What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Parks I'd first played this a few weeks back with mezike where I found it to be a pretty pleasant. When my girlfriend suggested we try out a new game I picked up a copy for us and I continue to enjoy it. I still think it's lighter than I would prefer but if I had ever hired Wingspan to be my Family+ weight game then Parks would definitely have fired it. Like Wingspan, Parks has amazing art and good graphic design which makes playing and explaining the game easy. Unlike Wingspan, Parks feels like my decisions matter even if scores are somewhat railroaded into being similar orders of magnitude and has enough interaction that I actually feel like I'm playing with someone else. Further to that, it's easy enough to hold a conversation while keeping the game moving without being boring. My biggest complaint is that the Personal Goals are kind of meaningless and almost distracting; however, apparently the Nightfall expansion fixes that. I want to get the expansion because Crater Lake and Death Valley are missing from the base set! Also, I'm not ashamed to admit that the wonderful production does matter and makes playing the game much more enjoyable. I'm all for gameplay over graphics but good graphics can really make decent gameplay cohesive (see Oath which is top of the class in both aspects!).

Jackwraith wrote: 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.

I think OUTER RIM can be a bit of an acquired taste for some , esp non Star Wars fans. Played a couple games last weekend. In one game, a player with Boba Fett just kept dying thru no fault of his own in most cases ( he did attempt some jobs without many of the prerequisite skills ) . Its def a game where adaptability is key - its not a route optimization game a la MERCHANTS OF VENUS say. I typically don't focus on bounties early but rather stash them away til myself or another player happens to find them; I'll dump them in favor of a more efficient job if given the chance. Players often forget they can cycle the top card of a deck before buying - both to look for better stuff as well as bury a card that an opponent might find useful.

Msample wrote: I think OUTER RIM can be a bit of an acquired taste for some , esp non Star Wars fans. Played a couple games last weekend. In one game, a player with Boba Fett just kept dying thru no fault of his own in most cases ( he did attempt some jobs without many of the prerequisite skills ) . Its def a game where adaptability is key - its not a route optimization game a la MERCHANTS OF VENUS say.

Sure, I got that right away. I appreciated the fact that it wasn't about being the best merchant. It's Outer Rim, right? You're supposed to be the best scoundrel. This wasn't going to be one of those situations where it seems far easier to win as a merchant than as a marauder. Except... the most reliable source of income was off the blue/Salvage deck, since it was almost always the shortest route to travel and meant easy money that didn't involve die rolling. I get what you say about not focusing on what could be quite difficult bounties early on, but with very limited slots available, dumping them back into the deck seems like dooming yourself to the luck of the draw if you want to actually reach Fett's personal goal at some point during the game (the reward for which seemed rather underwhelming, in all honesty.) Maybe it was just the luck of that draw, in that the IG-88 player seemed to just be coasting along (she was the eventual winner), completing her personal goal (2 droid crew) in the initial few rounds, buying a new ship right away, and always seeming able to complete jobs and simply be swimming in cash. I managed to buy a new ship, but was always dying for more money as I wandered out into the stars, trying to reach the next Encounter token...

I took full advantage of the cycling of the Market decks. I think that's a great idea for this type of game. But it didn't cut into all of the downsides that i was repeatedly confronting. Certainly, there's more shine on it if you're a diehard Star Wars fan (I am not), but I didn't think it would turn out as poorly as it did for me.

So I've been playing Fury of Dracula (3rd/4th Edition) and I want to ask: How often do you get a really good match? I like the game and its setting but it has never been more than just good to me. I can see a tendency in it to misfire or at least end in an anticlimax but I also wonder how much of it is due to my own inexperience. I've only played a couple matches myself and none with other experienced players. I can imagine good play making it significantly more tense.

What's your take on it?

Been enjoying some of Elizabeth Hargrave’s Tussie Mussie with my wife. It’s I-split-you-choose the game. Active player offers the second player Teo cards, one upside down. They make a choice. After four turns of this, you score. All points are described on the cards.

It’s cute. Probably improves with some card knowledge which shouldn’t be hard since there are just 18 of them.

It’s a great example of what setting can do for a game. If you were passing cinnamon and salt or magic swords and armor, it would be nothing. But flowers with Victorian meanings? It’s delightful.

tussie mussie is quite good for what it does. i backed the expansions recently, even. the theme really does elevate it a lot.

Erik Twice wrote: So I've been playing Fury of Dracula (3rd/4th Edition) and I want to ask: How often do you get a really good match? I like the game and its setting but it has never been more than just good to me. I can see a tendency in it to misfire or at least end in an anticlimax but I also wonder how much of it is due to my own inexperience. I've only played a couple matches myself and none with other experienced players. I can imagine good play making it significantly more tense.

What's your take on it?

I'm by no means an experienced player but I think Dracula is responsible for managing the pacing of the game. This isn't a moderator role but like most 1vMany games the 1 player needs to ensure the Many are getting harried sufficiently to maintain tension throughout. A Dracula that hides early game is setting themselves up for failure long term and making a more boring game. I love the game but have had very similar experiences and think FoD really benefits from a more experienced player being Dracula. That doesn't help when everyone is equally (in)experienced.

Dracula is absolutely not required or encouraged to pace the game or coddle the hunters. FoD is one of the few 1vAll games that actually wants full competition from both parties in my experience. I'm far from an expert FoD player, but basically the hunters need to be good at their role and well coordinated. If the Hunters are bad the game will be boring and/or frustrating for them and Dracula will win for free. Once they get there, there are modules to add in to make Dracula competitive again.

Edit: FoD is really a 2p game at heart. The hunters have to act as one. If everyone is doing their own thing they will lose badly. I think 3p is the sweet spot, since then you have an extra hand managing all the cards and stuff and also the hunters can bounce ideas off each other. With more hunter players I don't think there's enough for them individually to do for a game that's as long as FoD.

When I said pace, I meant to say Dracula needs to attack the Hunters to make them feel threatened early on but yeah, listen to Ah_pook. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about more than I do!

I agree 3P is best, 5 leaves you with very little to do and 2 misses out on the cooperative aspect. Which can be skipped but I like it.

The match was actually fun in that they were always on my trail or close to it so I had to constantly push foward and try to outmanouver them. We played with all the Dracula powesr except the misdirection one because I didn't quite know how it worked.

Every year we play Arkham Horror 2nd edition for my spouse's birthday. And every year I'm impressed with it, remembering what it does better than all the stuff that followed. There's still some outdated dogshit in it (arbitrary thresholds for losses and such, counting monsters in the game constantly, RUMOR DESIGN, final flaccid fight phase with the GOO), but there are other elements that the follow-ups never captured or are just better designed. You roll more dice, so odds are more predictable. The sliding skill tracks give you nice agency over what is coming up. The fights against regular monsters work nicely and are decisive. Etc.

As an overall thing, I just think its procedural story approach works a lot better for boardgames than written story.

I love AH 2nd. It's great at creating all these little stories that often combine to make something that feels bigger and more connected. But yeah, counting is tedious, just as I've always hated the idea of removing allies. I want to be able to meet allies and find them during encounters, but far too often they are gone from the deck if playing by the rules. So I just don't, but instead have all the allies in a big pile and don't bother removing them as terror rises. It works just fine. And maybe I should also just remove the most annoying rumors as they appear. I get how they make the game more difficult, and sometimes they do add a lot of story and tension, but just as often they don't.

Unlike you, I quite like chucking dice at the GOO. Especially with the final battle cards from Kingsport.

We do the same thing with allies... our biggest non-RAW thing for Arkham Horror 2nd which does make the game easier but mainly improves the cooperation in the game immensely is no first player. We do player decided turn order which opens up so many more opportunities to execute plans. If something calls for hurting the first player or whatever we just do a random die roll.

I miss Arkham Horror. Great reading your writeup Gary.

Our favorite house rule was that no one was allowed to flip up a monster token and read its stats/powers on the back of the token until they fought it. We didn't play often enough to memorize them so this added a nice tension of uncertainty.

AH 2e was one of my fave/top games for over a decade but last year, during my Lockdown game purge, I just decided that there were a lot more new games coming out that was doing similar but a bit different plus I already had Eldritch Horror - so I played it one more time but the 'hook' had gone so it went (base + 3 big box exps ) to a new gen of worshippers. I have Machina Arcana arriving in a few months (hopefully) so that will give me a new flavour.