What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I bought (and since traded away) 2nd ed ASiE, and then got hold of 1st for a reasonable price. I actually found 2nd more fiddly anyway, at least with the decks. There's more STUFF in 1st, but I feel like the mechanisms are somehow simpler and it's just circumstance that lets you access the extra stuff in the 1st. Like there's two things in 1st you can do with every card as opposed to different actions per card. So they said 2nd was more streamlined - but I think the bit that was streamlined were the good bits and not necessarily anything mechanical (in fact imo it got worse on that front). I was surprised I remember. Felt way smoother to me, the 1st.

Played Pax Pamir 2e yesterday as requested by my kid. I crunched it, but he did pretty well seeing some different stuff like taxing me to stop me buying things.

Also played MarraCash via playingcards.io and video chat with some folks. Such a great game. Dorra (For Sale), 1996. You auction off shopfronts and then try and move tourists into them around the streets with the great thing being if you direct them to someone else's shop you get a thick cut. So this awesome organic environment develops out of nothing with very little overhead rules wise.

I like the batshit craziness of games like ASiE, but honestly, stuff like Marracash is exactly what the medium of BGs are meant for imo.

Anyone else used playingcards.io? There's a bit of a community making modules for simple games. Mostly card ganes but I built Fresh Fish on there yesterday/today.

Played another game of The Vesuvius Incident tonight. This time we used our limited supply of exploration turns early and often, and did well for the first half of the game. Then we had a run of bad luck for a few turns in a row and lost all but 4 marines to xenomorph ambushes. We managed to account for 12 civilians, including one that we rescued, giving us 42 vp for a successful mission.

Then we played Camp Grizzly. One guy had Chet, another had Karen, and I drew Tracy the Scream Queen. Everyone got injured and Tracy got killed fairly early on, so they let me take a new character, which was the swimmer guy. Swimmer guy got killed three turns later, so I started fresh with the lady with the 'fro. We were playing the challenging lockdown scenario, so it was a real struggle to put together the items for the Van escape. Literally one turn before we would have escaped, Chet and Karen instead had to go skinny-dipping on the far side of the board.

Chet and Karen survived a couple of battles with Otis and lucked into an item that gave them the set for the closer Barn finale. They made a break for it and left me behind, but the particular endgame was like super-simplified Final Battle of Arkham Horror (2nd), which pulled me in even though I got left behind. Then we all had to secretly choose if we were cultists or not. If we all chose cultist, we would all lose. If any of us chose counselor, then they had to win a tough final battle with a Great Old One, who would get an extra hit point for each cultist. Cultists would sit out the final battle but win if the Great Old One won. We all chose counselor instead of cultist. He killed me but Chet and Karen defeated him and won.

After the usual post-game analysis, one of my friends and I got in big argument about why this game remains out of print. He said that the only reason Camp Grizzly is still out of print is because the designer is stupid or crazy. I maintained that the designer likely lost money on the Kickstarter, and can't afford to risk a second kickstarting. He has been approached by publishers, but I assume nobody has offered him enough money to entice him into another attempt at publication. And that is likely because the profit margin will be based on a normal boardgame price like $50 to $80 USD, and a publisher can't definitely can't command the current eBay prices for a rare and out-of-print game. At normal margins, they can't offer enough money to the designer to make it worth his while.

Our annual game of Talisman (the Black Industries 4th Ed.) at a cabin in the Oregon woods.

We had two new players who were somewhat aghast at the lack of "meaningful descisions" or ability to bend the game with mind-fists—but we got them into the swing with all the storytelling hijinks and cleaving into the glorious idea of having a shit adventure.

The Gnome got the Gnome follower* and swapped him out at the vampire's banquet—as is tradition—and ended up winning because the Wizard was unwilling to Acquisition his talisman away just before the Valley of Fire as it would extend the game another 90 minutes and the virgins were getting chafed.

They were, however, enthusiastic when it came to chanting "Toad! Toad! Toad!" at the the proper moments.


*Who looks exactly like him, same art and everything, so he's either some kind of homuncular creep, a cancer-ridden clone, or a complex delusion.

This is slightly off topic, but I enjoy listening to music while playing board games, and I have burned relevant music mixes for at least a dozen of my games. When I don't have a specific mix for a game, I like to play eclectic mixes of songs that I enjoy and that I think my friends will also like. Only one player ever complained about the music, and he relented when he realized that it was a thematic for the rpg we were playing.

Anyway, I was playing Marvel Champions with a friend on Friday night, and I have three mixes for that game, consisting primarily of music used in the first 21 Marvel movies, plus a few other songs on topic. But it was not fated to be. I accidentally broke the tray on my bookshelf stereo system months ago, and had been using my ex's portable dvd player since then, but suddenly it was struggling to read discs _and_ the built-in speakers completely stopped working. Then I got a durable old boombox that I had for decades, and turned on the radio. We were playing in the basement, so most stations weren't coming in clearly, but my favorite station was fine. Except that they replaced their usual mix of current music and good songs from the last 60 years with a re-broadcast of a local concert from a few years ago.

So we listened to a replay of a Sleater-Kinney live performance which included two of their songs that I like and a bunch of their songs that I don't care about. After an hour, I suggested that we listen to some old cassettes on the tape player on the boom box. That went well for a half hour, until it abruptly devoured the tape. I pulled out the ruined tape and tried the second tape deck on the box, but that one didn't work at all. Then I tried another tape in the first one, but it got wrecked immediately. So then we were back to listening to the radio, and now the concert replay had moved onto a set by some other band that I liked a lot less than Sleater-Kinney. It was awful, so I finally turned off the music and we finished the game in relative silence.

Since a couple of friends were coming over again on Saturday night, I went to Best Buy to pick up a replacement for the bookshelf stereo. Best Buy still carries bookshelf stereos on their website, but their instore stock was simply a few different cheap boomboxes, ranging in price from $25 to $100. I picked up a mid-range one that was surprisingly loud, but the bass/treble mix seemed a bit off and there was no way to adjust it. I will probably buy a bookshelf stereo system off the internet sometime soon. I'm not an audiophile, but I do have some standards.

HiveGod wrote: Our annual game of Talisman (the Black Industries 4th Ed.) at a cabin in the Oregon woods.

We had two new players who were somewhat aghast at the lack of "meaningful descisions" or ability to bend the game with mind-fists—but we got them into the swing with all the storytelling hijinks and cleaving into the glorious idea of having a shit adventure.

The Gnome got the Gnome follower* and swapped him out at the vampire's banquet—as is tradition—and ended up winning because the Wizard was unwilling to Acquisition his talisman away just before the Valley of Fire as it would extend the game another 90 minutes and the virgins were getting chafed.

They were, however, enthusiastic when it came to chanting "Toad! Toad! Toad!" at the the proper moments.


*Who looks exactly like him, same art and everything, so he's either some kind of homuncular creep, a cancer-ridden clone, or a complex delusion.

https://bgg.cc/thread/221861/they-call-him-talismangler

This is one of my favorite stories by you. That, and the GW session of mutants getting Bippity Bopped.

Played a 5-person game of Rising Sun tonight, which is always a treat. In fact, I don't really think I enjoy the game at less than 5. 4 is OK, but 5 seems to bring the dynamism of at least one player always being left out of the alliances to do their own thing. 6 can be very cool, but it does get a bit crowded on the map. One player had played before, but the rest were newbs, so I was going to play Moon, since they start slower, but someone else picked them before I got there. I warned him, but he wanted to go ahead with it. He did, indeed, get screwed by a first pick Recruit, but played really well for the rest of the game and was quite the martial menace, just as Moon are supposed to be. The rest of us were Bonsai, Koi, Dragonfly, and Fox (me.) It had been a long time since I'd played Fox and, like usual, when teaching a game that has as many moving parts as RS, I kind of lose track of where I'm going until the game is well underway. I wanted to take the frequent Seppuku path to points, since I can keep dumping and dying, but you have to moderate that with some wins or you'll just be surrendering the province bonus to one or more opponents. We had Raijin, Amaterasu, Tskukuyomi, and Hachiman as kami and I quickly solidified a hold on Amaterasu and basically sat at top honor the whole game... but I probably didn't need to since I was dying and writing poetry an awful lot. I also grabbed the Mountain set since I hadn't played with it in a long time, but there aren't a ton of Virtues in Mountain, which makes the honor path a bit more difficult.

In the end, I just muddled around too much while spending half my time answering questions. There was a massive fight in Kansai in autumn, which I managed to win, since I had both my daimyo and Yurei there with Path of the Dragon (+3 strength) and Kitsune, who gives you 6 VP for winning it, but Bonsai had won too many provinces in previous seasons and his bonus points outstripped my lead, 58 to 45, with the rest some distance behind me. Koi basically dominated Hachiman for the entire game, which is an enormous advantage that we let her have, but as a first-timer, she didn't have a great grasp of how to bid or exploit the power of having that pile of coins/ronin. Dragonfly picked up the Earth Dragon early on and used it well, but also couldn't seem to grasp the bidding system very well and missed a couple provinces he might've taken. It was still a good game, but now that they have some experience, I can probably play with a clearer head and let them make their own mistakes.

For fans of PAX PAMIR 2nd edition, check out www.rally-the-troops.com/

There are also implementations of WILDERNESS WAR, HAMMER OF THE SCOTS and a few other games there.

I've used it for a few games of PP and it blows away VASSAL or TTS .

And its free.

I’ve been having trouble scheduling things with my friends so I’ve been heading to the game shop trapped in 2010 and playing Magic. Some people could almost be called acquaintances at this point. Usually commander/EDH, although a couple drafts here and there. My Tiamat deck is my current favorite. It does big stupid things.

Did an honest to goodness game night with the gent from BGG I mentioned last time and my spouse, he brought some euros over and we played them. Didn't even show him the colossal bookshelf of weird games and toads. Maybe later lol.

Played:

Nujsford
The way that shares are in this game is fucking wild. It even has this like little mini version of the you/your company/your shares distinction that a good 18XX or John Company has. Absolutely bonkers this little Rosenberg game has it meaningfully packed in. What a weird, fun experiment.

Letter Jam
A fun little word game coop that has you trying to get into the head of the person creating the hint word. Word games aren't my thing but I thought it was very pleasant.

Quest for El Dorado
This game fucking rules, what a masterclass in tiny deck building that---stop me if you've heard this one---uses deck building as a means to an end (race game) and not an end in and of itself. Fucking great game. If I see it for cheap I'm definitely going to get copy. Knizia magic.

Letter Jam is very enjoyable. It's like pleasant multiplayer Wordle.

I just finished my first game of Tigris & Euphrates over at BoardGameArena. I haven't played the game in many years and appreciate that they've added this classic.

However, I quickly re-recognised the main problem I have with the game -- the battles (particularly the wars) are very "swingy":

"If my opponent has two or fewer green tiles, this move is brilliant. If she has three or more, it's disastrous."

And you have very little way of knowing what your opponent holds. This wouldn't be so bad if the game was light and breezy, but it's a brain-burner. Don't get me wrong, I like that it's a brain-burner -- figuring out how to acquire a balanced set of victory cubes is agonisingly delicious. It's just at odds with a reward system that favours the lucky.

I find that the swinginess in T&E battles is offset by the scoring. The massive amount of points of a single color usually doesn't mean much since the colors have to be balanced.

Nusfjord is top notch imo. Really good solo also.

I played 5 games of Space Alert last night. It's a real time coop programming game by Vlaada Chvatil. It's been on my list to play forever but the opportunity never arose, so I was excited to try it. It's certainly in the same vein as Galaxy Trucker. You all frantically try to handle the emerging threats before time runs out, and then after time runs out you reveal the cards you programmed and see how things actually worked out once things go completely sideways on card 2/12 when someone miscalculated some damage or whatever. It was enjoyable, I don't know that I would run to play it again though. The precise planning and communication required Is a bit much, especially as the difficulty ramps up. If I want this kind of feel ithink Galaxy Trucker will remain my go to. But I do think it's a really cool game, and if a team played it together a lot there's a lot of game to get into there.

My brother decided he had to have Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. I have an unplayed copy of Gloomhaven, but whatever. We played the first three scenarios last week. I like it better than the D&D dungeon crawlers - the hand management aspect scratches that particular itch. It's a steal at $25 on Amazon.

Also, if anyone is interested in Jaws of the Lion, I have an unopened copy and the removable stickers. Trade me something fun. I like Eurotrash.