What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Had a couple friends over who haven't been around in a while. One of them is a huge Lovecraft fan, so she wanted to play Fate of the Elder Gods. I like this game, but I think it kind of demands an experienced group that really understands the balance between readying spells and moving around the altar to really make the game shine. Thankfully, the four we had playing were at least eager to explore the different approaches to victory and we had a couple players coming close to the limit of Elder Signs, which ends the game, before I managed to max out my summoning track and steal the win.

Then we taught them to play The Crew. Like everyone I've showed it to, they really enjoyed it, but we only got through about 10 missions before deciding to shift to something else.

We finished off the day with Tiny Epic Pirates. It's been a while since I've played this and I'm still not sure that I'm sold on it. Like Fate, once you get the hang of the rondel system, I think it moves along pretty well, but it's still quite fussy for the size of game that it actually is. It's extremely mechanical and, as with the criticism sometimes leveled against Merchants & Marauders, it's much easier to simply plunder for goods and sell them (i.e. be a merchant, of sorts) than it is to risk combat with merchants and other players. However, I'd like to try it with the Amdiak expansion to see if some of the additions in that bend it back toward the pirate angle a bit more.

charlest wrote: Hopefully you get Wings for the Baron to the table soon, it's a great game.

So I’ve heard. A friend is lookin for a copy if anyone has one they are looking to unload.

Msample wrote:

charlest wrote: Hopefully you get Wings for the Baron to the table soon, it's a great game.

So I’ve heard. A friend is lookin for a copy if anyone has one they are looking to unload.

It's really two great games. I'll be curious to hear which you like better.

I had my mother-in-law over for Thanksgiving. She's an avid Bridge player, so I thought she'd really get into the subtleties of The Crew: Deep Sea Adventure. Nope. She HATED it! The whole notion of playing cooperatively just did not work for her. I was kinda stunned. "Don't you play with a partner in Bridge?" I asked. "Yeah, but just one." I thought just about everybody liked The Crew, but clearly not.

It was especially weird because she's always been very amenable to learning and playing new games. We've played many different games with her over the years, so it wasn't just the prospect of having to learn new rules. I think she just might be too competitive to play a co-op!

Played two more games yesterday . After the first game last weekend  and reading some rules questions on BGG ( the vast majority of which are on the solo bots or the more unusual factions like Utopia or Athurians ) we apear to have played correctly. I like it so far, the decks all play very differently and the game has some interesting mechanics ( like garrisoning cards vs the usual trashing ) .  All three games have featured close scores. About the only negative is that I can't see more than 3 players as the downtime would get bad I think. We find our games taking 90-120 minutes for two player. I don't know that a third would increase game length by 50% as game end trigger via decks running out would kick in before anyone built out their final Developed card. Our third game I also narrowly missed triggering Collapse ( running out of Unrest ) a couple times which would end the game sooner. 

^It's a clever little game... makes me want to give Voidfall the benefit of the doubt, but I'm waiting until I see their development progress. May just let my dollar go and wait till I hear good things when it comes out.

One of the appeals of IMPERIUM are the relatively low price point, short playing time and sensible table footprint. I am not sure its reasonable to deduce that the same designer will excel in executing a big ass box of plastic in a crowded genre. I'll wait for any good worth of mouth.

I did not care for voidfall at all, it felt like it was striving to ‘be the ultimate’ and was just clunky and opaque as a result.

Imperium is best with two in my view, I’ve had a couple of decent 3p plays but they have always run long even though we have a tendency to play quick. We still play it fairly often at home and of late I’ve found myself drawn almost exclusively to the Arthurians; they are like a whole other game with quests, a destructive final battle lurking at the bottom of your nation deck, and a power play between Merlin and Morgana that gives you options on high-cost shortcuts. I could see those mechanisms working well as a stand-alone game, with shared lands and competing for quests.

Played what was probably the best game so far of Dune Imperium last night. I had one player who'd played before and two newbies, but everyone in the group is both a gamer-type and quite aggressive and I think that mindset really serves this game. With so few agents to place, a defined time limit (Conflicts), and the ability to score in small bunches in the later game, it's never going to take a long time and you really have to try to gain an advantage on the VP track to have any chance. As it is, the game took over two hours, but there was tension throughout.

That said, I still think the game suffers as a deckbuilder from an inability to dump starting cards from your hand without getting one of the few cards with Trash effects or going to the Bene Gesserit every round (that is, being the first to get there.) You end up not using a lot of the cool cards that you get off the market more than once or twice (this was pointed out by one of the new players, so I know it's not just me) and you can also be crippled in a late game turn by drawing a hand full of starting cards, which is exactly what happened to me. I had a number of cards with swords and draw effects to reach those swords, but didn't draw any of them and had a hand of Diplomacy and Dune, Desert Planet. I came in second with 9 points.

In that respect, I think the Rise of Ix expansion is well-targeted, as it seems like the new cards have a solid amount of Trash effects so you're able to clear the chaff much more easily. Similarly, the change to the top part of the board (the green and orange areas) will probably be an upgrade, as those are easily the least used areas once Swordmaster is taken and a seat on the High Council is achieved. I still like the game and, as I said, this was probably the most exciting session I've had yet, but I can see where some adjustment would be welcome.

Terraforming Mars via Steam. They put a new patch out a few weeks ago, and it's total garbage. The game ends up in weird states in the game where your clock is ticking but you don't have a play. Sometimes a reload fixes it, sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes you're stuck on the reload screen. Or you can also sometimes get stuck at the draft screen. Shameful bugs in a beta, much less an app that has been out for years. Another patch purports to fix that, but nobody told my PC about it.

I have TM on my iPad and awhile back Playdek did something that slowed the game speed to a FUCKING CRAWL to the point where I don't even bother playing it anymore.

DUNE IMPERIUM - Its kind of incredible that after all these years designers fail to account for the importance of trashing cards . Esp in a game with a fixed turn length. My second game I honed in on acquiring BG cards to let me lean out my deck and I won going away . I've read the IX expansion will address this. That said like Jackwraith I enjoyed the games I've played and look forward to playing with Ix.

That's another thing IMPERIUM/CLASSICS+LEGENDS does well. Decks don't get too thick and there are multiple ways to either trash cards ( put in History, exile ) or temporarily take them out of circulation ( garrison ) .

The Terraforming Mars app started trash, and remains tras. It's a shame because with a good app I could see playing a bunch of games.

Temporarily taking them out is a very interesting wrinkle of Imperium.

Msample wrote: DUNE IMPERIUM - Its kind of incredible that after all these years designers fail to account for the importance of trashing cards .

The contrast with a game like Tyrants of the Underdark is very stark. I've had games of that where I was able to start promoting cards almost immediately and thin my deck down to the best elements rapidly. (The Drow half-deck is quite good for this.) Plus, the benefit of removing cards from your deck is that they'll be worth even more points (or points at all) in your inner circle and the tension is often whether it's worth promoting a card to max its points but lose it for the rest of the game. That's what makes Tyrants a better deckbuilder, IMO. But Dune Imperium is probably more interesting on the board, even though doing a comparison between worker placement (DI) and area control (Tyrants) is more difficult. The competition for spots on the Tyrants board is much slower, while on DI's board, it's ferocious in almost every round.

I've been playing some games of Clash of Cultures which I scooped up from sanildefanso recently, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I played a game on stream last night where I badly botched an autocratic military rush, and the democratic player ended up counter attacking and destroying the autocracy militarily. The middle of the board was all mountains and I underestimated the importance of a good alpha strike to make a military campaign work. It probably could have still worked with Roads, but I failed to plan it out correctly. Plus the autocratic player was resource starved to really be able to apply pressure consistently. Probably given the makeup of the map a spirituality/theocracy line would have worked better, but I've only played the game 4 times so that's just a guess

A few more games of the base game and I'll have to dig into the expansion stuff, which looks really fun.