengths to avoid interactivity--something totally at odds with the material. Once the upcoming game with the super long title that promises to be 85% of "real" Dune for 2-4 players and in under 2 hours gets released, what's the remaining constituency for Dune: Imperium?

The mechanics seemed like they did work to inject interaction into the standard worker placement formula. Presumably the constituency for Dune Imperium is people who like worker placement/deck building games, not people who like the original Dune boardgame.

Also, re Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition, I got temporarily less lazy and uploaded the VOD from yesterday to YouTube if anyone wants to see it in action. theres a nice Nugget cameo too

Just wanted to compliment how much your camera setup has improved since you started a few months ago, great job.