What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

Rliyen wrote:

WadeMonnig wrote: 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).

Hey, Wade.

I tried getting on yesterday to let you know my thoughts about the game, but the connection kept timing out, and I got real busy at work. So, here it is.

THE GAME IS &^!%$! AWESOME!

I am insanely glad to hear you enjoyed it. Our conversation here on the boards led me to dig into the "newest" rules and, apart from the horrible rulebook, got me excited to play with the new ruleset. The "One Free Power tile to start" had me mathing up possible powertile builds and strategy in my head for a couple of hours. Including the Onyx Tiles/pyramids in Blood and Sand means you can ignore the old Ta-Seti expansion as it literally has the good bits now in the base game. Thank YOU for picking it up, it has me excited for you and with you.

Tonight I teach and play Pax Transhumanity. Thoughts and prayers to your old pal Dave. I'll report back.

In order to help me process the rules and be able to teach, I made a player's guide. Bigger than a player aid, but smaller than a rules rewrite, it will hopefully give a good overview without going into too much depth. You can see it here:
docs.google.com/document/d/1-56izH3zFRVx...V3k/edit?usp=sharing

The game is actually not much more complicated than some heavier euros. It seems like more because it uses a lot of jargon that makes it hard to connect ideas and mechanisms, plus the usual Pax thing where a cube represents something different depending on where it is. But I have definitely played heavier euros. Hell, I think Porfiriana may be a more fiddly ruleset than this.

Showed off Double Dungeon to Jim Felli last night on TTS, and it was a hit! They gave me lots of good suggestions I have already floated to the publisher, as they have financial ramifications.

Last night I was reminded how negatively TTS affects play time. It probably doubled the game length just fumbling with the cards and dice.

My Pax Transhumanity game went very well, only a few rules hiccups. The two-player game isn't super great, though there's a posted variant that makes it better. Here's what I wrote:

I've been curious about this title for some time. I like Pax Porfiriana a lot, and I like High Frontier, so a science-based Pax was appealing, but it sounded very daunting and involved giving money to Phil Eklund. Fortunately a used copy showed up in an auction, and I bit.

Turns out, it's not really that complicated as far as rules go. It's no worse than many medium-heavy euros I've played. There are some fiddly rules, but not as many as, say, Pax Porfiriana or Gaia Project. The learning difficulty comes in the amount of obfuscating jargon and the way the actions affect multiple things at once. Thematically, though, everything fits together and makes sense.

But playing it is another matter. It's tough to get started, with no Splay to help make things viable, and not a lot of money to do research. Once things get going that gets easier, but then the difficulty of manipulating the Splay to keep things favorable for you kicks in. Since a single action can sometimes change multiple elements, it's a lot to keep track of. (In our game, I looked well set to commercialize a Tipping Point and take the victory, but my opponent commercialized a different idea, changed the Cutting Edge and thus the Regime, and suddenly that Tipping Point was going to give the win to him.)

It feels like it could be swingy, but I think that with more experience the players will get more control and be able to anticipate their opponents' plays more. As it was, we were just kind of doing whatever we could. In our newbies game, we usually only interfered with each other by accident. I also think it's better with at least three.

It's a really interesting game and I want to see more of it. I'm excited to have it in my collection.

Don't read the footnotes.

WadeMonnig wrote:

Rliyen wrote:

WadeMonnig wrote: 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).

Hey, Wade.

I tried getting on yesterday to let you know my thoughts about the game, but the connection kept timing out, and I got real busy at work. So, here it is.

THE GAME IS &^!%$! AWESOME!

I am insanely glad to hear you enjoyed it. Our conversation here on the boards led me to dig into the "newest" rules and, apart from the horrible rulebook, got me excited to play with the new ruleset. The "One Free Power tile to start" had me mathing up possible powertile builds and strategy in my head for a couple of hours. Including the Onyx Tiles/pyramids in Blood and Sand means you can ignore the old Ta-Seti expansion as it literally has the good bits now in the base game. Thank YOU for picking it up, it has me excited for you and with you.

Thank the publisher for being such a screw-up that it put the game on my radar.

Finished a game of Great Western Trail on BGA. I hated it when I first played it in 2017 and I hate it now. A gilded dog turd of an overdesigned mess. It's criminal that it's #12 on BGG. The light from the top 10 should take 17 years to reach it.

I played through the tutorial on BGA and I was like no fucking way, forget this shit. Pretty much everything I dislike about modern games in that class.

Playing a ton of async stuff on their now…Rallyman, Tash Kalar, Hive, Onitama,
Arnak, Abandon All Artichokes, 6 Nimmt, El Grande, Imhotep…y’all hit me up, MB1975.

i like playing Onitama on BGA, since it gives me a bit of time to strategerize. Time that I wouldn't feel comfortable taking F2F.

Always up for Rallyman.

I tried Arnak and was all "what kind of beard-stroking nonsense is this?" Here's a game about exploring lost tombs that might contain monsters! Or you can just move up the cathedral track and win. Fuck that shit.

I like arnak, but the multiuse cards and precise resource requirements for point conversion really drag the endgame out and it gets to be kind of a slog sometimes.

Tried out 7 Wonders: Duel. I maintain that original 7 Wonders works great at two, but the reduced footprint and setup of Duel are appreciated just the same.

No complaints thus far. Wife won twice, by a single point in the first game (we both thought I was walking with it, but she knocked out some resources, and I couldn’t afford anything in the third age) and by military the second game. I like the changes to science and military. My only thought is that this really grows with card knowledge, especially for calculating the chance for military and science victories.

I like Duel a lot. Played on BGA with Pantheon and as I expected it just added dumb fluff to a decent game.

After sitting idle for 17 months, Lords of Hellas came down off of the shelf tonight. We were slated to have a 4 player game, but I got a text from one player that their daughter tested positive for Covid. So... down to 3 players.

Everything started off great, but then one player, who always chooses chaos, built the Zeus monument almost every turn. This has the side effect of shortening the game dramatically, which irritated me since again, I had not played in a long time and I really wanted to savor it. That was not happening. I had hoped to do a temple victory, but only had two temples. I had to start amassing troops on the border of Zeus' region. On the last turn, we had an epic battle, but my opponent had a card that gave him a huge boost based on the number of hoplites in the region, and we had a shit ton of hoplites. He crushed me and won the game. No one ever hunted a single monster. This was also the first time anyone had won with the monument victory condition, so I guess that was cool. I could have short-circuited my goals to try to head him off more, I guess. Oh well.

We still had plenty of time left, so we played two rounds of another long time shelf toad, Dungeon Fighter. This was a blast! We died pitifully both times, but it was fun tossing dice. I think the neoprene mat on my game table actually is a detriment to this game as it makes the dice far too bouncy.

Got together with a couple of friends. Relatively short night of gaming because of us spent the whole day on gardening and yardwork. First we played Camp Grizzly. I played Chet, an expansion character who is definitely Chet from Weird Science. Chet-like things kept happening to me the whole game, especially when I found a box of cherry bombs that was actually labeled "Chet's stash." It was a thrilling and brutal romp, starting with Karen getting wounded by Otis on turn two and hunted to death on turn three. We let that player re-join the game as Sherry.

Things got better for a while. We found weapons, and put together the set of items for a Van finale. Chet became an unstoppable juggernaut, with 2 one-handed weapons, a +1 in combat from one of the weapons, a +1 from a bully camper, and a +2 from being injured. So my minimum roll in combat was a 6, and I could toss my last cherry bomb for another +1.

Then everything went sideways. Then all three of our campers got killed by a plot twist card. Then Otis dragged Sherry to the Swimming Area and started drowning her. Chet and Tracy had the items for the escape and were near the Van exit, so we decided to just hang out and see if Sherry could escape a slow death by drowning. She had to either roll a 4 on a 4-sided die, or we had to draw a Otis Strikes card or chit.

Tracy decided to try to increase the chance of drawing an Otis Strikes by searching out a couple of undiscovered chits, in addition to the usual cabin card draw. She drew an environment card (The Woods Have Eyes, IIRC), which would kill a Counselor if they went to the Woods without at least one item in their backpack. She had a weapon and a flare (cancel a combat with Otis) and I commented that would be a tough choice of which item to put in the back pack. The Tracy player wasn't listening at that moment, and died in the Woods the following turn. Then Sherry drowned.

I had everything for the Van finale except a set of keys. Sherry's body had one set of keys, on the opposite corner of the map. And Tracy's body had another set of keys, in the Woods. I decided to focus on getting to the Woods, which meant trying to cross a nature trail and rolling a 1 on a d6. I zipped back and forth on a nature trail but kept failing to roll a 1. A more powerful Otis fought me and I needed my last cherry bomb to beat him, which meant that he now had a chance of killing me in every subsequent fight. I found a Hellraiser-style puzzle box and decided to gamble on using it instead of continuing to run around on nature paths. It killed me. The end.

Then we played Masters of the Night, as a family of vampires battling against a cult of vampire hunters to take control of a city sometime in the late '40s. It was a good game, and we took some risks and won a very decisive victory with a few turns to spare. I could go into details, but it just doesn't have the same semblance of a narrative like Camp Grizzly. Both games were equally enjoyable, but that Camp Grizzly session was also memorable.

We had a fantastic 3-player game of Wings for the Baron yesterday. The linkage between theme and actions is wonderful, and it's clear the designer and developer spent a lot of time on historical research and incorporating that research into the game mechanisms. The pace is quick and tense, and the economy of actions is tight enough to be challenging, but definitely not so tight it's hard to make progress. We played the Basic game, where our competing factories produced only fighters. The Basic game really forces the players to interact, steal each other's tech, sabotage each other's development, etc. at the same time that it forces them to pay attention to the progress of the war, the quality of the Allies planes, and the timing of their profiteering. Just a really great game. She-Dives and our guest were first-timers, and I'd only played once solo before, but the rules explanation went smoothly and the game quickly moved to a German victory, strangely enough. We each took turns leading, it seemed, and the result was decided only in about the last turn. Fun stuff.

I'm really glad we played, and I'm anxious to play again. I wish we'd immediately played a second game, but instead we pulled out a new title.

Inspired by Sag and Charlest, I found a copy of Apollo, a Game Inspired by NASA Moon Missions. Like the title, frankly it runs a bit long. We played two games, the Gemini training scenario and the full Apollo mission. She-Dives was Mission Control, and our guest and I were the intrepid astronauts. It looks us several rounds to resolve the rules ambiguities and settle on a flow of play. In the end it was too easy. The time track kept us focused on the tasks we had to complete, but we always felt we astronauts had enough actions to keep the systems operating well, so well that Mission Control never really had anything to do. We enjoyed limiting our communications between ground and astronauts per the rules, and we astronauts probably coordinated a bit too directly -- but the initial klunkiness of play forced us to cooperate to figure out how to play.

We really wanted to like it more than we did. She-Dives and I met in a very similar circumstance, talking on a NASA comms loop. Brought back great memories. "SAM, IAM, we're ready for power-up on the next contact." It was fine, but the game takes too long. I'm glad we played, and we'll play a few more times, but I'm sure it's destined for the trade pile.

And why is there a slot in the Mission Control instrument panel that allows the astronauts to see the systems status sliders? What were they thinking?