What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Jackwraith wrote: I was one who thought the expansion expansion was a genuinely good thing.

*looks at 250 dollar copy on Noble Knight*

Yikes. Ebay is no help, either. Uh, there's a $114 French copy...?

Kingdomino has come on strong this past week. Boys enjoyed Carcassonne a few months back, and I figured another sort of tile layer would work out. It has. We play the rules very loose. The four year old goes straight for single-color tiles, builds whatever shapes he wants and has to be reminded that he won't score any points without crowns. The six year old tries to build squares but doesn't understand the power of making single blocks of colors. Still, they're practicing trading who goes first and having fun. I can't ask for much more.

The boys tend to run hot for two or three weeks on anything before moving on, so we'll see how long Kingdomino lasts. I like that we have a space for gaming before bedtime now and am hopeful for more in the future. Looking at Qwirkle and ICECOOL when they get tired of this.

Old friend still in town, cleaning out the hording mess left behind by his deceased relative. He came over for board games yesterday.

Masters of the Night: Normally the fun level of this co-op vampire game is a diminished by the ongoing need to prop up the masquerade that hides our existence from the mortals. But it was barely an issue for the first third of the game due to agents spawning in places where we weren't hanging out. The middle of the game involved a surprising number of events that locked up our favorite locations, but solving each hassle yielded a benefit to the masquerade. The events became vicious near the end, but we had everything under control and won with two turns to spare. Admittedly, we were playing on the easy setting.

Dark Venture: I always seem to play Dark Venture while I am studying the complex rules to Magic Realm, and the limitations of Dark Venture seem to make the heavy rules of Magic Realm worth the trouble. We played in a semi-cooperative mode, stumbled through four turns with the brief, sketchy rules and were finally hitting our stride. But we took a long break for pizza and a movie, and eventually returned to the table in the mood to play a different game. I still like Dark Venture, but it's fiddly with the bits and too thin with the rules. It could have been a great game with some editorial input by an experienced game publisher.

Camp Grizzly: Short but dramatic game. I had Jody the emo guy and Tracy the scream queen. My friend had Sherry the nature girl and Becky with the mouseketeer hair. We played a challenging lockdown setup, requiring a long, treacherous detour to get at the keys at the campfire. Otis picked on Tracy and Becky from the start and killed Becky soon. Annoying cameo John the Carpenter showed up, got killed, returned as a zombie and got killed by Otis again.

Tracy managed to hang on long enough that we got the items for a Boat finale. But while Tracy and Sherry waited at the dock for Jody to bring the rope, things went sideways, with Jody and Tracy both dying. Jody almost managed to escape via a crawlspace that allowed him to escape both a fire and a hopeless fight with Otis. Then he emerged from the crawlspace... right back into the fire by mistake.

My friend encouraged me to draw a new character, and I got the stoner in the overalls from Dazed and Confused. I went to Jody's corpse to retrieve the rope and soon escaped on a boat with Sherry. And then things took a weird twist... It was a relatively short game with a fairly low body count, so Otis didn't get the chance to level up much.

Brought some games to my wife's family, where we spent Christmas.

Coloretto was something of a hit, which I expected. Simple straightforward rules, quick to play. They picked it up fast and we had a good time.

Crossing also got multiple plays. This is such a great, easy game that is (I think) OOP but is dead simple to recreate. If you don't know it, look into it.

Lost Expedition - I was unsure on this one. It's cooperative, but my wife can be very bossy and her sister can be very anxious. We started with an "easy" setup that killed us on the morning of Day Two. Oops. Played again and this time got the more standard ending where one character limped into the City of Z barely hanging on to life. I thought they might go for a regular game of it, but it didn't happen.

Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition - The nephew is a mechanical engineering student working on a project for landing robots on Titan, so I thought he might like it. We played twice, him beating me in a close game the first time and me winning the second. He picked it up quickly and we had a good time. I really like this one.

Skip-Bo and Qwixx both live at the in-laws house and usually get played. I played a few games of Skip-Bo but missed the Qwixx game. Usually Rummikub happens too but didn't this time. I like all three of those, and will even roll with Phase 10 occasionally since the mom likes these games and isn't too keen on learning new ones.

For Christmas the only game I got was the Atomic Bonds expansion for Fallout: the Board Game. It converts all the missions in that game to be cooperative, which I think will probably work better.

I've been playing Ark Nova solo on TTS and it's fun. Takes about an hour. The solo is a little more prone to lich of the draw since there's no one else churning the card market, but I've handily win all the games I've played so far so it's not that bad. It shows you the tempo you need to be playing at, since you have 27 actions in the game and you need to have positive points by the end. I've been playing on the default "easy" difficulty which starts you at 20 appeal, though I did try the intermediate board last time. Hard mode is starting at 0 appeal on one of the expert boards, though I don't think I'm quite there yet. Probably will do an expert board at 20 appeal next time, and dial the starting appeal down depending on the results. Anyway long story short, it's fun solo. Kinda reminds me of Terraforming Mars Ares Project in the solo mode for whatever reason.

I'm curious to try that one but my experience with TTS has not been positive at all. I had to get a new laptop last year and didn't even bother to reinstall TTS.

Legomancer wrote: I'm curious to try that one but my experience with TTS has not been positive at all. I had to get a new laptop last year and didn't even bother to reinstall TTS.

If you decide to reinstall TTS shoot me a message, I'll teach it to you on there

My girlfriend and I actually got two games to the table yesterday. First I introduced her to Fallout, using the atomic bonds expansion to make the first scenario of the game, The Commonwealth, fully cooperative.

This dramatically changes the way the game plays, and it is for the better. While I admit that the push and pull of the two "factions" is missing when you go full co-op, overall the game just flows better. She LOVED the game and wanted to play it again right after we finished. After 3 hours in the Wasteland, I really was not up for a second journey so I managed to talk her out of that.

We decided to play Walking Dead: All Out War, which I consider to be the best zombie game I own. She had never played it, and I had not played in years so I had to refresh my memory and then teach her. We each had 100 points worth of characters and equipment, and played the standard "go get supply tokens" mission. Things were going okay until I decided to lure a zombie into base contact with one of her survivors. She got REALLY upset, which surprised me because I had explained that it was not cooperative and she has seen the show and knows what kind of fuckery can happen. Anyway, she did not end up enjoying this one, and we all died at the undead hands of the horde. Oh well.

Good timing, It was just announced that All Out War is ending/complete. Great game.

Couple people have mentioned Fallout with the expansion here recently. I seem to recall the base game getting EXTREMELY mixed reactions... Do y'all think the expansion makes it worth picking up? What would you compare it to?

Ah_Pook wrote: Couple people have mentioned Fallout with the expansion here recently. I seem to recall the base game getting EXTREMELY mixed reactions... Do y'all think the expansion makes it worth picking up? What would you compare it to?

I played the base game a couple times when it came out and it was a lot of grind for not much payoff IMO. If you didn't get a decent weapon you were kind of screwed. We'd end up repeating the same encounter multiple times just to get the right outcome. It just seemed tedious.

Ah_Pook wrote: The solo is a little more prone to lich of the draw since there's no one else churning the card market, but I've handily win all the games I've played so far so it's not that bad.

Any game with Lich of the Draw automatically gets my interest.

Ah_Pook wrote: Couple people have mentioned Fallout with the expansion here recently. I seem to recall the base game getting EXTREMELY mixed reactions... Do y'all think the expansion makes it worth picking up? What would you compare it to?

In my opinion you only want this game if you go all-in. The base game establishes the quest card system, which is fantastic. New California expands on this by having certain cards have "duplicates", so you will randomly pick one of them, causing uncertainty in repeat plays. This is much appreciated.

Atomic Bonds makes all quests cooperative and adds in mutations when you take too much radiation. It also adds the MUCH NEEDED fast travel system.

The expansions also made weapons easier to obtain, as it was a very common complaint that arming yourself in the base game was near impossible.

The game can still overstay its welcome, especially if playing a New California mission, some of which are FUCKING HUGE. But if you understand the time commitment going in, a lot of fun can be had.

played 2 solo games of Ark Nova in twitch just now. first two games on the expert boards w/ asymmetric powers +14 in one and -14 in the other lol. this is starting on 20 appeal. for reference I was scoring like 50+ on the beginner board. thyere definitely much harder to play well on than the beginner board. its harder to get your engine going, and the bonuses and stuff are trickier. i dont think you want to mix and match the asymmetric boards with the beginner boards, except as a handicap for newbies.