What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I played Dune Imperium tonight, and had one of those sort of enter the matrix moments where I simultaneously understood it pretty well and saw its flaws laid bare. But I need to go to sleep now… maybe I’ll expound on it later.

Have any of you played For Ex? It's a currency manipulation game from Hollandspiele (from Amabel Holland as a matter of fact, with Cole Wehrle doing the art of all people). We crashed and burned our first couple of games but now that we have the hang of it it's pretty doggone interesting.

I tried to insert a photo of it but apparently that's not something you can do on this site at the moment.

Sagrilarus wrote: Have any of you played For Ex? It's a currency manipulation game from Hollandspiele (from Amabel Holland as a matter of fact, with Cole Wehrle doing the art of all people). We crashed and burned our first couple of games but now that we have the hang of it it's pretty doggone interesting.

I tried to insert a photo of it but apparently that's not something you can do on this site at the moment.

I was excited about it before it came out, but could never justify the price for a game that I absolutely know would hit the table exactly once and even then only if I forced it.

Ah_Pook wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: Have any of you played For Ex? It's a currency manipulation game from Hollandspiele (from Amabel Holland as a matter of fact, with Cole Wehrle doing the art of all people). We crashed and burned our first couple of games but now that we have the hang of it it's pretty doggone interesting.

I tried to insert a photo of it but apparently that's not something you can do on this site at the moment.

I was excited about it before it came out, but could never justify the price for a game that I absolutely know would hit the table exactly once and even then only if I forced it.

It's on BGA now.

Imperium Classics: Interesting bag of mechanisms. This is primarily a deck builder trying to tell a history-lite story and I think it succeeds in that goal. It is nicely produced, great on price point and a little fiddly in play but not too hard to learn.

However, it does seem to run quite long for what it is. I would not play with more than 2 as turns can take some time and there is not much to do between turns. Even with 2 this could push past the 2 hour mark (unless i've made a rules error or you learn to be much more efficient).

I do wonder if this is BGG bate. What i mean by that is it has lots of mechanical cross interaction between systems and then 8 unique factions etc. This is all very interesting to dig into, but eventually once you have learned the decks and exploring the game loses it's allure will there be a competitive multifaceted game underneath? Maybe, impossible to tell at this stage.

Its kind of the opposite to the Knizia game we played this weekend Babylonia. Knizia generally has you cut through the fluff to the raw game underneath really quick in his designs. You play one game and you know how to manipulate your actions to your advantage. There isn't this mechanical exploration phase in the games life cycle. I quite enjoy fiddling about with game systems and learning them but i do think its a superficial experience.

Babylonia was great. First time we played it with 4. The fields that score by cities captured are way more important at this player count. Rocking game.

We also played Innovation with 4 at one of my friends request. Its a chaotic luck fest at that number and usually one player just gets hosed. I was getting hosed but managed to play cards that trashed other players influence piles late and keep the game running. I think luckily got an era 9 card that allowed me to play an era 10 card for myself only and won on an auto win condition. Very cheesy win as i was behind on more or less every other metric.

I have only played INNOVATION a few times with more than 2 players; far more players head to head. I think its better with 2 players. Easier to follow one other tableau than several.

agreed. I'd only choose it with 2, but in this case it was requested. Whilst i do think it becomes a strategy game at 2, to really play skilfully you need a pretty good knowledge of the card decks.

DukeofChutney wrote: I do wonder if this is BGG bate. What i mean by that is it has lots of mechanical cross interaction between systems and then 8 unique factions etc. This is all very interesting to dig into, but eventually once you have learned the decks and exploring the game loses it's allure will there be a competitive multifaceted game underneath?

I quite enjoy fiddling about with game systems and learning them but i do think its a superficial experience.

I also enjoyed Imperium and had the same impression. You do have a lot of "content" that is fun to explore but I don't think there's much depth beyond that. At the end of the day, most cards are fairly generic and there's only one way to get the most out of each civilization. Once you find it, you try to do it "right" and you have seen it all. For example, the Romans are geared towards getting glory cards. I played them once, won and I think I could perfect the strategy the next time. So I don't see myself doing much more the third or fourth times.

Still, for me the biggest issue is that lack of interaction. The other players do not matter but I have to wait for their turns. It's the kind of game I would prefer to play solo but I'm told you have to keep a bot or something. If I could just play alone, burn through all the factions and get 30 plays out of it, that would be fine.

Note there's an important bit of errata: All "free action" cards can only be played once a turn. I thought the huge amount of recursion in the game could be a problem and I was unsurprised to see the errata once we had an infinite points combo. It was funny because the guy who did the combo was disappointed by its existance and wanted to sell the game because of it. Meanwhile, I was playing the same card 2-3 times per turn, every turn which was every bit as broken.

Have any of you played For Ex? It's a currency manipulation game from Hollandspiele (from Amabel Holland as a matter of fact, with Cole Wehrle doing the art of all people). We crashed and burned our first couple of games but now that we have the hang of it it's pretty doggone interesting.

I tried to insert a photo of it but apparently that's not something you can do on this site at the moment.

--Sag

With a premium site subscription you can insert photos:

What is more Euro-y than a picture of charts, a spreadsheet and chits that say “EUR” on them?

I just beat the campaign for Arena: The Contest. Surprisingly, it was only 5 missions long. This leaves many missions not even touched, so I'm guessing you could replay the campaign at least 2 more times to try different paths. My last battle was the toughest one yet, against a White Dragon that just wrecked my heroes. He killed 3 of them, but I managed to resurrect two of them and eek out a victory.

I will definitely play the campaign again, but for now I'll probably just resort to doing some one-off missions to try different characters.

Maybe I'll tweet the image and then link the tweet here.




There. It's just that easy!

CranBerries wrote: With a premium site subscription you can insert photos:

Sag, when you quote somebody's post, you can see the codes they used to link images or whatever. The weird thing about CranBerries post here is that there is space right after his first "img" in brackets that would normally keep the image link from working. Not sure why that is working for him, and also not sure if that is what prevented you from doing it.

Shellhead wrote:

CranBerries wrote: With a premium site subscription you can insert photos:

Sag, when you quote somebody's post, you can see the codes they used to link images or whatever. The weird thing about CranBerries post here is that there is space right after his first "img" in brackets that would normally keep the image link from working. Not sure why that is working for him, and also not sure if that is what prevented you from doing it.

My submit button grays out when I try to add a file. My other option is to upload the image to an external web site and do a link from there. I used to throw to my BGG gallery but they change the urls on them on a regular basis. So I guess I have to find a new place to dump my junk.

DukeofChutney wrote: agreed. I'd only choose it with 2, but in this case it was requested. Whilst i do think it becomes a strategy game at 2, to really play skilfully you need a pretty good knowledge of the card decks.

We've learnt to only play the partnership version of Innovation with four players. Your demand dogmas don't hit your partner, but if they're the only ones who share in a dogma, you don't get the sharing draw. You go to the number of achievements for two players (6) but you add your achievements to those of your partner. You sit so the sides alternate (ABAB) - I think that's basically all the rules.