What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I played Everdell for the first time this weekend. About the only thing I can say about it is: "It's fine." Nothing really stands out about it (except maybe the presentation, which is very pretty). On your turn, you either place a worker or play a card or refresh ("Move to the next season" as it's called). That's it. Nothing feels particularly tight or constrained. I was always able to accomplish whatever goal I had. There's no conflict to speak of, as there are so many worker spaces, that we didn't encounter much competition. If a thing I wanted was blocked, there was always a viable Plan B. So ... yeah, it's fine.

The game uses the "If you own Card A, then you can play Card B for free" concept that 7 Wonders uses. Maybe we just had back luck, but this only got used a couple of times. It just seemed like Card B always came out first, so we weren't able to take advantage of many interesting card synergies and combos.

Given the imposing stack of cards, I expected a lot more variability in the deck, but there are a LOT of duplicate cards, to the point where I was getting annoyed at seeing the same cards pop up again.

Overall, I guess I expected there to be more game here. Instead it was just ... fine.

Sounds exactly like my reaction to petrichor above in this thread.

Everdell flows very well but it is absolutely meaningless.

jason10mm wrote: One of my son's friends has played Risk so that's a definite contender if it can play quickly enough.

I'm not sure about vanilla Risk but many of the variants have sort of built-in timers now to keep things moving. Hasbro seem to have done a lot of work towards making the game more fast paced and not drag on for an entire afternoon.

Erik Twice wrote: Everdell flows very well but it is absolutely meaningless.

Yes, exactly. It's a lot of empty calories with an excellent presentation. I even liked the big dumb cardboard tree!

The turns go fast, and it doesn't overstay its welcome (two big pluses in my book). It's just the poster child for a "weak 7" sort of game. Initially, we were all a bit daunted by the cards -- you get a handful of cards, plus there are 8 public cards available on the board. That's a lot to parse right off the bat, so the first few turns were pretty slow.

One design choice I liked was the variable worker spaces and the variable events (basically, points you can earn if you meet certain requirements). That would help with replayability.

Chronicles of Drunagor - Age of Darkness

Have been playing this for about two months now, once a week or so, with a friend who bought it. We had already progressed quite far in GLOOMHAVEN when we packed it away about 18 months ago.

Like GH, its an episodic dungeon crawler. The comparisons are inevitable, so I'll pretty much frame everything I say as a comp since GH is fairly well known .

Characters - you get the usual mix of types, with the twist that in addition to the character itself, you select a role ( support, leader, healer etc ) . This in theory allows more variety . The role also determines the characters initiative - for instance my dwarven fighter always acts first each round, no matter what.

Like GH each round you select an action from your characters menu. Since initiative is fixed, you don't do this in advance, so play is a tad faster as you know when everyone acts. You select a cube color coded to action types ( melee, ranged etc ) and block off that action. When you use the last of your cubes,you reset and gain a Curse cube, which blocks an action of your choice. While it sounds different than GH, the overall effect is the same. Unlike GH, there is no real time crunch at all - you can take actions to remove Curse cubes . The one sort of timer effect is that every turn Darkness tiles are placed and spread - they inhibit character TH#, inflict minor damage and boost monster attacks. But so far we've found it to be a minor annoyance and not any sort of doomsday clock .

Monsters - big difference is that they are depicted with actual minis. The downside of course is far less variety. The base set only has about a dozen types ( that come in four levels of strength ) . Like characters, their initiative is fixed.

Set up - the terrain and lack of monster diversity are a big aid in speedy set up. Each chapter starts with a set up diagram from a booklet, with one or more doors attached. Each door is a trifold cardboard sheet that when unfolded reveals a new room. There is a QR code as well for future expansion. This does a nice job of preserving the unknown .

Combat is much simpler. Monsters ALWAYS hit, prioritizing the strongest character they can reach. There are a variety of conditional effects - poison, burn, etc. I've got to say that the iconography is not a strong suit and even a half dozen chapters in we still find ourselves looking up reminders on certain icons. Characters in turn roll a D20 to hit versus their weapon to Hit #. 1 alway misses, 20 is a critical hit. There is no LOS - no blocking terrain. Some terrain inflicts damage .

Overall it plays like a stripped down GH. While the more streamlined play makes it a bit faster, the difficulty is also stripped down IMO and the tactical puzzles are less interesting. One big difference is that there is NO gold or currency whatsoever. Parties level up as a group, not individually.

Its been atop the BGG hotness for awhile and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. But of course I think this is as much self justification for the large KS outlay as anything. In a world without GH I think it would have more profile. But in reality, I think its more a watered down less interesting version.

For the first time since last fall, I played some Blackstone Fortress. My gamer friend is still in town for a few more days, so I got him to give it a try. We played halfway through a standard mission of 4 combats and 4 challenges. He was familiar with Silver Tower, so he picked up on Blackstone pretty quickly.

The first combat was too easy, until the recently deceased ur-ghuls (basically xenomorphs) received full reinforcements at an inconvenient time and place. Within one turn, half our party was badly shredded. We rallied and managed to mostly recover before moving on. A couple of back to back challenges gave us additional time to heal from grievous wounds, so we were practically in mint condition for the second combat. That one had more of an open layout, so we proceeded with more caution and took less damage.

My friend said afterwards that he was slightly bored until that first combat got ugly, but generally liked the game after that. I probably overdosed on Blackstone Fortress last year, because I don't have any enthusiasm for resuming the mission later this week. However, it was kinda fun running a religious zealot with a flamethrower, and also the space pope who managed to go through two full combats without taking a single wound.

Was interested in Drunagot and saw the price tag- fuck that shit!

Msample wrote: Chronicles of Drunagor - Age of Darkness

Have been playing this for about two months now, once a week or so, with a friend who bought it. We had already progressed quite far in GLOOMHAVEN when we packed it away about 18 months ago.

Like GH, its an episodic dungeon crawler. The comparisons are inevitable, so I'll pretty much frame everything I say as a comp since GH is fairly well known .

Characters - you get the usual mix of types, with the twist that in addition to the character itself, you select a role ( support, leader, healer etc ) . This in theory allows more variety . The role also determines the characters initiative - for instance my dwarven fighter always acts first each round, no matter what.

Like GH each round you select an action from your characters menu. Since initiative is fixed, you don't do this in advance, so play is a tad faster as you know when everyone acts. You select a cube color coded to action types ( melee, ranged etc ) and block off that action. When you use the last of your cubes,you reset and gain a Curse cube, which blocks an action of your choice. While it sounds different than GH, the overall effect is the same. Unlike GH, there is no real time crunch at all - you can take actions to remove Curse cubes . The one sort of timer effect is that every turn Darkness tiles are placed and spread - they inhibit character TH#, inflict minor damage and boost monster attacks. But so far we've found it to be a minor annoyance and not any sort of doomsday clock .

Monsters - big difference is that they are depicted with actual minis. The downside of course is far less variety. The base set only has about a dozen types ( that come in four levels of strength ) . Like characters, their initiative is fixed.

Set up - the terrain and lack of monster diversity are a big aid in speedy set up. Each chapter starts with a set up diagram from a booklet, with one or more doors attached. Each door is a trifold cardboard sheet that when unfolded reveals a new room. There is a QR code as well for future expansion. This does a nice job of preserving the unknown .

Combat is much simpler. Monsters ALWAYS hit, prioritizing the strongest character they can reach. There are a variety of conditional effects - poison, burn, etc. I've got to say that the iconography is not a strong suit and even a half dozen chapters in we still find ourselves looking up reminders on certain icons. Characters in turn roll a D20 to hit versus their weapon to Hit #. 1 alway misses, 20 is a critical hit. There is no LOS - no blocking terrain. Some terrain inflicts damage .

Overall it plays like a stripped down GH. While the more streamlined play makes it a bit faster, the difficulty is also stripped down IMO and the tactical puzzles are less interesting. One big difference is that there is NO gold or currency whatsoever. Parties level up as a group, not individually.

Its been atop the BGG hotness for awhile and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. But of course I think this is as much self justification for the large KS outlay as anything. In a world without GH I think it would have more profile. But in reality, I think its more a watered down less interesting version.

I’m always a sucker for dungeon crawls. This will help me avoid it, so thank you very much.

Played 3x Fantasy Realms today, which is just a great little card game. Really glad it came back in print, and Red Rising is going straight onto the trade pile. Turns out bolting tracks and a bunch of stuff onto the game didn't make it better.

Also played 2x Aeons End. Played the first two games of an expedition, and we're working on some absolutely busted stuff with our current mage/market/treasure setup. The expedition system is a fantastic addition to the game, even if I don't actually play 4x games in a row of AE that often.

Played a three-player game of Masters of the Night on Saturday. I played a bunch of solitaire games earlier this year, before and after posting my review. I lost most of my early games but eventually got above a 50% win rate. I played a couple of 2-player games last spring with my old friend who was for another visit, and we lost both games because he tried out some failed strategy experiments. It turns out that just quarantining the vampire hunters in one section of town doesn't work, because the veil (masquerade for you White Wolf fans) takes a hit every time a hunter isn't available to spawn. So it's better to keep killing hunters so there are always hunters available to spawn. He was also practically hostile to the idea of getting control of the museum so we could obtain relics (magic items).

Our third player is a highly-experience board gamer who has a strong preference for early German eurogames. He is also a really smart guy who does a great job of analyzing the game state in a co-op game. With his help, we had a decisive victory, winning two full turns before the event deck would run out. Even though this was his first play, he was great at identifying the priorities each turn and advising us on how to efficiently address those priorities. It didn't hurt that our third dice pool of the game was great, with an unlikely number of fives and sixes. Our new player was also very open to getting some relics, especially after the first one allowed him to give blood points to other vampires, regardless of location. So we each acquired two magic items early in the game, and those items served us well for the rest of the game.

At the not-a-club game night:

Search for Planet X is something that I hesitate to describe as a boardgame because it is essentially an app-based game that has some largely redundant physical elements, and quite timely to mention given the ongoing discussion regarding the latest edition of Descent.

Everyone gets a scratch pad with the night sky carved up into a dozen segments with an 'expert' mode that splits it further into eighteen. There are fixed quantities of half a dozen types of celestial body with some simple logic rules governing their location - comets can only appear in certain segments, asteroids always appear in pairs, etc. - and each player is given some further secret rules that only they know; for example you might be told by the app that asteroids cannot be adjacent to comets. The cool part of this is that you can vary the amount of clues for individual players which is great if you want to provide a handicap for certain players/dads.

Play then resolves through a combination of taking a research action (learn a new rule) and searching the sky (ask the app if a certain body is present within a specified range of sky segments). Doing these activities requires expending varying amounts of time that creates an organic jostle for player order. Every now and then you are asked to submit a theory which is essentially making a guess, whether educated or wild, as to which body may inhabit a specific sky segment. Play goes on until someone figures out by logical deduction where Planet X must be and there are points for correct theories as well as for locating the mysterious planet correctly. A neat twist here on deduction games is that, because the app maintains secrecy, everyone can pinpoint Planet X on the same turn and there is a sliding scale of points on offer based on where you are in player order.

It's all very nice and comfortable stuff. The theories are a lovely idea because they reveal new information when proven or disproven by the app and which end up every bit as valuable as doing straight research. Depending on what you have discovered they can become pivotal in unlocking big chunks of your personal logic puzzle, and there is a wonderful feeling when you figure something out and get to put in your research paper first to secure a big score. In our game we all figured out the game-ending location of Planet X at the same time but as I was last in turn order (having spent more time researching than the others) I got far fewer points. However I still managed to win because my theories were more robust; I may not have secured the glory of being the first to discover but was overall the more credible and trusted astronomer.

Here's the thing though - it feels like an escape-room experience in that once you've played it, well, you've had the experience. You can go again of course but it is literally the exact same game with slightly different clues to a slightly different puzzle solution, just like working through a book of Sudoku. Because the physical components do very little of interest this would have totally been better off as a digital app, and I'll wager that you can easily proxy what the components do with no more than pencil, paper and a couple of tokens. Overall it's very hard to recommend beyond being a short-lived novelty, but I would certainly encourage getting a play or two in if the opportunity arises.


At home:

Parks: Nightfall has been seeing a lot of play. The base game is a total Bob Ross in that it is peaceful, relaxing and beautiful; Nightfall puts in a big dose of pep that makes it feel much more of a gaming experience whilst retaining it's mantle of being supremely pleasing and remaining one of the best looking productions ever seen. The target-oriented scoring cards have been replaced with fairer and more dynamic scoring opportunities and a new strategy has been added to the mix where you can focus on acquiring more of them in order to maximise your return on the parks cards that you collect. Campsite tokens are added to the trail that allow you to take your pick of a selection of single-use powerful actions instead of the regular rewards, which makes the trail feel longer as it adds an additional three or four possibilities that can be collected every round. Everything in it feels like a straight upgrade without being burdensome, and elevates Parks from a nice activity to a far more rewarding competitive experience.


Got around to trying 51st State: Moloch, only a couple of solo runs so far. This puts a sort-of AI deck into the game that spawns adversaries that wreck everybody's stuff. Spending some resources or some combat tokens allows you to conquer them at which point they turn into useful cards that you can play into your tableau. There's clearly a bit of push-and-pull as to who takes on the burden of cleaning them up which could prove to be a useful leveler during play; my hot take on it is that Moloch was never much of a concern as it was relatively easy to get what I needed to take away the threat, however I can totally see it being a much bigger deal in multi-player as more 'bots go into play each round and some of them will undoubtedly persist. The cards that go into the main deck feel a bit over the top as what this pack essentially does is to raise the in-game stakes, so I would definitely see it as something fairly advanced for experienced players as lop-sided skill levels will see stronger players push those levers quite hard. Despite some initial reservations (I took ages to finally get a copy and it sat for a few weeks unplayed) I quite like this one and looking forward to trying it some more. It certainly does something uniquely different to previous releases.

Parks Nightfall so thoroughly improves Parks that I never want to play without it even when teaching new people. This is where the lovely production works against it as I'd love to squeeze all of the good stuff into the base box but the nice insert prevents me from doing that and I don't have the heart to throw it away.

Played my first roll-n-write, technically a flip-n-write, with Cartographers solo. It's a neat game but I don't think the monsters work well solo. Just never felt they were in my way after placing. I did like drawing the maps with color pens and briefly admiring them afterwards. No hard verdict yet on this one. Nothing annoyed me but nothing felt so much better than other short/light games I have. Time will tell if it gets pulled off my shelf more.

Hey gang, I'm still alive, just struggling with Sydney Lockdown 2.0 ennui. Having sailed through last years enforced isolation on a strange gust of productivity, I'm finding this years sequel to be far less agreeable. In between bouts of time dilation disassociation and recreational chugging of cough syrup I've managed to get in some games with my partner though. It definitely helps.

Destinies - Enchanting at first but the more we played the more we saw the simplicity of the strings that bind this thing behind the facade of the app. My partner was enamoured with it however, so it's perhaps a great game to share with the less obsessively inclined in your life. Tropes abound and the term 'Destiny' is a little high falutin for what are essentially a series of variations on 'help three villlagers' style fetch-quests. I've started a full review of this twice now and each time packed it in after 1000 words or so, feeling like I couldn't find that much of interest to say about it. We'll see. We enjoyed the 8-10 hours or so it took to get through the core box. I felt like I got my money's worth and it was nice to revisit some bread and butter 'dark fantasy' fare. Still better than Tainted Grail.

Concordia - After two games of this I think I 'appreciate' it more than I enjoy it. It's certainly engaging but it hurts my head a little. I'd make a terrible logistics officer. Maybe if I wore a toga? It scratches a similar itch to 'Brass Birmingham' but is far less buffed up for the ball. I can see the depth in this one and I think it'll definitely reward commitment, especially as the scoring mechanisms are initially so opaque. Clever, accomplished, and dry as a cracker.

The Court of Miracles - Light as a feather and the theme barely adheres to the mechanisms (which is disappointing as I'm all about sticky-fingered Parisian urchins) but this was actually a lot of fun. Just the right amount of player interaction and autonomy, and it rewards both thoughtful foresight and contingent response. Really quick to learn and perhaps a great contender for game night aperitif or dessert, but will never really touch the sides. A great opportunity to workshop the 'Baguette Scented Oliver Twist' character you've been developing to the stone faced delight of all your friends.

Quartermaster General 1914 - Having just finished a hilarious and tragic historical brick about the Cousin emperors (sweet Jesus the Kaiser was a trip), this was a timely arrival that I wound up really digging. Part Risk, part 'every CDG wargame' it models the attrition and grind of the First World War in a manner that skillfully avoids becoming overbearing or tedious. Actions are severely limited by your hand and resources, and the necessity of maintaining supply lines- this means that it both hews quite closely to the historical beats of the conflict whilst still offering really tough decisions on almost every turn. CDG's ala Twilight Struggle/ Paths of Glory et al have fast become one of my favourite genres, and this offers an entry level complexity that is is still engaging even in its abstraction, and can be ferried to armistice in 90 minutes.

Watergate - Another CDG of sorts, with an always tense tug of war sensation and a masterful deployment of theme. Quick, tight, elastic. There has already been enough ink spilled in its praise.

Philosphia: Floating World - A kickstarter I backed shortly after returning from Japan, intoxicated as I was at the time by the aesthetic. It's mostly window dressing on an odd hybrid deck builder/I cut you choose/ simultaneous play stitched yokai that is both simple and tangled at the same time. One play isn't really enough to get to grips with what it offers but I'm keen enough to revisit, especially at higher player counts.

Condotierre - I can see why people clutch this one to their breast so fervently. It has all the hallmarks of a classic. It engages effortlessly with a minimum of mechanics and you could play it with anyone from the nardiest grognard to your surprisingly ruthless grandmother (she's seen some shit man). Just the right amount of flavour to elevate it from pure abstraction, and it fits right in your pocket! (kinda).

Stratego - Gang, have you played Stratego lately? IT'S STILL SO GOOD.

Thanks for indulging me.