What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Today I played the infamous A Few Acres of Snow.

It's a fairly strange game, as it's meant to be a hybrid between deckbuilder and wargame. And it really is. It leans harder on the deckbuilding aspects than all newer games that combine both genres. Every space you capture adds a card to your deck and keeping cards in your hand is a key stragey. It is interesting and I can see why it was well-received at first.

But, of course, that's not what you want to hear. You want to know if it's as broken as you've heard and how was my experience playing such a famously broken game. So here's the thing: I had fun. It was interesting and didn't do anything broken. I expanded, hit my British opponent with ambushes, expanded massively and then won by like 40 points. I just played better.

Here's the thing. From what little I've heard of the "Halifax Hammer" and my single play of the game I can already tell the game has fundamental problems. So fundamental, in fact, that I doubt they can be fixed. First, let's point out the most glaring issue. Are these cards good?

1) Draw three cards for free.
2) Thin your deck so you can play your best cards (like 1) more often.

If you answered "yes", congratulations, you are better than Wallace's playtest team. In fact, they are so good that, once I started expanding I realized I had made a mistake. You see, when you expand, you put cards matching those locations into your deck. And they suck. They do nothing, have awful bad stats and become completely obsolete a turn or two down the line. Their only use is expanding more, which makes your deck even worse. Above all, they make 1 and 2 much worse. They give you VPs, which is how you win, though.

I won anyways. My opponent didn't realize the power of either card and played too defensively. But, even then, I followed the wrong strategy. If those cards are so good, is there any other way to win than to capture spaces and hoping to have more VPs? Well, yes. You can grow a military and attack your opponent directly. If you capture one their capitals, you win.

Does that seem sound to you? If it does, well, you just discovered the Halifax Hammer. As far as I know, it works in exactly this manner. You thin your deck for maximun economy and power. This is easy to do because you draw three cards every turn. Then you want to attack Quebec so you settle Halifax. Apparently, the game is designed in such a way that the British will always win this.

And there's no solution to it. You can remove the broken cards, sure, but this doesn't change the underlying issue which is that you can ignore the whole expansion angle and just attack. Even if you couldn't do it right away, nothing could change. At best, you could make so that the French do it instead of the British, but it will happen because the game is on a narrow path. Ultimately, this is a wargame in which the British start able to win the war both on the spot and in the long run. So it's broken.

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TL;DR: Martin Wallace is a great designer but he needs an editor.

Played 4 person game of Forgotten Waters with Meetup group New Years day. Took about 4 hours to play and by the end I was ready for it to be over but had fun.

I was Coconut Burt the safety pirate. Each player comes with a player sheet with some mad lib to create your backstory. After introductions you were off on a pirate adventure narrated by an app. As you move through the water or on land each tile has its story and each turn you place your character on the action you are taking. You have 40 seconds to choose sometimes to help yourself sometimes to help the group. You don't know what the choices will be until its revealed and then you got 40 seconds.

I'd choose Merchants and Marauders over this for a long pirate game, but as a more social type game (semi coop) it was ok...just too long.

I love Forgotten Waters. The pacing is much better if you just play to the midway point where it pauses and pack it up, then continue a different day. That feels as though how it's meant to be played. I think of it as a short two session campaign almost.

Admittedly, it's difficult to do that without a regular group.

hotseatgames wrote: 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.

I'm so glad to hear that! I got Atomic Bonds for Xmas and am looking forward to trying it out. My friend and I enjoy the game but felt that competitive mode just doesn't work that well.

January 3rd is Tolkien's birthday, so this has been our New Year's tradition.

my wife and I have been playing Wordle with a scrabble set and some tokens. its fun, if you like wordgames. its basically Mastermind but with a 5 letter word. if you havent heard of it, try the daily online puzzle!

www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Great Western Trail - i suggested this to a friend who likes Terra Mystica purely based on internet opinions. He picked it up and we played it over new years when we were up in Skye.

Point salad games generally are not my thing, largely due to their narrative weakness and lack of big decision points. There are old threads discussing this. Great Western Trail has those problems but some good stuff and some lame stuff.

Good stuff; The core game idea is actually really good and fairly unique. You move down a track to market that gets populated with buildings for you to use actions on. You move from spot to spot down different routes and build a deck of cows. When you get to market only the cows in hand matter. So its hand management and timing. I think if the game was gutted down to just this, perhaps just as a card game and with much higher risk reward stakes it could be really great.

The bad stuff; The biggest weakness is the absolute cowardice of design when it comes to consequences. If you go through a flood tile or another obstacle you pay 2 money, or if you are broke nothing. This is very weak sauce. The game paints a picture of cattle driving to Kansas being a complete gravy train with few real risks or threats. It takes away any desperation or adventure from the game and leans heavy into a theme of pure action efficiency.

The second issue is just how damn cluttered it is. The basic idea is sound but there are so many little bits of systems glued onto it. You race down a train track for bonuses, have an over complicated worker recruitment system, clear obstacles for points, trade with native Americans etc. All off this fluff makes it a point salad game and i get that's what a lot of the market wants but im not sure it adds real depth, tells a story or has much point. Its just things that is there.

Overall i thought it was ok, it dragged a bit and I would not play it with four. My friend liked it, but perhaps i could have made a better recommendation.

DukeofChutney wrote: The bad stuff; The biggest weakness is the absolute cowardice of design when it comes to consequences. If you go through a flood tile or another obstacle you pay 2 money, or if you are broke nothing. This is very weak sauce. The game paints a picture of cattle driving to Kansas being a complete gravy train with few real risks or threats. It takes away any desperation or adventure from the game and leans heavy into a theme of pure action efficiency.

Good point, there's a very good push your luck risk taking hybrid somewhere in this theme.

Aurelian, Restorer of the World. I was more of a Restorer Until Turn 5 when I played my first real game. This is a solo conquest game, and I really enjoyed it. You have a bunch of stuff to take care of and a minimum victory point total for each turn, finishing on turn 6. You gotta build, you gotta conquer, you gotta grease palms. I had 50 points at the end of turn five, needed 55.

I know how to fix that. But turn six’s total is 85 and that’s a whole lot more points. I may take a few more swings before clearing that.

I’m not a big fan of solo or cooperative games, but this one still intrigues me. Need to find a couple of hours to get it out again.

Played a little TTS TWBG 3p Oath.

Not Sure wrapped us in a bear hug with a smart combination of 2-3 draws in his first few plays and never let go. We still had a somewhat interesting ending where our third player held the relic that doesn't let you take sites but supercharges your mustering, so he grabbed the people's favor for his vision in a massive military campaign (all 14 exile warbands vs. 10 chancellor warbands), but we never found out how that would pan out because NotSure rolled up the win. NotSure would almost certainly have grabbed the people's favor back easily using some economy. I think our third player had some interesting decisions to make that he couldn't see because of the kind of tunnel vision you get in Oath when things aren't going your way, I wonder if he could have grabbed the darkest secret instead of trying to fulfill his vision, but I can see the case for going for the win rather than extending the game. IMHO, he DEFINITELY should have grabbed the people's favor one turn earlier with his 7 coins even if he had to activate his vision on a later turn.

I had probably one of my worst played turns in a game I've ever played where I just frustratedly did 3 draw actions in a row to try to find a beast card so I hardly covered myself in glory either. Horrible game from me.

Oath is just a game that is made for my gaming interests, I can see problems with it but it just fits my preferences almost perfectly. I've always wanted a game that played like a long extremely varied epic empires game but fit into a reasonable amount of time and for me Oath does this.

The chaptering that Oath does to make it feel bigger in a relatively short playtime is one of the smartest bits.

There were a few subtleties that fell my way, and one of them is being aware of "hate-drafting" in Oath. Sometimes you have to take a card just so it doesn't get loose in the wild (at least until you have a chance to bury it somewhere unattractive). I took Pied Piper specifically because of the threat it posed to the "government secrets reset" that I was using to keep the game under control. Eventually being able to use it for Beast was purely lucky in that you had that Beast travel card you placed there.

But in the same way, the Ancient Binding that put the hammerlock on the game was a card that was discarded in the first draw. In a Devotion game, I'd never do that as an Exile, because it so powerfully plays into the Oath itself. I'd want to know where that card is at any time.

But that's why Oath is fun, even when it's stacked unevenly. The crazy interplay of all the cards makes for some wild changes to the game, and sometimes innocuous stuff becomes game-tilting.

Played Sleeping Gods the other day with the friend who owns it and my son. My friend had already played the tutorial, and my son watched a Youtube video. I hadn't slept well the night before and was literally nodding off during the game. They had me read the descriptions. If you are playing a cooperative game and are dropped into the middle with two players who really know the system, then you are the third wheel.

After Dan Thurot's review I was pretty psyched to play this but alas, another gaming session damaged by my sleep disorder. Maybe it's an anxiety thing too, not sure.

My son had a great time, and we did manage to finagle a map from someone, which led us to a spot where we were chased by statues and attacked by a vampire panther and a regular vampire, barely surviving. Damage distribution seemed important. The personalities of the characters came out a bit too. It was gracious of my friend to have us over, but I think it might be a two player game, at the end of the day. It did make me want to sit down and figure out Robinson Crusoe, however.

Sag, Gregarius, the_jake, and I just finished the 50th (and last!) mission of The Crew on BGA. Took us 116 attempts to get through all of them. A great game, although better live instead of async, and better in person than live.

Cool! My wife, my daughter, and I are on mission 40. We'll probably get Mission Deep Sea next.

dysjunct wrote: Sag, Gregarius, the_jake, and I just finished the 50th (and last!) mission of The Crew on BGA. Took us 116 attempts to get through all of them. A great game, although better live instead of async, and better in person than live.

It also took us just over a year!