What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Roborally is a great game but so very dependent on the course. And far too many players think a tragically difficult setup will be fun when it's being constructed only to learn that it's soul-destroying when you actually play it.

Shellhead wrote:

RobertB wrote: The two times I played RR, it collapsed under the weight of too much AP.

Seriously, a short sand timer really improves this game. Also, don't play games with AP players. They always murder the fun.

As badly as a Termagant to an Imperial Guardsman.

Last week we played Return to Darktower -- it was as good as everyone is saying. Hews closely enough to the original to give you the shot of nostalgia while updating things to be more inline with modern design trends. We won a two player game towards the end of the 5th month with the warlord and the treasure hunter.

Last night we played two games of Ecosystem -- a cute little card drafting game about building an ecosystem. Points are scored based on how the cards are laid out in a 4 x 5 grid. It played quick and was mostly non-offensive. Probably will keep it around to play with the kids (2nd and 4th grader) as it seems right up their alley.

We followed that up with a play of the 2012 Conquistador Games Kickstarter, The New Science -- I recall Josh not being a fan, but I have kept it languishing around because I really don't have too much demand on storage space. However, I have come to the point where I am tired of looking at all the bullshit I have on the shelf...so we tried it out. In the plus column, it was about scientific discovery in the 1700s. In the minus column, it is worker placement.

Generally, I find worker placement games non-thematic because the restricted action selection is mostly non-sensical (looking at you Agricola). This suffered a bit from that, but not as bad as other titles. The board as an appealing art style in that it attempts to look like some scientific documents from the 1700s; however, the tech tree for progressing in scientific discovery looks like a Gantt chart (or whatever your favorite flowchart is)....which does not inspire anybody. There is a bit of randomization for whether experimentation succeeds or fails -- Leibniz (me) got stuck for 3 turns in a row trying to prove Analytic Geometry. There are some cute little mechanics where the designer tried to instill some flavor, but the end result is a fairly procedural, repetitive affair that doesn't result in much excitement; nor does it result in much complex decision making, if that is your thing.

For now, it stays because I have been thinking about a similar game about modern scientific publishing -- which would have much more of a luck component in it. And, I like the topic is non-standard.

Beyond that, the 2nd grader remains obsessed with baseball and WW2 -- so we have played some All Star Baseball (he loves the spinners) and Escape from Colditz, where he has started to form his own strategies for distracting the guards. He's reading the Boy on the Wooden Box, which I haven't read before, so that is interesting. He also talked his mom into playing a game of Risk and enjoyed it, so maybe some Axis and Allies (probably the stripped down 1941 edition) might be on the way.

Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.

Des asked to play a co-op over the weekend and I didn't have the energy for Sleeping Gods so I grabbed Silver Tower on a whim and we had a blast.

Having picked up the Chaos Adversaries card set a while back (it expands the types of enemies that can spawn beyond what's included in the box, so long as you have the extra models), I wound up snipping out the bad guys in the Hammerhal set to mix it up even more the next time we play. Man, I don't know what happened... halfway through assembling the Blight Kings I caught myself totally unironically thinking "These miniatures are the coolest freakin' thing in the world!" - the same way I felt seeing Space Marines for the first time as an 8-year old at Games Workshop in the mall. I'm getting a jolt from all the Warhammer stuff that I haven't felt about most gaming recently and I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why.

I haven't picked apart the infernal calculus of GW's "ooh, if I buy unit or troop X, I can also use them in game Y" that I think leads to owning everything they make, and there are so many good reasons to be bitter against the company. But I'll be damned if I didn't eventually figure, well, I only need 18 Chaos Marauders to fill out my WQ Slaves to Darkness adversary roster, but wouldn't it look so much cooler if I proxied them with some of the wilder Warcry miniatures? One rabbit hole later, I've got the Red Harvest Warcry starter on the way (I can use all the miniatures I already have!) and I just grabbed a secondhand copy of Gorechosen - the price for the whole game was the same as the retail cost of three figures included therein and I can use them in all three games.

Love to hate and hate to love you, GW. Lots of snipping and scraping in the near future...

Ark Nova finally showed up in physical form. Played my first actual irl game of it tonight, lost by a point to one of the two I taught. Its long as fuck when you're teaching people but man I really like that game.

Also tried out Cubitos, which is basically Quacks of Quedlinberg the dice game. You roll a bunch of dice, you push your luck, you buy better dice to roll that have different powers and sides (and there are big stacks of the different ones to randomize for each game), and it's all driving a quick race around a little track. It's pretty great for that kind of 30-45 min lighter game slot.

Virabhadra wrote: Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in...Man, I don't know what happened... halfway through assembling the Blight Kings I caught myself totally unironically thinking "These miniatures are the coolest freakin' thing in the world!" - the same way I felt seeing Space Marines for the first time as an 8-year old at Games Workshop in the mall. I'm getting a jolt from all the Warhammer stuff that I haven't felt about most gaming recently and I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why.

Don't worry, iirc Mr. Barnes went through a similar phase a couple of years ago, and look at him now, 'prefer abstracts for the time being'.

I am happy for all of you who get to enjoy games with people.

^this

I never thought I'd be all in on a coop lcg for many hundreds of dollars and hundreds of plays, but here we are. Just enjoy the ride. There's nothing anyone is "supposed" to be playing.

Dig what you dig when you dig it and then ditch it when you no longer dig it.

LOL yeah right now I am 75% abstracts, 15% Return to Dark Tower, 10% Llama.

Been hitting BGA more there are quite a few great abstracts to play on there, some unpublished. Tumbleweed is -amazing- but wow, talk about brain burn. It’s core mechanism is actually line of sight. You place a piece on hex grid, the number of your pieces that “see” it are its strength. Then what spaces it sees are your territory. It gets wild. But man, players on there of these kinds of games are SHARKS. I won a game of Hive and it was a miracle. Tash-Kalar is just brutal, I’m rolling up in there and may as well be skipping my turns. Really wish GIPF games were on there…it’s getting frustrating losing ever game to my daughter. Tzaar, for some reason, is the only one I can beat her at consistently. Girl is a Tak prodigy too.

RTDT is holding up after several plays. It is outstanding. Like Doug said it has that 80s feel and it does feel like DT 100%. But it just offers more, it comes across as how DT would if it were released today.I also think it is the best integration of an app to date. We played last night with my son’s best friend and everyone loved it, my dude was texting his dad halfway through asking if they could buy a copy.

As for Llama, it’s amazing. Yes it is “like” Uno. But it has these really subtle decision points that force you to consider whether or not they actually matter and then it turns out they do. There are mind games and bluffing. Brinksmanship and push-your-luck. Dramatic Hail Mary runs where you clear your hand while watching everyone else draw, scrambling to find something to play. The discovery arc for new players is “WTF is this stupid shit” to “Oh, OK” to “can we play it again”. It is up there with the very best of late career Knizia.

Michael Barnes wrote: As for Llama, it’s amazing. Yes it is “like” Uno. But it has these really subtle decision points that force you to consider whether or not they actually matter and then it turns out they do. There are mind games and bluffing. Brinksmanship and push-your-luck. Dramatic Hail Mary runs where you clear your hand while watching everyone else draw, scrambling to find something to play. The discovery arc for new players is “WTF is this stupid shit” to “Oh, OK” to “can we play it again”. It is up there with the very best of late career Knizia.

I got this and we played it and I don't think anyone was overly whelmed. It seems like the decisions are limited and obvious. Play the highest card you can. If you can't play a card, draw unless it looks like someone might go out. Are we missing something?

You shouldn't always play the highest card you can.

Sometimes also, you should draw a card even if you could otherwise play one. One of the best gambits in the game is hanging onto your entire hand and drawing up like crazy. If no one plays their last card and you get them to fold, you can play through your entire hand and then flip a point token back to the pot. This is such a power move and feels so good.

Additionally, you can conspire with others at the table to prolong the round, depending on if the leader went out already.

The biggest decision point though is whether you should gamble upon it getting around the table again. This decision is mostly gut, but there are some indicators if you're doing some observation - such as no one being able to play last time it was on "3". The tempo at which the numbers escalates is also something you can read. In some games people seem to push the cycle quickly, and in others it ticks up softer with people playing lower numbers. This tempo also shifts significantly at player count. In a lower player count game it's more likely you will get to play that six if the current number is five, than if you were playing at max players.

The decision on whether to go out also really needs to take into consideration the current scores at the table. You should not fold if someone is close to hitting 40 and you're not winning. You should ride it and try and be the one to play the last card if you want a shot at coming back.

I really adore this game. It hits some of the emotional highs of poker while mechanically structured similarly to UNO.

There are definitely some finer points:

- unlike Uno, you are not compelled to play. If you have a solid run (what that means varies based on player count) you can draw to bluff or to delay playing into a solid run.

- the. Binary card play choice has nuance. Play to stall or play to progress? Put a llama on the llama or roll it back to 1, potentially trapping the players with 4/5 cards into being left with llamas.

- Estimating availability and timing is a thing. If everybody shed a stack of4 s early in the round, those 5s become a hazard.

- The fold is a key decision point. You can bail with a fat hand that looks bad to the table but you only take 2-3 points. If you stay- hoping to zero out or reduce points- it turns into pure push your luck. You might roll into a hand clearing sequence or top deck a 10 point blunder.

- The chip return is subtly brilliant. If all you is 9 white chips, clearing your hand isn’t as valuable as trying to end with a singleton 1- thereby letting you change the 10 whites to a single black 10 point chip that you can play to ditch to zero out your score on the next hand. Plus, once scores get into the 20s about halfway through a game that return can be a tremendous shift in points, potentially halving your score.

- Watching how other players play matters. There is definitely a psychological element. Some folks will play just to throw cards to rush the round out. Some will build and wait to play. Some will sandbag and and play to stall. Some don’t bother to pay to empty in the first few rounds.

It’s definitely not a “gamer’s game”, it’s not fucking Great Western Trail or some shit. It’s silly, obnoxious, and light but underneath the rainbows and llamas, the Uno variation…there’s some serious design work and consideration here. I think it’s slightly more complex at a mechanical level than Knizia’s Loco/Flinke Plinke/etc. but it’s more more complex at a meta level. But both are firmly in that delightful category that causes gamers to wonder “is this a game”.

Charlie and I will be publishing a joint paper on Llama for The Journal of These Games of Ours.

Tempo is so, so critical in this game…as is to some degree initiative.

I think Knizia knew this game would be recieved as silly and stupid. He showed up at SDJ wearing a llama costume FFS.

Old friend in town, got a group of four together to play Mansions of Madness 2nd. Interesting scenario that defied the premise and started out with a sinister parade. We managed to monkeywrench the parade floats and steal a magic item needed for a ritual, but the cultists absconded with their intended sacrifice. Then we crashed a party which turned out to be full of cultists, and tried to rescue the sacrifice.

By the second half of the session, I started to think Hey, this really feels like playing Call of Cthulhu! But we're doing it with a board game! However, when we finally got to the sacrifice, we discovered that we needed to have a rope so we could escape out the second story window. I immediately thought of two alternatives. First, we were in a bedroom with two made beds, so there was more than enough sheets available to knot together into an improvised rope. Second, we could just hang from the window and drop to the ground, then catch the sacrifice after one of us pushed her out the window.

But it's a board game, so we can't do either of these things and instead must rush back across the map to find the rope. Time ran out and we lost.

Additional LLAMA note -- if you have a lot of different numbers in your hand, then drawing is very close to zero-risk. This is because you only get dinged for each number once. (I.e. if you have 1 six or 5 sixes, you still only get six points.) So that changes the risk analysis too, and lets you get closer to that sweet spot Charlie mentioned of laying down all your cards in sequence like a Boss.

While the whole table is thinking LOL that guy is FUCKED.

This game is magical.