What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Someone gave me all of high frontier 3rd edition and I have been too intimidated to bother for a year.

In my own gaming news, there are a lot of laugh out loud fun Arkham Horror encounters, but this that came up today may be my favorite:

The past few weeks saw us finally finish Tainted Grail; The Fall of Avalon, it was advertised as 30-50 hours for the campaign but we did over 70 hours as we really got into the story and the gameplay itself. This is a great game and if you enjoy a professional and exceptional multi-branched story narrative that it was built on then it is incredible - only problem is trying to find the time to complete the other two full length and one half length campaigns .
We also started Deep Madness on our Friday sessions and now, on our freed up Sundays, Bloodborne - both these after only a couple of plays feel like very good games, I'd rate Bloodborne slightly better as it has cleaner mechanics although both need a decent FAQ to sort out the few gaps in the rules ... and both are hard with Deep Madness taking top spot for that.
Filled in leftover time after all those games with some plays of Shadowrun Crossfire and Dead of Winter (a recent re-buy after getting rid of it a few years ago).
I haven't been to my euro-centric groups Tuesday meets so far this year as they have just been pulling out games just too euro for me, I'd rather not subject them to my 'participating but bored' face - they're too nice to do that to them.

Escape From Hades. What a hoot!

Ah_Pook wrote: got the expansion for Lost Ruins of Arnak in the mail today, tried a solo game, seems great. if you like the base game it seems like a no brainer. asymmetric player powers that are real fun, and then just more stuff (more cards, more exploration sites, more guardians, 2 new research tracks). doesnt add rules bloat, just adds more variety and cool stuff.

A few more plays of the expansion, still enjoying it a lot, but it definitely exacerbates the one downside of base Arnak. The last couple turns can be a real grind as you puzzle through your options and try to figure out what resources exactly you need in what combinations to score points. All the cards can be played for an effect or for icons, so there's potentially tons of permutations to work through. The expansion characters are more powerful generally, and have more weird things they can potentially do, so that grind is just that much more.

Pretty good game day yesterday. The City, where I performed the worst I ever have. Just couldn't get any synergy going; Ginkgopolis, a game which is in many ways a dry soulless euro but I love the look and play of it. Upped my rating to a 10.; Coloretto; Le Boomb, a stupid zero-decisions game I forgot I even had, but it's dumb fun and is easily thrown into the game bag; Vinci, which I still like Small World better but I can't deny that its predecessor is still a good game, upped to an 8.

Also I was re-packing my copy of Pret-a-Porter and for some reason I have a duplicate of one of the design cards. I set it aside so it wouldn't get in with the rest of the cards. Then I realized that doing this on top of my High Frontier tutorial game resulted in:

With the cancellation of the usual Niagara Boardgaming weekend , some Crotchester locals organized a small gathering at a Hampton Inn off I90 this past weekend. Peak attendance was maybe 15 people. Arrived Wednesday night, got in three days of gaming, left at dawn yesterday and was home in time for the playoff games. Games played in no particular order:

PAX PAMIR three times. Once each with 3,4,5 people. Won the 3P game by ruthlessly sucking up every coin available til at game end I controlled almost all the money. That said it wasn't easy - we went into the last scoring card fairly close ; whoever could trigger the last Domination check would win. In some cases those w/o money just bought cards in hopes of the last card appearing while #3 was still out ( forcing final scoring )  . But that didn't happen so I bought the last one and with double points ended tied for the lead but won on the second tie breaker ( most money ). A similar strategy in the last game didn't pan out as I had a fairly weak tableau most of the game.  This game has replaced PAX PORKER as my favorite since it plays faster and has less stall type game play IMO. 

HERE I STAND . I drew the Pope and was hamstrung thru most of the game by poor CP card values.  The game ended on Turn 5 with a Protestant victory; in that time frame I never saw a 5 card, had one 4 card and a ton of ones. To counter weak cards my religion rolls were probably above average for the most part. I burnt a Prot debater early on, but whiffed on later debates in that I'd win ones I was supposed to win, but not by enough to burn them even with favorable dice differences. 

SWORD OF ROME 4 player. It had been ages since I played this. I drew Rome and spent the early game doing the usual consolidation by beating down the Volscii on Turn 1, retaking a city that had gone Neutral on Turn 2, and building cities. My mid game Consuls sucked; I had one turn where I only had cards that could move them like 2 times . Meanwhile Greece had kicked the Cathaginians out of Sicily and were slowly but surely pulling away. I finally got the Dictator out on Turn 5 but by the the Greeks were too strong; in retrospect I should have gone north to stomp the Etruscans/Gauls. 

STUDY IN EMERALD. 4 player; I was a Restorationist ( good guys ) . I got Sherlock Holmes early along with Sigmund Freud, who lets you absorb 5 Sanity tokens instead of 3. Along with two other agents I formed a sort of hit squad, each agent having at least one bomb icon. I proceeded to blow up 3 Old ones; then the rest of the board got wise to all the smoke plumes . One agent turned traitor , then Sherlock got killed and Grant took the lead and the game. 

WILDERNESS WAR. My Brits held firm early on and then in turn got Regulars, Big and Little Highlanders and had all their leaders in play including Wolfe in Halifax where he made quick work of Louisbourg. However in the meantime the French got tons of Indians with which he got probably 3 Raid VP as well as enough cannon fodder to absorb losses in a game that went down to the wire as I lost. 

WAR OF THE RING. My Fellowship had no problems rolling Character Dice to an extent that it sort of forced me into a speed strategy to dunk the Ring. Normally that might work, but Jeromey's Hunt tile draws were insane. While he won via Military Victory, when the game ended we looked at the tile draws and I think he had drawn both each  3 and 2 tiles as well as some delaying Reveal tiles. The Fellowship went into Mordor already at like 5 Corruption. At game end I was still two steps away with 11 Corruption and no way to Heal . It was a near run thing for him; his sieges were all very costly and his forces were pretty wiped out in most places after winning - he was barely screening Erebor after failing to take it. It was a very fast game, a little over 2 hours including set up . 

Had a big day of gaming yesterday, the first since Halloween. First up was:
Cosmic Frog with 6 players. 3 players were new, and as it seems to go with Cosmic Frog, the first game is never as good as it could be. People need game 1 just to figure out what is going on, so it was not as violent as it gets when everyone knows what they are doing. Still, fun was had. The standout moment was when someone was in combat and rolled 3 0s in a row.

Next was The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31. We had 7 players, only one of whom had not seen the Carpenter film. We used Mark Chaplin's house rule that people get more blood tests at the end of the game, which encourages the Infected players to cause more havoc in order to reduce the number. This is the fatal flaw (in my opinion) of the game; the alien players are thoroughly incentivized to play it straight. This may be thematic, but it isn't terribly fun.

Everyone enjoyed the game, and it was with a bit of disappointment that the aliens won in the second section as both Thing tokens were destroyed in rooms. People wanted to immediately set it back up and play again, so we did.

One person left at this point so we had 6 players for the second game, and the Infected players played it extremely straight. I really had no good notions of who was infected by the time it got to the escape chopper. We nominated one player to be the Final Captain, and she had 3 blood tests to administer. She identified 3 humans, and we all flew away. At which point she revealed that she herself was infected. Fuuuuuuuuuuuu

The last game of the night was Cosmic Encounter. This was the highlight for me, although it did go for 3 hours, which was a bit too long. There was just a lot of discussion about powers and some uncertainty, lots of table talk and finger pointing. I didn't mind much, it was a blast. I had The Vacuum, which let me take along any players' ships to the Warp with me whenever I had to go to the Warp. I used this as a threat a LOT, and it was great fun. The Cyborg player probably had the most useful powers, as he had extra cards on hand at all times, and a flare that let him keep artifacts he used. We ended with a 3-way tie for the win.

I also had a big gaming weekend as some old friends came out to visit, and my wife took the kids to the in-laws for the afternoon.

Opened with SEAL Team Flix. As tends to happen in my plays, things go pretty well until they get immediately and completely out of hand. We had holed up in an office for a few turns where we could abuse the sound limit to take multiple shots with the sniper and battle rifles and cleared out most of the sentries and patrols with power flicks that knocked dead two tangos and a cover block at the same time. We finally picked up the last evidence and were heading for the exit when some unlucky spawns and dead eye shots cut three of us down in two rounds despite body armor and med kits.

I really enjoy the game because there's nothing else like it, but there's nothing else like it because few other games have the guts to balance on the knife edge it does. On the one hand the SEALs are played as straight as Call of Duty grunts, but they're facing joke named masterminds just a breath more clever than G.I. JOE villains. On the one hand it's a dexterity game, a genre replete with three-rule games that can be played with a beer in hand, but there are pages devoted to enemy movement on patrol, on alert and when taking cover. It's a game at odds with itself that won't click with most but very much clicks with me.

We got in two games of Speicherstadt, an old favorite when we still had weekly game nights. I took both pretty handily. The first I won by picking up most of the resource converter cards in the first season to buy out most of the ships and immediately make my money back on them. The second I took when I filled three big-point contracts on the back of a very good turn when I had more money than everyone else combined.

One of my friends brought along his new copy of the fifteenth anniversary edition of Ticket to Ride: Europe. I got absolutely stomped into a distant last place as I managed to forget to finish two very short tickets and several times got cut off from my preferred routes a turn or two before I was ready to claim them myself. The anniversary upgrades like the unique train sets were cute, and the large train cards were a huge upgrade, but I'm not sure they're worth $100.

Taught two of them Melee while our fourth was picking up the pizza. Still a top 10 game for me, but one of them greatly misunderstood the value of money. I took his castle at the beginning of the second turn for the win. I hope that didn't sour him on it.

We fit in three games of Fantasy Realms waiting for the pizza to cool. There's not much game to it, it's not worth trying to shield cards from the other players, too many cards directly reference other cards by name so that you're constantly double checking your hand, but it's short enough I can't complain too much.

Winner's Circle is another old favorite from our past weekly sessions and a good late night game as it doesn't require the most thought. Two of us were tied for the lead a third was just $150 behind us going into the last race to make for a tight finish.

Beowulf: The Movie Board Game was not a good late night game because there is a lot of arithmetic and calculating when to put points on the board and when to play to take those points for yourself, but I've been sitting on it for years since finding at a thrift shop and wouldn't be deterred. It's fine. It's a Knizia with a lot of math. He could draft the rules after a two-week bender and make something decent, which it was. It just never felt that exciting. It is one of the ugliest games I've played in a long time, though. The colors, from the player pieces to the tiles to the board itself are muddy, and nothing reads as clear as I feel it should. How this got through Fantasy Flight quality control, why anyone thought Zemeckis' Beowulf needed an adaptation or why said adaptation should be a reskin of a Knizia is beyond me.

And because they were good guests, we also played a few hands of UNO: Harry Potter and Go Fish with the boys.

Having played and heartily enjoyed Nate Hayden's Rocky Mountain Man last year, I thrifted a copy of the game on which it was based: Avalon Hill's 1978 Source of the Nile.

It's tough for me to settle on a solitaire game because my girlfriend is so enthusiastic about our solo and cooperative titles and I'm trying to avoid playing those without her. At the same time, I've been dying to leave something set up that I can come back to when she's busy or asleep; I decided on Source because it's solitaire, low-stress, can be played for a variable amount of time, and she can start her own expedition on the board if it sparks her interest. There are a lot of empty hexes on that map... and I've been itching for a pure exploration game for a while.

Source of the Nile was developed contemporarily with the original version of Dungeons & Dragons, and Gary Gygax himself reviewed it* in Dragon magazine and offered his own invaluable rules changes and additions in the article. This led to an encouraging response from the designers and a "Lost Civilizations" Fantasy supplement being published in subsequent issues of Dragon, culminating in Source of the Nile: Tributary: an expansion digest of revisions, official optional rules, and designer-approved fan submissions. Eighteen pages of pure chrome.

Be still my heart. This is the kind of sandboxy thematic stuff that I love digging into.

(For the record, the expansion is expensive and difficult to find in hard copy. Another ToS user graciously shared a PDF with me; if you're looking for a copy, let me know!)

I'm playing the long game. My goal is to explore all nine major river systems on the continent, and I may try to fill in the entire map depending on how the terrain turns out. I plan to incorporate as much of the additional detail as I can manage (down-time isn't so much an issue in solitaire play) as soon as I have a handle on the basic gameplay.


If you look very closely at the bottom of the map, you'll see the path traced by the honorable Aubrey Pierpoint's inaugural African expedition on behalf of the UK's Royal Historical Society. Ten hexes, seventeen turns, about two hours of real time - this is going to be like eating a proverbial elephant.

The creators emphasize that mapping the continent is a massive, dangerous undertaking and that players are likely to expend a number of explorers in the process. For a bit more narrative specificity, I checked Wikipedia for a list of "notable 19th century European explorers of Africa" and made a quick 'Random Explorer Nationality' table based on the proportion of countries represented there:

1-11 United Kingdom
12-13 Portugal
14-15 France
16 Austria
17 Germany
18 Prussia
19 Spain
20 Sweden

I also used a name generator for my first explorer.

In addition to that, Tributary greatly expands on a chart that Gary Gygax had submitted for creating random African tribal names. I haven't gotten down to the total-head-explode level of naming and choosing Advantages/Disadvantages for every individual member of my expedition(~30 individuals in my first party); I'm on the fence about going to the trouble since bearers and Askari (native soldiers armed with muskets) seem to disappear and reappear as quickly as a D&D character's hit points. Maybe I'll incorporate the extra detail when I'm more skilled at keeping my crew alive.

The continent's terrain is procedurally generated using the territory that has already been explored so you don't wind up with a weirdly incongruous map. When you enter a blank hex, you roll a die and check the number against a compass on the board. If the compass points to an adjacent hex that has already been mapped, you fill the unexplored hex with the same terrain. If the compass points to another empty hex, you fill your unexplored hex with a random type of terrain listed in a chart on the board. This simple process creates organic mountain ranges, vast stretches of grassland and jungle, massive marshes, and of course, the immense rivers for which the game is named... and all without too much predictability.

My initial plan had been to trek from Durban to the Vaal river, following it north to its source and the mystery chit located several hexes from the fork. I got stuck in the swamp and lost my guide almost immediately following our crossing of the mountains, and given the process for generating terrain, that swamp begat more swamp, which begat more swamp, etc. I spent most of the session mucking around and trying to push past the bog, but to no avail. We retreated into the slightly more traversable jungle once feeding everyone started to look like a concern and we were rewarded by the discovery of a 300 ft. waterfall near the mouth of the Limpopo - a beautiful view that made a nice capstone to those uneventful weeks of trudging through the mire.

I don't have much to say about my first session; spending just about every turn re-reading the rules for terrain generation to make sure I was doing it correctly was understandably distracting from the narrative. It turns out that determining terrain and the type/direction of a river is fairly simple, but I tried to jump into the system from the longer Game 2 (which uses dice for compass direction) without first becoming familiar with the system from the shorter Game 1 (which uses number values printed on the cards.) My fault on that.

I disagree with Gygax's assessment that Source of the Nile needs more illustrations. I can envision that version of the game very easily - but the theater-of-the-mind approach works particularly well here, the rudimentary artwork and scant details on the cards making way for my brain to fill in all sorts of vivid, narrative detail. The "Cafe Africa" Spotify playlist helps, too.

I have an interesting decision to make now that I'm outfitting my second expedition. I have my sights set on that mystery chit: do I take canoes up the river and through the swamp at the risk of getting stuck, or do I approach more slowly on foot via the jungle to the East? It may depend on how much the Historical Society decides to "donate" to my next enterprise.

*And Richard Hamblen was credited as a playtester. Neat piece of gaming history.

Dude — that’s an article.

I have this sitting on my shelf, haven’t played.

That post deserves to be Front Paged. Great article.

Thanks, y'all! I had a few thoughts and they ended up running long. I don't have a captial-R reviewer's breadth of experience to draw comparisons with other games and assess its place in the hobby, but I'm always excited to share something I think is cool.

Finally got my pledge for It's a Wonderful Kingdom. Initial reaction is mostly positive. IAWW is a game my spouse actually likes, so that’s nice. This is, unfortunately, only 2p, but they make some pretty fun design choices to prevent it from being merely “IAWW, but with fantasy art.”

Bedtime games with the boys remains way more popular than I could have hoped. Qwirkle was a bit much for them as they rarely made a legal move without me stepping them through it, but Bruno Cathala's Hand of the King has been a surprise hit. It's not a deep game. You're bouncing Varys around a six by six grid of the Westeros nobility, trying to get majorities in the most families. It's not a deep game, but that simple loop is pleasant enough and rewards paying attention to what moves you're setting up for your opponent. My oldest only needs me to point out the lines Varys can move on. Otherwise he's making all his own choices. We've even begun playing with the companion cards which provide thematic one-shot powers like Brienne stealing Arya or Sansa to your collection or Gendry counting as two Baratheons.

And still plenty of Go Fish, but I've bargained them down to one hand a night.

Played Anachrony last night, and it seemed... Fine? Thematically it was cool, mechanically it was a pretty standard worker placement game, except there weren't that many good places to place workers. Resources and workers generally weren't scarce, and Research seemed weak, so the pressure on Build seemed overwhelmingly out of whack to everything else. Building gives you stuff to do with all your workers (and the actions aren't contested on top of that), and getting behind on building seemed like a death knell. So yea I dunno, obviously I've only played once but it seemed pretty linear and no one was chomping at the bit to play it again. I'm curious about the Fractures expansion, since even the designer posted on BGG that it fixes mob building, but i dunno if I liked it enough to throw more money at it tbh... We'll see, as again it was cool thematically.