What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

What is Rear Window like Charlie? (Sorry if I've missed a review or something somewhere!)

mc wrote: What is Rear Window like Charlie? (Sorry if I've missed a review or something somewhere!)

It's roughly a Mysterium-like game with the twist that the person giving clues has a small (30% chance) of wanting you to lose instead of win.

It fits the themes of the film very well in terms of the feel of the game and the discussion that takes place. It's extremely clever.

I'm not convinced it's strategically winnable in certain circumstances - instead relying on lucky guesses, which may slightly undermine it.

I've played it three times now and want to play it more. Not sure how many I need before I can review it. I need certain things I can't control to happen in the game (such as a murder occurring).

Played Werewords this week. Basically a mash-up of 20 questions and werewolf. Profoundly unimpressed. Maybe I’m entering my grumpy old man phase as my 37th birthday approaches.

Had a game night at work and then met with some friends yesterday to game. So a pretty good week of gaming.

I returned to RA for the first time in, what, 20 years. It's not at its best with five players - a bit too random to make your decisions matter - but still a great game. All the other players loved it.

Then we played DREADFUL CIRCUS which a bidding game with cool artwork. Players take turn offering one of their cards, and then the other players must bit secretely using a small cardboard box. I think playing it more with the same group will change the game, but nothing in it made we want to play it again. Could be that I'm dense, but I had a hard time to spot any meaningful strategy in either making or receiving bits. I always enjoy trying a new game so I had a good time, but I think I would rather play Modern Art in the future.

I then had to co-workers join me for at game of DEATH ANGEL. Even though I solo a lot of games I haven't played it a while, but that is clearly a mistake. It's tight, it's merciless, and I love how the game hangs on the roll of the dice again and again. We lost, obviously.

We ended the night with a six player game of DICE THRONE. Dice throne is a great Yahtzee style dice chucker where different characters duke it out. It looks great, and I think they've done a great job in making the different characters feel different. But six players are too many. We had an average of just over two turns each, and that was to little to really get a sense of your character or anything. Also, if you don't know the other characters and their abilites by heart, it's too tempting to just zone out when it's not your turn.

Then yesterday I played NEMESIS: LOCKDOWN with some old friends. It's very much like the first game, but you are in a base on Mars, and rather than guessing where the ship is going and all that, you have to figure out what the contiency plan is. Maybe the soldiers who arrive at the base at game end will kill everybody who didn't send a signal, maybe they'll just kill all who've locked themselves in the isolation room (which is otherwise safe), or maybe something else. I like that part of the game, and I also like how darkness and power play important roles. The game ran a bit long because of the new rules (we had all played Nemesis previously), but nonetheless it had lots of epic moments like when one player was chased through six or seven rooms by the same alien. Or when I moved to the exit and just had to leave on the rover when the queen showed up. I still made it out, and I had solved my objective, but unfortunately I didn't have enough knowledge and was promptly killed.

Finally I have been playing BAD BONES with the six yo. It's a tower defence game where you can play vs. or coop, and I think I like it. You place traps on your board to destroy or turn around the attacking skeletons or you kill them with your hero. A big part of the game is moving skeletons on your board using a neat system, and while it should be busy work, it feels like fun. I'm not sure the game has a ton of legs, but there is an advanced variant with more different traps which will maybe change things.

charlest wrote:
Kind of off-topic, but it seems like it's getting more difficult the past several months to get rid of games. I used to be able to put together trades relatively easily, sold off some games, gave a few away to people in my group that liked a particular title. Now, everyone is just packed to the gills with stuff. I know I am, stuff overflowing to the floor around my shelves, not sure what to do with it all.

But I keep asking for review copies and buying more. Just purchased a big lot of Academy Games' Agents of Mayhem which seems to have completely escaped the zeitgeist. It was probably a mistake. Also spending at least a hundred on new content for Company of Heroes.

I consign my games at Game Nite on Watson. They give you 80% of your asking price in store credit. I mostly use the credit to fund my Discount Dives, and if I don't dig the used games I've bought, i just consign them back, kind of like a rental program lol. Actually, it just funded a new copy of Ankh I had them order. It's no muss, no fuss, helps out the FLGS, AND gets in front of plenty of eyes.

Woo! More Heroes of Land, Air and Sea. But not with the group that I've been prepping with Tiny Epic Kingdoms. Instead, this group had mostly played before. It was Elves (me) vs Undead vs Lizardfolk vs Goblins. Since I had won the previous game and am probably the best DoaM player among this group, I was going to take the Undead, as they're generally considered the toughest faction to play. But it got picked before me, so I took the second-toughest, which are the Elves. Most of the Elves' abilities are predicated on mana and Spell cards, but it's difficult to really accelerate your acquisition of spells without taking occasionally sub-optimal actions, on top of the fact that you often have to use the optimal actions (Build, March to get Serfs into regions to collect) to gain enough resources to advance your capital city so you can hold more than one spell at a time.

I did approach the Elves with the usual path of gaining the Mana Tower ASAP, so that you can Scribe and gain new spells with one Research action and so your Sorceress (your best hero) can be a significant assist in combat. But I also picked up the Air Spire so I could build the Phoenix and really emphasize the offense of either the Sorceress or the Assassin if anyone else's heroes became a problem. A lot of people tend to underestimate the airships, which can really be quite deadly when properly applied. I thought the Goblins would build their Chopper, which can cause all kinds of havoc for opponents, but they never got to it. The game started slowly, with a lot of build-up happening, but then the battles began in earnest. The Undead player played them in exactly the right fashion: picking fights wherever in the hopes that they could accumulate souls in the Underworld and build their combat snowball. But they also couldn't win any of those fights, which kind of undermines the attempt. The Lizardfolk eventually triggered Exploit (build all three towers) which began the endgame and I took advantage of having both Harvest and Scavenge scribed which let me pile up resources so I could wield any combat card I wanted or needed. I ended up controlling 3 villages, but I had jumped ahead in a few other ways and won 45-31-27-23. The Lizardfolk player is not really a DoaM player and was also the only newbie, which led to a lot of analysis paralysis, which made the game last longer than usual, which made her enjoy it even less, so that was a downside, but otherwise it's still one of my favorite area control games.

Had a couple of friends over yesterday to play a couple of games.

The Vesuvius Incident is a good three player game. We started with four space marines each, but the game is such a brutal xenomorph meatgrinder that I was unsurprised when we were down to one marine each. We managed to escape before atmospheric re-entry, with a total of four space marines (2 were unconscious), 2 robots, 1 surviving scientist, and 9 other scientists accounted for, out of 15 scientists. Our final score was 39 points, which was a marginal loss. 42 is the minimum score for victory. The guy who hadn't played Vesuvius before had a useful insight near the end of the game. We should have used most of our limited number of Orbital turns early on, for more cautious exploration while we will still had a full squad. Saving them for the end helped us keep our last few guys alive, but it would have been better to keep more alive early on and cover more ground in our exploration. We also might have stayed a few more turns and potentially accounted for one or two more scientists.

Escape from 100 Million B.C. was more enjoyable. During the first half of the game, we did a great job of managing the time portals, and quickly ushering the castaways back to their proper time periods. Around mid-game, my charming investor character found a nanotech replicator, basically a water-powered 3D printer capable of making time machine parts. But I was on the far side of the map chasing down castaways. It turned out to be a very Fourth of July game, as we rescued U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Kennedy, and (Teddy) Roosevelt. Then we had a lengthy run of bad turns where we got at least one new time portal _every_single_turn_. I was intent on catching up with Abe Lincoln, so I handed off the replicator to the research assistant. She and the reporter met up in one of the coastal hexes and sacrificed six items to replicate the last two parts that we needed. We left some relatively unimportant castaways behind, like the stable boy and Amelia Earhart (no paradox penalty because she vanished without a trace in actual real-world history), plus one tasty snack cake (3 paradox), which allowed us to escape with two spaces to spare on the paradox track. As soon as we returned to our drastically-altered present, we were arrested by agents of a Nazi America regime. Technically we won, but getting sent to a concentration camp didn't feel like a victory.

WadeMonnig wrote:

charlest wrote:
Kind of off-topic, but it seems like it's getting more difficult the past several months to get rid of games. I used to be able to put together trades relatively easily, sold off some games, gave a few away to people in my group that liked a particular title. Now, everyone is just packed to the gills with stuff. I know I am, stuff overflowing to the floor around my shelves, not sure what to do with it all.

But I keep asking for review copies and buying more. Just purchased a big lot of Academy Games' Agents of Mayhem which seems to have completely escaped the zeitgeist. It was probably a mistake. Also spending at least a hundred on new content for Company of Heroes.

I consign my games at Game Nite on Watson. They give you 80% of your asking price in store credit. I mostly use the credit to fund my Discount Dives, and if I don't dig the used games I've bought, i just consign them back, kind of like a rental program lol. Actually, it just funded a new copy of Ankh I had them order. It's no muss, no fuss, helps out the FLGS, AND gets in front of plenty of eyes.

I am still working off a big chunk of credit when I shipped 4 large boxes off to Noble Knight last year. I think between shelf bloat and high shipping costs, getting rid of used games is harder these days other than high value hard to find stuff. I am bringing 3 large boxes to the WBC Auction/flea market later this month as well.

We started a campaign of Stars of Akarois Wednesday night with 3 players. Stars of Akarois is a co-op in Battle Star Galactica like world where an alien race has blow up your home planet. So far I like it. We played 3 scenarios. In all 3 scenarios we were fight pilots fighting off alien ships. The combat system is a little like War of the Rings meets X Wing. You roll 4 dice and the results are either move, shot or stress on the dice. Pilots and ships have upgrades on what they can do with each type of dice. The system is fun, simple but also has lots of decisions to be made. The 1st two scenarios were easy but we almost lost the 3rd scenario. Next up will be some space exploration scenarios we’ll see how they play out.

Had a game day yesterday celebrating my new house and divorce (Independence Day, lol). I played:
Mysterium
California*
Cubitos*
Tenpenny Parks*
Moonrakers
Planet*
LLAMA

* were new to me. I didn't win anything except I rejoiced in my shared victory in California. There were about 10 people there, so multiple tables were going. A great time, and some great friends!

I played Ruination a couple of times, LLAMA, Cuthulu Wars Duel, Dune Imperium...and don't think I won a game all weekend except Rummy.

We were at a BBQ on Saturday night. There was a copy of flourescent Trouble out. My wife asked about it and I told her I grew up playing it. Somehow they don't play Trouble in Germany so she had never played. We played with our friend Mandy and had a blast. I attacked my wife relentlessly and came in second. We are absolute evil to each other when we game so it was all fun. She was hysterical most of the time. I guess I need to buy Trouble?

Yo! Contrary to popular belief I'm still around, just not super active on places that require more effort than firing off an errant post on my phone lately. Time management would probably help. Impossible to gauge.

Recent things for me that I think are hot: Godtear (excellent skirmish game that does a lot with a relatively lean ruleset), Bullet Star (more Bullet, possibly a bit overwrought but still very good), and Dice Realms (best Lehmann game in years and a stark contrast to Res Arcana).

Need to play Cryptic Explorers, but as I sell more and more games off for not being an immediate "ooh yes I want to play that" I find bigass crawls like that to be challenging to motivate myself to table. Doubly so since I don't get to play a ton of stuff these days.

Also because I was catching up from a bit ago and Gary took a guess - I never had any kind of substantial problem with TWBG, or at least not anything important enough to remember. Y'all are cool. I'm just very busy and very tired.

Dice Realms is really on my radar pretty hard, it's in my "see if it's on your wishlist in a year or so." It's pretty steep pricewise because of the constructed dice face stuff.

Man yeah, and I cannot in any way tell someone that they "should" drop almost $100 (assuming you don't buy at MSRP) on it. We played a bunch of a friend's copy, loved it, then burned store credit we were floating to snag it. It's basically several deckbuilder expansions' worth of stuff in the core box, but it feels more substantial than a lot of games it resembles. Feels less like shopping for new tools and more managing a pretty wide tech tree.

It's also a board game-ass board game, basically Dominion 2. If you want a narrative throughline this ain't it.