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Kevin Klemme
March 09, 2020
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oliverkinne
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Mycelia Board Game Review

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December 12, 2023
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December 07, 2023
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River Wild Board Game Review

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November 30, 2023
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Outback Crossing Review

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What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

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01 Jul 2021 10:31 #324356 by charlest
Fantasy Realms is fucking great.

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01 Jul 2021 10:58 #324358 by hotseatgames
I have had the Fantasy Realms expansion for weeks now, and still haven't managed to get it to the table.

In actuality, I *think* about playing board games a hell of a lot more than I actually do it.
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02 Jul 2021 15:38 #324385 by Gregarius

charlest wrote: Fantasy Realms is fucking great.

What!? Have you lost your mind?

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02 Jul 2021 16:32 #324387 by hotseatgames
Oh I KNOW you are not talking smack about Fantasy Realms.
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02 Jul 2021 16:45 #324388 by Michael Barnes
<stepping in behind Mark and Charlie brandishing a spiked flail>

Did he now?
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02 Jul 2021 17:00 #324389 by Msample
Just got back from a small gathering of WBC friends who decided to get together given the cons cancellation. A rather relaxed pace that saw mostly lighter multi player games , with some heavier stuff thrown in.

Games played :

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition x4

Its basically TM the card game, or aka Terraforming meets Race/Roll for the Galaxy .

The game is an almost pure card game, apart from a very small board that tracks TR ratings and lake tiles being placed. All the corporations and most of the cards are tweaked versions of their base game counterparts. Each round you secretly choose one of five roles - Develop, ( build green building cards ) Construct ( build blue action cards or red event cards ) , Action ( use action cards and Standard actions, convert Plants/Heat into TR ) , Produce ( get money, plants, heat ) and Research ( draw cards ) . Each round you perform ALL the roles chosen by players, with the role you chose conferring a bonus on top of the normal action allowed. If you've played RACE/ROLL FOR THE GALAXY, you know how to play assuming you've played the base game. Since everyone is doing stuff simultaneously, this speeds up play. I'd say 90 minutes max per game once you get the hang of it. The game ends when water tiles, heat and oxy are maxed out, just like the base game.

Differences off the top of my head:

you don't produce steel/titanium. Rather they confer a permanent discount. So if you have 3 steel production, you get $6 off EACH building icon card you build, even if more than one is built in a turn.

you never pay for cards, you can sell them back for $3 each at any time. Besides Research phase, some card effects allow bonus card draws during Production

there are NO attack type cards. Asteroids don't nuke plants, no cards reduce another players production/steal stuff.

There is no production of power/conversion to Heat. There are no cities.

Right now its in Target in a slightly stripped down form ( no double layer player mats , no promo cards that the KS has ) . Its unclear whether the non Target version will be the KS version, Target version, or something in between. Its also in the process of shipping to KS backers. I am sure some of you hooples backed it.



Ecos: First Continent x3
Space Base x3
Atlantic Storm x2
Star Wars: Outer Rim x2

Our second game I got the guy who can do encounters/attack patrols 3 spaces away. I sat still for several turns collecting money to buy a much better ship then went on a tear attacking patrol ships and several other players with higher Fame than me. Meanwhile one guy had Boba Fett who must have died at LEAST ten times, maybe more. I started off slow but ramped up fast in the mid game and stole the win in the end.

We all remarked that the game desperately needs more content, esp the various card decks - there are only a dozen or so of some card types, esp cargos. The event deck has gaps in the numbers that show more content was clearly intended, but sadly the gutting of FFG means we'll likely never see it.

Angola x1

Playing FNLA , my partner and I fell behind on the opening turn and spent the whole game playing catch up, sometimes up to 3 VP spaces behind. However on the 7th turn we had a huge surge and got the auto win.

Combat Commander: Europe x1
Commands & Colors: Ancients x1
Las Vegas x1
War of the Ring: Second Edition x1
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03 Jul 2021 14:07 #324403 by Gregarius

hotseatgames wrote: Oh I KNOW you are not talking smack about Fantasy Realms.

This is the same Fantasy Realms where you draw a card, play a card, repeat, then add up the score at the end, right? I want to make sure I'm not confusing it with some new fantasy-themed LCR variant.
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03 Jul 2021 17:01 #324406 by Michael Barnes
Looks like we got ourselves a smart guy here, fellas...

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03 Jul 2021 17:15 - 03 Jul 2021 17:16 #324407 by charlest

Gregarius wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: Oh I KNOW you are not talking smack about Fantasy Realms.

This is the same Fantasy Realms where you draw a card, play a card, repeat, then add up the score at the end, right? I want to make sure I'm not confusing it with some new fantasy-themed LCR variant.


That's it. I'm surprised this is controversial. That game has been a huge hit and is loved by people with all different tastes.

It won't shock with its brilliance, but it's one of the best experiences for a 20 minute game that this hobby has to offer in my opinion.
Last edit: 03 Jul 2021 17:16 by charlest.
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04 Jul 2021 08:55 - 04 Jul 2021 09:05 #324416 by Ah_Pook
Played a few games of Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition 4p, and it's fine! It feels pretty hard to actually deny people using the phase calling, so generally you just choose what you need to do. Probably 2p there's a little more opportunity for tactical play there, but 4p it didn't seem worth the mental effort. Also, it's still definitely a game about drawing things that combo well together early. One game I was stuck in an endless cycle of produce/research (ie draw cards), both of which were woefully inefficient and benefiting everyone else more than me, because I didn't draw a playable Green (production boosting) card for the first third of the game. It felt real bad, but that's the nature of these top decking engine building card games yknow. It's why 2p Race For The Galaxy is my favorite, because it's SO FAST that if you fizzle your early draws you're sad for 20 minutes rather that 90. There might be enough time in TMAE to bounce back if early leaders stall on their draws, but I wish it would just end faster instead.

It's fun solo, and I'm very interested in the 2p coop variant, but it's not going to be a game I love ever I think.

Edit: to be clear, I'll take Ares over regular TM 1000% of the time, solely for the shorter play time.
Last edit: 04 Jul 2021 09:05 by Ah_Pook.
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04 Jul 2021 23:51 - 05 Jul 2021 09:57 #324425 by Jackwraith
Had some former regulars who are now only intermittent show up for the day. We started with Tournament at Camelot; a game I traded for after Wade's review of its expansion, but which I had yet to get to the table. It was King Arthur (me) vs Tristan vs Gawain. Gawain exploited his inherent ability against Deception regularly and Tristan got battered hard in the third or fourth round. I could never get dealt decent Swords cards to exploit with Arthur's ability and by the time I could use Excalibur, no one else had good enough Swords cards to beat me so that I could take advantage of it. All buried at the bottom of the deck or something. I found the Feint result which saw two players protected from the melee while the player who put down what was, in fact, the strongest card was the loser to be a really wonky aspect of the game, although I can see the potential strategy inherent to the "best card not always winning." Tristan went out to end the game and Gawain beat me by 25 points.

Then we added a fourth player and put Tiny Epic Kingdoms on the table, which it hadn't done for a while, much to my chagrin. The first game was Imps (me) vs Merfolk vs Orcs vs Ooze. There was heavy investing in Research, as happens with a lot of new players (I was the only non-newb at the table) and I never got beyond level 3, but was able to exploit the Imps' ability to spread far and wide and keep expanding. That game ended with the Ooze hitting the top of their Research table, but I had the dude advantage and was also camping out on the capital city on the Merfolk territory, which gave me the winning margin: 12-10-10-8. Then we tried a second game which was Death Knights (me) vs Undead vs Treants vs Draconians. There was a lot more competition over the Tower and I wasn't able to get into a position to utilize the combat abilities of the Knights, as everyone had significantly more mana than I did. The game was again ended by two people hitting the top of the Research (I again didn't get past level 3) and while I was leading on the Tower, the Treants hit enough of their bonus to get past me 14-13-12-10.

Then we lost our fourth and one of my players who is a longtime Runebound fan asked to play, since she hadn't gotten a game in for several years. We decided to play Sands of Al-Kalim, since it's the best of the large expansions. I was Malikki the Claw vs Bogran the Shadow vs Sahla. Bogran was a first-time player, but he caught on pretty quickly. I was fortunate in that I started in Irram, the northernmost city, and every time I looked at a Legendary quest deck, the top card seemed to be targeted at a region that was in the top 1/4 of the board, so I didn't have to travel very far. I also landed a really good shield (Bulwark) in the early going, which gives +4 to rolls when defending, so I was able to deal with even the more strenuous Green and Yellow encounters in this expansion with not much trouble. I later added the Bloody Dagger and the Ghost Armor rune, which made me pretty much unstoppable and I managed to complete my four quests for the win, but Sahla had three and was on the verge of her fourth, so it wasn't the frequent curb-stomping that I've handed out in the past.

Finally, we got Outer Rim off the shelf for the first time. I obtained it in a trade with Ah Pook last year. Maybe it was just fatigue setting in (we also had a gathering of about a dozen people yesterday for which I did all the cooking) but I really, really do not get the approbation for this one. It's a pick-up-and-deliver that has you spend a ton of time doing nothing but chasing ghosts across a ridiculously extended board. The worst part is that it frequently forces you to either sit still and make a little money or move to make real money but only after two or three turns of doing nothing to get to that real money. People compare this with Merchants & Marauders but this would have equated to the worst M&M game I've ever played. There are so many more possibilities to both make money and simply do things on M&M's standard board, simply because you're closer to more possibilities. I spent most of my time as Boba Fett (vs IG-88 and Lando) turning over Encounter tokens to see if I could find my bounty targets only to discover that the delivery point for said targets was literally on the other end of the board. Combine that with having neutral reputation with most of the factions for much of the game, such that they would stop me in my tracks half the time, only increased the frustration and I was basically forcing myself to keep going and finish the game. Pile all of that onto the number of Jobs that need X trait that you don't have which become useless to attempt due to requiring a crit to proceed on even the first step, plus the outright uselessness of many of the Encounter cards which only add to the stack of inefficient tasks that might make you money if you can make it across the galaxy, plus the general irrelevance of most of the Mods that we saw and... man. I'm usually not tempted to put a game on the trade list after only one play but I'm really considering it here. The two people I was playing with are total Star Wars nerds, so they were having fun discovering a lot of the obscure characters and reveling in playing the more known ones (Lando managed to buy the YT and turn into the Falcon with Chewie on his crew), so at least they had fun. But I have precisely zero interest in playing this one again anytime soon.
Last edit: 05 Jul 2021 09:57 by Jackwraith.
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05 Jul 2021 00:38 #324427 by Gary Sax
Good lineup, sounds fun.
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05 Jul 2021 01:49 #324428 by hotseatgames
Two games today with my girlfriend... first up was Fantasy Realms with the new expansion. I don't yet see the appeal of the cursed items. Both of us promptly ignored our item since it seemed fairly useless. The new suits are interesting, particularly the Undead since they earn you points based on what is in the DISCARD area! I had trouble getting much going and she creamed me by like 70 points.

Later I taught her Theseus. I had not played in years, but it came back pretty quickly. I had her play the Marines since I consider them to be the easiest faction to grasp. I took the xenos.

I had an impossible time upgrading my units, while she had an easy as hell time. I also barely got any modules installed. She had onslaughts installed all over the place and started really hammering on me. I only had ONE units upgraded to be able to do damage and never got any of my modules to do a single thing. She utterly destroyed me and I only did 2 damage to her the whole game. Embarrassing! She liked the game a lot and wants to play again, so that's cool!
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05 Jul 2021 05:44 #324430 by southernman

Michael Barnes wrote: Looks like we got ourselves a smart guy here, fellas...

Very smart, possibly :)

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05 Jul 2021 05:49 - 05 Jul 2021 05:53 #324431 by southernman
Since we started to relax restrictions over here on May 17 I was finally, after seven and a half months, allowed visitors to my house and to visit others so gaming has been too frantic to be able to post anything interesting here. My 'catch-up' gaming since May 17 to now has been:
Zombicide: Black Plague x9
Legendary Encounters: A Firefly Deck Building Game x7
Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords – Base Set x7
Destinies x5
Sword & Sorcery x5
BANG! The Dice Game x3
Disney Villainous x2
Ra x2
Xia: Legends of a Drift System x2
Kemet: Blood and Sand x1
Mercado de Lisboa x1
Pan Am x1
Rallyman: GT x1
Runebound 2e x1


You can probably spot the couple of visits to my euro group B)
Last edit: 05 Jul 2021 05:53 by southernman.

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