What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

hotseatgames wrote: Did your fleet of Rock Striders not help early on?

Oh, yeah. I pushed out hard and grabbed a 1 mine on 1 turn and a 2 mine on another turn. But since I had no income to back them up, I got slaughtered in the subsequent turns. My Energize cards weren't a whole lot of help, either, but did lead me to score some points later when my two opponents had (rightly) decided I wasn't really a threat.

I think I have a convert. Got a call about an hour after I got off work last night from the coworker who I invited to try 5 player ANKH. He wanted to know if I wanted to play ANKH. So, he stopped by and we had a two player game (which wrapped up in a hour and 15 mins or so). He won with Osiris with me trailing about 3 points behind. And he did some really nice strategy moves, stocking up on followers that I assumed he was going to drop to use Plague of Locusts, instead he bought the Ankh power that let him spend 2 followers after every battle to gain a devotion.

It's fun when that happens. I find normie new gamers want to play the same game a whole bunch of times so my fingers are always crossed they introed into a game I like with some depth---like Ankh!.

Gary Sax wrote: It's fun when that happens. I find normie new gamers want to play the same game a whole bunch of times so my fingers are always crossed they introed into a game I like with some depth---like Ankh!.

He's expressed interest in Cuthulu Wars, Root, and Lords of Hella.... so SCORE!

Finally played Cosmic Frog last night. It was a first for all four of us, so likely we may not have been playing 100% correctly, much less "right". Here's my first impression.

I've heard a lot about this one, and of Jim Felli's games in general, so I was eager to try it. The theme is delightfully bonkers and well-realized. You are a giant frog eating huge tracts of land and vomiting them forth in an effort to please vague elder gods. This can lead to conflict with other giant frogs, as you would expect.

From there, though, things aren't quite as wild. Maybe we were too cautious or conservative, but despite the Jack Kirby artwork, dice rolling, and whole giant frog thing, the gameplay was kind of prosaic. When the frogs aren't fighting, they're just moving around the board picking up tiles. You want to time your exit from the board (to disgorge your tiles into your vault) just so, to prevent opportunists from attacking you, which slows things down, but the ability to take extra actions often makes that moot. Once you vomit forth your spoils, you try and arrange them strategically in your vault in order to both protect them and yield endgame points. When the frogs do clash, the combat isn't particularly exciting or wild, just being a roll-off of dice that can be slightly augmented.

You can get special powers for your frog which ramp things up a bit, but don't get too attached to them, as they cycle around pretty often. (This could be a "first play" thing, though. I personally was eager to get new powers because I had no idea what was in the mix.)

In short, every crazy thing in the game turns out to be somewhat tempered, leading to disappointment. I was expecting hot hot frog-on-frog violence involving me spitting a mountain at someone in order to knock them out of the universe. I ended up mostly just harvesting land and being very lucky in defensive dice rolls. The player who was trying to be aggressive, even with a potentially aggressive power, rolled poorly and didn't accomplish much.

The action system is also a little too much. In a four player game each player gets five cards of their color in a shuffled deck. The deck then determines whose turn it is. Meaning someone can go many turns in a row while you just sit and wait, watching everything you want to do get taken from you. That's just not fun.

I think there's more to this than we saw and I'm happy to try it again, but it really felt like this nutso design unnecessarily reigns itself in.

I assure you, Cosmic Frog gets better as the players gain experience. It is specifically structured to encourage violence.

My first play of Cosmic Frog (4 players) involved my non-gaming Dad. Why he decided to play (which I appreciate), I don't know. It got brutal and we all were beating the hell out of each other's massive anurans. Combat, at the right time, is necessary for the game to flow.

hotseatgames wrote: I assure you, Cosmic Frog gets better as the players gain experience. It is specifically structured to encourage violence.

This. It's also one of the few games that gets seriously better the more players you have. Four is fine, but if you can weasel your way into putting together a game of five or six, it only increases the chaos and the enjoyment, IMO.

Absolutely, I put it in the "the more, the merrier" category.

Had a 2p game night this evening with the new acquaintence from BGG. He told me to bring some sort of weird heavier game, he's looked at my BGG collection and knows how weird my tastes are... he's a pretty traditional euro guy but open minded.

So I brought Archipelago and Gears of War and gave him a choice. I figured he'd choose Gears, which is an easy co-op shoot em up. Instead he chose Archipelago, so I did a teach of that game. What an utterly strange and fascinating game---like most of my favorite games, it's like you are astride the board state with other players, tipping it back and forth in pretty wild ways. Unfortunately, it is also very unforgiving in its opening with 2p and we were all killed and thrown into the ocean by the angry locals due to not having a very efficient first 5-8 action turns. The game does not let you just fuck around. As my opponent said, I don't think the 2p game is balanced well in terms of how full the domestic market starts and how few actions you have to get it down to reasonable levels through buys and sells---later learned I messed up the setup and put too many resources in those markets and it helped torch us. Whoops. What an endlessly interesting game, though, I hope some day he'll give it another shot. He seemed very intrigued by it once he got through the heavy teach and even after we crashed out.

Then we played space station phoenix. I really hated this game. The absolute worst, most grindy euro worker placement/engine builiding game I could imagine. Only sort of not engine building? The premise is that you start with your engine already built through a draft and then dismantle it as the game goes on for raw materials to build your starbase. I must say I really despised this game, and any of you here know that I actually like a lot of euros in this ilk quite a bit---see how much I liked Lorenzo il Magnifico which I thought was great. This game went forever and had you do the same thing the entire time. It was clearly a game of skill---squeezing out little efficiencies over the course of the whole game would bring you the win---but it's ultimately a game where my opponent won 164-152 or something and that is a tough one. Anyway, I'm an adult and we chatted about it and I said a few nice things before saying I felt the game had no drama compared to the quite tense and dramatic Lorenzo il Manifico we played a few weeks ago, while still operating in similar euro spaces.

I owned Archipelago but the reality dawned i was never going to get the best out of it because it's mostly 2 player and nobody else likes big complicated things.

I hate dubbing things "art" as if that means something or is better than other creations, but games like that get closest to "art" within this medium, imo. Not because it's "beautiful" or whatever, aesthetically or otherwise, but because at least it's trying to say something, and at least it does something interesting with how it works instead of painting by numbers. I think of the cliched description you might read about a movie, you know, "Deeply flawed but fascinating" or something like that.

I seem to remember one of the expansions made 2 player a bit better or something? Maybe? Can't recall.

The new edition of Warcry is up for pre-order today and most of the details have surfaced already. "All the Big Rules Changes" looks more like a marketing hook. Points rebalancing, shorter and more varied campaigns, Reactions, no major shakeups and one book to rule them all... it's all looking surprisingly good considering GW's track record of piling on rules (Kill Team) or invalidating whole army lists (main games.) Price is a bit of an ouchie but I'd like to see a review of it nonetheless.

Another round of Lords of Vegas which is a game that continues to intrigue. I think it likely will be one of our first podcast episodes when we launch, the idea being to speak about older games and whatever thoughts they engender. There’s some interesting thoughts in this one.

Sagrilarus wrote: Another round of Lords of Vegas which is a game that continues to intrigue. I think it likely will be one of our first podcast episodes when we launch, the idea being to speak about older games and whatever thoughts they engender. There’s some interesting thoughts in this one.

I love Lords of Vegas. I've had it since it was first printed. And I appreciate how smoothly the expansions integrate into the game without taking away any of the core features that make it so great.

Finally got The Crew out for a few rounds with my wife and mom. I can forgive the latter’s performance since she spent last weekend playing Sheepshead and Oh Hell with an old friend and was getting the goals of competitive and cooperative trick taking backwards. My wife though? No excuses. We enjoy Fox in the Forest: Duet. She understands letting the other players win a hand. Took about four tries to get past the fourth mission with just three tasks and the misplays were often just not looking at the other players’ tasks. Ended the game after an hour and before finishing the sixth mission. We didn’t even get to space.

After my wife went to bed my mom convinced me to play a round of Cribbage. She opened with a quadruple run, and it went downhill from there.

My boys are back on King of Tokyo which is great and even begged to play a game of Flamme Rouge. Not surprisingly they only played their highest possible cards every hand and limped across the finish line.