What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Stuck in a game of Terraforming Mars for four hours that won't end. Someone please call in an air strike. 32UMB127073

I read your post and it actually made me shiver.

Sagrilarus wrote: Stuck in a game of Terraforming Mars for four hours that won't end. Someone please call in an air strike. 32UMB127073

Forcing an asteroid to land at your location. Stand by.

Space Empires 4x truly channels the Risk curse at dice vibes.

Sagrilarus wrote: Stuck in a game of Terraforming Mars for four hours that won't end. Someone please call in an air strike. 32UMB127073

Watch out for AP Guy. He will steal years from your life if you let him.

Shellhead wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: Stuck in a game of Terraforming Mars for four hours that won't end. Someone please call in an air strike. 32UMB127073

Watch out for AP Guy. He will steal years from your life if you let him.

And in this case, these are Martian years — 1.9 earth years each.

Don't mind me, just checking in to see if Rliyen has played Kemet and what they think of it. (I might become way too invested when I know someone is doing a maiden voyage on one of my favorite games).

DINOSAUR WORLD. Basically Jurassic Park, the board game. Has a real Kickstarter feel to it -- overproduced and underdeveloped. Lots of bits. So many bits. And yet, not enough -- there's a unique dinosaur figure for each species, but I ran out and had to substitute with a different species. It doesn't matter, as the actual figure has zero effect -- they could have replaced everything with cubes (all green dinosaurs are the least dangerous species) -- but what's the point of doing this ridiculous over-the-top production and then skimping on it?

The game is kind of a complex Euro salad that is almost entirely multiplayer solitaire. The only points of interaction are someone buying a park feature before you, someone getting a bunch of DNA before you (you need DNA to make dinosaurs, but it's really just a bunch of colors in the right combinations), or someone getting an achievement before you (like having nine red dinosaurs).

You send workers out to do things, but it's not worker placement as you can't block anyone. Then you fiddle with stuff on your board. Then you create a path for a tour around your park, which generates points and income. But each time you go past the same attraction, it generates a little less, which I guess is thematic but you track it with tiny d6s which you turn to represent increasing boredom. (Edit: the increasing boredom of the park patrons, not mine.)

You have to invest in security to prevent deaths, but people will die anyway. Just have the least amount of deaths at the table and you're fine. Not really sure why it needs six different colors of DNA. The game really needed a firm editorial hand to carve off a bunch of the cruft.

Also it's a complete table hog. I came in 2nd in a 3p game. No need to play it again. 4/10.

THE KING IS DEAD. A consistently tense and gut-churning experience. I couldn't seem to get my footing in this game though. I had a strong presence out of the gate, securing some regions for the Scots, and having the most Scottish support. Then the game entered a muddle where it wasn't clear what I should do, and I dithered around while the other players shored up their positions. Near the end it looked like the Welsh were going to tie the Scots on the number of regions controlled, and win on the tiebreak to become the most powerful. So I went all-in on the Welsh. On the last action of the game, J. caused political instability in the last region, and took the last Scottish noble from the board, having one more point of Scottish support than me, and preventing the Welsh from tying. So the Scots were ascendant and supported J.'s claim to the throne.

Lesson: If it's not clear what to do, then I should pass. Great game, possibly my favorite at 3p. I wish I was better at it. 8/10.

CASCADIA. An inoffensive light game with points for everything. Not much to recommend it over Carcassonne. I like the eco-theme though. 6/10.

My girlfriend and I played several rounds of my upcoming Tomb-inspired card and dice game, Double Dungeon. Went well, found a couple of cards I want to tweak and a rule book change. I'd like to organize some TTS sessions of this soon with some people around here.

Got to try out the Pixelvania expansion for Battle for Biternia. This was awesome, and is such a great game. It's always a bit tough when you don't know your heroes though, as this is one of those that gets better with experience. I hope to introduce my girlfriend to Guards of Atlantis soon.

Had a really cool afternoon of gaming with a couple good friends of ours. We had thought two more might show up and we could get in another sprawling game of Heroes of Land, Air, and Sea, but we ended up with four and so decided to shift gears a bit. First up, like dysjunct, we played The King is Dead. I'd never played 4-player before, where you have to split into teams and try to read your teammate's intentions without directly communicating (a la trick-taking games like euchre.) It's not too different and experience than playing 2-player except that, just like in 3-player, the entire situation can and usually will change by the time it gets back around to you if people are taking actions. As dysjunct said, passing is almost never a bad thing unless you have a very clear goal in mind with the card you're playing. It's also key to remember that you still pull a dude to your court, even if the card you play is useless in the current state of the game. The opposing team won the first game when I set up the game for invasion. We were actually tied on complete sets, but they played an action card last. In the second game, the English got out to a fast start with three territories and I had a better handle on counting cards than I did in the first, so I was able to shape the game in the direction I wanted and leave people with no English cubes to pull to be able to catch up to me when they were crowned.

Then I pulled out Samurai for the first time in I don't know how many years. I'm still happy that I held on to my Z-Man version, though, as it's still a brilliant game that, as with many Knizias, most first-time players wonder why they hadn't gotten to it before. That was the case with our friends, Nick and Leah. Nick won the first game with the first tiebreaker, as all three castes were tied among more than one player, so no leader tokens were handed out. But he had the second-most rice and more of that than anyone else had in their second place. We were tied again in the second game, with one leader token each handed out to three different players, but my girlfriend had the most total pieces, so she took that one. Both of them are kind of heavy thinking games, because the picture on the board can shift so radically, so quickly, but they're still light enough to not leave you feeling like you've spent all afternoon frowning over a table.

I spent a weird amount of time UN-Expanding a couple of game. The copy of Shogun I recently got had the expansion mixed with the base game, so I pulled that out to (Hopefully) sell the expansion. Then I went through my copy of Cyclades and put all the Titan expansion bits back into the expansion box. We usually play the base game or add Monuments, so instead of filtering before each game, just figured it would be easier to keep it separate. Of course, while doing this a whole conversation came up about wanting to try the team variant...which requires Titans. Lastly, I pulled out Champions of Midgard which my wife prefers without the Valhalla or Dark Mountains expansion. I previously tossed the expansion boxes for those, so i just sorted it out and we played a round.

As if typical with base Champions of Midgard, I gambled too heavily on my dice luck. The second to the last round, I went for a monster, hit a bad travel card which lost me a food and a warrior. Then I spend 3 turns (using two reroll tokens) rolling blanks or shields on the remaining three dice. I didn't get the three damage i needed, so they wiped. My wife won handily while I came in a distant third.

We played LLAMA or Don't LLAMA about a dozen times over the weekend, my wife loves this game. One memorable moment was me being dealt 4 LLAMA cards in my initial hand. I went with a keep drawing strategy, thinking I was holding a majority of the LLAMA cards and they would stall when I didn't play them. Nope. I finished the round with something like 28 points when my wife cleared out her hand.

Played some Red Rising but I will save those impressions for the review.

I got Red rising in a trade, but traded it away and got fantasy realms instead. I really don't think adding a board and complexity improved the core game there. I mean red rising was fine, id play it again, but between the two I think fantasy realms is clearly better.

For me I played Eclipse Second Dawn last night. 2p, first time for both of us. Game is a lot of fun. Also just physically A LOT. I grabbed early orbitals tech and strongly out economied my opponent, who conceded at the beginning of round 7 staring down the barrel of my dreadnaught fleet that he had no defense for. I wasn't planning to attack him tbh, as I had a clear win without it, but the last couple rounds were a foregone conclusion so it made sense.

Having never played Eclipse, I gotta say it seems like a really cool game. Managing your economy is tricky, the ship upgrades are really fun in to piece together, tech is impactful and cool... Yea it's just a lot of fun systems piled on top of each other. Also it plays really smoothly once you get into it, and seems like it would play in a reasonable time frame for this kind of thing (after your first play or two). It's one of those games where everything you want to do is hard and expensive, but in a fun way I guess. I really like how your actions get more expensive themore territory you control, that's an awesome touch both mechanically and thematically.

Having never played 1e it's hard to say how much better this is, but 2e is a wild production. There are so many bits, but they're all in their little bespoke organizers to make it really easy to set up and play. I'm always conflicted on a game that's this damn expensive, but I basically traded Cthulhu Wars for this and didn't spend anything out of pocket, so with that caveat I gotta say it's really nice.

Also I don't know what human table could fit a 6p game of this 0_0 I needed a side table for a 2p game I'm pretty sure I could get 4p on my table, but certainly nothing above that.

Sagrilarus wrote: Stuck in a game of Terraforming Mars for four hours that won't end. Someone please call in an air strike. 32UMB127073

Did I talk about my nine hour game of TFM here?

Legomancer wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: Stuck in a game of Terraforming Mars for four hours that won't end. Someone please call in an air strike. 32UMB127073

Did I talk about my nine hour game of TFM here?

There's like nine expansions now, including one that's about a government and holding influence. For the record, I only play Terraforming Mars for the cool tech stuff. I don't give a rat about the red party.

And a bunch of the stuff was on the far side of the very big table and I told them right out, "I'm not playing that stuff because I would have to get up to look each turn and I'm not putting y'all through that." I think it was colonizing other parts of the solar system. There was a Pluto thing.

A great $40 game with $160 of tripe hanging off of it.

I ended up selling off all of the TM expansions, except the additional boards. It just becomes too bloated too fast.