What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Ah_Pook wrote: 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/

What's My Word is worth a look if you and your wife like the wordle thing. You can find and print off sheets easily enough online.

Similar concept but played over a set number of rounds, and you can't actually guess the other persons word till the last round. Instead you guess words with other numbers of letters and try and find the matches that way, and get points for correct letters. If you can work out early what their word is, the challenge is then to actually guess other words that have correct letters, if that makes sense.

Probably easier if you see it:

gamersalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/20...myworda-531x1024.jpg

FIRE TOWER. An obscure Kickstarter picked up by the meteorologist in the group, who monitors wildfires conditions as part of his job. An abstract, card-based take-that game where you are trying to light other people’s fire towers aflame. Fun, a little silly, maybe a little long. Happy to play it, no need to own it.

ROOT. 4p with cats, moles, otters, and me as the lizards. The otters initially jumped way out in front and then the rest of us gradually closed the gap. I ended up winning the turn before the cats would have won by dominance. A very close and tense game; all of us were a turn away from winning on the last round, and both the moles and the otters would have won if the dice and cards had been a little kinder to them.

Go, lizards. My favorite faction (just narrowly ahead of the Corvids.)

Played Saltlands with a friend yesterday. I hadn't played since maybe 2019, so it was a struggle to set up and teach. Once we got rolling, the game went really well. We managed to survive just long enough to get some decent gear, then pulled together the elements for an early victory. The visual design does a great job of establishing the post-apocalyptic setting, and the harsh, deterministic combat closes the deal. If the movement system was faster, Saltlands would be a great game instead of merely a good one.

dysjunct wrote: FIRE TOWER. An obscure Kickstarter picked up by the meteorologist in the group, who monitors wildfires conditions as part of his job. An abstract, card-based take-that game where you are trying to light other people’s fire towers aflame. Fun, a little silly, maybe a little long. Happy to play it, no need to own it.

ROOT. 4p with cats, moles, otters, and me as the lizards. The otters initially jumped way out in front and then the rest of us gradually closed the gap. I ended up winning the turn before the cats would have won by dominance. A very close and tense game; all of us were a turn away from winning on the last round, and both the moles and the otters would have won if the dice and cards had been a little kinder to them.

Forgot the first one we played:

BETRAYAL AT BALDUR'S GATE. Kind of fun, maybe, but also really dumb. I like the exploration of a city more than the exploration of a house on a hill, and it looks like they solved the issue where a quarter of the scenarios were just broken. I don't like the derp-fantasy of current D&D (everyone is a magical snowflake, everyone glowers and tries to look like a pissed-off badass, everyone has random spikes on their equipment, the most unusual race you can be is a normal human, etc.). The main problem with the game, I think, is that the entire first half feels pointless. You don't know if you're going to be the traitor or not, so there's no strategy other than wandering around and hoping you get some powerups to either stats or equipment. I was a human monk; I wandered around until the traitor was revealed. It wasn't me; it was the halfling druid, who got the MacGuffin, turned into an owl, and flew to the "you win" tile faster than we could catch up.

The most fun in the game is reading the bad flavor text in a breathless "IN A WORLD WHERE..." movie trailer guy voice.

So, suddenly Blackstone Fortress is back in print, and a local store got it. After a week or two I ordered it, assembled the minis, made a whole' freakin' organizer out of foamboard (not perfect, the lid is up by 1 inch), and played an entire expedition by myself.

Great game. Love the format, and the no non-sense no-story nature of the game. You get in, blast stuff, get things, and sometimes shit happens. The combat is solid. The dice activation mechanics bought over from the new WHQ games are great, and the addition of cover just makes it perfect.

The minis are... magical. Snap fit, with minimal amount of component, but very dynamic poses. The design of the sprue is just dreamy. Truely 3D-poses on snapfit minis! I've never bought any of the newer GW snap fit so this came like a wake up call to me. What's incredible is that they have options. One of the enemies have an 1 alternate part that significantly change the shape of the miniature, they're like 2 completely different minis. The traitor guards were sculpted with four different weapons set ups that actually matters in the game.

It's the most expensive board game I own, but I really dig it.

Blackstone Fortress is the best of the modern Warhammer Quest dungeon crawls. The enemies have better AI than the other games, and present surprising diversity in tactical threats given their limited numbers. Silver Tower, including the expansions, offered greater variety in heroes and enemies, but the Blackstone Fortress base set is better as a standalone set. Cursed City has unrealized potential, but suffered from lack of either playtesting or proofreading, and Hammerhal requires a DM and therefore functions as just a very, very limited rpg. I hope that the Blackstone Fortress expansions will also get back in print.

Have they said if the expansions are coming back?

I've had the Seas of Glory expansion for Merchants & Marauders sitting on my shelf for a couple months, and this past weekend I had an odd hankering to set it up for the first time. I played a game with all 10 expansion modules in the mix and settled on a solo variant from ToS in case the new details were too head-explodey. (The solo goal is to pick up 10 Glory points before you run through a 15-card Event deck, and you can't gain Glory by stashing loot.)

I was delighted to find that almost all of the new options boost the game's swashbuckling feel without noticeably affecting complexity or playtime. The slightly more involved additions (Loyalty, Locations) come at the cost of a bit more analysis paralysis, but also make the game feel that much more like Sid Meier's Pirates (which was what I wanted out of this game in the first place, so... success!)

I completely forgot to use the NPC upgrades. In my defense, I spent most of my journey in a sloop, dodging Mans-O-War all the way across the Caribbean so that I could sell off a crate of explosives in St. Maarten (Contraband module), upgrade to a frigate with the profits, then light those same explosives on my way back to sea to blow the port sky-high (thereby eliminating a threat to Nassau's sugarcane trade, new Mission.) I only had two NPC combats the whole game; one was a Man'O'War that sailed into St. Maarten to investigate those pyrotechnics, and the other was the Spanish Treasure Galleon for my final Glory Point of the game. Wrong place, wrong time, Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla.

Awesome. I think you're right in that the modules in Seas add more chrome, but not onerous chrome. My one negative point is that the spinner on my wind direction dial is off-kilter, so that it almost always stops at "west". I've tried adjusting it a few times over the years but have never been successful.

You must have gotten the Trade Winds edition. :-P The spinner is a little janky and I might have to replace it with a compass direction die over time, but it's kind of nice to have the arrow on a compass for visual reference.

Played a solo quest in Arena: The Contest since it had been a while since I dug it out. I really like how this game plays. It's fun to figure out exactly how to best use each character's turn to accomplish the goals. I could see this being miserable with an AP player, but what isn't miserable with an AP player?

I deliberately built a party of four heroes I had never used before, including one of the "special" heroes that don't fall into one of the set hero categories. The one I chose is The Faceless Emperor. Their whole thing is that they can summon a tiger that gets its own turn after the Emperor's, and they can even switch places on the battlefield. I used this to great effect in order to get the Emperor out of a tight spot.

I am really looking forward to getting the Tanares Adventures set this Spring, which should really add to the base game, including being able to play the PvP mode by yourself or co-op if you like.

Depending on how effective it is, I may try to modify it and apply it to Guards of Atlantis II when that ships.

I cobbled a bootleg copy of Camp Grizzly together today. Technically, I have not played it yet.





I got carried away going over the blood with a red colored pencil, and at this point I probably won't reprint the components in color. Maybe the board. I like the Psycho Raiders/Spire's End palette, even if it still sorta looks like a prototype.

The six-section folding board would have taken much less time if I were slicing the chipboard with a metal ruler and an X-Acto and not a $12 Amazon papercutter, but c'est la vie. I kind of dig the rough finish on a lot of the pieces. Only one of my tile prints wound up crooked; how it was the first one I glued down, I'm not sure. I used bookbinding/linen tape to wrap the board edges and for the hinges. It mangled the chipboard underneath when I tried to pull it up a couple times, so I'm hoping it sticks long-term. The whole process made me wonder how often Nate Hayden questioned his own sanity when he was producing The Mushroom Eaters.

I'll get around to the expansion material once I play the base game. I'm not sure how I want to do the spinner for Exp. #1, so no rush either.

EDIT: Sorry about the big post. I can't get the images to resize.

One of the Camp Grizzly expansions has a card that requires players to guess the color of the card before they draw. I suppose you could just ignore that card. And all of the tempting fate cards require you to draw a bunch of cards and look for red cards, so you should be cautious about which cards you are coloring red.

That’s a good looking PnP!